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

[Treebore]

RA can definitely be one big dungeon crawl.

I prefer to have the PC's come back and do bits and pieces. When I ran it I was trying to have them do it in 6 parts. Unfortunately they were only able to get to the middle of the 4th part before I had to move, due to my wife being in the Army at the time.

Since I involved Tomb of Abysthor (they do have a direct link or two) and Crucible, Morrick Mansion, Grey Citadel, and LCoB it was turning into a nice and well "spider-webbed" campaign story. A lot of it growing out of what the players did.

So it can be a long, drawn out, dungeon crawl, like Temple of Elemental Evil, but breaking it up was a lot more fun.

 

[Odhanan]

I'm always a bit surprised by people complaining about an adventure known to be a dungeon and saying "that's just a dungeon crawl". This sort of assumes that in a dungeon crawl there isn't any role-playing going on or worse, that no role-playing would be possible in such an environment. I can't disagree more with such an assumption. When a dungeon crawl remains "just a boring dungeon crawl" where you "open the door, kill the monster and loot the corpse", that's IME because the players start with the opinion that a dungeon crawl "sucks because it ain't role-playing". They could be wrong, if they chose to.

 

[Ranes]

I'll try to keep the thread hijack to a minimum.

RA 1-3 are the only NG products I've bought. I actually like dungeon crawls. That's why I bought all three instalments of RA together, mail order (ie without having seen them) on the basis of the way they'd been received here. I can't quite put my finger on why they didn't do it for me (I've long since given them away or I'd look through them to jog my memory). I just remember the impression that nothing about them made me think, "Sweet." I've bought one Goodman DCC (Dungeon Interludes) and enjoyed that more. There is something about the question Quasqueton has raised in the thread about "old school" design to my thinking. I am a nostalgic old school/grognard but I've long believed that the "first edition feel" blurb is nothing but hype. I've said so before on this board.

Veering slightly back towards the direction of this thread's topic, I did a London games shop crawl on Saturday, following the abandonment of a scheduled game I was due to DM (ironically homebrewed, despite access to plenty of very good pre-designed mods - mostly in copies of Dungeon). All three stores had copies of the Wilderlands box set in stock. All were charging around £40. As Zander is my witness (he was there), I agonised over buying a copy, recalling what I'd read in this thread. Had any of the copies been open, I might have been swayed to part with the cash but they were all shrinkwrapped and my doubts won the day. Incidentally, the blurb on the back of the box said something like, "The biggest campaign setting ever - over 400 pages!" Unfortunate, considering another product I weighed up (literally) was Ptolus, which is nearly fifty per cent bigger. (I didn't buy that either - again, shrinkwrapping).

I can still see myself picking up Wilderlands, because I am intrigued by the idea that it's a setting built for players who want to explore, whose characters know little about the world in which they live. I just take a lot of convincing. Modules I've liked? Dungeon magazine adventures aside, Sunless Citadel, Forge of Fury and Speaker in Dreams I thought were respectable. For all its faults, I liked RttToEE for the dynamics Monte applied to the dungeon design and would like the opportunity to run that one day, although I'd have to divorce it from its setting before I could lure the sort of players I know into it. I'd need somewhere unfamiliar... like... ah. Well, let's say I'm keeping Saturday's decision under review.

 

[Treebore]

Hmmm. Not enough to really go on, so I will just hazard a guess.

My guess is you didn't "see" how alive the dungeon actually is. There are a lot of powerful NPC's in there, and a fair number fo not so powerful. Now RA is not written to hold anyones hand. So you have to look at these NPC's and what little is written about them. Then let your imagination go. Figure out for yourself how they fit. Do they have any involvement in other things going on in your campaign world? Are they at war with or allied to others down here in the dungeons? Why haven't the various priests of Orcus wiped them out?

Start asking questions like that and the Dungeon comes alive, and can even weave itself into campaign events going on outside its confines.

So if your not good at looking at things like that, asking the questions and coming up with the answers, RA will probably never work for you.

I bet a lot of other modules would, though.
Like the ones I suggested a post or two ago. As for DCC's, well they have a range of different flavors/taste for each module. You would probably be best served to just go to Goodmans website and read the blurbs to see what sounds good.

 

[Ranes]

Oh I'm all for putting meat on the bones. In fact, the less prescriptive designs do have that appeal. As I said, I homebrew, so I have no problem imagining what might not be written down for me. I've never stepped up to bash RA and I'm not going to now. It just so happened that nothing in it fired my imagination. The only reason for my original comment about NG was that I'd formed an impression of them but the discussion here was giving me cause to consider making a fairly hefty NG purchase in spite of that impression.

I appreciate your helpfulness.

 

[Odhanan]

Thanks Ranes. You made your point of view much more understandable to me. To each their own, I guess. I really like RA:R, personally!

 

[Treebore]

Well, it was a guess. Sorry it didn't fire for you. I have plenty of examples of that for me. Others love stuff, rave about it, and I don't. Then there are things, like RA:R, that I love and go on about, and many could care less about it.

So we just have to accept that we all have widely varying tastes and live with the fact that we don't all like the same things.

 

[Turjan]

I'm always a bit surprised by people complaining about an adventure known to be a dungeon and saying "that's just a dungeon crawl". This sort of assumes that in a dungeon crawl there isn't any role-playing going on or worse, that no role-playing would be possible in such an environment.

I didn't mean it that way. I mentioned Tomb of Abysthor, which is also a dungeon crawl, and a quite interesting one. The point is simply that I do not like spending weeks and weeks of playtime in one dungeon. It's a psychological thing. I never looked at the "World's Largest Dungeon" because I knew that I would never, ever use it. And RA didn't have anything obvious to convince me that it might be interesting.

This is not an RA thread, though. It's about the Wilderness, a place where the sun still shines .