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When Queen Iliana formed her great Empire, it was built on several wars that served to unify – or conquer, depending on whom you asked – the diverse pony tribes. While her status as the patron deity of a particular society guaranteed her a stable body of followers, her lack of cross-cultural recognition ultimately proved to be her undoing. On the young world of Everglow, a particular tribe of ponies were the primary worshippers of Lashtada, the goddess of romantic love. As such, allow me to present my own version of: Several mini-releases have followed, the latest one being Forgotten Gods of Everglow, detailing two “new” deities for the game world.Īs such, this struck me as the perfect opportunity to back-convert one of the deities here and give them AD&D 2E/TPO statistics. Moreover, Silver Games hasn’t sat idle since releasing the campaign setting. Even considering my burnout on Pathfinder supplements, I’m quite fond of Ponyfinder, since I find it fascinating how it takes a more grownup view of what ponies would be like if they were from a world with Pathfinder-based monsters and magic. Though I haven’t mentioned it since I first started making pony-related posts, there’s a(n unofficial) pony sourcebook for Pathfinder called Ponyfinder, released by Silver Games. …which brings us to the ponies (apparently I can’t seem to stop referencing this topic). They may not be “official,” but for me they’re close enough.Īs such, since I’ve recently given myself permission to post non-Pathfinder-related RPG materials here, I’ve decided that this post will have AD&D 2E stats for a Primal Order-style deity. Having picked up a used copy of the first printing (the book has since become available for download and print-on-demand, but that’s only for the second printing, which excised the D&D materials) early last year – as well as all three supplements – I’m able to create stats for gods using the AD&D Second Edition rules at last. Once I found out about this book, I had to acquire it. The insights it presents, and the rules that back them up, are required reading for any GM that wants to make their deities be active, dynamic facets of the game world. Presenting a universal set of rules with appendices covering their specific implementation in well over a dozen different RPGs – something they called the “capstone system” – The Primal Order remains one of the best (if not the very best) book about how to make gods a natural, tightly-integrated part of your campaign.
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The irony was that, it would be well into the life of Third Edition before I found out that a third-party company named Wizards of the Coast put out a sourcebook designed specifically to address this very deficiency: The Primal Order. Only in Second Edition were we told “gods are beyond stats. After all, Basic has its Immortals, First Edition and Third Edition have their respective Deities and Demigods books (which are basically divine monster supplements), and even Fourth Edition had stat blocks for gods in various supplements and adventures. It also seemed particularly unfair, given that every other edition of D&D has stats for gods. Likewise, cries of “but that promotes munchkin-levels of optimization!” are also poor excuses to me – the min-maxers are going to do what they do, regardless of what they have to draw upon.
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I’ve always looked askance on the idea that statistics for gods are somehow inherently “unbalanced” in D&D, mostly because nobody can seem to come to a consensus what “balance” means anyway (let alone find a way to measure it). Unfortunately, none of those things included statistics for deities, something which always bothered me. Still, even that was inspirational in a way less structure meant more freedom in what was presented, and there were some truly inspirational – and bizarre – things to be found across the spectrum of 2E products. Of course, Second Edition’s mechanics were far less cohesive than those of the subsequent Third Edition.
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Never before nor since has D&D made so many worlds, or developed them so richly (the closest we’ve seen since then is Eberron in Third Edition). I say that fondly, as I consider 2E to have been the game’s high point when it comes to setting development. More specifically, I came to the game with Basic D&D, using the black “board game” starter set, before transitioning to the Rules Cyclopedia.įrom there, I eventually made the jump to AD&D 2nd Edition, and in many ways I never really moved on from there. Like many tabletop gamers, my introduction to RPGs came from Dungeons & Dragons. I’ve been feeling somewhat nostalgic lately…