All classic Judges Guild D&D products (City State of the Invincible Overlord, Wilderlands of High Fantasy...) appeared before I started gaming, but now many of them are available online. Are they good? Which ones do you recommend? And what about the 3E version?
The Wilderlands of High Fantasy boxed set is an excellent resource if you can find it. I hear that copies are somewhat pricey nowadays, though.
It's an old school swords and sorcery style setting with 18 large area maps ideal for hex crawling.
Quote from: Frey;915170All classic Judges Guild D&D products (City State of the Invincible Overlord, Wilderlands of High Fantasy...) appeared before I started gaming, but now many of them are available online. Are they good? Which ones do you recommend? And what about the 3E version?
Note that I am one of or the author of some of the 3e Judges Guild products.
Most of the D&D related Judges Guild products are available as PDFs on RPGNow.
City State of the Invincible Overlord is the one that started the line and is a complete city. There is a 3E version that is fleshed out but consistent with the original. Stats are minimal in favor of description text.
Judges Guild has a setting called the Wilderlands of High Fantasy. The original and the 3e version are both available as PDFs on RPGnow. Not the originals don't come with maps. Like City-State, the boxed set version expands on the original and is consistent with it. The Wilderlands are the canonical example of a hexcrawl setting. The map is a series of numbered hexes which the entire keyed by hex number. It large with 18 maps covering an area the size of Western Europe. There is little in the way of high level detail allowing you to make the setting into whatever you want. It strength in in local level detail like ruins, lairs, villages, and castles expaned to an area the size of Western Europe.
I am one of the authors of the boxed set.
Anything by Jaquays is good and are considered classics. For example Dark Tower, Caverns of Tharcia, and the Book of Treasure Maps I.
The Ready Ref Sheet compile the various random charts that Judges Guild like to pepper their product with. It great if you are running classic D&D especially OD&D.
There also a series of Wilderness books that expand the detail of a region of 5 miles hexes from the bigger maps. It only six that cover various area on Map 1 City-State. Mines Custalon, The Spies of Lightelf, etc. They are mid range in Judges Guild Quality.
Tegel Manor, Thieve of Badabaskor, and Citadel of Fire are classic adventures by Bob Bledsaw. Tegel Manor is the only complete megadungeon ever published from back in the day. Note that in order to use, you need to pay careful attention to the notes on the maps as well as the text. Also Tegel demands a lot of improvisation skill from the referee because at best you have one or two sentance, and some one word maps notes to detail a room.
Citadel of Fire also has some quirks in that it is better used as an "evil town" than a dungeon. The same with Thieves of Badabaskor.
I wrote the 3rd edition Adaptation of Thieves of Badabaskor (Goodman Games). I opted for expanding the details of the original and I doubled down on the whole evil town premise. The 3e Citadel of Fire is rubbish in my opinion and pretty much its own thing and not all faithful to the original. The 3E Dark Tower is a edited version of the original with 3e stats and maps slightly cleaned up. I did the cartography for all three.
The Castle books, and the Village Book have dozens of maps and useful tables pertaining to castles and villages. The maps are black and white and very useful.
I will be glad to answer any specific questions about any of the Judges Guild products.
Thanks! Although a primer would be nice, too many supplements.
Another question: what makes the Wilderlands special? How is the setting different from Greyhawk or the Known World?
I think the Wilderlands of Fantasy 3E version is good. I like it better than the OD&D versions which are a little too spartan for me. The main conceptual difference between most game settings and Wilderlands is the hex as a unit for things. Some hexes are left blank for the DM to fill as he likes and others have locations or encounters listed.
A random copy-paste from a random page (the number is the hex number):
Quote0818 Nixie Lair (EL 14): On the eastern shore of Council Lake, near the confluence of the River Briskly, is an underwater village of nixies. The 95 nixies (CR 1; hp 3 each) will play tricks on anyone camping nearby, and will attempt to charm anyone who disturbs them. Their village is 40 feet underwater. They fear the witches of the marshes to the west, and will be friendly if anyone is proven the enemy of the witches.
0823 SPRINGLE (Small Town): Conventional; AL CG; TL 6; 800 gp limit; Assets 36,600 gp; Population 1,464 (Able bodied 366); Mixed (human 79% [mostly Tharbrian and Alryan, some Skandiks and Altanians], halfling 9%, elf 5%, dwarf 3%, others 4%); Resources: Sulfur. Authority Figure: Hanutar, male Tharbrian NG Ftr8. Important characters: Josai, female Tharbrian NG Com2/Wiz2 (leading exporter of sulfur, rival to Arnsen of Red Cliffe); Texar, male Alryan Com6 (head of the mining gangs); Langston, male Tharbrian Wiz5 (area researcher in the hot springs). Lord Hanutar is sympathetic with Lady Tenava's fight but won't help as it would violate several treaties with the World Emperor. The region has many hot springs and sulfur deposits. The sulfur is mined and shipped back to the City State where is eagerly used by wizards and alchemists.
A copy-paste from a recent post I made on another forum with the same question:
Keep in mind that the Wilderlands as a setting is vastly different from Greyhawk, or any other D&D setting for that matter. In some ways, it's exactly the opposite of that kind of setting. For the most part, there are no nations per se (or even much information on how individual settlements relate to each other), nor is there much in the way of history, pantheons or cultures. It assumes that most of that kind of detail will be supplied by the individual DM.
You could treat the Wilderlands as a gritty sword-and-sorcery setting or you could treat it like Middle Earth. Some of the later supplements like Witches Court Marshes drill down into a relatively small region and attempt to provide more detail - but IMO, those are really only one possible interpretation of basic information previously provided in the regional books.
Necromancer Games' later re-interpretation of the Wilderlands for 3e goes into a lot more detail about every individual hex location, but again, IMO, it would be a mistake to assume that is anything but one possible interpretation of what the original JG material could mean.
Some basic facts about the Wilderlands as I see them:
- Demihumans, Humanoids and Humans are intermixed throughout the world. A dwarf settlement might be a mile away from an elf settlement. A mostly human settlement might be ruled over by an orc or an elf village controlled by a halfling. There are some predominately demi-human/humanoid areas, but they are not large nations by any means.
- The Gods are mostly taken from real-world mythology. Think of it like including ALL the pantheons from Deities and Demigods EVERYWHERE. You could have a temple of Zeus and a temple of Quetzalcoatl in the same city. If that bothers you - you could always just interpret that to mean there is a Wilderlands equivalent of those real world deities and call them whatever you want.
- There are anachronistic artifacts and relics everywhere. That means the players might pull up that rotten log and find a crashed UFO or a Panzer. Again, if that bothers you, just work it into your own vision and make up an explanation you can live with.
- There are villages everywhere but very, very few towns and cities. You can either go with that as is, or start placing cities and towns wherever you feel appropriate. Unlike Greyhawk, it's possible to just slap down Haven or some other thing from a different publisher and you won't have to do a whole lot of revision or worry about breaking the setting.
- The JG toolkit books (Castles, Villages, Temples) are really useful for detailing almost every part of the Wilderlands, and IMO, were intended as such. Hex 0304 is a castle for example and you know how many people live there and the name of the ruler, his class and level. What that castle looks like, what's really going on there and it's role in the area is entirely up to you.
- Similarly, the JG adventures can be placed almost anywhere. Badabaskor or Tegel Manor doesn't have to be wherever it says it is and moving it will not matter one bit.
Quote from: Frey;915207Thanks! Although a primer would be nice, too many supplements.
Another question: what makes the Wilderlands special? How is the setting different from Greyhawk or the Known World?
The
Wilderlands existed before
Greyhawk or the
Known World. In fact, it was the first published campaign setting, the second being Dave Arneson's
First Fantasy Campaign, which was in fact the first campaign setting ever to exist, but the second one to be published because Dave saw (and also played in) the Wilderlands setting, and then asked Bob Bledsaw to create a published version of his Blackmoor campaign setting, which Bob readily agreed to. They even made conjoined maps so if you exited the Southwestern edge of Blackmoor you would find yourself in the Valley of the Ancients in the Northeast corner of the Wilderlands.
TSR at that time (1977-78) had no campaign setting and would not have a campaign setting until 1980 when
Greyhawk and
Mystara were published.
Most GMs made up their own campaign settings. I had two by 1978, One was an Ancient Roman setting on a distant fantasy oceanic tropical world, filled with pirates and fell undead. My second campaign setting was a generic fantasy mashup continent that included places from some of my favorite fantasy authors...this campaign setting I named
Tamerthya after the highland queen in the
Jannissary novels by
Larry Niven and
Jerry Pournellle. On this continent there were some central highlands that featured holds of the Dragonriders (Pern) and some tolkienuesqe Vales and valleys for hobbits and Elves surrounded by orc infested mountain chains. In the east was The Land, based on many of the Kingdoms from the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, The Unbeleiever, and I had Urviles, and Andelain, and the lands of the Bloodguard, as well as Revelwood, Wildwood, and Garroting Deep, as well as the stonemelders and woodmelders. In the South a great jungle with the legendary Amazons, and in the Southeast human fuedal kingdoms. I lost both of these in 1985 when my ex-wife sold all of my gaming stuff for pennies on the dollar in a fit of spite.
TSR finally published Gary's home campaign
Greyhawk in 1980 for AD&D, this was just about simultaneously published along with
Mystara at TSR for 0D&D or Basic D&D.
Mystara was a very genetic setting, created by
Aaron Allston, Frank Mentzer, Bruce Heard, Dave Cook, and Ann Dupuis (yes, that Ann who later went on to publish
Fudge.). Greyhawk was Gary's baby, and the setting was developed in conjunction with the RPGA Judges who wrote campaign modules for various "events" at gaming conventions which filled in the details of the Greyhawk World. The TSR Staffers continued to support BD&D and the Mystara campaign setting all the way until TSR collapsed, but Mystara was for home consumption, and being for basic D&D was shunned by the 1e AD&D crowd. Also I don''t recall seeing many events at game shows in the 80's and 90's for Mystara. I regularly attended Ghengis Con in Colorado, during that time frame.
What made the Wilderlands special? It was the first published setting. It is also the largest campaign setting that has ever been published. See for yourself...
The Entire Wilderlands campaign setting from the 2011 Notre Dame RPG Club gamefest;
(http://i.imgur.com/plOnby6.jpg)
Photo Credit: Amanda Gray
I *love* Judges Guild products! I have most of the original Wilderlands stuff, only for some reason I never bought "Wilderlands of the Fantastic Reaches" back around 1980. I have since purchased it as a PDF, and I did buy the entire Wilderlands Map pack, too, as a PDF. I also have plenty of other JG stuff, like all of the Pegasus magazines, plenty of modules (Treasure Maps, Kelnore, etc). I like the basic framework, to which I can customize the details. Even if I use a very detailed module (whether JG or some other company/author), I'm always going to change some things around, especially now that players can find things online. Plus you usually need to change some things to fit in with your own campaign, such as increasing/decreasing the strength of the opponents/monsters the party will have to defeat, just to keep things "fair."
What I really like about the Wilderlands is it saves me the time to create large geographical areas, and there are so many "empty" hexes that I can drop in new villages, add creeks and other geographical details, new dungeons, etc. When I DMed many years ago, I used photocopies of the original Wilderlands maps, and had to use Wite-Out to make changes. Now, however, I can edit the graphics on my computer--much nicer! I also use spreadsheets and word-processing software to update notes and charts about locations, plus I map some hexes in greater detail, etc.
The descriptions in the Wilderlands books about lairs & isles give the DM just a nugget of an adventure, and then the DM can flesh things out in greater detail. I also don't think it necessarily ties you to any particular rule system or version, as many of the descriptions are pretty generic.
I haven't used any other backgrounds or settings, as I am quite satisfied with the Wilderlands. Regarding Frey's original questions, most of the original Judges Guild stuff is available online. Don't worry about which edition, as it is easy to convert between systems (although it will take some work by the DM to revise things).
I would recommend one of the City State packages (of the World Emperor or of the Invincible Overlord), also Tarantis is a slightly smaller city than the CSWE or CSIO, but still adds lots of details. Tarantis, for example, will give you lots of ideas for military patrols of various areas, religions in the area (and when their festival days are held), various competing factions, spying organizations, and lots more. And although the CSWE or CSIO might be too much detail to begin with, Tarantis might be a nice city to start with, although if the DM wants to start a party in a large city, the DM should REALLY study the city first!
The Books of Treasure Maps can also give you ideas about how to "seed" a campaign with things like having characters find a portion of a treasure map to whet their appetite. Frontier Forts of Kelnore offers a "standardized" fortress setting that you can drop in to multiple locations, so you don't have to design unique citadels for every location.
I currently have a campaign taking place in the SE area of the Tarantis map, and the NE area of the Ebony Coast map.Those areas were originally in Wilderlands of High Fantasy (Tarantis map) and Wilderlands of the Magic Realm (Ebony Coast map).
Some players prefer glitzy products, with lots of glossy color printing, but I would actually prefer lower cost products that give good bang for the buck, like the original Judges Guild pulp products!
Rusty DM
My problem with most of the Wilderlands stuff is that is was mostly incoherent gibberish, almost indistinguishable from randomly generated stuff.
A good comparison is with most of Traveller's Imperium. You get the basic codes for 100s of worlds, but very few are fleshed out and many don't make sense. And conversely, so everything is detailed, albeit in a very sparse manner, there's no room for your stuff, simply fleshing out what is already there.
It's not like it's a played in world, something that grew from a campaign. It simply seems rolled up on the various tables JG loves to use.
As to their other adventures, it really varies a lot from product to product. The Jaquays stuff is as good as anything ever produced. Inferno is pretty good (and the author recently published the rest of it on DTRPG). I also really liked their Treasure Maps series, especially the III, which are a bunch of small dungeons.
Years ago a friend gave me as a Christmas gift a big stack of JG stuff he found mixed in with old magazines on the bottom shelf at a used book store.
It was one of the best Christmas gifts I ever received.
If you like like old-school D&D and you see a JG product somewhere for a reasonable price, grab it! It's good shit.
Quote from: JeremyR;915266My problem with most of the Wilderlands stuff is that is was mostly incoherent gibberish, almost indistinguishable from randomly generated stuff.
It's not like it's a played in world, something that grew from a campaign. It simply seems rolled up on the various tables JG loves to use.
I concur. I was quite disappointed when I found some old JG stuff and grabbed it, having heard so much about it, only to realize that a couple of hours with a web generator would have given me the same thing.
I get that Back In The Day before computers were cheap and ubiquitous these kinds of pregenerated random list output products had value, but today not so much. And I think a lot of the time "gonzo" is a retroactive rationalization for "random and incoherent".
Quote from: daniel_ream;915273I concur. I was quite disappointed when I found some old JG stuff and grabbed it, having heard so much about it, only to realize that a couple of hours with a web generator would have given me the same thing.
I get that Back In The Day before computers were cheap and ubiquitous these kinds of pregenerated random list output products had value, but today not so much. And I think a lot of the time "gonzo" is a retroactive rationalization for "random and incoherent".
Ehhh? show me any web generator that can generate a double set of maps that covers 5'6"x8'6" of table space. You need a 6x9 table just to layout one set of the Wilderland maps. Lots more spaces is needed to layout the additional maps of the various city-states. CSIO 22"x44 CSWO 17"x22" Tarantis 17"x22" Judges guild always included two sets of such maps for the campaign series, a fully keyed Judges set, ands a mostly blank players set.
No one ...in fact, ...has made a coherent mapping system since then that would let you duplicate the effort that went into producing the original maps of the Wilderlands. Never mind doing better... I challenge you to show me a
"Web Generator" that could create even one complete set of campaign maps that covers a 6'x9' table. Now when you can create just one such megamap, then be able to burn 10,000 copies and have those copies available for distribution for about $50 a wack (which is what a full set of original maps would have cost back when they were new, get back to me. Then you might be able to run your trap, and I'd be interested in listening.
You f&%%^ idiots running your f**#^^% mouths about "gonzo" and "random and incoherent" are absolutely f((&%&& clueless about the quality, scope and scale of production back in the day.
Almost anyone here having a full set of the
Judges Guild Campaign Hexagon subsystem, (
which, I would argue almost none of you here do have even being able to buy them on the cheap as pdfs) ...and half a brain, could make a completely original 0D&D gaming world in just a few weeks time, following the very unrandom and coherent process outlined in those skinny books. You haven't actually looked close enough to be able to tell there's a coherent process in there, have you?
The most amazing thing about all of this... You could create these absolutely beautiful maps, and your own unique fantasy campaign, without even ever having to touch a computer or some other retarded retrograde handheld device that you slavishly log into every. single. day. just to learn how incredibly. stupid. you. already. are.
If you haven't been able to generate even one coherent and exciting 17"x22" fantasy map using the Judges Guild Campaign Hexagon subsystem, it's because you are either too lazy, or too dense to grok the material that is presented for you...Sometimes I weep for the younger generation. They probably are going to be led off into slavery.
Please don't post your objections to the most awesome works of
Bob Bledsaw and the original
Judges Guild anymore, because you'll simply be shaming your children and grandchildren, when they come to see what you have contributed to RPG gaming. (Which is, ...so far as I can tell so far, nothing more than a snide comment about one of the truly great RPG designers)
Just to give you even the slightest inkling of just how extremely difficult it is to publish on that scale, back in 2013 Bob Jr. at Judges Guild doing a kickstarter, collected $95,000, that's almost a hundred grand just to recreate the original
City-State of the Imperial Overlord, and he failed, and he nosed in. He was bankrupted by the publishing costs before he even started. Joseph Goodman turned around, and also did a kickstarter last year collecting $115,000 to publish just four of the original JG modules, they should be being released to the general public anytime now. That's $200,000 and three years from experienced gaming insiders ....to recreate just five of over a hundred campaign settings, modules, and supplements that Judges Guild published in just a five year span.
Now you little punks just run along now, so I can show the rest of the real gamers here just what kind of beautiful maps one can make using that awesome
Judges Guild Campaign Hexagon Subsystem;
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and
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I'm a big Wilderlands fan, I run a 5e online campaign that's been going well over a year, PCs are 13th-15th level now. Of the 3e material I'd strongly recommend the WoHF box set and the softback Player's Guide, both are available as pdf on rpgnow. I prefer the original City State to the 3e version though, no cruddy Sword & Sorcery Studios White Wolf art, and rumours properly integrated into locations.
Huh, that map looks like a mirror image of Birthright's Cerilia continent, with a whole bunch of extra island sprinkles around the coasts. It even has a Thule atop and an Anduria on the bottom.
:cool:
Carry on!
Judges Guild materials were certainly cutting edge for the day (I was a Guild subscriber back in the 1970's) and some of the most awesome D&D products came out of their company (CSIO, Dark Tower, Thracia) but it was a hit-miss sometimes in that they put out a few products that made me go ... huh? Total duds.
I owned the entire run of Wilderlands maps at one point but found frustration in the fact that almost all of my favorite products took place in map #1, which meant that I had minimal use for the rest. I did like the fact that Dave Arneson's First Fantasy Campaign had been linked to the Wilderlands (after the fact, but still cool) and I think that the cool placenames scattered through the world are like gold for a GM who likes to "wing it" a lot. I never thought of the Wilderlands as "gonzo" but maybe it's just because we always played a certain way and so we played Wilderlands games the same as we played Greyhawk or Blackmoor or Middle-earth, or whatever. It was just one more world among many that we explored.
I can't say much about the 3E products because I've never played them and have only read through parts of them, but I do trust Rob Conley's sense of what works and what doesn't so if his name is on it the product is probably well done.
Jaquays' stuff is fantastic. The City State of the Invincible Overlord is still a classic city. The rest of the JG material I've come across - and I was buying books like Badabaskor and City State of the World Emperor at release - is meh to downright bad. It definitely has a cooler vibe than TSR products from the same era. Sword and sorcery. Gonzo. Chaotic. The problem is that much of it is not much use at the table.
Take the Wilderlands. I had the Necromancer Games boxed set until I sold it a couple years ago. It's absolutely chock full of cool stuff. But really, it's nothing more than a massive book of extremely sparse setting hooks. A village of halflings grows grapes and has secretly been taken over by a rakshasha. Neat. Now how much work do I need to turn that into something that I can actually use at the table? And there's virtually no coherence or connections. You can take any village and plunk it down in the middle of another map and it changes nothing. The sheer scope, while impressive, is also impractical. I couldn't fathom even a dedicated Wilderlands campaign covering more than half of one of the nine maps. The rest of the material is wasted. And again, you'll still have to do 90 per cent of the work yourself to turn it into something playable.
Quote from: GameDaddy;915279Ehhh? show me any web generator that can generate a double set of maps that covers 5'6"x8'6" of table space.
Are those damn kids refusing to get off your lawn again?
I have links to about six of them in my bookmarks, plus a couple of installed binary versions that will do everything from crappy fractal terrain all the way to tectonic plate modelling, rain shadows and atmospheric patterns, at any resolution I want, with a hex overlay if I felt that hexes were at all useful for this sort of thing.
QuoteNo one ...in fact, ...has made a coherent mapping system since then that would let you duplicate the effort that went into producing the original maps of the Wilderlands. Never mind doing better... I challenge you to show me a "Web Generator" that could create even one complete set of campaign maps that covers a 6'x9' table.
The concept of resolution is difficult for you, isn't it?
QuoteNow when you can create just one such megamap, then be able to burn 10,000 copies and have those copies available for distribution for about $50 a wack (which is what a full set of original maps would have cost back when they were new, get back to me. Then you might be able to run your trap, and I'd be interested in listening.
Well, I doubt I could sell them for $50 a copy, since this is
so easy to do now there's massive competition, but programmatically generating a megamap, emitting to PDF, and making the result available as POD? Dude, I could do that in an
afternoon.QuoteYou f&%%^ idiots running your f**#^^% mouths about "gonzo" and "random and incoherent" are absolutely f((&%&& clueless about the quality, scope and scale of production back in the day.
So those kids
are refusing to get off your lawn.
QuoteJust to give you even the slightest inkling of just how extremely difficult it is to publish on that scale, back in 2013 Bob Jr. at Judges Guild doing a kickstarter, collected $95,000, that's almost a hundred grand just to recreate the original City-State of the Imperial Overlord, and he failed, and he nosed in. He was bankrupted by the publishing costs before he even started.
And yet somehow both Lou Zocchi and Mayfair managed to pull it off.
QuoteNow you little punks just run along now, so I can show the rest of the real gamers here just what kind of beautiful maps one can make using that awesome Judges Guild Campaign Hexagon Subsystem;
Wow, that's really pretty! It almost makes me want to fire up Photoshop and follow any of the Cartographer's Guild tutorials and bang one out this afternoon with the aid of a computer and a retarded retrograde handheld device.
Seriously, man. You're just a clown show at this point.
Quote from: finarvyn;915294I can't say much about the 3E products because I've never played them and have only read through parts of them, but I do trust Rob Conley's sense of what works and what doesn't so if his name is on it the product is probably well done.
Thanks for the compliment.
I think the best work was done the Wilderlands Boxed Set. Every deal that was in the original is in there and the expansion are consistent either with that or the few additional details released in other JG products.
In my opinion CSIO is notch below but just a notch. As mentioned, where the original Wilderlands is was really really, did I say really, spartan, the original CSIO was not. So it is a matter of taste which version works better.
The Players Guide is all after the fact information first created in the 2000s by Bob Bledsaw and Clark Peterson. It good if you want a larger dose of the Swords & Sorcery and Weird Fantasy that the was hinted at in the original.
SO for the new stuff I would go Boxed Set, CSIO, and Players Guide in that order.
The old stuff I would start off with.
CSIO, Wilderlands (18 maps), Dark Tower, Citadel of Fire, Caverns of Thracia, Tegel Manor, Verbosh and Thieves of Fortress Badabaskor. There is a dozen more that are good, plus dozen more aides that are still useful and then you start getting into the not so good products of the JG Catalog.
The virtue of the entire line it is a snapshot of how people though fantasy roleplaying ought be in the 70s and early 80s. Due to Bob Bledsaw generosity and flexibility, there no singular vision except that the product be useful in someway to the referee and players. We have multiple products written multiple styles. If there one theme that dominates is that people liked to kitbash stuff.
Quote from: Haffrung;915349And there's virtually no coherence or connections. You can take any village and plunk it down in the middle of another map and it changes nothing.
This. And the sad thing is is that there's a framework that makes this not inevitable. There are defined cultures, human subraces (I'm on the fence about the rainbow-skinned humans) and defined polities bounded by geography. It just isn't reflected in the details of the various locales the players will actually interact with.
QuoteThe sheer scope, while impressive, is also impractical. I couldn't fathom even a dedicated Wilderlands campaign covering more than half of one of the nine maps. The rest of the material is wasted. And again, you'll still have to do 90 per cent of the work yourself to turn it into something playable.
I think the original mentality was that you could run multiple campaigns all set in different parts of the same world, since it's Old School that The Campaign is a larger entity than any one group of players, but in practice most groups I know of ran successive campaigns with the same people, and if the campaigns never intersect because they were on opposite sides of the continent, the fact that there were
on the same world all along OMG is really just a conceit rather than a feature that you use.
A couple of the JG products I own -
Verbosh and
Of Skulls and Scrapfaggot Green - also have humour that is embarassingly juvenile. Sure, it's the sort of jokes we told at the age of 14 drunk on Cheetos and Mountain Dew at 2 am, but it's not something we would have expected anyone to pay money for.
Quote from: daniel_ream;915355I have links to about six of them in my bookmarks, plus a couple of installed binary versions that will do everything from crappy fractal terrain all the way to tectonic plate modelling, rain shadows and atmospheric patterns, at any resolution I want, with a hex overlay if I felt that hexes were at all useful for this sort of thing.
Well I those programs do. What you are forgetting that the Wilderland maps were not a product of random generation. Instead they incorporated a bunch of technique used by Bob Bledsaw and his team. In short it what you get after you put the work to turn the result of those utilities you mention into something another person can use. Traveller is the RPG that has supplements that were literally little more than a well formatted result of multiple random rolls. That is not the case with any of the Judges Guild products.
What was important to Bob Bledsaw that it be useful out of the box for the referee and that it have, for a lack of a better word, coverage. That it is not confined to a letter size page but rather be truly expansive.
Quote from: daniel_ream;915355Well, I doubt I could sell them for $50 a copy, since this is so easy to do now there's massive competition, but programmatically generating a megamap, emitting to PDF, and making the result available as POD? Dude, I could do that in an afternoon.
Again the maps of the early Village/Castle books were all hand drawn. They are not fancy because they were aiming to cram dozens of maps into a single book. Now some of the later books like Starports, and Temple are pretty bad. Mostly because the original Village/Castle obviously were the result of something taking the time to think of a location before working at with pencil, ink, and zipatone. The later book appears to be the work of somebody just cranking out pages.
Quote from: daniel_ream;915355And yet somehow both Lou Zocchi and Mayfair managed to pull it off.
Lou Zocchi only did work on a Tegel Manor reprint, the rest were literally authorized photocopies. As for Mayfair, yeah they had good production value, however they just slap the name on somebody else's work. They have little in common with the original. But... that aside the boxed adventures are actually good.
Quote from: daniel_ream;915355Wow, that's really pretty! It almost makes me want to fire up Photoshop and follow any of the Cartographer's Guild tutorials and bang one out this afternoon with the aid of a computer and a retarded retrograde handheld device.
Seriously, man. You're just a clown show at this point.
So where your version of this.
Isle of the Blest (http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ez9pZMmI5QI/Uecxw8ybBHI/AAAAAAAAIlI/t56ugfmEx-A/s1600/IsleMap.jpg)
Or this
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I been doing computer based cartography for 25+ years, and working with Judges Guild material since 1981. I even done it by hand (https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-U4Om77-IVjk/TmjINwAZ5oI/AAAAAAAABZs/N9csEB_lbYI2fJdv-SSDbWyvXsPXLTa9QCL0B/w391-h532-no/CSIO_HandDrawn_SM.jpg) myself
I know exactly what it takes to do a RPG Map. Are some of Judges Guild map products crap, absolutely. But the stuff that is good and useful are still good and useful today. And better than what you would get with random map generation.
I had a bunch of it and sold it. Like some others have said, it has tons of neat ideas, but they don't make sense. I'd take Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, or Harnworld over Wilderlands any day.
Also, Harn has better maps. :D
Quote from: GameDaddy;915279No one ...in fact, ...has made a coherent mapping system since then that would let you duplicate the effort that went into producing the original maps of the Wilderlands.
There a couple of components to the system that Judges Guild used.
The first the regional hexmap which is 52 hex columns by 33/34 hex rows. It has one flaw in that they don't overlap well going from left to right (east to west). If you overlap them it results the maps staircasing 1 hex row, north or south depending on the overlap. In Judges Guild it result the map staircasting north from east to west.
City-State Map One was drawn first and doesn't line up well with the other maps. The overlap is shift up and over by a column and a row. The remaining 17 or more less consistent with a few mistakes. Those mistakes are more or less drawing mistake not a fundamental flaw like with Map 1.
All of this been resolved for the Kickstarter maps. None it it was hard to fix but the Bledsaw had exactly how to implement each fix as there was two or three way you could go and remain consistent with the originals. I don't now what the other cartographers, but my maps are taken off a single combined master that at this point has everything drawn. However not every region have been proof read and checked which is why I can't just slap out PDFs for the Bledsaws. Plus I have to do a half dozen post processing steps after the proofing to get the final released map.
The good news that once it done, the Bledsaw have the option of printing out a combined map roughly 5 feet wide and
8.5 feet long. And it will dead nuts accurate in regards to the individual maps. Not a redrawn map like other setting have done. Plus because it all vector based, I can export any size needed and it will crystal clear.
The Campaign Hexagon System is pretty good, it basically a letter size hex grid setup in such a way that takes a larger hex and sub divides it into 25 small hexes. This allows you to do a 5 mile regional map where each small hex is .2 miles. Or a smaller local region map where each hex is around 42.24 feet (rounded to 42.25 feet).
Judges Guild is the first to do something like this and pretty only people to come close to getting right outside of the traveller guys. Everybody else relied on artistic impression to draw smaller scale maps. Note that is not an unreasonable approach as it really takes a computer drawing program to do it perfectly right. By hand you would have to had masters on vellum or another paper that can work with a light table.
When I did my hand drawn maps I used a light table with the vellum over top the original. I would draw in coastlines and rivers and then take it to a blueprint photocopier. I would ink in that and add in the rest of the details and color. My main issues, is that while had the technical skills to make it accurate, I was a shit artist. It wasn't until the 90s and CorelDRAW that I would be able to make publishable maps.
The original Judges Guild map were drawn with technical pens and with zipatone textures. The #1 problem with duplicating old Judges Guild maps is locating digital version of those textures. Fortunately I was able to do so, so I can draw them. If you are willing to learn use Inkscape (https://inkscape.org/en/). You can use the below to recreate Judges Guild style maps. http://www.ibiblio.org/mscorbit/sandbox/Hex_Crawl_Map_Kit.zip. The textures and symbols can be used in Adobe Illustrator and CorelDRAW if you use those.
Quote from: danbuter;915366Also, Harn has better maps. :D
Yes Harn does have the best maps (and mapping system when it comes to it). The maps I been drawing for the Judges Guild kickstarter have been drawn in my version of that style.
Quote from: danbuter;915366I had a bunch of it and sold it. Like some others have said, it has tons of neat ideas, but they don't make sense. I'd take Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, or Harnworld over Wilderlands any day.
FR, Greyhawk, Harnword are THE setting for their respective authors. The Wilderlands wasn't designed that way. Yes it started as Bob Bledsaw setting for when players want to take a break from Middle Earth in his campaign. However when it came to be published Bob Bledsaw designed it as a aide to serve as the foundation for a referee's campaign.
This part of it is pretty much unique to the Wilderlands. One thing all of had to do when the Boxed Set projects was to let go of our notions of what the Wilderlands were. It quickly became obvious that every author Wilderlands campaign was not like the other authors. While we had the same geography and many of the same places, how it hanged together can came off in actual play was as different as Harn is to Greyhawk is to Forgotten Realms. Once we got over that, then what we did is started with the original stats and came up with a new take on the setting for the boxed set. Each region or map reflecting its author style.
Quote from: GameDaddy;915279Just to give you even the slightest inkling of just how extremely difficult it is to publish on that scale, back in 2013 Bob Jr. at Judges Guild doing a kickstarter, collected $95,000, that's almost a hundred grand just to recreate the original City-State of the Imperial Overlord, and he failed, and he nosed in. He was bankrupted by the publishing costs before he even started.
So everybody knows the problem with the Judges Guild Kickstarter is that they got in over their head on the miniatures. And that what caused them to run out of the initial money. The Bledsaws don't consider it an excuse and are building up their funds to complete the maps. But they can't print until they get the money together.
The lesson to be learned is not to have stretch goals unrelated to the main purpose of the kickstarter.
I think the value of the JG materials really depends on what you expect from your gaming materials and what you bring to the table yourself. The dungeons (Caverns of Thracia, etc.) are relatively uncontroversial - I think everyone understands that when you get a dungeon produced in the 70's you will have some maps, brief room descriptions, a couple of wandering encounter tables and that's about it. What is less clear to people today is that this is what you could expect from the first generation of broader setting materials of that era as well. If you use those materials in a kind of passive way, just marching through, reading what they present in order, and then resolving whatever encounter seems to be implied, you will have a sort of bland, hack and slash dungeon crawl experience. This is not so different from what many people have in mind with a dungeon adventure (though I would say they are selling the experience short). When that simple, mechanical play style moves to a city or country side you really realize how mindless and flat it is. What am I supposed to make of the fact that when I walk into this hex I run into 20 ogre magi? Why are they there? How and why do I encounter them? What are they doing? Where, exactly are they living and what is that place like? Who else is there and why? Without answering these questions it is just a random fight. So, if you are interested in riffing off of these materials, answering all those questions yourself, the materials have a lot to offer. If you don't want to do that, they seem stupid.
Quote from: Larsdangly;915398I think the value of the JG materials really depends on what you expect from your gaming materials and what you bring to the table yourself. The dungeons (Caverns of Thracia, etc.) are relatively uncontroversial - I think everyone understands that when you get a dungeon produced in the 70's you will have some maps, brief room descriptions, a couple of wandering encounter tables and that's about it. What is less clear to people today is that this is what you could expect from the first generation of broader setting materials of that era as well. If you use those materials in a kind of passive way, just marching through, reading what they present in order, and then resolving whatever encounter seems to be implied, you will have a sort of bland, hack and slash dungeon crawl experience. This is not so different from what many people have in mind with a dungeon adventure (though I would say they are selling the experience short). When that simple, mechanical play style moves to a city or country side you really realize how mindless and flat it is. What am I supposed to make of the fact that when I walk into this hex I run into 20 ogre magi? Why are they there? How and why do I encounter them? What are they doing? Where, exactly are they living and what is that place like? Who else is there and why? Without answering these questions it is just a random fight. So, if you are interested in riffing off of these materials, answering all those questions yourself, the materials have a lot to offer. If you don't want to do that, they seem stupid.
This indeed is a major difference in expectations. Many GMs today have no interest in hobby products designed as a framework over which to build their own creative content. They want consumer products, effectively pre-created stories with all the details filled in that can be followed along. Some people find no joy in creating anything. JG style products would naturally not be be to their tastes.
Quote from: Exploderwizard;915506This indeed is a major difference in expectations. Many GMs today have no interest in hobby products designed as a framework over which to build their own creative content. They want consumer products, effectively pre-created stories with all the details filled in that can be followed along. Some people find no joy in creating anything. JG style products would naturally not be be to their tastes.
Just so. I think the evolution of the text-rich module and 300 page setting book basically ruined the hobby, or at least drove the things that make it great into a small corner of the marketplace. It resulted in a complete inversion of the idea that motivated table top roleplaying games in the first place: we started with the idea of a loose, mutable rule set that helps you create, populate and quicken your own world, and within 10 years we were well on our way to complicated rube-goldberg rules machinery, modules that actually tell you exactly what to say at every turn, 100,000 word setting books, and a hobby that seems to be more about owning and reading things than creating things.
Quote from: Exploderwizard;915506This indeed is a major difference in expectations. Many GMs today have no interest in hobby products designed as a framework over which to build their own creative content. They want consumer products, effectively pre-created stories with all the details filled in that can be followed along. Some people find no joy in creating anything. JG style products would naturally not be be to their tastes.
So let's turn this around. I've been making my own campaign settings - adventures, worlds, cities - since I was 11. So it's safe to say I find joy in creating. The question is how much effort the Wilderlands really saves me, as an owner. Why not just make up my own setting generated by random tables and my imagination?
Quote from: Haffrung;915528So let's turn this around. I've been making my own campaign settings - adventures, worlds, cities - since I was 11. So it's safe to say I find joy in creating. The question is how much effort the Wilderlands really saves me, as an owner. Why not just make up my own setting generated by random tables and my imagination?
This is a good question, and could be re-stated more generally as, 'what materials are useful to someone who wants to create their own setting'? I.e., where is the balancing point between having so little that you won't overcome your creative activation energy and get moving, vs. having so much hand-fed material that you basically turn into the DM version of Frito from Idiocracy, sitting in your batin' chair, watching 'ow my balls!'. I would say that almost any amount and detail of maps do more good than harm, unless, of course, the part you really love is drafting. A map defines a space without telling you what to do in it. Written material that explains that map can help or harm, depending on its intent and how it is used: text that effectively explains the map - 'this square you see here is a blacksmith's shed' - I think is usually positive, with the caveat that any creative DM will move things around a bit and let them evolve as play proceeds (as they will with the physical features of the map). The next layer of explanation – 'the blacksmith's name is phil and he's a 3rd level fighter' - is often fine, provided the decisions made by the author are generally in line with the setting you are trying to create, but will often need to be changed in some way. This material is a convenient time saver when it is generic and appropriate to your game, but even this level of detail can start to seize control of you as a DM if you let it. I.e., if 10 % of the named NPC's in a setting book are able to perform magic, you are in a very different setting from one where only the wizard in the spooky tower outside of town can do that. The next layer of explanation — 'if you walk into phil's shed he tells you about his mysterious past' is well into the danger zone and probably does more harm than good. Finally, we get the version where phil's feelings, life story and connection to the rest of the setting get two paragraphs of text - this is basically always toxic to real DM'ing as it makes you a passive observer of the game. Which often leads to adventures where the players are, for all practical purposes, passive observers of the stuff that happens to their characters. And now you aren't really playing a table top roleplaying game - you are watching a really, really, really slow, badly acted TV show.
Quote from: Haffrung;915528So let's turn this around. I've been making my own campaign settings - adventures, worlds, cities - since I was 11. So it's safe to say I find joy in creating. The question is how much effort the Wilderlands really saves me, as an owner. Why not just make up my own setting generated by random tables and my imagination?
In my opinion it save a lot of work. The problem is that with RPGs like Traveller random generation works really well. Traveller work well because it's terrain is empty space. The result that matter or solely the contents of a particular location.
However with anything based on a planet terrain has a huge impact on people. Now you can do random terrain generation easily enough, the people part it is a cycle of rolling stuff, see what fits, rerolling and see if that fits. And you will problem do this a handful of time for each region.
The Wilderlands has this already done and organized in a way that you can make sense of it. Yeah there is a region on the southern edge of the map where there are dozen or so dwarven settlements. So it will probably be a region dominated by dwarves in your campaign. However it up to you decide the details of why the dwarves there and what their relations are to the name.
In most areas of the Wilderlands there are a dozen plausible explanation for why things exist the way they do. The result is that there is a lot of flexibility in how you can setup a campaign in the Wilderlands. And the thing is that there 18 maps worth of details. That is a lot of work already done for what you pay. And more importantly it is the core product. Not the supplements you buy.
With Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, even Harn. What you get with the core product is an overview/travelogue. To use any of those settings for a campaign, you have to pick a region to flesh out detail what you need. Sometimes there is a supplemental product that details what you are interested in. Which is extra bucks compared to the Wilderlands. Along with the limitation that it will conform to the overall vision of the setting.
Now the above is great if you like the setting in question. But supposed you don't have a particular idea in mind for a setting, don't have the time or desire to make something completely original. You want something that you can readily modify but has a lot of the grunt work done. The Wilderlands are your ticket.
Quote from: Larsdangly;915561Which often leads to adventures where the players are, for all practical purposes, passive observers of the stuff that happens to their characters. And now you aren't really playing a table top roleplaying game - you are watching a really, really, really slow, badly acted TV show.
Very much in agreement here!
Tangent:
I am not totally enamored to some elements of the Hexagon Campaign System: It appears that some random generation tables assign equal chances to weird as well as common outcomes. So, "Ogre Magi as moat-swimming creatures" is just as common as Frogs would be.
To me this takes away a bit from the value of the tables.
Now, I only own the one Castle Book, so how are the random generation probability structures in the system as a whole?
That said, I recognize the truly grand intellectual and creative achievement that Judges Guilds products represent.
Quote from: GameDaddy;915242The Wilderlands existed before Greyhawk or the Known World. In fact, it was the first published campaign setting, QUOTE]
I think that you'll find Tekumel (published in 1975) predates Wilderlands by a year, so in fact it wasn't the first published campaign setting.
Shemek
One thing that distinguishes the Wilderlands (I've got the 3e boxed set) from other familiar settings is that the information provided is mostly very local in nature, while how it all fits together in the big picture is left more vague. Two DMs starting with the boxed set could end up with settings that feel very different and neither one would be contradicting or clashing with the contents of the set.
Quote from: estar;915564The Wilderlands has this already done and organized in a way that you can make sense of it. Yeah there is a region on the southern edge of the map where there are dozen or so dwarven settlements. So it will probably be a region dominated by dwarves in your campaign. However it up to you decide the details of why the dwarves there and what their relations are to the name.
But are those patterns of settlement even evident to a reader? I know my eyes start to glaze over after reading 60 or 70 settlement entries. I'll take your word that some thought was put into making these sorts of connections in regions, but I'd guess a great many DMs remain oblivious to the fact that there's a high concentration of halflings-led communities on the Western shores of the Winedark Sea.
Quote from: estar;915564In most areas of the Wilderlands there are a dozen plausible explanation for why things exist the way they do. The result is that there is a lot of flexibility in how you can setup a campaign in the Wilderlands. And the thing is that there 18 maps worth of details. That is a lot of work already done for what you pay. And more importantly it is the core product. Not the supplements you buy.
Well yes. There's flexibility because the content is so thin. An entry that says "A village of 80 gnolls that worship a statue of an elephant. The dwarf smith Spurgeon has a cache of 400 SP and a medallion of ESP." is remarkably flexible. It also offers very little practical aid to a DM who wants to run a Wilderlands campaign, IMHO.
The fact there is 18 maps also have little utility to me. I've never run campaigns of far-ranging transcontinental travel, where PCs go on month-long voyages across seas and cross deserts and mountain ranges in the span of a handful of sessions. I have a more boots on the ground style, of travelling on foot and exploring that abandoned shrine up on the hill. A campaign that spanned even a single one of the 18 maps would be epic. That means, for me, the other 17 maps have very little utility. I know some people enjoy the vast potential of those kinds of mega-settings. But that strikes me as buying to read rather than buying to play.
Quote from: estar;915564Now the above is great if you like the setting in question. But supposed you don't have a particular idea in mind for a setting, don't have the time or desire to make something completely original. You want something that you can readily modify but has a lot of the grunt work done. The Wilderlands are your ticket.
But I don't find it has a lot of the grunt work done. At the scope I play at, three short entries in the wilderlands - say a town, a village, and a geographical location - will probably be good for a half-dozen D&D sessions. The amount of material I'll need to run those half-dozen sessions (maps, setting details, NPCs, agendas, encounters) is far, far greater than the three paragraphs the Wilderlands books provide. So really, its' only cutting down on maybe 10 per cent of the work I need to do.
Quote from: Haffrung;915580But are those patterns of settlement even evident to a reader? I know my eyes start to glaze over after reading 60 or 70 settlement entries. I'll take your word that some thought was put into making these sorts of connections in regions, but I'd guess a great many DMs remain oblivious to the fact that there's a high concentration of halflings-led communities on the Western shores of the Winedark Sea.
It not necessary or important to read 60 or 70 settlement entries. If you are doing that because you think have too then I would say stop. For the Wilderlands you only need to read around two dozen entries of a quadrant of one map to get started. It will take three days of non-stop travel to get out of an area that size. Then as the players approach one edge of what you adapted, you read the entries in the next region over.
The outside of the reason, you should look at the major cities to get a sense of what you want them to be like. With the boxed set there is a small initial chapter that does that. With the original, the settlement with a population of a 1000 more stick out in the lists.
Quote from: Haffrung;915580Well yes. There's flexibility because the content is so thin. An entry that says "A village of 80 gnolls that worship a statue of an elephant. The dwarf smith Spurgeon has a cache of 400 SP and a medallion of ESP." is remarkably flexible. It also offers very little practical aid to a DM who wants to run a Wilderlands campaign, IMHO.
In my 30 years of doing this what I seen that people have about two dozen solid idea about a region. Beyond that it become a chore as they grind out entry after entry. Most just quick after around three dozen and just wing it. The number will vary but there is a cut off point where you are going say "fuck it". I found that you can go on further if most of what you are doing is EXPLAINING why something is what it is. What is the elephant the gnolls are worshipping? Who are the Gnoll's leaders? Who fuck is Spurgeon and why does have a Medallion of ESP? Then you chop out anything you don't like or just our right those two dozen ideas floating around in your head. At the end of it you are ahead of where you would have been with less work.
Quote from: Haffrung;915580The fact there is 18 maps also have little utility to me. I've never run campaigns of far-ranging transcontinental travel, where PCs go on month-long voyages across seas and cross deserts and mountain ranges in the span of a handful of sessions. I have a more boots on the ground style, of travelling on foot and exploring that abandoned shrine up on the hill. A campaign that spanned even a single one of the 18 maps would be epic. That means, for me, the other 17 maps have very little utility. I know some people enjoy the vast potential of those kinds of mega-settings. But that strikes me as buying to read rather than buying to play.
Well first so we are in on the same page the Wilderlands do not describe a continent. It is an area the size of western Europe (France, Spain, Italy). Of all the major published RPG settings it is the smallest in land area. And it can be traversed in weeks, not months or years. And the entries focus on exactly what you are talking about; "the shrine on the hill" kind of shit. But overall an area of the size of Western Eurpoe.
Quote from: Haffrung;915580But I don't find it has a lot of the grunt work done. At the scope I play at, three short entries in the wilderlands - say a town, a village, and a geographical location - will probably be good for a half-dozen D&D sessions. The amount of material I'll need to run those half-dozen sessions (maps, setting details, NPCs, agendas, encounters) is far, far greater than the three paragraphs the Wilderlands books provide. So really, its' only cutting down on maybe 10 per cent of the work I need to do.
Some referees make a new setting for every campaign. Most referees I know don't stick with any setting for campaign after campaign. I do. Aside from the occasional Harn campaign, I been running the Majestic Wilderlands for 30 years. SO eventually in some campaign, I wind up using the detail. But not how everybody does there.
Which is why wrote Blackmarsh, Wild North, and the two Points of Light books. To put out hexcrawls like the Wilderlands but with a way smaller land area and a cheaper price.
Quote from: Haffrung;915580But I don't find it has a lot of the grunt work done. At the scope I play at, three short entries in the wilderlands - say a town, a village, and a geographical location - will probably be good for a half-dozen D&D sessions. The amount of material I'll need to run those half-dozen sessions (maps, setting details, NPCs, agendas, encounters) is far, far greater than the three paragraphs the Wilderlands books provide. So really, its' only cutting down on maybe 10 per cent of the work I need to do.
This is also my experience with the Wilderlands. I found the products interesting as historical artifacts and curiosities, but basically useless for any type of actual play. The work they're doing is so simplistic it borders on irrelevancy. Actual entries include:
"A simple tribe of men tend crops and hunt in the shady green vales."
"An octopus lives in a cave."
There's no value for me here. This stuff is trivial for me to come up with off the top of my head or can be generated through random tables with significantly greater utility. People refer to this as "doing the grunt work", but it's really not doing anything at all.
Even worse are the entries where you can't imagine how they would ever be used at the table. For example:
"Beside a broken skiff filled with mud is a +1 scimitar partially buried in the murky bottom."
I guess I could mention the broken skiff and then pause meaningfully until my players decide to follow the metagame hint to investigate further. But for all intents and purposes, that's an empty hex for me.
Quote from: estar;915369The Campaign Hexagon System is pretty good, it basically a letter size hex grid setup in such a way that takes a larger hex and sub divides it into 25 small hexes. This allows you to do a 5 mile regional map where each small hex is .2 miles. Or a smaller local region map where each hex is around 42.24 feet (rounded to 42.25 feet).
Also: I don't find any of those scales useful.
Quote from: Shemek hiTankolel;915568Quote from: GameDaddy;915242The Wilderlands existed before Greyhawk or the Known World. In fact, it was the first published campaign setting, QUOTE]
I think that you'll find Tekumel (published in 1975) predates Wilderlands by a year, so in fact it wasn't the first published campaign setting.
Shemek
Indeed. Three things here...Tekumel was very expensive, and It was not really originally marketed as being D&D but being it's own separate game, and the print run was so small we never saw it in our friendly local game store out in Colorado. I finally heard about it after the release of AD&D in 1979 from a friend who had moved from the midwest to Colorado, and I finally had the chance to play it for the first time in 1981 as part of a D&D game.
In the scheme of stuff for D&D it didn't rate, because it wasn't really available. Technically, yes, it was published first. We didn't see it though until about the same time as we saw the TSR campaigns (Mystara/Greyhawk).
Quote from: GameDaddy;915613Quote from: Shemek hiTankolel;915568Indeed. Three things here...Tekumel was very expensive, and It was not really originally marketed as being D&D but being it's own separate game, and the print run was so small we never saw it in our friendly local game store out in Colorado. I finally heard about it after the release of AD&D in 1979 from a friend who had moved from the midwest to Colorado, and I finally had the chance to play it for the first time in 1981 as part of a D&D game.
In the scheme of stuff for D&D it didn't rate, because it wasn't really available. Technically, yes, it was published first. We didn't see it though until about the same time as we saw the TSR campaigns (Mystara/Greyhawk).
Ok, fair enough. I see your points. It was scarcer than hen's teeth back in the day, to be sure. I remember seeing, and then it just disappeared until Different Worlds re-issued EPT. To be honest, I really didn't know what Tekumel was all about until '83 / '84.
Shemek
Yah, Tekumel was one of those things that even people seriously into the hobby didn't know existed in ~1978-1979.
Quote from: Justin Alexander;915588Also: I don't find any of those scales useful.
I would agree, some of the writeups are weak, but you know, bob did them all, for each map set, in just a couple days each... They at least have something though, to get started on making a unique encounter.
The five mile hexes though, here is why they were chosen for the campaign hexagon subsystem, and what made them special;
Keen SightingThe range of unobstructed sighting possible should be varied according to creature type. For the purpose of this guideline, a man of normal height is assumed to be the observer. Allow 5 miles per foot of height from 1-10' and additional 2 miles per foot from 11'-50', and an additional 1 mile per foot thereafter. Probability of discernment of details is equal to 2% times the height in feet, of the detail. A bonus to the base probability is given for details under 1000' from the observer. +50%...
So a 5' man could see 25 miles on flat level ground... that would be five hexes. easy to measure. If he was on a hilltop 300' tall he would be able to see 180 miles to the horizon if the ground was flat and level. The whole thing on the five mile scale was to allow the player to have some sense of the terrain around them, and how far they could see..
That's what the five mile hexes were really for. That an a man on horse traveling daylight hours at walking speed will cover about 40 miles a day on horse.
Quote from: daniel_ream;915361I think the original mentality was that you could run multiple campaigns all set in different parts of the same world, since it's Old School that The Campaign is a larger entity than any one group of players, but in practice most groups I know of ran successive campaigns with the same people, and if the campaigns never intersect because they were on opposite sides of the continent, the fact that there were on the same world all along OMG is really just a conceit rather than a feature that you use.
I've found a good approach is to run successive campaigns in neighbouring areas. Most of my campaigns have been in the CSIO or Barbarian Altanis areas. This allows impact on subsequent campaigns and a 'living world' feel, while also keeping things fresh.
I suppose I may be 'doing 90% of the work myself' (and I use 15 mile hexes so plenty of room for expansion), much of it using additional stuff like Dyson's Delves dungeons, but Wilderlands gives me a framework to develop, and also it is possible for the PCs to go anywhere on the map, with no prior development by me, and find things to do.
Quote from: Frey;915170All classic Judges Guild D&D products (City State of the Invincible Overlord, Wilderlands of High Fantasy...) appeared before I started gaming, but now many of them are available online. Are they good? Which ones do you recommend? And what about the 3E version?
You can find them on-line as pdfs. The very best IMHO are (1) City State of the Invincible Overlord; (2) The Caverns of Thracia; and (3) The Dark Tower.
Quote from: Haffrung;915528So let's turn this around. I've been making my own campaign settings - adventures, worlds, cities - since I was 11. So it's safe to say I find joy in creating. The question is how much effort the Wilderlands really saves me, as an owner. Why not just make up my own setting generated by random tables and my imagination?
Quote from: Haffrung;915580But I don't find it has a lot of the grunt work done. At the scope I play at, three short entries in the wilderlands - say a town, a village, and a geographical location - will probably be good for a half-dozen D&D sessions. The amount of material I'll need to run those half-dozen sessions (maps, setting details, NPCs, agendas, encounters) is far, far greater than the three paragraphs the Wilderlands books provide. So really, its' only cutting down on maybe 10 per cent of the work I need to do.
I think the confusion might be the difference between broad setting material and focused adventure material. I don't expect to get detailed NPC motivations and encounter area detail in a setting level product. Adventure modules, which can worked into that setting provide that kind of stuff. If your campaigns are largely taking place in somewhat small geographic areas then you would naturally need much less setting material and would want more adventure material.
Generally great products. Unfortunately I ran Wilderlands badly the only time I gave it a serious try.
Quote from: RPGPundit;916313Generally great products. Unfortunately I ran Wilderlands badly the only time I gave it a serious try.
How did you run the Wilderlands badly? Wwas just a bad campaign altogether? Or was it something specific to the Wilderlands?
Quote from: estar;915183Most of the D&D related Judges Guild products are available as PDFs on RPGNow.
City State of the Invincible Overlord is the one that started the line and is a complete city. There is a 3E version that is fleshed out but consistent with the original. Stats are minimal in favor of description text.
Judges Guild has a setting called the Wilderlands of High Fantasy. The original and the 3e version are both available as PDFs on RPGnow. Not the originals don't come with maps.
If I want the original edition non-3E versions of CSIO and WHF and maps, what do I need to buy?
For some of us, the "huge map with shit dribbled all over it" is a feature, not a bug. I hate trying to invent geography so I'm just as happy to buy some maps and put my own world over them. Shit like "a Hobbit village of vintners run by rakshasas" is wonderful; give me a weekend and I've got a year's worth of gaming ready to go.
It's from a different age and a different mindset, when we looked for springboards for our imaginations. I remember years back at Tiny Bolotomus Peckers somebody reviewed the original "BLACKMOOR" D&D supplement and complained that it "didn't tell you how to integrate Monks into your game."
To quote both Dave and Gary, "why would you want us to have all the fun for you?" Once upon a time, making shit up you thought would be fun, was fun.
Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;916509If I want the original edition non-3E versions of CSIO and WHF and maps, what do I need to buy?
CSIO (1976) (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/113262/Guide-to-the-City-State-1976?affiliate_id=81207)
CSIO Revised (1978) (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/56309/City-State-of-the-Invincible-Overlord--Revised?affiliate_id=81207)
Wilderlands of High Fantasy (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/1018/Wilderlands-of-High-Fantasy?affiliate_id=81207) (maps available through links at the bottom)
Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;916511For some of us, the "huge map with shit dribbled all over it" is a feature, not a bug. I hate trying to invent geography so I'm just as happy to buy some maps and put my own world over them.
Which is a fair point. But in an era when I can hit the "Random" button on Hexographer and pop out infinite full-color maps that I can send over to GotPrint.com to be printed up on long-lasting vinyl for a few bucks, the product model hasn't aged well.
Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;916509If I want the original edition non-3E versions of CSIO and WHF and maps, what do I need to buy?
First off I am listing this because there is no old map bundle. The maps done for the boxed sets are accurate reproductions of the original and have every mistake they did.
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/2836/Wilderlands-of-High-Fantasy--Map-Pack?hot60=1&src=hottest_filtered&it=1
But if you are willing to pay $2 to $3 a crack for the original 18 maps then you can go to the below link. They start at the bottom of the 2nd page and into the third page.
http://www.rpgnow.com/browse/pub/31/Judges-Guild?test_epoch=0&page=2
A PDF of the last edition of City-State, Judges Guild sold.
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/56309/City-State-of-the-Invincible-Overlord--Revised?manufacturers_id=31
A PDF to the first standalone version of City-State
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/113262/Guide-to-the-City-State-1976?manufacturers_id=31
A PDF to the Initial subscription release of Judges Guild which feature the City State of the Invincible Overlord
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/81990/Initial-Guidelines-Booklet-I-1976?manufacturers_id=31
A PDF to the Second subscription release focusing on Thunderhold
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/133523/Initial-Guidelines-Booklet-J--Thunderhold-1976?manufacturers_id=31
Installment K and M are available as well. As far as I understand they are exactly what a subscriber would have gotten. They print out fairly well too.
The Four level dungeon maps from Installment J
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/92614/Four-Dungeon-Level-Maps-1976?manufacturers_id=31
The Wilderlands of High Fantasy
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/1018/Wilderlands-of-High-Fantasy?manufacturers_id=31&it=1
Fantastic Wilderlands Beyonde
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/1019/Fantastic-Wilderlands-Beyonde-1978?manufacturers_id=31&it=1
There is no PDF of the City State of the World Emperor with the map descriptions but map 6 is available.
Wilderlands of the Magic Realm
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/1019/Fantastic-Wilderlands-Beyonde-1978?manufacturers_id=31&it=1
Wilderlands of the Fantastic Reaches
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/1021/Wilderlands-of-the-Fantastic-Reaches?manufacturers_id=31&it=1
Hope this is what you are looking for.
Quote from: Justin Alexander;916591Which is a fair point. But in an era when I can hit the "Random" button on Hexographer and pop out infinite full-color maps that I can send over to GotPrint.com to be printed up on long-lasting vinyl for a few bucks, the product model hasn't aged well.
Except that the Wilderlands maps were not created by random tables. It a mix of both random results and human design. Something that Hexographer doesn't match which is all random. I realize that I sound defensive but the idea that Wilderlands were a result of careful design is not true as well the idea it being a result of staff rolling random tables. It something in between and the details are a bit of both and the geography is 100% from Bob Bledsaw's imagination.
Quote from: Justin Alexander;916591But in an era when I can hit the "Random" button on Hexographer and pop out infinite full-color maps that I can send over to GotPrint.com to be printed up on long-lasting vinyl for a few bucks, the product model hasn't aged well.
I would rather have something done by a person.
Estar, what is this product?
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/2836/Wilderlands-of-High-Fantasy--Map-Pack?cPath=121_4485&it=1
Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;916625Estar, what is this product?
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/2836/Wilderlands-of-High-Fantasy--Map-Pack?cPath=121_4485&it=1
The original maps done in a more modern styles for the Wilderlands Boxed Set. They preserve all the details of the old maps including the mistakes. They are also better quality in terms of being a digital product. The digital version of the original maps were done on a two color blueprint scanner at some college. These are from the artist's adobe files.
Note that the original maps two color scan are vastly improved if you apply a slight blur using a photoshop program.
Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;916511For some of us, the "huge map with shit dribbled all over it" is a feature, not a bug. I hate trying to invent geography so I'm just as happy to buy some maps and put my own world over them. Shit like "a Hobbit village of vintners run by rakshasas" is wonderful; give me a weekend and I've got a year's worth of gaming ready to go.
It's from a different age and a different mindset, when we looked for springboards for our imaginations. I remember years back at Tiny Bolotomus Peckers somebody reviewed the original "BLACKMOOR" D&D supplement and complained that it "didn't tell you how to integrate Monks into your game."
To quote both Dave and Gary, "why would you want us to have all the fun for you?" Once upon a time, making shit up you thought would be fun, was fun.
Then why buy products at all?
As I noted earlier, I've been making up dungeons and realms since I was 11 years old. I've written binders and binders of the stuff. I don't expect someone else to do the work. But I do sometimes want to buy products that do much of the work because I don't have the time on my hands that I had when I was 12 or 22. So the question becomes
what work do I want to offload to a product. And I don't want one-paragraph descriptions of towns or forests offloaded, because that's stuff I can do easily myself, and enjoy doing. It's the details I can't be arsed with - the map of the ruined shrine, the description of the bandit leader, the spell list of the high priest. So with a product like the Wilderlands, I'm getting the easy stuff I can come up with myself, and I'm left doing 90 per cent of the work - mostly onerous stuff I don't enjoy.
Quote from: Haffrung;916634So with a product like the Wilderlands, I'm getting the easy stuff I can come up with myself, and I'm left doing 90 per cent of the work - mostly onerous stuff I don't enjoy.
I don't think at any time from anybody I knew promoting the Wilderlands products, including myself, has ever said that every roleplayer would find them equally useful or useful at all. You asked earlier why would they be useful. I explained why. Now you explained why they are not to you. Which is a reasonable answer. However what true for you is not true for everyone.
Quote from: Haffrung;916634the map of the ruined shrine, the description of the bandit leader, the spell list of the high priest.
As for these items, Judges Guild had other product that covered these. The Village books, the castle books, Fantastic Personalities, random tables, and so on. While they were not tied to specific locales on the Wilderland maps, they gave the fan of Judges Guild a shopping bag of prepared content that they could pull out and combine to run the campaign they wanted in the area they wanted to run it in.
If you want something as useful for locations but done in a more modern style I suggest you look at the Harn Pottage series on Lythia.com
http://www.lythia.com/series/pottage/
Quote from: Haffrung;916634Then why buy products at all?
I already answered that. "I hate trying to invent geography." This product does the thing I hate most.
And the detail stuff like the ruined shrine is the stuff I like doing.
Quote from: estar;916604First off I am listing this because there is no old map bundle. The maps done for the boxed sets are accurate reproductions of the original and have every mistake they did.
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/2836/Wilderlands-of-High-Fantasy--Map-Pack?hot60=1&src=hottest_filtered&it=1
But if you are willing to pay $2 to $3 a crack for the original 18 maps then you can go to the below link. They start at the bottom of the 2nd page and into the third page.
http://www.rpgnow.com/browse/pub/31/Judges-Guild?test_epoch=0&page=2
Quote from: estar;916633The original maps done in a more modern styles for the Wilderlands Boxed Set. They preserve all the details of the old maps including the mistakes. They are also better quality in terms of being a digital product. The digital version of the original maps were done on a two color blueprint scanner at some college. These are from the artist's adobe files.
Note that the original maps two color scan are vastly improved if you apply a slight blur using a photoshop program.
I'm sorry if I'm thick, but this confuses me. I thought you said there was no map bundle, but then you list a map bundle. Please clarify?
Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;916678I'm sorry if I'm thick, but this confuses me. I thought you said there was no map bundle, but then you list a map bundle. Please clarify?
I misspoke there is a map bundle for the new maps but not for the old scans.
Quote from: estar;916680I misspoke there is a map bundle for the new maps but not for the old scans.
Is it possible to simply, briefly explain the difference? I'm getting a bit overwhelmed by the sheer volume of detail, and very fuzzy on which product is which. What I really want is CSIO maps and guidebook, and outdoor maps and keys.
Quote from: Larsdangly;915633Yah, Tekumel was one of those things that even people seriously into the hobby didn't know existed in ~1978-1979.
By 1976 it seemed as obvious as Boot Hill to us. Which is to say, obvious. I guess what was obvious may have depended on who you knew and whether you or they bothered to look at what TSR had for sale.
Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;916708Is it possible to simply, briefly explain the difference? I'm getting a bit overwhelmed by the sheer volume of detail, and very fuzzy on which product is which. What I really want is CSIO maps and guidebook, and outdoor maps and keys.
The new maps (part of the bundle you were looking at) are part of the Wilderlands Boxed Set that were released by Necromancer Games in the mid 2000s. They are basically redrawn from the original with a different style of art.
Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;916708What I really want is CSIO maps and guidebook, and outdoor maps and keys.
Then you want this for CSIO
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/56309/...acturers_id=31
These for the Outdoor detail
The Wilderlands of High Fantasy
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/1018/W...ers_id=31&it=1
Fantastic Wilderlands Beyonde
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/1019/F...ers_id=31&it=1
Wilderlands of the Magic Realm
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/1019/F...ers_id=31&it=1
Wilderlands of the Fantastic Reaches
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/1021/W...ers_id=31&it=1
And these for the original maps
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/1255/Map-1-City-State-Region?manufacturers_id=31&it=1
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/1256/Map-2-Barbarian-Altanis?manufacturers_id=31&it=1
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/1257/Map-3-Valley-of-the-Ancients?manufacturers_id=31&it=1
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/1258/Map-4-Tarantis?manufacturers_id=31&it=1
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/1259/Map-5-Valon?manufacturers_id=31&it=1
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/1260/Map-6-City-State-of-the-World-Emperor-Viridistan?manufacturers_id=31&it=1
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/1261/Map-7-Desert-Lands?manufacturers_id=31&it=1
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/1262/Map-8-Sea-of-Five-Winds?manufacturers_id=31&it=1
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/1263/Map-9-Elphand-Lands?manufacturers_id=31&it=1
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/1264/Map-10-Lenap?manufacturers_id=31&it=1
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/1265/Map-11-Ghinor?manufacturers_id=31&it=1
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/1266/Map-12-Isles-of-the-Blest?manufacturers_id=31&it=1
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/1267/Map-13-Ebony-Coast?manufacturers_id=31&it=1
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/1268/Map-14-Ament-Tundra?manufacturers_id=31&it=1
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/1269/Map-15-Isles-of-the-Dawn?manufacturers_id=31&it=1
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/1270/Map-16-Southern-Reaches?manufacturers_id=31&it=1
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/1271/Map-17-Silver-Skein-Islands?manufacturers_id=31&it=1
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/1272/Map-18-Ghinor-Highlands?manufacturers_id=31&it=1
The other maps are for the boxed set and drawn in a different art style.
I realize that the Judges Guild could have their store better organized but even then because of the way Judges Guild released their early products it got a little confusing what where.
In a nutshell what happen is the following.
Judges Guild was started a subscription service, most of their early product were released piecemeal through the various installments. The first installment was labeled as I for initial. The second was J, the third was K and so on.
Each subscription had product and an issue of the Judges Guild Journal. After a couple of installments, these where were bundled into a traditional standalone product. City-State of the Invincible Overlord, Tegel Manor, Widerlands of High Fantasy, Modron, etc.
And then to just to make it fun, Judges Guild started to turned the Journal into a standalone magazine and then merge with Jennell Jaquay's Dungeoneer for a series of Journal/Dungeoneer. Then that was dropped in favor of 12 Pegasus issue.
There are several distinct printing for many products most only had two during Judges Guild first period of operation but City-State of the Invincible Overlord had 7 each were slightly different. For CSIO the later the printing the more stuff JG threw in. The final version of the original print runs was the one I linked too in the post.
As for the rest you can use the Acaeum Judges Guild site (http://www.acaeum.com/jg/index.html) to get a grip on what what. It also includes the new products so you can how all those relate. Includes screenshots of the covers.
If folks what to get a sense of how things were released this is the list (http://www.acaeum.com/jg/IndexbyCode.html) to look at.
Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;916708Is it possible to simply, briefly explain the difference? I'm getting a bit overwhelmed by the sheer volume of detail, and very fuzzy on which product is which. What I really want is CSIO maps and guidebook, and outdoor maps and keys.
As far as the outdoor area maps go, I've got the Necromancer 3e boxed set, and old Judges Guild versions of
City State of the World Emperor and
Tarantis from the early 80s. My impression of the differences are 1) the boxed set is black on white and on thinner paper stock compared to the brown on beige and thick paper stock of the original maps, and 2) the location keys in the book are sometimes slightly different, usually by being a bit more fleshed out.
I don't have the products with me for comparison just now, so this is from memory.
Quote from: estar;916636I don't think at any time from anybody I knew promoting the Wilderlands products, including myself, has ever said that every roleplayer would find them equally useful or useful at all. You asked earlier why would they be useful. I explained why. Now you explained why they are not to you. Which is a reasonable answer. However what true for you is not true for everyone.
I haven't said the Wilderlands are bad products, or that they should be for everybody. I was challenging the assertion - depressingly common on any forum frequented by grognards - that the only reason someone wouldn't like a setting book that's light on details is because they're babies who expect everything to be done for them, instead of the resourceful and self-reliant types who filled the hobby back when giants walked the earth.
Quote from: Haffrung;916781I haven't said the Wilderlands are bad products, or that they should be for everybody. I was challenging the assertion - depressingly common on any forum frequented by grognards - that the only reason someone wouldn't like a setting book that's light on details is because they're babies who expect everything to be done for them, instead of the resourceful and self-reliant types who filled the hobby back when giants walked the earth.
Show us where somebody said that in this thread.
Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;916875Show us where somebody said that in this thread.
GameDaddy's post. How did you miss it?
Quote from: danbuter;917001GameDaddy's post. How did you miss it?
If you mean Post 12, I admit that "Walls O Text" make me skip over them. But yeah, point taken.
Quote from: estar;916408How did you run the Wilderlands badly? Wwas just a bad campaign altogether? Or was it something specific to the Wilderlands?
My main error was that I started the campaign out in the middle of nowhere.
Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;917003If you mean Post 12, I admit that "Walls O Text" make me skip over them. But yeah, point taken.
Eh? ...Some of the jaded young kids here... were dissin on Bob Bledsaw, who in fact, was the first person to create a dedicated campaign setting for D&D back in 1977. Then he published a commercial version of Dave Arneson's D&D campaign. I just took exception to the ignorant and jaded disrespect shown here about that awesome accomplishment, that is all.
All the new kids seem to think that anyone could have created a published campaign setting for D&D, however, no one had in fact done that, in at least 1,977 years, since we have kind of been keeping track of time... so there's that.
Once the D&D books were published, just about any one who had a set of the LBB created their own game world, but Bob published, and mass produced an RPG game world that everyone could share.
Quote from: Justin Alexander;916591Wilderlands of High Fantasy (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/1018/Wilderlands-of-High-Fantasy?affiliate_id=81207) (maps available through links at the bottom)
I have an extra original print
Wilderlands of High Fantasy that I picked up last year as part of a bundle when I needed to get an extra CSWE book after I found one of my books missing, It has two GM's maps instead of a Player's Map and a GM's map for the Map 1 ...make an offer.
Mike Badolato has extra original CSIO player map 1's available for $4 a pop plus shipping.
Quote from: daniel_ream;915355I have links to about six of them in my bookmarks, plus a couple of installed binary versions that will do everything from crappy fractal terrain all the way to tectonic plate modelling, rain shadows and atmospheric patterns, at any resolution I want, with a hex overlay if I felt that hexes were at all useful for this sort of thing.
Care to share?
I own a lot of JG stuff (both original and 3e). I treasure it. But I mainly use it for ideas. I don't think I've ever run the setting itself.
(My version of the Forgotten Realms -- the Savage North and the Moonshae Islands -- is strangely shaped by the Wilderlands.)
Quote from: GameDaddy;918076All the new kids seem to think that anyone could have created a published campaign setting for D&D, however, no one had in fact done that, in at least 1,977 years, since we have kind of been keeping track of time... so there's that.
http://geekologie.com/2012/11/move-over-ancient-romans-new-oldest-d-20.php
The ancient Egyptians were rolling d20's as far back as the Ptolemaic period. We might just not have uncovered their campaign notes written on papyrus still buried somewhere beneath the sands. :D
Campaigning with the ancient Egyptians- Thats REAL old school!
I know of several good map generators but none of them are capable of generating anything like a Wilderlands product or Blackmarsh. The big problem is fitting the locales in with the geography. To date it takes human invention to make anything worth using however tersely it is written.
The situation with dungeon maps and specific setting, like science fiction, is different. Because of the characteristic of both types of setting (a room with maze, a star field on feature less space). Random generators are able to generate something only a step or two from being usable . For example the Donjon site (https://donjon.bin.sh/) and the Traveller Map (https://travellermap.com/).
But even as skilled as Drow is in coding up all his utilities the map generation he has only produces the map. There is no associated content unless you use the science fiction utilities. Or you use his random dungeon generator.
Quote from: RPGPundit;918050My main error was that I started the campaign out in the middle of nowhere.
Yeah that would do it. When the Boxed Set released a bunch of us who wrote stuff promoted it heavily. A couple of months later we kept getting reports of campaigns not working out. It soon became obvious that we missed communicating an important step in our campaigns with the Wilderlands. The campaign were failing because like yours they started out in nowhere and expected the players to start exploring. And only a small majority of hobbyist likes doing that.
What we were doing in our campaigns, is basically fleshing out a small region and giving each PC some background info or detail. With that, they could figure what they wanted to do and it is off to the races we go.
However even after we started explaining that, the idea that a sandbox campaign started out with a blank map was hard to shake and still persist to the present.
Quote from: CRKrueger;918081Care to share?
The web ones can be easily located with a Google search, but you want to look at Wilbur (http://www.fracterra.com/wilbur.html) for a really nice terrain generator (that's nonetheless not very realistic because it's based on fractals) or World Engine (http://world-engine.org/) if you want something more plausible at the cost of really, really long processing time.
The real problem with this thread is the neckbearded old farts pretending the Labour Theory of Value has any validity.
Quote from: daniel_ream;918176The web ones can be easily located with a Google search, but you want to look at Wilbur (http://www.fracterra.com/wilbur.html) for a really nice terrain generator (that's nonetheless not very realistic because it's based on fractals) or World Engine (http://world-engine.org/) if you want something more plausible at the cost of really, really long processing time.
The real problem with this thread is the neckbearded old farts pretending the Labour Theory of Value has any validity.
It isn't the physical labor that has the real value, although a well done map by a talented artist will always have value, such as Darlene's map of Greyhawk. That is a thing of beauty. Perhaps it can be copied/reproduced today with much less labor, but the value of the intellectual work still belongs to the original version. Copying and mass producing is always easier than expressing the original vision no matter what tool you use to accomplish it.
Quote from: daniel_ream;918176The web ones can be easily located with a Google search, but you want to look at Wilbur (http://www.fracterra.com/wilbur.html) for a really nice terrain generator (that's nonetheless not very realistic because it's based on fractals) or World Engine (http://world-engine.org/) if you want something more plausible at the cost of really, really long processing time.
The real problem with this thread is the neckbearded old farts pretending the Labour Theory of Value has any validity.
And the real problem with your argument is thinking that Wilderlands is just about the maps. It is the data + maps + random tables that give the originals value and the thing that Wilbur, Fractal Terrains, and the rest can't replicate for fantasy maps.
Quote from: Exploderwizard;918183It isn't the physical labor that has the real value, although a well done map by a talented artist will always have value, such as Darlene's map of Greyhawk. That is a thing of beauty.
You make my point for me, or perhaps you simply don't know what the Labour Theory of Value (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value) is.
Quote from: estar;918202And the real problem with your argument is thinking that Wilderlands is just about the maps. It is the data + maps + random tables that give the originals value and the thing that Wilbur, Fractal Terrains, and the rest can't replicate for fantasy maps.
How fortunate, then, that that isn't my argument.
Quote from: estar;918202And the real problem with your argument is thinking that Wilderlands is just about the maps. It is the data + maps + random tables that give the originals value and the thing that Wilbur, Fractal Terrains, and the rest can't replicate for fantasy maps.
In the words of Master Yoda, "Your breath, you are wasting, dude."
He's decided that anybody who likes JG stuff is guilty of Badwrongfun, and you can't get anywhere with somebody like that.
Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;918217He's decided that anybody who likes JG stuff is guilty of Badwrongfun, and you can't get anywhere with somebody like that.
The phrase "we made up some shit" refers to game rules, not other people's arguments. Are those damn kids on your lawn again, grandpa?
Quote from: estar;918160Yeah that would do it. When the Boxed Set released a bunch of us who wrote stuff promoted it heavily. A couple of months later we kept getting reports of campaigns not working out. It soon became obvious that we missed communicating an important step in our campaigns with the Wilderlands. The campaign were failing because like yours they started out in nowhere and expected the players to start exploring. And only a small majority of hobbyist likes doing that.
What we were doing in our campaigns, is basically fleshing out a small region and giving each PC some background info or detail. With that, they could figure what they wanted to do and it is off to the races we go.
However even after we started explaining that, the idea that a sandbox campaign started out with a blank map was hard to shake and still persist to the present.
...and this where I copy or use the original
Frontier Forts of Kelnore, and parts of the B1 dungeon,
In Search of the Unknown, and make sure my players start off in a small town or fortified keep somewhere, with a few basic resources, and a bunch of extra hooks like a collection of npcs who have their own collection of rumors, anecdotes and stories about the local region. Even starting in just a small Keep, with a local military leader who is running off some particularly troublesome monsters, or having a few traveling merchants or traders stop by the local Inn to share a few pints, rumors. and stories about nearby locations.
An important part of every sandbox campaign.
The original Frontier Forts of Kelnore is one of my favorite products by Judges Guild, and the one that in the close to 40 years I've had it has gotten the most use. I've used it more times than I can remember in fantasy games, used it in sci-fi games, and used it in contemporary and historical games - rpgs and miniatures scenarios. Still treasure my copy.
My current Wilderlands campaign started 'in the middle of nowhere', but I had a couple of large dungeons (Thracia & Dyson's Delve) within a day's travel of the starting point, and a lightly sketched out starter village with a few NPCs. Also setting it in Altanis meant I had Estar's always-useful map of areas of influence to use/modify - (http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BNkPyvL-RIA/Uovg6XkEzLI/AAAAAAAABDE/Y5ajh4v0efA/s1600/map_8_overview.jpg)
I think the Wilderlands really shines for the OD&D approach where PCs intend to make their mark on the world without any unassailable Powers That Be to tell them what to do; for that reason I tend to avoid play in the City States. Out in the wilderness PCs can start by looting local dungeons, segue into wilderness exploration & questing, then establish territories and become rulers and warlords.
The provided material creates a framework to build from. It's very useful that wherever the PCs go there is stuff - settlements, a few monsters, ruins and points of interest. When travelling the feel often resembles Vance's Dying Earth; chaotic and full of unrelated events - you might well be on a mission of your own and run into a completely unrelated major villain's iron golems doing their own thing.