Reading Old D&D Books

 Given that it was on sale for 7 bucks, I picked up the 2nd Edition Ravenloft campaign setting guide on DM's Guild.

Now, I really don't actually understand a lot of the 2nd Edition systems - I started playing in an era of attack bonuses and saving throws, and I haven't even begun to wrap my head around THAC0 (for one thing, as a 5th Editioner, the concept of something having an AC of 0 is utterly alien.)

But I'm there for the flavor, trying to rebuild what I can should I want to play around with these classic settings (in the absence of a 5th Edition release.)

So I've got the Planescape and Ravenloft books from 2nd Edition and the 4th Edition Shadowfell: Gloomwrought and Beyond books.

Planescape's focus is a lot more on lore, which makes it feel like it'd be a lot easier to run 5th Edition adventures in Sigil and the Outlands. While it's not as comprehensive as I'd want it to be (it only details some of the Gate-Towns, skipping I believe all the ones attached to Upper Planes) there's still a lot of really cool information there.

Planescape also leans into the "weird fantasy" feel of the setting, which I love. Don't get me wrong, I love Lord of the Rings. But the kind of fantasy I like to (or would like to) craft has a bit more oddness to it. Planescape actually gives me some very Jim Henson-y vibes, with the surreal landscapes and bizarre armor and uniforms of the representatives of the various "Factols" and the Gate-Towns.

While I think that the numbers and dice can be a really great tool, I've found that I like handling broader narrative arcs with a sort of "mechanics-light" approach. This has been a major lesson in running a Ravnica campaign - one in which I've been admittedly liberal in giving players renown.

As such, I think I could handle some of Planescape's odd planar mechanics in more of a narrative-without-rolls way, or have important moments resolved with simple dice rolls (one thing I'm trying to work on as a DM is to not get too attached to a particular outcome and try to force it to happen.) I love the idea that the planes can effectively steal land by concentrating enough of a philosophical alignment there - a quest idea I had was a group of monks from Arcadia needing to be defended from a bunch of demons as they try to liberate a former stronghold of theirs that was corrupted, simply by meditating really hard while the party fights.

As someone who started with 5th Edition, I was somewhat shocked to discover that the Shadowfell is a super-recent addition to the canon, showing up only in 4th Edition (and 4th Edition being one in which the whole Great Wheel cosmology was smashed, which 5E seems to have just kind of swept under the rug, decision-wise.)

I definitely noticed some odd retcons, like the fact that Shadar-Kai were humans in 4E, but are emphatically elves in 5E.

The Shadowfell book places a lot of emphasis on the city of Gloomwrought, which is very cool, but I'd be more interested in a general way flavor Shadowfell locations. I'm really interested in the "dark reflection" aspect of the Shadowfell, where every location has a corresponding one in the Material Plane (and the Feywild, for that matter.)

Ravenloft comes with a lot of lore on various Dark Lords and NPCs, and a lot of suggestions on building the tone of gothic horror. It is also, I must say, the most obviously dated of the books. Not only does it frequently use an outdated term for the Romani people (which, you know, I get, as I think that term was considered fairly neutral in the 1990s by most people, though the stereotypes were never really "ok,") but it also seem to really, really assume that players are male (again, to be fair, there is some language that acknowledges that it won't always be the case, but the choice is still to always default to male pronouns, which might not bother you, but to me feels, well, dated.)

Of the three, the Planescape guide lights up my imagination the most. Naturally, as it's only one book, the focus remains fixated on Sigil and the Outlands. I think I'd need some other book (I want to say "Manual of the Planes") to get more info on the rest of the multiverse, but I think there's a ton of potential for an interesting Planescape campaign that you can get just from this.

Also, I know that a lot of older players pronounce Sigil with a hard g. I don't care if that's the "canon." Sigil is a word in English and it's not pronounced that way. Harumph.

Anyway, these books are interesting, but I don't really understand the older editions' mechanics enough to convert things like stat blocks over to 5th Edition. I'm really hoping we get some releases in the coming years bringing these cool settings into 5th Edition.