Assume I can only afford one. I will list the things which at present interest me most about each:

Majestic Wilderlands: I like Rob Conley and respect him greatly, and Wilderlands is one of my favorite settings, but I only have the extremely over-hefty d20 version of it

Vornheim: It's reputed to contain some of Zak's best tables, and in abundance, however I understand there are several drop tables which are not best for me. I don't feel like I've run enough city-based adventures.

5 Ancient Kingdoms: I have always had a taste for Arabian Nights inspired fantasy, JB seems to have done some clever innovating with it, and I am particularly curious about the system of feats/advantages he used (simple-but-effective feats being something of a white whale for me.)

Quote from: LibraryLass;685746Majestic Wilderlands: I like Rob Conley and respect him greatly, and Wilderlands is one of my favorite settings, but I only have the extremely over-hefty d20 version of it

Appreciate the compliment.

The Majestic Wilderlands is not the Wilderlands of High Fantasy.

Although to make things confusing I wrote the villages for two and a half maps (CSIO, Barbarian Altanis, and main land portion of the Isle of Blest). I basically sat down the originals and came up with all new material.

The best way to use the Majestic Wilderlands is buy the originals from Judges Guild on RPGNow each set of maps cost $4 and there are four of them. The original are far more compact than the boxed set.

Use a scale of 12.5 miles to the hex.
Cities are cities.
Villages are towns of the same name.
Square dots are castles
Round dots are keeps.

Use my supplement as a guide and use the original stats and descriptions as inspiration. After thirty years I rarely use much of the originals except for the cities like CSIO and CSWE.

My blog and website has some additional details including detailed maps.

And optionally Scourge of the Demon Wolf focuses on small area near CSIO that gives you a sense of how I run the setting at a local level.

Over time I plan to publish more but that is the quick and dirty way of getting started with the Majestic Wilderlands.  For somebody wanting to use my supplement it might a better way to make a campaign that is truly their own.

As for the Wilderlands of High Fantasy I have some suggestions on that if you are interested.

Quote from: LibraryLass;685746Vornheim: It's reputed to contain some of Zak's best tables, and in abundance, however I understand there are several drop tables which are not best for me. I don't feel like I've run enough city-based adventures.

What impresses me about Vornheim that is not a travel guide to Vornheim but an effective description of how Zak runs Vornheim. Written up in the form of text and many tables. Which to me is more interesting then a simple physical description.

Quote from: estar;685761The Majestic Wilderlands is not the Wilderlands of High Fantasy.

Could you elaborate (apart from the scale and the timeskip involving the death of the World Emperor, which I'm aware of through reputation)?

I can only speak of Vornheim, as it is the only one on the list I've read - but it's awesome. Every table in the book creates something cool - an adventure hook, a fantastic npc, a mad encounter. Everything page just reeks inspiration and yells "use me in your game". And it's all arranged, so you can use it at a whim - no need to plan ahead. Also, it has innovative and fun ways to instantly generate street maps, building plans, npcs, etc. It's probably the most "bang for the the buck" role-playing book in my collection (or at least a tie with OtE)

And it's a just a really good looking book. It reminds me of my dads underground comics from the 70s.

Final selling point: Right now I'm handing off my Ptolus book. I would never part with my Vornheim book. It's better and more useful, to me

Quote from: LibraryLass;685765Could you elaborate (apart from the scale and the timeskip involving the death of the World Emperor, which I'm aware of through reputation)?

The original Wilderlands of High Fantasy are basically Swords & Sorcery with D&D tropes with a little gonzo thrown in. But it was real thin as the original background amounted to little more than a dozen full pages. The guts of the Wilderlands were in the barebones lists of villages, castles, lairs, ruins, and islands.

There was just enough to retain some consistency and save work but barebones enough that you had to come up with the details to flesh it out.

Which is why most of the referees who started out with the Wilderlands have very divergent campaigns. The closest thing in RPGs is the original Spinward Marches in Traveller. Again extensive lists that did save work but barebone enough that was resulted in play was uniquely the referee.

The Majestic Wilderlands got it start in the fact that I was the referee who allowed players to "trash" his campaign. They could found, topple, and destroy kingdoms, cities, and villages and I would have no problem with that.

My experience over the years changed this.

The Majestic Wilderlands is a setting where the adventure results from the clash of culture, religion, and politics. In current pop culture terms it would be Game of Thrones with a higher level of fantasy. Scourge of the Demon Wolf is the typical type of adventure that occurs in my campaigns. Although I have dungeons as well mostly in the form of ruins from past cultures or civilizations.

To this end I expanded the scale and created kingdoms, cultures, religions, etc to fuel all this. And I did this while sticking to the standard D&D tropes. Rather than create new races I came with new cultures for existing races especially humans. Same with monsters especially intelligent ones.

The supplement is my background and character creation notes written using the mechanics of Swords & Wizardry. And my guess is that because I stuck with the D&D tropes many folks find useful elements for their own classic edition games.

And at $12 for combined print and PDF on RPGNow I think it is a pretty good value.  Or just $8 for the PDF.

As an aside, I do have another line of products that uses the Wilderlands format but in a more compact form. The settings they detail are not related to the Wilderlands.

The Blackmarsh PDF is free to download from RPGNow and the book is only $7. If you have a tight budget you may want to start off with that.

And there are the Points of Light books from Goodman Games which give you four setting in each book in the same format as Blackmarsh.

The rules portions of my Majestic Wilderlands work fine with the above along with some of the cultural notes.

Let me know if you have any more questions.

Quote from: estar;685845As an aside, I do have another line of products that uses the Wilderlands format but in a more compact form. The settings they detail are not related to the Wilderlands.

The Blackmarsh PDF is free to download from RPGNow and the book is only $7. If you have a tight budget you may want to start off with that.

And there are the Points of Light books from Goodman Games which give you four setting in each book in the same format as Blackmarsh.

The rules portions of my Majestic Wilderlands work fine with the above along with some of the cultural notes.

Let me know if you have any more questions.

I've had Blackmarsh for some time now. I have some interest in the rules content of Majestic Wilderlands as well, which is why I haven't sprung for Points of Light.

Quote from: estar;685761As for the Wilderlands of High Fantasy I have some suggestions on that if you are interested.

Given that it's you, I'd be very interested in this!

Quote from: LibraryLass;685746Vornheim: It's reputed to contain some of Zak's best tables, and in abundance, however I understand there are several drop tables which are not best for me.

Only 3 of the tables are drop tables (one on the front cover, one on the back, one inside) and of those, one is also represented in standard d100 format. The drop tables are for mundane things (armor class of a city guard, f'rinstance). That leaves about 63 pages of other stuff.

As for Vornheim's quality: I'm biased because I wrote it.

But you know who isn't? Ralph Mazza. He hates me. He once said:

"I know you think you're a hot shit DM but I've followed your actual plays and your articles...and frankly, I'd rather have a root canal than sit in one of your sessions."

...and his take on Vornheim is:

"
You want it.

It is a fascinating city that takes the approach of making a fantasy city actually fantastic. Why yes the crazy lady in the spooky house is a medusa...and everyone knows that and its just a thing that exists.

Its stupidly full of little color bits that could grow into full on plot hooks...solidly in my category of "things I'm very glad I bought..."
"

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I am also interested to hear about Majestic (using much of the original Wilderlands in the campaign I'm running now) and 5 kingdoms (players are in pseudo-Arabia at the moment).

Anyone have a link to the 5 Kingdoms thing?

I have two of the three:  Vornheim and Majestic Wilderlands.  Between those two, Vornheim is most useful in a plug and play sense.  You can slot that in for city adventures almost anywhere.  Also, its awesome.  Its got a higher weird and wonderful quotient than I would come up with left to my own devices.

Majestic Wilderlands is solid taken on its own merits, but you've probably got to want to run it as your campaign setting to get much use out of it.  There wasn't anything in there that screamed to be used in another world.

Hm, how rude of me to not respond to the original post! I have both Vornheim and Wilderlands. Like Saladman, I'd recommend Vornheim at the table. It's effectively setting independent, and is terribly useful if you're running a (at least moderately) fantastic fantasy city. Sure, the "drop charts" are a bit weird (though I'd probably call them charming), but there's tons of other stuff in there to use.

Sorry Rob.

If you look on the reviews forum, you'll find reviews I wrote for both Majestic Wilderlands and Vornheim; that might help you decide.

They're both great products, I've ended up using both in my actual gaming, which is only true of about 10% or less of the ridiculous amount of books I've gotten for review over the years.

I have Majestic Wilderlands, and it's a great book, especially if you use older D&D (but it will still be useful for most any fantasy rpg).