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Tormsskull
2006-12-06, 06:50 AM
Ok, tell me this isn't hilarious: "Other published sources (wink, wink)" There goes Baker putting in a not-so-subtle plug for Ebberon. Good article all and all though.

amanodel
2006-12-06, 06:55 AM
"He also designed some campaign setting or something. At long last, his will has been crushed beneath the iron heel of his archnemesis, Rich Burlew, and he has been chained to a desk somewhere in Colorado to churn out fodder for this website."

Notable, indeed :smallbiggrin:

Medesha
2006-12-06, 11:50 AM
Awesome! Keith rocks!

Amotis
2006-12-06, 11:42 PM
Haha I loved the taunt at the end. Glad to see archrivals can be funny sometimes.

Grey Watcher
2006-12-07, 11:28 AM
I really, really like this class. It's nice to see something you can use to build the village wise-woman without going so far as to build a fully-fledged druid.

Lord Iames Osari
2006-12-07, 12:03 PM
I really, really like this class. It's nice to see something you can use to build the village wise-woman without going so far as to build a fully-fledged druid.
Quoted For Truth.

mac13eth
2006-12-07, 12:21 PM
Seems to be an error in one of the spells though...

Sow's detail block says 10ft square/round, but the text says a new 5ft square each round.

bosssmiley
2006-12-07, 06:12 PM
I liked the gleaner class. Flavourful without power creep. A nice 'community druid' counterpart to the Adapt and *cough* Magewright *cough*.

We look forward to seeing more from young Mr Baker, he may just have a career in RPG writing ahead of him.

"Eberrwhatnow? No sorry, never heard of it. Is that for, like, Greyhawk or something?" :smallwink:

alanajoli
2006-12-07, 07:29 PM
Nice balance to the other NPC classes--and more fitting as far as flavor than the adept (as noted in the descriptive text, of course, but isn't it nicer to have it said by reader rather than creator?).

Good stuff! Yay guests! Glad to see that whole phone-cord thing is long behind everyone... ;)

-Alana

hewhosaysfish
2006-12-07, 07:47 PM
Hang on a minute... did any one else spot this?



NPC Class: The Gleaner
...
...
... A massive gnome farm may have a host of 1st-level gleaners who use the farmhand spell to keep operations running like clockwork, producing food for the nearby metropolis....

"Gnome farm"?! Is this a metropolis full of ogres, by any chance? :smallsmile:

Zherog
2006-12-07, 09:11 PM
Not bad, Keith. Not bad at all. Keep working at it, and eventually you might even be as good as Rich. :smalltongue: :smalltongue: :smalltongue: :smalltongue:

StickMan
2006-12-07, 11:28 PM
Final I know what class I would be if I had a normal job in a DND world. I think its a perfect balance. Plus Keith Baker, my favorit setting author is on my favorit DND site. Though if Rich had won I'm sure his would have been better.:smallcool:

MrNexx
2006-12-12, 11:03 AM
Why is it called a "gleaner"? That part didn't make any sense to me.

headwarpage
2006-12-12, 02:26 PM
Gleaning is the official term for gathering herbs and whatnot for your root-based folk remedies. Or so I vaguely recall from my high-school English class. I'm sure somebody will correct me if I'm wrong.

jrodman
2007-09-27, 07:22 AM
Gleaning is the official term for gathering herbs and whatnot for your root-based folk remedies. Or so I vaguely recall from my high-school English class. I'm sure somebody will correct me if I'm wrong.


My experience with the term was from my high school english class as well. We read a short story, which I want to say was Hemingway or Faulkner, but I cannot for the life of my find it. Nonetheless it involved a farmer and possibly his son who completed the harvest and then went ahead and told the gleaners that it was their turn.

The term referred to the concept of people who are given access to a harvest field after the landowner or perhaps sharecropper or such have harvested the main crop for profit or food. The practice of giving access to essentially all comers after completing a harvest was a form of charity. Only the poor, and likely migratory folks who could not provide for themselves would show up to glean. Farmers, at least those who owned their land, were generally self sufficient, and giving a small portion of the harvest (the most difficult to extract from the field, generally) was seen as their fitting contribution to those who had less.

In the story the farmer harvested the field with a mechanised harvesting method of some kind. Limited in turning radius, typical of anything with wheels, the harvester could not easily fully harvest the corners of the field. The primary remainder of the harvest to glean was located outside these rounded corners.

Apparently the term appears specifically in the Old Testament holiness code, Leviticus, in english translations of the hebrew antecedents. Eg. From the King James Bible Leviticus Chapter 19, verse 9 "And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not wholly reap the corners of thy field, neither shalt thou gather the gleanings of thy harvest." Which of course dates to 1604-1611, and has almost certainly helped to cement the connotations of charity in the intervening time as this text became fairly central to most english speaking cultures in the interim.

Certainly the most famous work associated with the term is the painting by Jean-François Millet, as viewable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gleaners
The text in this article suggests that gleaning a harvest might in some circumstances instead be paid work rather than charity.

At least in American society, the term is fairly strongly associated with charity, however. Certainly the highest profile domain named directly after the term is a food bank: http://www.gleaners.org/about.shtm

I found the name truly strange in the sense that to my mind it exemplifies the social status of dependency, requiring the charity of others to survive, with all the complex social issues that raises. Perhaps others may have a different history of the term, and a Gleaner might be one who lives off the leavings of the world and nature but remains his or her own agency. That would be in keeping with my ideas of druid nature, in any event.

Eikre
2007-09-28, 07:43 PM
Possibly, it's supposed to invoke a subtle community-minded feel. In a society of few gleaners and many farmers, the most effective method of crop production would be farmers tending to individual fields and gleaners contributing magic for the overall maximum yield. In this case, the gleaners' sustenance is actually a share of the entire community's crop.