I’m fond of saying that the campain’s not dead, just embalmed for the duration. They were about half-way through the global adventure I had planned when I folded it up and put it away. One interesting touch: for the first year, the entire campaign took place in Aysle prior to the commencement of the Possibility Wars. The characters got to see events the game considers ‘background’ from the inside – it worked wonderfully well. And produced a few events still referanced today, such as a PC perched on a red dragon’s lower lip, his arms stuck up it’s nostrils to the elbow, to prevent it snorting fire….

Thnks for the tip on the Conan RPG, it’s worth knowing about. Most of my campaigns tend to be high fantasy because that’s what I enjoy, but high fantasy at low levels can be tricky, and a change of atmosphere might work well at times.

Regarding the Magic Item Compendium tables: They do have half-line summaries, more or less – a typical entry reads “+1 leather, various fox-themed bonuses and effects”. The problem (aside from the vague descriptions) is that they aren’t organised in terms of who they are suited for – you have to read the whole table set, every time, and even then they won’t help much a lot of the time. They aren’t organised by effect, they are listed (with summaries) by Location and by Market Price – making them less than useful. A list that said “these are primarily intended for Clerics, these are for Wizards, these are for Fighters,” and so on would have been much more helpful.

Slight interjection, though, on the Magic Item Compendium: The tables in the back of the book that separate everything out by magic item slot have one line descriptions of what the item does. It lists both DMG and MIC items.

At least, I think it does…

Eventually, I’ll get around to doing more-or-less exactly what you suggest – compiling a codex. It will unify both DMG and MIC lists. But that’s work, and the fact that I have to do it detracts from the value of the book. Time that could have been spent on other things…

Any time I had to look up an item in the DMG because I couldn’t tell what it does, I wrote a little summary line in there so I wouldn’t have to do it again.

CC because that’s what I’ve got – I mentioned the revised edition in the text and the problems with it, and provided a link to the relevant Amazon page, but I’ve never personally looked at or used the revised version. I can only reccomend what I use! So far I havn’t had too many problems using the original – of course, it will probably trip me up the next time that we play now that I’ve said that!

And why Creature Collection but not Creature Collection Revised? The CC breaks so many of the monster rules from the d20 system (because it was released before the Monster Manual) that it becomes comical. The Revised edition cleaned that up very well and took all the great ideas from CC and made the rules work.
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