Recently for reasons undisclosed I've decided to take another look at 3E. I also grabbed various tools and tricks to "fix" 3E and make it less of a superhero's journey. I grabbed multiple d20 treatments to attempt this. I found something odd -
Monte Cook's Call of Cthulhu (CoC, March 2002) - Worthless
Unearthed Arcana by a ton of WotC authors including Jonathon Tweet (UA, Feb 2004) - Useful
Monte Cook's Arcana Evolved (AE, Feb 2005) - Worthless sequel to Arcana Unearthed (AU)
Game of Thrones d20 by several GoO authors, none of which I've heard of (GoT, July 2005) - Useful
So, the reasons I got these were simple: I owned CoC long ago and remember it being a relatively more grounded version of the game. I could have saved myself some bucks as all the changes to make this game more grounded are in UA. I had never owned UA, but I heard that it was a shitty version of what was done in Arcana Unearthed (AU), which AE is the ultimately "evolved" version of.
Up and down the internet I heard praises sung for the two games - AE and GoT. Back in the days before the TV show I was mildly interested in GoT but the price was astronomical as the game had one small print run then fell off the face of the earth forever. The only reason I bought UA was because everyone said it wasn't as good as AU. It stands to reason the best version of AU is AE so I got that to compare.
The crowd is sometimes stupid and sometimes smart. Monte Cook is now heavily entrenched in the "gassed up over-hyped lame brain game designer" category in my mind, I'll know to never read anything of his ever again. I should have trusted my gut because Mena Mena and/or Cypher System were both garbage when I saw them a decade back or so. I thought maybe he was like Jonathon Tweet and is brain may have been rotted by TDS but it seems like he's basically always been just not very good at designing games and my original assessment that Jonathon Tweet did all the 3E design heavy lifting back in the day still holds firm. Maybe Monte was always more of a module writer than a game designer.
CoC wouldn't be completely worthless if every trick it had wasn't also espoused in UA. UA was written a few years later but AE was written even later so that's no real excuse. To be fair AE wasn't really ever in the running as it's not actually a toolkit, just named like one. It's actually an unsuccessful attempt by Malhavoc Press to get Corebook money from 3E players. A good 60% of the book is a restatement of the 3E PHB. It could have been a 156 page supplement for 3E is what I'm saying. There is much, much less content in its 430 pages than in UA's 224 pages.
And now for a quick as lighting review of UA. UA is the "Mastermind's Manual" of D&D 3.5. A massive book in terms of scope even with minimal page count. This is a designer's handbook for the system, never ever fairly compared to AU or AE as really they are entirely different beasts because Monte Cook decided to improperly name his little houserules/setting combo. In my eyes UA is many times the value of AE, just because you can't, don't, won't, and shouldn't use every single change within it's covers at the same time doesn't make it less valuable, merely more versatile.
