Monday 26 March 2012

Theorems & Thaumaturgy progress

I've been a bit quiet here the last couple of weeks, not for any particular reason, just that nothing really blog-worthy has entered my mind or occurred in our LL games.

However I thought I'd break the silence with a small progress report on my upcoming book of magic for Labyrinth Lord.

The first round of proofreading is now complete (thanks all who helped out!), and the text of the book is now going into the final stages. Bob of Back to the Keep has very kindly offered to act as editor, and has been doing a sterling job of whipping my meandering prose into shape ;) Meanwhile several artists are working away to get everything looking pretty. The wonderful Cadanse D just sent me a draft for the book's cover recently. I won't show it off here, preferring to leave it as a surprise when it's ready, but it's going to be a awesome!

A stroke of inspiration hit me this morning as I was looking at my AD&D 2e player's handbook -- I had the idea of releasing Theorems & Thaumaturgy in two versions: one with the spells in the "modern" A - Z order, and one in the "traditional" 1st - 9th level order. I still find that I'm more comfortable with the latter, even though the Labyrinth Lord books follow the D&D 3e inspired alphabetical ordering. Does anyone else have a preference? I guess it will mostly come down to how much work it will be to do the layout twice!

As a final glimpse into the book's progress, here's the table of contents for your perusal:

Introduction 3
Section One – New Classes 5
Elementalist 5
Necromancer 11
Vivimancer 22
Section Two – Variant Classes 33
Fey Elf 33
Illusionist 36
Section Three – Tomes 41
The Book of Deceptions 41
The Book of Figurines and Puppets 42
The Book of Meta-Magic 43
The Book of Pranks 44
The Chronomancer's Workbook 45
The Dimensional Treatise 46
The Libram of Chaos 48
The Prism Codex 50
The Tome of Infernal Power 51
The Tome of Ooze and Slime 52
The Tome of the Spider Mage 53
Appendices 56
I. Optional Rules for Magic-Users 56
II. New Monsters 57
III. New Magic Items 62
Alphabetical Index of Spells 65
Open Game License 71

5 comments:

  1. I like by level more than A - Z also.

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  2. I'm old school... need I say more about which order I'd prefer?

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  3. It's not just me then :)

    I think maybe I'll make level ordering the "official" version then, and do an A-Z version if I have time and it's not a world of hassle.

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  4. Very late to this discussion, but I also prefer it by level as a player, because I'm having to make decisions between which spells of a certain level I'm going to work with that day. I get the sense that DMs (or anyone else just trying to find out what a spell does) prefer the A-Z, since they don't know the spell level off the top of their heads.

    I also prefer cleric spells separate from MU spells.

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  5. Spawn I think you're right about the player vs DM thing...

    Also, re: level vs alphabetical ordering, something that only occurred to me later on was that level ordering only really works for large spell lists with at least a few spells per level. This is fine for section one of the book, for example, where the three new classes and their spell lists are detailed. However for the other sections, especially the tomes in section three, some of which only contain a small number of spells, the by-level ordering is unwieldy.

    So it seems like it'd either be a choice of consistent ordering throughout all sections of the book, or by-level ordering in section one and alphabetical ordering in the rest. I'm still undecided which is better, though to be honest I think I err on the side of consistency in this case.

    And don't worry Spawn, there won't be any cleric spells sullying the arcane purity of this tome ;)

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