I was looking through my copy of 'Old Ones' for Palladium Fantasy for this Thursdays game and it struck me how much useable material were in the Palladium sourcebooks. Old Ones has more than 50 maps from full cities, towns, forts, dungeons, catacombs, all that could be easily be ported and used right away in any session. The maps are fully keyed as well so they are all set to go. This is beyond the fluff, classes, etc. The book has seven different adventures that are suitable and could be published as individual modules. That doesn't include the adventure hooks in the books. A lot of the sourcebooks I get tend to be for AiME or other OSR games and tend to be a lot lesas dense then the old Palladium stuff. I picked up some of the adventure books for 5E which are very focused on the module and not really as "portable" as the old Palladium Fantasy stuff.

I guess I just am impressed for a book that is more than 30 years old to have so much stuff in it.

I want sourcebooks to have things I'm bad at or things I don't have time for. Maps that are fleshed out, keyed, and include fluff hit all the buttons for me. I don't have the time to map out dungeons, cities, towns, crypts, forts, etc. anymore. And when I have these keyed maps it makes my life so much easier because I can use them as is or just repurpose them no matter what rules system or campaign world I'm in.

What do you guys want out of sourcebooks?

Also when did the dungeon become such a passé concept in role-playing games? I was at Midwinter Con here in Milwaukee a few weeks ago and just talking to other folks and they came into the hobby either with 3E or post 3E and dungeons just weren't part of their gaming up bringing. Is it just generational?

I want tools that expand the game / setting in meaningful ways to gameplay at the table.

Palladium supplements are among my favorites for all the reasons you listed. Not all, but many are awesome.

Quote from: Ulairi;1025197What do you guys want out of sourcebooks?

Something original or unique that hasn't had much published before about it. GURPS' latest batch of hardcover source books have been nothing but references to movies, novels, comic books, TV/radio shows, etc, that we already know about. Source books need to be interesting reading, at least.

Quote from: Ulairi;1025197Also when did the dungeon become such a passé concept in role-playing games? I was at Midwinter Con here in Milwaukee a few weeks ago and just talking to other folks and they came into the hobby either with 3E or post 3E and dungeons just weren't part of their gaming up bringing. Is it just generational?

2nd-gen role-players are not familiar with hex crawl exploring. They focus more on martial arts, combat exercises, boob armor, and collecting feats.

Are we distinguishing "source book" from "adventure" or "module"?

I don't do a lot of settings these days, though I can be convinced. I purchased Yoon Suin on recommendation for its tables and procedures for setting up a sand box.

I was always drawn to the Palladium books, but I seem to remember some city maps that seemed cut off, so you only got part of the city.

These days what I would look for is material to help me run a sandbox game. Inspiring maps are of interest. I don't want lots of rules additions, but I would accept alternate character classes (though at most of AD&D style of complexity) or spell lists as part of defining a new setting. Will I run it? I dunno, one of these days I do hope to have enough time to run some alternate settings.

Frank

I have similar desires to the OP - give me stuff to riff off of, give me (curtly) keyed maps (Dyson Logos is a great model) and briefly sketched NPCs. Don't do a Paizo and spend three pages on one minor NPC villain. Don't do a WotC and fail even to name the villain, or leave a friendly NPC as nothing but a name and quest line.

Vague fluff ideas & notions in a sourcebook aren't a lot of use to me. I already have lots of *ideas*. I don't like the common 'high level overview' approach; I want bottom up stuff like keyed ruin maps, useable stat blocks - NPCs, monsters, spaceships - encounter tables, and keyed wilderness maps or star charts for exploratory play. An NPC relationship map might be good if it's a highly political setting.

Never, ever do the 1990s metaplot thing of telling me "Here are the cool, powerful NPCs you're Not Allowed To Use because The Setting Is More Important Than Your Players".

Quote from: S'mon;1025247An NPC relationship map might be good if it's a highly political setting.

Yes. More of these.

I think that the thing to remember about 30-year-old RPG books is that back then the focus was on material. Thick or thin, RPG books were packed with stuff. Newer books have a lot of fluff and extra stuff to read that often doesn't really enhance RPG play much, such as details about what a spell effect looks like or whatever. I don't need to know that glowing green mists come off of my fingers, but I do want to have maps and actual setting material.

A great example of this would be to compare the OD&D rulebooks to the 5E rulebooks for D&D. OD&D plus its supplements would combine to be fewer pages by far than the whole 5E Player's Handbook. Spells back in the day had short, tight paragraphs of key info. Spells in 5E are much more elaborate. Same with monster stat blocks, character class info, and nearly everything else. Ironic that 5E got rid of weighty combat charts and replaced them with simple equations, then traded simple rules for weighty prose.

As to Palladium rulebooks in particular -- I usually avoided them because I didn't like the system, but I know that Beyond the Supernatural was an amazing book for exactly the reasons stated by the OP. It was stuffed full of setting material about Professor Lazlo (I think I have the name right) and his research about strange things around the planet. Fun to read, great for a modern or Cthulhu style setting even if I didn't use the RPG mechanics parts.

I like for any new rules material in my sourcebooks to build exclusively on the core rules of the game. I do not want to have to buy two or three other sourcebooks to able to use the material from the sourcebook I just purchased. FFG Star Wars was particularly bad in this area, with it sometimes being necessary to buy books from their other product lines to be able to make full use of new materials.

It's true. But different types of fluff work for different people. Some people criticized Dark Albion for having pages and pages of the histories of different noble NPCs. But if you're running a Rose-War campaign, where these will be the characters your PCs interact with regularly, knowing who they are and what they did is essential!

That said, my more recent products like Cults of Chaos and Lion & Dragon are both way more concentrated. They're shorter page count by quite a bit, but totally jam-packed with material.