4E Essentials Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms - A Review

 

The second player's book for the Essentials line is another 368 page full color softcover. It covers Druids, Paladins, Rangers, and Warlocks with new class builds. The included races are Dragonborn, Drow, Half-Elves, Half-Orcs, Humans, and Tieflings. The only duplication among these with the first book is the inclusion of Humans in both volumes. Let's break it down:

This book opens with a 29 page rule/overview/how to play section that is the same as the one in Heroes of the Fallen Lands (for that review see here) and I do think after reading through it again that someone could start playing with an experienced group with this section alone, but it is still not a complete set of rules by any means as it really only covers combat.

Next we have 25 pages of how to make a character - ability scores, alignments, personality, etc.. This looks the same to me as the prior book, it's mainly important for new players.

Following this we have 20 pages about Powers - types, format and presentation, keywords, and definitions. This is an excellent section if you haven't read it in HOFL and is utterly redundant if you have. It is a handy thing to have in a player book for reference during play so this is not a mark against it.

Then we get to the Class chapter, 160 pages long and covering 5 new builds for 4 different classes:

Druid - this druid is the Sentinel, a Primal Leader. Druids in the PHB2/Primal Power books were Primal Controllers, so this is a change.  The most obvious feature here is that the character gets an animal companion who grants either combat advantage in a 1-square radius or +2 to all defenses in a 1-square radius. That's a pretty strong power either way though the defender will probably vote for the bear (defense buff) while a rogue will campaign for the wolf (combat advantage). It otherwise follows the more standard 4E power structure of at-will/encounter/daily powers added to then replaced at higher levels. Attacks are almost all melee/close burst Wisdom vs. AC. There are a fair number of physical buffs that target "you or one ally" so the druid can do a lot of it on his own if he has to. There are some very flavorful knacks and abilities included too - talking to animals or plants, bonuses to skill checks in the wild, the kind of thing druids had a ton of in earlier editions of the game. At the higher levels there are some special abilities that begin to look a lot like 1E/2E druid class features - ignore difficult terrain and change appearance among them. There is a seasonal element to the class as the player has to choose either a "spring" or "summer" association and this will affect a few powers along the way (and the animal companion)  but it's not huge and it only affects a few power choices along the way. In all it's very flavorful and looks like it could be a lot of fun for a different kind of leader than we have seen before in this edition.

Paladin - this build is called the Cavalier and is a traditional defender class. They gain proficiency with all weapons and all armor but have a new wrinkle with Virtues. The book includes two Virtues - Sacrifice or Valor (and gave me a flashback to Ultima IV when I read about them) and a player has to choose one of them which will affect his powers down the road. Sacrifice tends more towards healing and buffing companions while Valor is more focused on offense. They do follow the at-will/encounter/daily power structure of earlier 4E products unlike the fighter in HOFL so as another Essentials Defender there is already a mechanical difference. They do use the same Defender Aura at-will as the Knight Fighter in HOFL so that part is the same - it's the other powers that are different.   Holy Smite is an encounter ability that adds damage to an at-will attack and the ability to use it more than once per encounter is added on at higher levels, so it appears that a lot of Paladin atttacks will be at-wills with the occasional boost from Holy Smite, similar to the way the fighters in HOFL gained extra uses of their power-up ability as they advanced in level. Almost all attacks are melee Str vs. something, mainly AC with a smattering of Fortitude or Reflex. I think a Sacrifice Cavalier could fill in for a Leader class in a small group if needed as there is a lot of healing available to them. The Valor Cavalier is closer to a Striker for a secondary role. This build bears very little resemblance to the !E/2E Cavalier class as there is only 1 nod to mounts at all in the class abilities (a speed boost to all nearby mounted characters) and no ties to lances or particular weapons. That said it does look a fair amount like a 1E/2E Paladin with the Virtues and no worries about having a Divine focus or implement. These builds do give a different flavor from the prior 4E Paladins so they should be interesting to play.

Ranger - Rangers are the most different from the other classes in their 2 sub-builds, similar to the Fighters in HOFL, so I will cover them separately.

The Hunter is a bow Ranger but is typed as a martial/primal controller. The idea is that they  begin as mainly martial characters but as they learn more about the power of nature and the spirits around them their powers start to tap the primal power source. I don't like mudding up the nice clean power source structure 4E has had previously but it does appeal to me in the game-world-logic sense so I'm OK with it.  As archers they get some cool abilities for their at-wills including one attack that ignores cover or concealment, one that lets them slide/knockdown/slow their target, and one that lets them shoot multiple foes at once. Now these are all "Make a ranged basic attack with this special modifier or effect" type powers so they do go back to the HOFL Fighter design philosophy as does the inclusion of Aspects, which are just like fighter stances in that only one can up at a time, it adds some kind of bonus or modifier, and the character will learn more of them as they progress in levels. They also get Knacks like the Sentinel Druid does above and so are very wilderness-flavored. They really don't get a ton of other attack powers, most of their higher level powers are things like traps, some conditional zones they can create - they are definitely not strikers and they do not look like a blasting type controller at all (ala Wizard or Sorcerer). It's an interesting take on a controller type class but I think a lot of players might prefer the Boomstick approach rather than Twang!/Entangle/Leap/Twang!

The Scout is a martial/primal striker (as above) two-weapon ranger, focused on either axe or sword similar to the weapon choices of Fighters in the HOFL book. There is a damage-boosting encounter power much like those Fighters (and the Cavalier Paladin above) that gains more uses as the character levels up. There are aspects just as with the Hunter Ranger so most of the attacks are going to be Str vs. AC with some kind of modifier or special effect. The wilderness knacks are here too, so the flavor of the mountain man fighter is very much present. There are a lot of movement buffs and awareness buffs but for a striker I'm a little underwhelmed - they may be as mobile as a barbarian at times with all the speed and shifting bonuses that they get (not charge-monsters like a barbarian) but they just don't seem like they would hit that hard once they get there. Maybe in play it's different but I don't see an alpha strike type attack for this striker - it's going to play more as a longer term fight,wearing the opponent down while dancing around in difficult terrain and I'm not sure how effective that's going to be.

Warlock - The build here is the Hexblade, a 3E class that was presented as a fighting mage type and is very similar here as it's a melee focused arcane striker, something we haven't seen before. There are only two pacts to choose from, Fey or Infernal. The pact choice determines the starting at-will and encounter melee powers plus the type of pact blade the character begins with. Both types also begin with a range 10 at-will attack power. Most powers are melee or close burst/blast Charisma vs. something and most of the time it is not AC. Fey gets a lot of mobility from various teleports while Infernal goes more for self-buffs. One interesting thing is that both types gain some summoning powers too as a Daily Minor. I'm not sure how this would work in practice but it sounds cool. Maybe the Hexblade fights until he's used up some of his better powers or has taken too much damage then summons up his ally to fight in his place while he tends to wounds or gets healed by another character. It is a different wrinkle for a Striker and I'm curious to see it in play.

The Epic destiny in this book is Destined Scion and is more of an offensive take than the Indomitable Champion from HOFL. Just as an example the top end power in HOFL is the ability to turn a hit on the character into a natural 1. In HOFK the top end power is to turn a missed attack roll into a hit. Nothing earth-shattering, just the flip side of the same coin. Strikers will probably like this one better while defenders may prefer the one from the previous book. I will say that these two Epic Destinies seem a little vanilla for what is supposed to be the peak of power. Compared to "Demigod" or "Archmage" they just are not all that flavorful and suffer from being very generalized since the one destiny has to apply to all classes in the book. . They aren't bad mechanically, just a little boring in their descriptions.

After Classes we get to Races

• Dragonborn are now Charisma then Strength or Con, racial power is Dragon Breath which is unchanged
• Drow are now Dex then Wisdom or Charisma, Darkvision, racial powers are Cloud of Darkness and Darkfire.
• Half-Elves are now Con then Wisdom or Charisma, low-light vision, racial power is now Knack for Success which has 4 different effects and can be used on you or an ally in a close burst 5. It looks very much like a list of leader powers and is goig to be a lot different than a half elf using Dilettante from the PHB1. It's less versatile in many ways (no free attack power) but from a design perspective I can see the sense in doing away with the wild card ability of "choose another power from any other class" as each new class adds to the possibility some weird combo will come about. It's actually pretty flexible as a racial ability - free shift, free save, +2 to an attack, or +4 to a skill check. Make a half-elf sacrifice cavalier paladin and you have a pretty good Defender/Leader in the making. 
• Half-Orcs are now Dex then Strength or Con, low-light vision, then Furious Assault which is unchanged
• Humans are the same as HOFL - +2 to any one stat and Heroic Effort - +4 on a missed save or attack.
• Tieflings are now Charisma then Con or Int, low-light vision, and Infernal Wrath which is the errata'd version of close burst 10 , d6+ stat bonus damage

The rest of the book is Skills (same as HOFL), Feats (a slightly different list than HOFL reflecting the different classes in this book, e.g. more wilderness less divine) , and Gear, including a very limited number of magic items.  Once again no rituals, no exotic weapons, and no multiclassing, all of which are supposed to appear in the upcoming Class Compendium. There is also a glossary and an index, always good to see in thick rulebooks.

So how is it? I will say that it dramatically expands the options available to an Essentials-only game in both classes and races. It would be very easy to run a campaign this way and pretty easy to give it an old-school flavor by limiting players to these two books.

I think the Sentinel Druid and the Hexblade Warlock are both something we haven't seen before and are probably the most interesting mechanically.

The Cavalier Paladin is very flavorful for a traditional Paladin player who may not have liked the original 4E paladin.

The Ranger leaves me a little less enthused. The Martial classes in Essentials appear to be the most simplified of all and while that's fine in some ways and while I liked the fighter options in HOFL of both the Knight and the Slayer,  I do not really see a lot of shine to either of the ranger builds presented here. The bow-controller is an interesting idea but I think it would be better served by the 4E standard power structure rather than the basic + stances structure we have here, and the fact that the Mage Wizard (Arcane Controller) in HOFL was the only class in that book to stick to that 4E power pattern backs me up.

Overall I like what Essentials has given us this year in these two books. There are still some issues to be solved, mainly multiclassing, feats (Essentials feats are clearly better in many cases), and the crossing over of Epic Destinies and Paragon Paths between these new classes and the existing ones.

I would definitely call this the "Expansion" book to heroes of the Fallen Lands mainly because the earlier versions of D&D started with the classes and races presented in that book, and the ones in this book, for the most part, were added later. If I was bringing in a new player with no D&D experience I would probably still start them with HOFL to set the baseline for what D&D is about then point them to this one later. If I were bringing in an experienced player from 1E or 2E or even 3E with no 4E experience, I would also go with HOFL because of the traditional D&D party and class presentation. That said it would be entirely possible to start someone with this book too, it just would not be my preference.

In the end this is a solid book that presents more options for an existing game. there are no new classes, no new power sources, no game-changing updates or additions, just solid expansions to an already solid game. As I noted in my earlier review I consider the Rules Compendium a 5-star product and then called HOFL a 4-star product in comparison. I would call this one 3 1/2 to 4 stars just because it feels a notch less "essential" to me and not because of any major flaws or problems.  I like it and I expect to use it myself or see my players use it sometime in the near future, assuming we get the chance to make up some new characters.

Motivational Monday

Motivational Monday

WOTC Shoots Self in Foot - Again...

So let's review: The launch of 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons was undoubtedly successful by some measures, but seemed to have a lot of customer backlash both on the timing -less than 5 years after the 3.5 debacle - and the radical degree of change - mechanically there is very little backwards compatibility - and in the way it was marketed where many of the changes in 4E were portrayed as fixes to flaws in 3E and in some ways denigrated 3E in the eyes of fans. For the first time a directly competing offshoot of the previous edition took shape  in Pathfinder.

Now I can tell you when 2E was announced most people were excited - some continued to play 1E but 2E was very backwards compatible and most people happily made the switch and there was nowhere near the amount of venom shown then.

When 3E was announced many of us were ready for a new system and the full year's worth of articles in Dragon made a lot of the transition easier to digest. Some saw it as too much change and stuck with 1E or 2E and as the first edition launched in the internet age there was more griping to be seen but there was still not a backlash, just some grumbling.

The development of a 4th edition was flat out denied in early 2007 then announced in August of that year as a done deal that would be published in May 2008. This caused a tremendous uproar in the D&D community and what looks like the least well-received transition yet. Paizo, sensing that this time there was both enough consumer discontent and a legal framework to allow a competing version of D&D used the OGL to create Pathfinder, initially labelled "3.75" - not a good sign.

Among the many new things promised with 4E was the creation of  computer software to allow players to make characters, make monsters, and play online with a virtual tabletop. By 2009 it was clear that the online play tool was not going to happen. The character builder was pretty good though, and the monster builder was adequate if not truly finished as a product. So a small disappointment but not a total failure.

The launch of Essentials in the fall of 2010 caused another uproar - one largely unfounded IMO - that it was 4.5 and the failure of WOTC to both anticipate this and defuse the situation in a timely fashion is regrettable. It's another marketing black eye and it made me wonder how much attention they were paying to customer feedback.

One of the good things for WOTC had been the character creator. The best thing about it was that it made it much easier for players to see all of those nifty feat and power and class and race options in all of those books at once - even if they didn't own them. It also enabled the questionable "living game" approach where rules are updated every month, sometimes in small ways sometimes in massive ways - whatever happened, players could be assured the builder would keep their character up to date. It's the one piece of software that they have published that pretty much works as designed and that most people are happy with.

So what do they do? They go and change it. Completely. Into a buggy, unfinished mess that users still have to pay for! Could they have failed this project any more completely? 

It's just mind-boggling. Take the one thing people actually praise sometimes about your pay-to-play suite of online support tools, the one thing that really makes the game work for a lot of players and BREAK IT! Who decided this was a good idea? Customers were not asking for a whole new tool, just continuing updates to the one they already had.

To pull back the curtain a little bit I have some knowledge of professional software development, project management, and marketing and I can tell you that this would get people fired in any real B2B environment and in many business to consumer environments. "It works for some people" is not a statement anyone should be comfortable making to a client. WOTC took the old character builder down on the day the new one went live so there was no choice for users if they did not already have the old one. The dividing line for content is that only the new CB is getting the Dark Sun and Essentials material so there is pressure to upgrade. Understandable, but this is just insulting to their existing customers and a strong warning to potential customers.The obvious solution here should have been to launch it as an open beta or even a subscriber-only beta and let your loyal users assist with working out the kinks before anyone has to start paying for it. Apparently the on-paper meeting of hard internal deadlines was more important than getting it right and not infuriating the customer base. Maybe they will learn this lesson someday, but I'm not confident in it at all.

There is also the matter of it being a web-based application. This is clearly a matter of piracy prevention and has little to no benefit to the consumer, but that's really up to WOTC. If they had replaced the old offline CB wit ha new bug-filled mess of an offline CB it would still be a problem. I suspect that it will not be the piracy solution they think it is and that bootleg character builders will still be used a year from now.

They have also promised a new virtual tabletop and  a new monster builder in the future. Sure, great, whatever. They were promising those in 2007 and eventually gave up - so how long will it be before those come about? They had a perfectly good character builder and they couldn't launch a new version of it - how solid will these other 2 applications be if they do get to the point of being released? Is it something you would feel comfortable paying for?

Finally there is the matter of the future. I tend to think of myself as an old-school guy. I like to hang on to my old RPG's and just because someone stops printing new stuff for them doesn't mean I stop playing them. We played 3E more than a year after 4E came out. In the past 2 years I've played or run sessions of Basic D&D, Marvel Super Heroes, d6 Star Wars, and Twilight 2000 1st edition. I don't let a publisher tell me when to stop playing a game. With so much of 4E built into the online tools and so many players dependent on them, what happens to 4E when these tools go offline? The day WOTC announces 5th edition, the clock will be ticking on all of 4th edition's online elements. Look at how Star Wars Saga was handled - the day the license ran out - all of that material disappeared from the site. Now D&D isn't a licensed game, but how much of this "old"material will be kept available by WOTC when they are trying to sell the latest and greatest version of the game? With no OGL, no 3rd party will be able to keep it alive legally this time so 4E will just disappear from the Wizards online machine and only the books that are disdained by so much of the 4E D&D community will remain. Then suppose you don't like 5th edition and want to keep playing your 4th edition campaign - what will you do then?

To me this whole episode is an illustration of a few things:

One, tabletop RPG's should beware of becoming too dependent on cool new online tools. Character generators are nothing new - GURPS and Hero System have had them since the 1990's but they were never as widely adopted by players as the 4E CB has been. Heck we were AD&D writing character generators in BASIC  back in the 1980's too so this is not a new concept. The danger is when it becomes a replacement for the books themselves - economic downturns, marketing shifts, and management direction changes can all have drastic impacts and programmers are not cheap. The core of the game you play could disappear overnight.

Two, companies that have little or no expertise in software development or online support should probably not build their games around software tools or online support for those games. License it out to someone who does that kind of work full-time. Your odds of success increase dramatically and if things go wrong you have a convenient scapegoat to blame and possibly fire.

Three, customers don't like broken promises so you shouldn't break them unless absolutely necessary.  Everything from the VTT to the uproar over Essentials being 4.5 to the errors with the new Red Box set and going back to the original handling of the 4E announcement shows a serious lack of connection with their customers. In the internet age how can this company be so out of touch with the people that buy its products? This feels very much like some of the arrogance that other companies from GM to Microsoft to even the old TSR have suffered from in the past. It looks more and more like they are listening to internal directives over external feedback to me and I'm not sure why. The RPG market is not that big. A few wrong steps can generate tremendous negative word of mouth. (It's also about time for the annual holiday season layoffs so there will soon be a new crop of former insiders who will spill the beans about how this was handled internally and it will no doubt be very unflattering). Listen to the customers. Listen to what people think who are actually playing the game right now - that should be your number one adviser base. People who used to play have a role there, and people who have never played but might be interested are worth some attention too, but if you can't get it right for the people who are already giving you money every month then why would potential customers care at all about what your plans are?

In the end it makes me a little bit sad - I was totally in love with 3rd Edition when it launched - it felt like a renewal of an old friend. I felt completely jilted when 4E launched but I have since come around and feel like I discovered a secret that a lot of the old school crowd missed - this is a good game. This year I have really turned into a 4E fan and it feels like it's in spite of the company that makes it rather than because of them. I'm not a big fan of Pathfinder but I am a huge fan of Paizo and the way they handle their business. I liked them back when they were just publishing Dragon and Dungeon and I like them even more now as I see a small company with passionate, involved management doing things the right way and being rewarded for it.

I know being part of a larger corporate structure makes it harder to operate like a small company but WOTC needs to do things differently or soon no one is going to care. Get players rolling on a decent set of rules - then change them. Come out with a good support tool - then change it. That's the kind of thing that drives people crazy and drives them away. People just want to play so make it easier for them. Remove obstacles, don't create them. Stop telling them how great the next massive direction-change is going to be and start asking them what they would like to see in 2011 or 2012. Stop making them fight through format changes and pullbacks and products being taken off the schedule after they have been announced - you have a good game here! You had a nice set schedule and format for everything for 2 years along with the start of a nice suite of tools - why screw that up? The past year has not been a good one in relating to the customer base. Please try and sort it out and move forward with a new approach. "Customer-Driven" is not just a marketing phrase, especially in smaller markets like this one. Most of us would like to see D&D flourish and it's in your hands now. Try to get it right. The first time. Not in errata. Not in website apologies or clarifications. Find out what the players want and then get it right the first time. It matters.

Motivational Monday

Guardians of the Vale - Session 4 - Into the Barrow of the Ogre King

Setting out from Loudwater the party follows a very obvious trail left by the goblin raiders. Moving almost directly south they soon come to an area of forest known as the Southwood. Soon enough they find the trail leads into an area of tumbled stone ruins. The work is clearly dwarven and the barrow is rumored to be part of the old dwarven kingdom of Ammarindar.

As they venture into the ruins Apollo (the Elf Ranger) notices that something doesn't look right about a large area ahead and warns the party to skirt around it. The Druid then spots a loose stone near where the tracks stop and moves it, revealing a ladder that descends into darkness. After a brief discussion the party climbs down.

At the bottom is a small dark room which seems to be a dead end but they soon feel a draft coming from one end and discover a secret door which they open. Ahead is a large rubble-choked room which slopes up to their right. There is some indirect light but the area is not well-lit. At the top of the slope stand 3 large dwarven statues. between those statues stand a pair of goblins who have not yet noticed the party. The group stealthily moves out and prepares to take out the guards

Charging forward the Dragonborn Paladin slices into the nearest goblin to open the battle. He strikes hard but the goblin does not fall - clearly these are not the rabble they fought back in Loudwater. The Elf begins firing in support while the Dwarf moves to engage and the the Druid begins casting storm spike. A vicious melee erupts as  more goblins move in from out of sight including some kind of wizard who blasts from a distance with stinging and blinding spells.This fight goes hard for the heroes as the Paladin goes down and the Elf is constantly fighting off blind spells, interfering with his archery. The dwarf takes a beating until he eventually goes down after using up his healing abilities (Inspiring word from dwarf to Paladin- "By the gods you suck! Get back in the fight!) and even the ranger drops at one point, leaving the bloodied druid in beast form trying to slay the last goblin warrior and drive off the wizard before he drops and his friends all die. After many exchanges (and much dodging of wizardly blasts) he  rips into the last armored goblin for one final time, slaying him, and causing the hexer to flee through a set of doors at the other end of the room. He quickly attends to his companions and they stagger to their feet, wondering if this was such a good idea after all.

DM Notes: This was another very long fight, 13 rounds, and was almost a TPK. Part of the problem was that the players last fight against goblins included some minions and this one did not. Plus it is intended for 5 PC's and we only have 4. Now that being said it's also intended for a level 1 party and ours is level 2. Either way it's a level 4 encounter which seems awfully tough for the second encounter of a new campaign. So it's higher level AND the party is outnumbered by 1 and there are no minions. The party was also reluctant to use their dailies because of the easier fight last time against the goblins - we don't need to use them they're just goblins! Of course by the time 3 of them were on the floor they were thinking a little differently but it was too late by then. Scouting this one out earlier I had not really thought this would be a super tough fight but the restricted terrain - there is really only 1 square clear for movement between each pair of dwarf statues so if the goblins block them the Goblin Hexer can stand back and blast pretty much at-will. He managed to keep the elf in enough distress that there was no return fire. The party's decision to fight in between the statues made a big difference here. It's an interesting but very dangerous tactical situation. Hopefully they are learning.

Next time - behind the big doors...

Motivational Monday

Slow Week

I'm pretty much taking this week off from my online activities - posting should resume next week.

Motivational Monday

Fantasy Books, Gaming Fiction and My Background in Them

I really just wanted a post on the blog that explains my background with fantasy literature as it might help someone get why I think a book is good or bad. This is that post.

I liked stories about knights and castles and such when I was a kid. In about the third grade our teacher read us the Hobbit in class and I completely fell for it. A short time later I saw a little animated movie called "The Hobbit" and heard that there was a follow up story called "The Lord of the Rings." During a discussion with an aunt who was into fantasy books I mentioned that I had heard of these books but I didn't know how to get them. She loaded me into the car and drove me to Waldenbooks in the mall and bought me all 4 of them. I read those books over the next week and read them many, many, times over the next 20+ years. Those books were my introduction to fantasy and in some ways are a high-water mark for fantasy lit.

In elementary school I also read The Chronicles of Prydain and was thrilled. These were written more for kids but they were very good stories and were still better written than a lot of the material that comes out today. I read them again a few years ago (reading them aloud to my kids before bedtime) and they still hold up very nicely.

I read a lot of World War II and Science Fiction stuff in elementary school too but since this is about my Fantasy background I will focus only on it.

I discovered D&D in 5th grade and beyond the game itself it provided a nice bibliography of fantasy books - remember this was way before the internet and it was sometimes hard to know what to look for at the library or the bookstore. Now I had a list...

In Junior High I read Sword of Shannara (thought it was kind of weak back then), The first Xanth trilogy (OK and kind of funny), a lot of comic books, and then we moved to Texas and the local library had the Conan books.

Feeling like I had found the holy grail of fantasy fiction (beyond LOTR) I dived in and read all 12 Ace edition Conan books over my 8th grade year and it set the new high mark. They are different from LOTR but they are equally powerful in their own way. I've read them many many times since then as well as the new un-pastiched director's cut versions that came out a few years ago and I still rank them at the top.

Next I found the Elric books and I pored through those as well - different than Conan or LOTR but kind of a weird middle ground. Violent like Conan but also baroque and fantastic like LOTR. I loved them and still do. I tracked down Moorcock's other works and devoured them as well and all together they make a very nice block of Fantasy reading with a distinct feel to it.

In some ways that's my Triangle of Fantasy Greatness - LOTR/Hobbit, Conan, and Elric. Maybe that dates me but that's the core of it to me. If you want to include the classical trilogy of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid then you might have a second "center of greatness" that I think has an impact on the earlier works of fantasy at least.

Other classic works that I like include The Worm Ouroboros, The Compleat Enchanter, and Burrough's Martian stories. I am also a fan of Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories though I do not rank them quite as highly as some old-schoolers do. They are very good though and very much tied into the core of what led to D&D. Along that same line Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson is clearly the genesis of the D&D paladin and the D&D troll and has a good dose of fey/faerie too.

The 80's - In the remainder of the 80's I read Fred Saberhagan's Swords trilogy and thought it was decent enough though I think I like the Empire of the East series that precedes it a little better. They're both good reads. Laurence Watt-Evans Lure of the Basilisk series is a good set of tales with a non-human point of view. Chronicles of the Black Company by Glen Cook is a good set of stories - I don't see it as the major work that some others do but I do think they're good. The Guardians of the Flame by Joel Rosenberg is one of the early "gamers transported into a fantasy world" stories but after the first trilogy that tends to show up less and less as new characters fully tied to the fantasy world take over. It's a good series and covers 2 or 3 generations now.  There were two other major fantasy series in the 80's that I think bear mentioning:

1) Thieves' World - these books were very popular and were by far the grittiest, nastiest set of thing I had ever read, at least by the middle to end of the series. If you think Conan or even the Black Company stories focus in on the low fantasy end of the spectrum take a look at these. Technically the first one was published in 1978 but they came out about one a year all through the 80's until the final volume was published in 1989. They get nastier as the series goes on and after seeing the same trend in Wild Cards I wonder if it's a trait of shared world novels as the writers try to outdo each other. In any case if you are interested in low-fantasy with a wide variety of characters it should be on your list.

2) Dragonlance - this was the real beginning of the D&D fiction avalanche. At first it was just a trilogy and a bunch of game support material but soon it would open the floodgates and we would see everything from Greyhawk novels to Forgotten Realms novels to books focusing on the gully dwarves of Krynn. This also indirectly opend up 2 other types of fiction - the non-D&D gaming fiction series such as the Battletech novels and later the Shadowrun, Vampire, and Wwarhammer/Warhammer 40K novels. It also opened up the "trilogy based on a guy's D&D campaign" series of books - more on those later. These were the first and they are decent stories. Re-reading them as an adult I see some things I do not like as much now but there is some fairly grown-up material in there. The death of Sturm is one. The unrepentant selfishness of Kitara the former friend is another. The whole character of Raistlin and the strain between family, friends, and the desire for power is pretty well done though it does play a bigger role in the Twins trilogy that came after. Those are all well done and the world is painted well and feels like a D&D world. It's not LOTR, but it's not garbage either and it was a major work at the time and still is now if partially for what it represents. I can tell you that my 11-year old reading it this summer for the first time thought it was as awesome as I did back when I read it for the first time and I think that says something.

There have been some other "big" fantasy books that have come out in the last 20 years:

David Drake has written some fantasy and as much as I love his military science fiction I am not as big on his fantasy. Lord of the Isles and the sequels are interesting but not my favorites.

Robert Jordan wrote a  huge pile of words about something and I have yet to read any of them. I do have the first two on my bookshelf and they have been there for several years now. I just have not been able to bring myself to start down that road as every book in the series is ridiculously long and there are way too many of them - there's no work of fiction that should take 5000 pages. History of Rome from 500 BC to 500 AD at 1 book per century? OK, 10 volumes sounds fine. History of made-up world and characters in 10+ volumes of 600+ pages? Ridiculously overwritten.  I may get to it someday but it won't be soon.

L.E. Modesett wrote a bunch of stuff about a world called Recluce and it's pretty good.  Looking at the list there are 16 of them now covering around 2000 years of history. Alright that's more than I expected but each one is much smaller than a Wheel of Time novel so it evens out. They describe an interesting world and a very interesting magic system, one of the more detailed ones I have seen as far as describing how magic works and how it feels to be a magic-user. I like them a lot though I confess I haven't read the last wave of them.
 
David Eddings put out a bunch of stuff in the 80's and the 90's and a lot of it was over-padded crap. To me this is the start of the "fantasy bloat" we are still living with today. If a trilogy is good, what's better? A 5-book series! Of course! So he wrote two of them! About the same characters! Pretty much doing the same thing! And they are very slow! He eventually wised up and wrote 2 trilogies about a totally different world and character after this and those were actually pretty good. So my insight from reading these was that if you, as a writer, think that you have a good story for a trilogy, try making it a single novel. If you  think you have a good story for a 5-book series try making it a trilogy. If you have the brilliant idea to write a 10-book series about a fictional fantasy world please don't - try writing one book and let's see what happens. The Belgariad and The Mallorean were some of the first series I read and came away thinking they were just not that good and had me wondering why 5 books was better than 3 when the story clearly wasn't there. I should credit them as they did open my eyes that not everything publishers issued was great or even good.There's a good story in these books somewhere but it's a shorter story than what was published.

Raymond Feist put out a pair of books that were very good (I thought) and they soon grew into an ongoing ad-hoc series  that's up to around 20 books now - in other words it's another runaway case of sequel-itis. There were in some way based on the author's D&D campaign so at this point we've come full circle to where D&D, inspired by fantasy fiction, is now inspiring fantasy fiction in a new generation of authors.   Now I liked the first book -or two depending on when you read it - and thought it was really good. I thought the first trilogy was good, but then things started to decline for me from there. It is cool to follow along as a character that was a child in the first book grows up and is eventually an old man 10 or os books in but there has to be a limit somewhere. I suppose as long as people keep buying them that "the franchise" must go on and the generational thing does keep the characters on a limited rotation but even that wears thin after a time. I would really like to see experienced successful authors experiment a little more - write a new series set in a different world or try some historical fiction or try some horror or post-apocalyptic book - something other than "the 27th novel in the Riftwar Saga". Good stories deserve a good ending and too many nowadays never get one.

The next-to-last major work I want to mention is one I am just starting - George RR Martin's Game of Thrones. series. I have all 4 of them now but I've been waiting to read them until I know I'm going to be able to do it in large chunks. With the HBO series coming out next year I have more incentive to cover them soon. I have not read them but I have heard nothing but good things about them so I am looking forward to it. Hopefully they rise above a lot of what passes for fantasy these days.

The place of honor at the end of my ramblings here goes to the Discworld novels. I've been reading these since the late 80's and thinking about them now they are the fourth leg of my "triangle of fantasy greatness" that  I mentioned above, which is somehow appropriate. They can be read in almost any order but I have a soft spot for those initial Rincewind books, Mort, and Reaper Man. They are the fantasy equivalent of the Hitchiker's Guide (another major work in my developmental period) and if you like that style of humor you will appreciate them but if you liked that AND have read a bunch of fantasy novels good and bad over the years you will feel like you finally found a home when you start reading those. As a fantasy world the Discworld is better described than most serious fantasy novels. The characters and organizations have more internal consistency than a lot of them too so they meet the real test of quality - they aren't just funny they're good. If you haven't read one then find one at a used bookstore and work it in to your schedule - they're short so it won't take long. I'm betting if you're reading this blog you will probably end up liking it and looking for more.

Anyway that's a chunk of my fantasy lit background  and my view of some of the peaks and valleys of the genre over the last 30 years. The biggest problems I see are that the books are too long, too many authors write sequel after sequel because they can and not because the story demands it, and that much of fantasy has been colored by the assumptions of D&D  as a generation of authors grew up playing it and another generation grew up reading it. These are not universal issues - there are good books out there - but I do hope we see a return to shorter works, self contained novels or trilogies at most. In today's short-attention-span world it seems like it would be a natural path to follow. I hope it comes about.