Editing Arcana Unearthed (section)

=Arcana Evolved=
Starting 2003, The Community tested out how the AU / DT / LoD world with its overhauled d20 system was going to work. They found a number of stress-points and opportunities for improvement. Come 2005, we got ''Arcana Evolved''.

This rewrite had to justify its existence so, in addition to the fixes, and the appendix, ''AE'' has new material. The '''Ritual Warrior''' is herein introduced. Alongside this was Mike Mearls' ''Transcendence'' book which offered the '''Totem Speaker''' class, several new Feats and prestige-classes, and "Tylonian" (crystal) equipment.

''Evolved'' is where this sequence and this setting jumped the shark. Start with the colour-theme, which AU had as a nice eye-pleasing yellow-on-black formerly and in AE is an eye-blasting white-on-red.

Most of all - just as players and DMs were figuring out all these weird new rules ''and how they worked in Diamond Throne'' - OH HI WE'RE THE DRAGONS AND [[metaplot|WE'RE BACK NOW]]. We didn't even get a gazetteer of a single starter location.

So, here come the Dracha, dragon-men. And the dragons come behind them, bearing gifts... Tenebrian Seeds. Some races can use these to become Evolved or Transcendent or whatevs; giants become taller for instance. Because nobody ever listens to the historians. And we thought Cook was writing fantasy...

This is perhaps the Malhavoc Press answer to ''Dragonlance''. Takhisis doesn't come to conquer; she comes to seduce.

Anyway, the massive AE book makes a Dragon-sized blunder in bundling the player material with the DM's, guaranteeing that the DM is going to make some awful decisions in how to parcel the former to the players - handing a PDF excerpt to them, most likely.

This version at least had a first-party adventure-module. Mearls, ''Ruins of Intrigue''. The ruin (singular) is an arena, between dragon and giant. The ruin was once a dramojh nursery; the giants and dragons are working out who gets the loot. Mearls tries ever so hard not to take sides, because a major theme in this universe is that alignment is Nuanced, but... only one side can make new dramojh, and that's the dragon side. Did anyone even play this thing who wasn't playtesting it?