D&D 2E Jakandor

Thanks for finding this thing.

I took a look at the three books, and while some of the basic ideas seem interesting enough as a sword & sorcery/pulp fantasy style setting there was also a lot ... and a lot of it seemed pretty mediocre and it has that 2E/3E quality of just being too much. Rules and options maximalism. Not something I would use now, but were I playing much in 92-93, it would have seemed pretty cool.

It reminds me in a way of my personal favorite late TSR bit of unremembered content: Dragon Mountain ... an enormous boxed set mega-dungeon (with a rather extensive 2e railroad style intro). I should add that at the time it was well received, was reprinted in 2018, and won awards, but I don't ever hear about it these days. From the Wikipedia article on Dragon Mountain you can get an idea of the scope:

"The box includes six poster-sized maps, half of which are tactical displays of village and battlefield settings, while the rest detail the three-levels of the mountain's interior. Six cardstock mini-maps show self-contained sections of the mountain that can be attached to the poster maps at various locations or simply set aside."

Of course when you actually read dragon mountain it's so big that the keys can't catch up to these poster sized maps. So what you get is a series of humanoid lairs. It's a scope vs. content issue that one sees in most really large mega-dungeons, but in Dragon Mountain at least the humanoids have actual factions that a party could exploit... I think Arden Vul is the only thing that gets close to sufficient conceptual density and content for this scale ... and well ... Arden Vul is a unique thing. Anyway...

I think a bit about the mid-90's era of D&D and how it's sort of both the natural evolution of what I see as the TSR Gygax/sensibility in game design - adding more, making rules more granular, always seeming to aim towards a complete fantasy world simulation rather then a "game". There's something appealing about it, but I suspect that in practice it leads to all the cliches about bad 90's heartbreaker games...

Gus L said:

I think a bit about the mid-90's era of D&D and how it's sort of both the natural evolution of what I see as the TSR Gygax/sensibility in game design - adding more, making rules more granular, always seeming to aim towards a complete fantasy world simulation rather then a "game". There's something appealing about it, but I suspect that in practice it leads to all the cliches about bad 90's heartbreaker games...

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A big part of it is that 90s TSR produced SO MUCH stuff. I sometimes see people criticize the pace of publication for 3e, which IIRC was usually something like 2 books per month (one core and one either FR or Eberron), but at its height TSR published over a dozen products per month. So when you're churning out that much stuff, you run out of low-hanging fruit pretty quickly and then you need to get into the weird stuff or you just keep repeating yourself.

Gus L said:

Thanks for finding this thing.

…

I think a bit about the mid-90's era of D&D and how it's sort of both the natural evolution of what I see as the TSR Gygax/sensibility in game design - adding more, making rules more granular, always seeming to aim towards a complete fantasy world simulation rather then a "game". There's something appealing about it, but I suspect that in practice it leads to all the cliches about bad 90's heartbreaker games...

Click to expand...

I don’t remember hearing about Dragon Mountain. And I rediscovered the existence of Jakandor, though I haven’t read or owned it.

Anyhow, yes, I agree 2e became overgrown with too many subsystems, which is part of why I love 3x so much (still) - simulationism with consistency so it’s more understandable.

What do mean about “cliches about bad 90’s heartbreaker games”?

haakon1 said:

What do mean about “cliches about bad 90’s heartbreaker games”?

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The characterization of 90's design, especially the sort of indy design as being heavy on rules bloat and specificity. A trend towards GURPS like systems one might say.

I've got all 3 of the Jakandor books from a co-worker earlier this year but I havent had a chance to give them much more than a cursory glance.

As someone running a few 2e groups(with additional 1e content), I can somewhat agree that 2e can quickly become bloated if you try to bring in every system/setting. Its already been a bit of a handful to be bringing my groups in and out of Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, and Ravenloft.

Since I am a terrible glutton for punishment, I will also be factoring in Al-Qadim, Darksun, Dragonlance, Mystara(Including Redsteel, Savage Coast, and all Known World content from D&D BECMI), and Lankhmar in the future.

So far most of my PCs are either new to D&D as whole or 5e players and all of them are surprised at the lore depth available in 2E for each campaign setting. I've kept the number of extra systems pruned down and I fear I'll need to be more aggressive with it in the future!