Wilderlands of High Fantasy - Wots...Uh The Deal?

Wilderlands of High Fantasy/City State of the Invincible Overlord. I keep hearing one of two things about this setting box set:

Best! d20 Setting! Ever!

and

Large! Dull! Politically Incorrect!

I'm always looking for good settings to grab bits from and port into my homebrewed world. Your thoughts?

My thoughts are;

"Guy's a Floyd fan!"

elijah snow said:

Wilderlands of High Fantasy/City State of the Invincible Overlord. I keep hearing one of two things about this setting box set:

Best! d20 Setting! Ever!

and

Large! Dull! Politically Incorrect!

I'm always looking for good settings to grab bits from and port into my homebrewed world. Your thoughts?

Click to expand...

Well I am biased considering I am one of the authors. I think the usefullness of WoHF will depend on your campaign. If there are areas where can you put new lands or just a bunch of villages then WoHF will be very useful. The 18 maps of the wilderlands cover an area about the size of western europe. Large but not an entire world or even an entire continent.

There is a overall campaign background for the Wilderlands but the individual description makes little reference to it. The descriptions of villages, lairs, and ruins focus on local politics, persons, monsters, etc. Because of that it is quite easy to impose your own's campaign's background on the setting.

Generally the setting is a sword and sorcery feel with not a whole lot of "good" kingdoms. The setting isn't a dystopia but rather of how little civilization has tamed the Wilderlands. The politically incorrect stuff comes from the fact slavery is widely prevalent in the Wilderlands.

Again these things can be changed without bringing down the setting. In my own version of the Wilderland Map 1 there is a kingdom centered around the the town of Damkina that is very much like a traditional good-aligned kingdom. However if you were game in my campaign with the map 1 chapter open you find that very little of the villages and virtually none of the ruins and lairs are different in mine. Expanded perhaps but the boxed set description was used.

The greatest benifit of using the boxed set is the ability to allow your character to explore the world. They can pick a direction and as a GM you have something to hang a plot off of. Just as important if they come back you have something that will help you remember what was there.

Using the Wilderlands is like using the Spinward Marches for Traveller. Sure you could roll your own but it is a pain. But on the other hand if you look at all the Traveller campaigns out there you will see no two Spinward Marches are alike either. Some are vastly different.

The Wilderland is like the Spinward Marches but for D&D style fantasy. And it has the same degree of customizability.

Hope this helps
Rob Conley

Well, I never expected to receive a detailed response from one of the setting's authors, so I am both impressed and grateful. Thanks, Rob.

I am trying to build a fully detailed world where every continent has a unique magical/geographic/sociopolitical flavor. This allows me to port in ideas from great settings like Ptolus, Thieves World, IK, and Arcanis into my world and combine them with my unique ideas.

In general, I am also interested in reading campaign setting sourcebooks that have a unique "twist" to the standard fantasy world or are exceptionally well written. It doesn't actually take much persuasion for me to purchase a setting and give it a shot, so I'm curious to hear what WoHF fans think are the best parts of the setting (though I'd surely love to hear more from its authors, too!).

Also, what is the best thing to purchase- the box, the player's guide, or the city-state?

Also, what is the best thing to purchase- the box, the player's guide, or the city-state?

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In all honesty? The three of them form a great synergy together.

Wilderlands is really cool if you want to have a setting that is S&S in feel (not "wee-wee let's play with the elves" nice but rather "let's explore these unknown regions where Gnolls and Lizardmen are rumored to have raised a ziggurat in honor of some dark and evil god of old and steal the fist-sized gem it holds" kind of S&S) but isn't special enough as to override the specificities of the adventures you want to play. In other words, it's cool because you can plug nearly whatever has a S&S base feel to it into the setting.

Metaplot isn't really the focus of the Wilderlands. It's more about ready-to-use areas/regions/city (in the case of the City of the Invincible Overlord) with a sort of "pulp fantasy" flavor (read "that fantasy of the 1930's+ with bits of Sci-Fi mixed to it and vast uncivilized areas described in the stories, mostly") where you can plug your own adventures, really.

With the announcement that they are releasing products for Castles & Crusades, what is the future of the D20 Judge's Guild line ?

Melkor said:

With the announcement that they are releasing products for Castles & Crusades, what is the future of the D20 Judge's Guild line ?

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The Castles and Crusade annoucement is by James Mishler will be using the wilderlands to present his own take on the setting using the C&C ruleset. James' C&C version should have useful material for a Boxed Set Wilderlands campaign as many element like Geography and place names are similar.

As for stuff being set in Bob Bledsaw's WoHF (the Boxed Set) I heard there are things in the works but until they are annouced by the companies involved there is little anybody can say about it.

In a nutshell James Mishler will show how flexible the Wilderlands can be. My own version has a low fantasy feel (think Harn but with more magic) and I run it using GURPS. Even using GURPS I am able to use what the other authors did on their maps for my own game. (the work was divided up by map, I did the settlements on Map 5, 8, and the northern part of 11. Basically the big pennisula in the center of the Wilderlands where CSIO is located)

While all the authors wrote basic descriptions, and while it came out to a sword and sorcery feel, each of the maps have small differences in style. My entries tended to focus on local politics and developing interesting NPCs. For example a series of entries about orc villages on map 8 and 11 link together to describe the Arang-Tok Orc Tribe. Other authors wrote more on how the village interacted with the surrounding monsters, or ruins in the area.

Each map isnt a cookie cutter sword and sorcery feel with the same element repeated over and over again. Because of the diversity of authors contributing there is a huge amount of variety in the boxed set.

Another exampe is on Map 5 and 8 there is a series of villages impacted by the Red Reavers which you can think of "What would happen if a evil PC group got their way in the Wilderlands".



Rob Conley

Odhanan said:

It's more about ready-to-use areas/regions/city (in the case of the City of the Invincible Overlord) with a sort of "pulp fantasy" flavor (read "that fantasy of the 1930's+ with bits of Sci-Fi mixed to it and vast uncivilized areas described in the stories, mostly") where you can plug your own adventures, really.

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...

Oooh.

I'd love to hear more on how the Wilderlands are like pulp fantasy. A comparison of the different approaches that Eberron and the Wilderlands take to emulating pulp fantasy would be even cooler.

Melkor said:

With the announcement that they are releasing products for Castles & Crusades, what is the future of the D20 Judge's Guild line ?

Click to expand...

The Wilderlands of High Adventure will be my own version of the Wilderlands -- as Bob said, every Judge's Wilderlands is different from others, as campaigns develop and styles differ. The WoHA will be larger, with the Swords & Sorcery style influenced by modern High Fantasy and Epic Fantasy -- sort of as if Robert E. Howard wrote the Lord of the Rings trilogy, or maybe if David Gemmell ran a D&D game...

The main focus of Adventure Game Publishing at the start will be on the Wilderlands of High Adventure... however, we also plan on publishing Wilderlands of High Fantasy products. In fact, one of our first products will be the Ravaged Ruins of the Roglaras, which fills a gap left for almost 30 years -- ruins described for the City State of the Invincible Overlord map (Map 1 Classic/Map 5 New). It will be designed for use with Castles & Crusades, but there will be, as with all C&C products, free d20 System support available to buyers through our website.

Ideally, Ravaged Ruins will be only the first of many Wilderlands of High Fantasy products from AGP. Bob and I are talking about further projects, including Tula, Karak, the Demon Empires, the Great Glacier, and the Giant Lands, among others... including a series of novels about the rise of the Invincible Overlord!

Finally, there are other groups out there working on other Wilderlands of High Fantasy projects. Apparently, one of these groups is working on converting classic JG modules to publish them as d20 System products. Then there is still Chris Bernhardt and his City State of the Sea Kings. And, of course, Necromancer Games will release the revised Tegel Manor for d20... I imagine there are others out there, too... I do not have an exclusive license with Bob for the Wilderlands.

When I first heard Necromancer Games slogan "3rd editon rules, 1st edition feel" I didn't really "get it"

Seriously, I was aware of 1E products (I've been around the game since my twelfth year), but I wasn;t really certain what was supposed to make, say, Rappan Athuk more "First Edition-ey" than anything else. I really didn't understand how "old School" was diferentiating itself from "regular joe" D&D.

These proiducts really make it clear...and it is good

Wilderlands itself is pretty much what I like to work with in a published setting: an incredibly broad and shallow collection of brief descriptions, plot hooks and completed "Grunt Work"

Something like Forgotten Realms is less useful to me as everything is so exhaustively detailed (right dow to who the real protagonists of the setting are) that a lot of the joy I get from DM'ing--world creation--is simply not avaialble without discarding much of the purchase.

The "feel" that they describe definitly seems to be more of what my friends and I had during our tenure with 1E. The current game's near obsession with the idea of good battling evil is anathema to what we used to do.

Wilderlands comes a lot closer to our old games, which were alot more "Our side vs Their side" rather than "good vs evil".

City State of the Invincible Overlord and Bard's Gate are both consideably more detail than I am used to or--technically--need, but both are so well put together, their utility high enough and their adherence to their "theme" consistent enough that they have great use as both Setting elements and adventures in themselves.

Earlier in the thread Odhanan said...

[bq]...Wilderlands is really cool if you want to have a setting that is S&S in feel (not "wee-wee let's play with the elves" nice but rather "let's explore these unknown regions where Gnolls and Lizardmen are rumored to have raised a ziggurat in honor of some dark and evil god of old and steal the fist-sized gem it holds" kind of S&S) but isn't special enough as to override the specificities of the adventures you want to play...[/bq]

...and I've got to tell you, that really gets the feel of things about right