[Let's Read] Legends & Lore 2e

[khyron1144]

I don't know how many here hold dual citizenship with both this board and RPG.net, but there's a sort of phenomenon over there of tagging a thread Let's Read, and then kind of going over something big a little bit at a time.  Here's a good example of this type of thread in its native habitat. For whatever reason I tried to start one recently.  I would like to hear what the folks here think.

Here's what I've got so far:




I am not one hundred percent sure what a Let's Read thread is.  It seems to be one guy giving sort of his review notes for a large work bit by bit with commentary from the peanut gallery.  I thought I'd try one for Legends & Lore, the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition version.  There doesn't seem to be any sort of committee or approval process:  Just one man with a mad idea, seeing who else will bite.  Well, this is my mad idea, who's gonna bite?

One note:  I do not have internet access at home.  I can almost certainly get to the library once a week to use the internet.  When I do so, I will update this.  So, probably weekly updates.  Not the hectic daily schedule (un)reason is doing on his Dragon threads.  In case you're wondering:  I am typing this in wordpad from notes I hand-wrote out in pen earlier, copying the end result RTF to a flash drive and taking the flash drive to a library, where I will copy and past it here.





Page 1:  I think most people skip the title page, but that's a shame.
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition
Legends & Lore
Then there's a nifty, big drawing by Jeff Easley reproduced from the cover in black and white without the text from the cover cluttering it up.
At the bottom it says:  The all new, fully revised edition of an AD&D game classic!
One of the things I love about this title page, is the classic dragon-shaped ampersand (or ampersand-shaped dragon) in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition logo.  Seeing as to how it was replaced with a more normal ampersand for the Player's Option books and 3e used a different version, it can be argued that the demise of the classic dragon-ampersand was the beginning of the end.
Hooray for alliteration too.
The exclamation point at the end of the blurb is their own.  I guess it's somehow part of the sales pitch.
The image is pretty nifty too.  Clerics of rival Gods engaged in epic battle while their Deities cheer them on.  This is what D&D is meant to do.  Also it's easier to find Easley's signature on the black and white reproduction of the cover artwork here than on the actual cover artwork.  Jeff Easley was one of the artistic treasures of the late 1e to early 2e era.

[khyron1144]

Pages 2 and 3:  Contents pages with the credits, copyright notice, and company address crammed in at the bottom of page 3.
Again another are that might be normally taken for granted, but let's take a look at this for a moment.  This is a good table of contents page.  Every individual God covered is easy to find here and thus find in the book.
Looking at the credits I see it was designed by Troy Denning and James M. Ward with additional design by Timothy B. Brown and William W. Connors and edited by William W. Connors.  I am just this side of positive I have seen at least three of these four names elsewhere in connection to RPG products, with Timothy B. Brown being the one exception that doesn't really ring a bell.  I could of course, actually verify this by looking through my library a bit to cross-check these names against other books I have, but that would take more effort than it takes to sit at Wendy's and drink Dr. Pepper and listen to Ben Folds Five on my headphones while I jot this down in my notebook.  I wonder if I could get any money for that bit of product placement.
These credits are exceptionally specific in some places, listing credits for things like keylining, typesetting, icons, and cartography (what the heck is keylining?) and vague in others:  Cover illustration doesn't get its own credit line.  Instead I had to search the image for an artist's signature, in this case Easley's, and then check it against all the names credited for color artwork.
The copyright of 1990 indicates that this is early in 2e's history, seeing as how the core books just came out the previous year.  I turned nine in the summer of 1990.
That brings me to a little confession:  For me, this is not a book I am already quite intimately familiar with having owned and treasured for many years and read cover to cover more than once.  I bought it on ebay a year or two ago, and while I have looked into it here and there, I haven't given it even one thorough cover to cover reading yet.
Wow I mined three content-lite pages for two pages of handwritten notes and according to a recent print preview of this as an RTF, a solid page of typed up text.

Ok. Page 4.  The Introduction.  The real book begins to begin.

It is a complete rewrite from top to bottom, with many completely new entries.  Even the old entries have been researched again and examined in a fresh light.

Deities & Demigods[/u] (a later printing without the Elric and Cthulhu material) for a good number of years before I acquired this one.  I never bought the 1e Legends & Lore because it looked like too much rehash from Deities & Demigods.  I was always a little disappointed in Deities & Demigods because it was sort of just a turbo-charged Monster Manual.  Before Spheres and Specialty Priests there wasn't really a good crunchy reason to specify your Priest PC's God.  Now with this book and the 2e rules in general there is.

No doubt, some readers will take issue the content of some of the entries themselves.  In a project of this nature and scope such disagreements are unavoidable.

Actually I'm not sure where the [sic] should go, or if I should have just inserted a "with" in square brackets[] into the phrase "take issue with".  Besides pointing out a typo, I wanted to say:  Got that right!  Between this book, 1e Deities & Demigods, 3e Deities & Demigods, and probably 1e Legends & Lore (although that one I don't really know, never having owned/read it), I have never seen a good official (A)D&D handling of the Greek God Hades in their Deities books.  I'll get back to that one, if I survive to the Greek Gods chapter.

[khyron1144]

Nore does Legends & Lore make any claim to being a scholarly work.  A comprehensive study of the mythology of even one culture would fill many volumes of this size.

Deities & Demigods[/u], this book (2e Legends & Lore) lacks the chapters on the Babylonian, Finnish, and Sumerian mythoi that 1e Deities & Demigods had.  Similarly the 3e version of Deities & Demigods loses the American Indian, Arthurian, Aztec, Celtic, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and Nehwon chapters that had been in the previous versions.

[khyron1144]

On the other hand, neither are the gods super-powerful monsters.  Most of them are capable of destroying a mortal at the merest whim.

Deities & Demigods[/u] approach.  Okay 1e Deities & Demigods does have a similar warning label about not using the Deities therein as monsters, but it kind of doesn't give you much else to do with them.  They are also given stat blocks pretty similar to the format used for monsters in the Monster Manual.  The warning is further undermined by the declaration at the start of the Nonhumans' Deities chapter that certain monsters count as Deities.  If you can slay Orcus and he's a Lesser Deity, why can't you kill Loki

[khyron1144]

The important thing to remember in selecting a pantheon and using Legends & Lore is that it presents resource information, not rules.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v619/khyron1144/License.jpg[/img]

If a man is foolish enough to irritate a god, he will almost certainly be noticed-- and then quickly crushed by the deity's supernatural finger.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v619/khyron1144/Acts.jpg[/img]
When something random and big and bad happens, they call it an act of God.  Well, which God? and why did he act in that manner? and why didn't a colleague stop him?  

Anyways something about the advice here about handling Deities appeals to the megalomaniac in me, that I suspect lurks within most other Dungeon  Masters too.

Also:  I just wanted to say: BWA! HA! HA! HA!

Another interesting aspect of the gods is that they cannot be killed by anything save another god of greater stature, or by a god of any stature using an artifact.  This means that no mortal may ever kill any god.

your PC can't kill Odin[/b].  Sorry.

Which leads to the avatars rule, which I'm not going to quote in any detail.  Instead I will simply observe that this section tries to come up with a game mechanics reason why your PC can't kill Odin.

[Lmns Crn]

the classic dragon-shaped ampersand (or ampersand-shaped dragon)

You know, I never noticed this before. It's very cool!

[khyron1144]

the classic dragon-shaped ampersand (or ampersand-shaped dragon)

You know, I never noticed this before. It's very cool!

Well I got into the game seriously with this edition, and the aesthetics of that era stuck with me.

[LoA]

This is pretty interesting. It also seems like fun, and i may do one too. As for the book itself, it seems to be one of those things that inspire the artsy "hopeless" DM. Have you ever seen Dark Sun DM's who are like "Uh! There's no hope at all! The world is dying, and the sun is decaying! There's nothing you can possibly do!"? So i may as will go "Grug looks out at the savage wasteland and red sun, realising the overwhelming despair, and throws himself off a cliff. You guys have fun, i'm going to go home and do something productive." Atleast throwing my character off a cliff makes an artistic statement.

The point i'm trying to make is, what's the point of playing a game where you can't really win? If my PC can't kill a god or ascend to godhood, and challenge the gods, why should i play at all?

Sorry, this may seem a tad mean, but i adhere to the eberron tradition of "PC's are the heroes and they should be able to do impossible things". Make it challenging of course, but not completely impossible...

[khyron1144]

This is pretty interesting. It also seems like fun, and i may do one too. As for the book itself, it seems to be one of those things that inspire the artsy "hopeless" DM. Have you ever seen Dark Sun DM's who are like "Uh! There's no hope at all! The world is dying, and the sun is decaying! There's nothing you can possibly do!"? So i may as will go "Grug looks out at the savage wasteland and red sun, realising the overwhelming despair, and throws himself off a cliff. You guys have fun, i'm going to go home and do something productive." Atleast throwing my character off a cliff makes an artistic statement.

The point i'm trying to make is, what's the point of playing a game where you can't really win? If my PC can't kill a god or ascend to godhood, and challenge the gods, why should i play at all?

Sorry, this may seem a tad mean, but i adhere to the eberron tradition of "PC's are the heroes and they should be able to do impossible things". Make it challenging of course, but not completely impossible...

Strange as it may sound, I agree with you a bit.  In my main (A)D&D campaign world of Terra (linked to in the sig)  ascension to Godhood is not out of the question.  Under the right circumstances, a Lesser God or Demigod of the Terra setting might be susceptible to being killed by a PC.

So that's one place where I am going to rule 0 this book in implementing it into my game, if I choose to do so.  

What this book does well, is offer a lazy DM a good model for what Spheres a specialty priest of Zeus ought to have.