The Kingdoms of Kalamar Atlas is something I’d like to see for each campaign setting that I play in, and that’s pretty much the highest praise I can give a product. In some ways, this is a return to Kalamar’s roots. Long before they even had Knights of the Dinner Table or were an official product, Kalamar was a D&D style setting that came in a boxed set with okay art and layout but absolutely fantastic maps of the highest quality, both in terms of paper weight and detail.
The maps are broken up into different sections. Section 1 covers the Brandobia area, Section 2, Kalamar, Section 3, The Young Kingdoms, Section 4, The Wild Lands, Second 5, Reanaaria Bay and Section 6, Svimohzia. The maps include elevation above sea level, ocean depth, different coloration for different terrain types. The map symbol keys include oases, ruins, hamlet, village, small towns through metropolises.
The problem with the hamlet is that it looks almost exactly like the village and if not for the coloration, would like just like a small town, which looks almost exactly like a large town. They handle this small issue with a small section on each page that covers city with population ratings on each page. For example, if you flip over to page eleven, you’ll see that in Cosdol, Almven has 4,000 people while Vreldden only has 304. Of course sometimes, due to the vastness of the land, there are actually no population centers so those areas go blank.
As far as the quality of the maps and the paper that the whole book is done on, not just the map section, top notch. One of the reasons I’d love to see a product like this for the Forgotten Realms, for the Scarred Lands, for Greyhawk. It’s just good to have. Reminds me of the old wall maps that TSR put out a long time ago with a ton more utility and easier to use due to the book form.
Now in addition to the maps of the world, Appendix A includes a ton of ‘Geographical Abstracts.” Stuff like common trade routes, ocean currents, winds and air pressure systems, fishing, herding and ranching. Lots of maps for those who want to know where the grain production and military deployments are all coming from and where to go for those precious metal deposits.
After the maps, we get appendix B, pronunciation. A solid guide with a word sampler in alphabetical order. I know I’ve always wondered how something like Ashakulagh or Izhoven are pronounced. The good news is that the word sampler includes the definition so you find out that Dynaj is a small city-state in addition to how to pronounce it.
Appendix C covers land categories of Tellene. For some reason, this section isn’t in alphabetical order. You get mountains, volcanic areas and maturelands, followed by climate types such as frozen, tundra and prairie. It’s a good overview for dummies like me that get the specifics mixed up.
Appendix D is a collection of phrases and comments of the various racial languages. Ranked by language, you can get little bits like Geeno tabash, Bugbear for claw foot and Fissmall, low elven for coldstrike. Each section includes the original reference and the section ends with the Tellene Language Tree, a massive two page spread that should help those scholarly GMs decide how much overlap languages have and where the overlaps might occur.
For those who want an index, Appendix E has you covered. It includes all entries here, as well as where to find more information on the item in question. For example, for the Fyban Forest, it refers you to the Kingdoms of Kalamar sourcebook, with a page reference, as well as its location in this Atlas.
Appendix F shows the population of different towns. Instead of doing it by country and town, they do it by town, in alphabetical order, so if you want to see all the towns of Zahani, you’ve got some page turning to do. It includes town name, population, country, page, latitude, and longitude. Useful but a little cumbersome due to the ordering. Very complete and very expansive.
Is the product perfect? For what it does, almost. One thing I didn’t like? The pages of water. A whole blue page…Not a fault of the book. It’s going for completeness. In a few cases, some of the map tiles overlapped as well, such as with the case on pages 80-81 where the second page overlaps with the first instead of continuing the flow. Sometimes the events overlap like the Sea of the Dead where you get different levels that don’t match up because of the overlap.
A smaller problem was that the maps are too blank. I understand that this isn’t some fantasy setting where each and every grid has to have dozens of little things on it, but some dungeon sites, some haunted places, some question marks like “Contact ended with Jarnil here.” With an X on it would’ve helped pull the book into greater use. One of the few problems I have with Kalamar over the Scarred Lands is that the former concentrates a lot on adventurers instead of sourcebooks so you get all of these non-interlinked adventures for various levels that make it easy to GM is you don’t like making up your own stuff that are packed with source material, but if you’re like me and enjoy mixing and matching… well, for the most part, outside of the Stones of Peace and the Fury in the Wasteland book, you’re out of luck. (Althought I hear a hobgoblin sourcebook is on the way...)
In the end, the Atlas is a solid piece that I hope other companies do for their own settings. The amount of information, not only visual, but factual in terms of army placements and population centers, is top notch and a vital link in any campaign that demands a higher level of realism that most deliver.
). Taking a closer look at the maps you can now guess the population density of the different regions without interpreting pages of country disriptions. For me, this is a great help to get a better feeling for the world and to expand the flavor of my campaign background.
