The bonus action and the boost in hit points goes straight to that.' The key thing to me was to finally give the rogue a sense of swashbuckling and agility during a fight.

'It’s no coincidence that I like playing rogues. Fritz Leiber 'has always been a personal favorite of mine,' says Mearls.'A lot of the stuff behind bonds, flaws, all the stuff that binds characters to the campaign, was inspired by reading Throne.' Saladin Ahmed 'did a great job of capturing the concept of an adventuring party in Throne of the Crescent Moon,' says Mearls.'We actually talked about using words of power as big element of the bard, but toned it down as too on the nose.' Fifth edition designers knew that players would use the bard class to create characters inspired by Kvothe, the hero of Rothfuss' novel The Name of the Wind. Patrick Rothfuss 'showed that bards didn’t have to suck,' according to Mearls.'I came to the Elric saga from Tolkien and it blew my mind,' says Mearls. Moorcock’s influence on the warlock class is noticeable as well. Roger Zelazny and Michael Moorcock 'influenced our approach to modifying the planes, casting specifically the elemental planes as places to visit and explore,' he says.Other places to find the influence of fantasy authors in the new D&D rulebooks, according to Mike Mearls: 'In the warlock, several of the invocations (such as the Witch Sight invocation) are drawn straight from the darker magic shown in The Broken Sword.' 'We really looked back to the paladin’s roots, which you can trace back to Three Hearts and Three Lions specifically, but there’s also a lot of influence from The Broken Sword there too, specifically in the Oath of the Ancients,' he says. Rodney Thompson, another designer on the fifth edition of D&D, says much of his work on the game was influenced by author Poul Anderson, and that you can see it best in the paladin and warlock player character classes.

Range of ghosts by elizabeth bear