And this manifested as three books: Tome of Battle, Tome of Magic, and the first release of the series: Magic of Incarnum. Essentially, they were charging people to give them 4th edition feedback. Ironically, Mearls then grabbed some of the stuff they had been working on with Orcus, converted it in a half-assed manner to 3rd edition rules, and released it as Tome of Battle, which got rave reviews and is the most popular book Mearls ever worked on.īut in 2005, that hadn't happened yet and WotC had just come up with the idea of focus grouping ideas for 4th edition by making books with more radical ideas in them and then selling them for real money. And while it is historical reality that Orcus appears to have been kind of cool, Mike Mearls convinced them to scrap it in favor of making a new new ground up redesign that had daily power use limits front and center. In 2005, we now know, the WotC design team had begun working on a ground-up redesign of Dungeons & Dragons, codenamed Orcus. We're setting the wayback machine to 2005, which means we aren't quite doing something “old school,” but are instead drinking and ranting about a transitional fossil: something that served as a waypost on the way to the catastrophe that was 4th edition D&D. So this will be a “hung over review.” Having spent 16 hours drinking all the beer and all the Jameson and Coke, I don't think I intend to drink any more during this reading. This will be in the style of an OSSR or drunken review, but I started it while hung over.

Dragon magazine 386