Crothian
First Post
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Settings can be an odd thing as the books come and come and the place starts to really get defined. Sometimes the original writers are not able to stick to it or other times new blood is brought in that changes the feel of the place. I know there are some setting where I have read books and just wonder where the heck the stuff is coming from as they go against what was written about in the main setting book. Other times the setting supplements feel like they are tacked on. Like they are all just pieces of a puzzle, but if one does not have a few pieces it really does not seem to matter. There seems to be great fears from companies to have books build off of other books. Everything has to use only the basic rules and cannot refer to other books even in the same product line. I know some older gamers took that to a great height and that bother a lot of customers, but at the same time it would be nice if some publishers wrote books that acknowledge that other books in the same line exist. It can cause the settings and games to feel like piece male that has no interlocking parts. They all hook to the main books but not to each other crating a bit of a disjointed place that has a lot of loose ends that cannot fit together. Luckily, Oathbound does not have that problem. Oathbound is the setting that the book this review is about lies in. And quite frankly this is the best Oathbound book to date.
Wildwood is a new book for Oathbound. It is published by Bastion Press and written by Thomas Knauss and Darrin Drader. The PDF is two hundred and fifty four pages long. The files are also pretty big as far as PDFs go. The book comes in a zip file that is over thirty five megs. Un zipped there are three files here one that is most of that. The cover is a great picture by Shawn Ye Zhongyi. It is a really nice action picture in the woods. It is one of the better covers I have seen in a while. The book is in two formats. One of them, the big PDF file, is full color with great colorful borders and a real gem to read. The book is nicely book marked and has a very complete table of contents and as great index. The smaller version doe not have the page borders though the art and maps in it as still color. Printing this out is not that bad with the borders removed but can still be a bit hard on an ink based printer with the sheer size of the book and all the art. The art in the book is really well done. In the past some of the art inside Bastions books was not really well liked by gamers. The full page images and partial page art they have is just really good. Bruce Colero, Christopher Pickrell, Jason Engle ,Jeff Ward, Terry Pavlet, and Todd Morasch all need to be complimented on a very good job with the art in this book. The art compliments the book very well and it really makes the book look great. There are maps in here by Jeff Visgaitis and Jason Rosenstark who did a very nice job of show casing the Wildwood.
The book starts off with a nice preface. This is just a nice introduction to what the book is. One of the nice things the book comes out and says, and I can verify that it is true, is that this book stands alone. The Oathbound campaign setting book is not needed as all the important information on the setting is in here. That makes this a very good introduction to the setting for people that are not that familiar and may have been interested in Oathbound before. The Wildwood is one of the most interesting and highly anticipated sections of the world to see in print. The section also gives a nice chapter by chapter overview. There are some spoilers of the setting overall given here and I am not going to reveal them on the off chance that people are not aware of them.
The first chapter gives a good overview of the Forge, the land Oathbound is called. It talks of the seven different domains of which the Wildwood is one of them. It gives a good overview of all of them and should be enough to give people a good grasp of the setting. It is an overview so it is a quick picture of the places but the feel and depth really come across in the descriptions. There is also a very nice color map of the Forge and all the domains. As a PDF it does not come out quite that well in that there are two halves on separate pages and one has to scroll up and down to get a good look at it all. These are two pages that are much better to just print out and see them side by side as one map. That is a pretty small complaint though as the map looks great. There are new races of Oathbound that first appeared in the original Oathbound book and are reprinted and updated here. The races feel like unique races. They do not have the feel of being an alternate of an existing race or a sub race like is a problem with many other settings. The races here are nicely described and detailed. They have racial class levels for these races in this section. These are nice additions and are a bit different then the paragon levels from Unearthed Arcana though they are of a similar vein.
The next many chapters really cover this place like I want it covered. And that means they have great details but also plot and adventure ideas in the writing. The Wildwood is a place swarming with conflict and adventure hooks for a creative DM. This place has monsters and animals, great ecological information, lost civilizations galore, and many predators that will hunt anything. The Wildwood is not a safe place to travel but for people wanting to explore and have a wide variety of potential encounters and adventures the Wildwood will really deliver. The bulk of the book is setting details. It really comes alive. And it is not just the Wildwood. This book and setting can really be used for any great forest type area in other settings. The Wildwood can easily be separated from Oathbound with a bit of work. The races are the biggest thing to pull out but inserting other races is pretty easy. The Wildwood can make a good addition to other campaign settings.
One nice update the book does is it revisits the prestige race concept from the earlier campaign book. In that edition that prestige races were extra abilities characters could gain that cost experience points. It was power that was gained outside the level system and there were a lot of proponents to system. Now, they are basically very small classes that offer the same abilities as the old system but these go along perfectly with the class system and work even better.
Wildwood does a very nice job of showing how a section of a campaign setting should be described and detailed. Bastion has had a slow year or so in producing books and I am hoping that books like this are in their future. I do not mind getting few books from a company as long as they look and read like this one. This is just a fabulous book.
Settings can be an odd thing as the books come and come and the place starts to really get defined. Sometimes the original writers are not able to stick to it or other times new blood is brought in that changes the feel of the place. I know there are some setting where I have read books and just wonder where the heck the stuff is coming from as they go against what was written about in the main setting book. Other times the setting supplements feel like they are tacked on. Like they are all just pieces of a puzzle, but if one does not have a few pieces it really does not seem to matter. There seems to be great fears from companies to have books build off of other books. Everything has to use only the basic rules and cannot refer to other books even in the same product line. I know some older gamers took that to a great height and that bother a lot of customers, but at the same time it would be nice if some publishers wrote books that acknowledge that other books in the same line exist. It can cause the settings and games to feel like piece male that has no interlocking parts. They all hook to the main books but not to each other crating a bit of a disjointed place that has a lot of loose ends that cannot fit together. Luckily, Oathbound does not have that problem. Oathbound is the setting that the book this review is about lies in. And quite frankly this is the best Oathbound book to date.
Wildwood is a new book for Oathbound. It is published by Bastion Press and written by Thomas Knauss and Darrin Drader. The PDF is two hundred and fifty four pages long. The files are also pretty big as far as PDFs go. The book comes in a zip file that is over thirty five megs. Un zipped there are three files here one that is most of that. The cover is a great picture by Shawn Ye Zhongyi. It is a really nice action picture in the woods. It is one of the better covers I have seen in a while. The book is in two formats. One of them, the big PDF file, is full color with great colorful borders and a real gem to read. The book is nicely book marked and has a very complete table of contents and as great index. The smaller version doe not have the page borders though the art and maps in it as still color. Printing this out is not that bad with the borders removed but can still be a bit hard on an ink based printer with the sheer size of the book and all the art. The art in the book is really well done. In the past some of the art inside Bastions books was not really well liked by gamers. The full page images and partial page art they have is just really good. Bruce Colero, Christopher Pickrell, Jason Engle ,Jeff Ward, Terry Pavlet, and Todd Morasch all need to be complimented on a very good job with the art in this book. The art compliments the book very well and it really makes the book look great. There are maps in here by Jeff Visgaitis and Jason Rosenstark who did a very nice job of show casing the Wildwood.
The book starts off with a nice preface. This is just a nice introduction to what the book is. One of the nice things the book comes out and says, and I can verify that it is true, is that this book stands alone. The Oathbound campaign setting book is not needed as all the important information on the setting is in here. That makes this a very good introduction to the setting for people that are not that familiar and may have been interested in Oathbound before. The Wildwood is one of the most interesting and highly anticipated sections of the world to see in print. The section also gives a nice chapter by chapter overview. There are some spoilers of the setting overall given here and I am not going to reveal them on the off chance that people are not aware of them.
The first chapter gives a good overview of the Forge, the land Oathbound is called. It talks of the seven different domains of which the Wildwood is one of them. It gives a good overview of all of them and should be enough to give people a good grasp of the setting. It is an overview so it is a quick picture of the places but the feel and depth really come across in the descriptions. There is also a very nice color map of the Forge and all the domains. As a PDF it does not come out quite that well in that there are two halves on separate pages and one has to scroll up and down to get a good look at it all. These are two pages that are much better to just print out and see them side by side as one map. That is a pretty small complaint though as the map looks great. There are new races of Oathbound that first appeared in the original Oathbound book and are reprinted and updated here. The races feel like unique races. They do not have the feel of being an alternate of an existing race or a sub race like is a problem with many other settings. The races here are nicely described and detailed. They have racial class levels for these races in this section. These are nice additions and are a bit different then the paragon levels from Unearthed Arcana though they are of a similar vein.
The next many chapters really cover this place like I want it covered. And that means they have great details but also plot and adventure ideas in the writing. The Wildwood is a place swarming with conflict and adventure hooks for a creative DM. This place has monsters and animals, great ecological information, lost civilizations galore, and many predators that will hunt anything. The Wildwood is not a safe place to travel but for people wanting to explore and have a wide variety of potential encounters and adventures the Wildwood will really deliver. The bulk of the book is setting details. It really comes alive. And it is not just the Wildwood. This book and setting can really be used for any great forest type area in other settings. The Wildwood can easily be separated from Oathbound with a bit of work. The races are the biggest thing to pull out but inserting other races is pretty easy. The Wildwood can make a good addition to other campaign settings.
One nice update the book does is it revisits the prestige race concept from the earlier campaign book. In that edition that prestige races were extra abilities characters could gain that cost experience points. It was power that was gained outside the level system and there were a lot of proponents to system. Now, they are basically very small classes that offer the same abilities as the old system but these go along perfectly with the class system and work even better.
Wildwood does a very nice job of showing how a section of a campaign setting should be described and detailed. Bastion has had a slow year or so in producing books and I am hoping that books like this are in their future. I do not mind getting few books from a company as long as they look and read like this one. This is just a fabulous book.
