Any love for the Scarred Lands?

[havard]

Does anyone out there still play Scarred Lands? There is a bit of a fan revival of the setting over here, but I was wondering if there are other fans of the setting out there. It really was a setting that seemed to disappear over night?

Simply another result of White Wolf's retirement from the hobby, or did it never catch on enough to stay?

-Havard

 

[Twowolves]

I bought every SL product they put out and ran a multi-year campaign in that setting. The rules crunch had severe growing pains, but by the time the 3.5 compatible player's guides came out, they had a ton of fresh, balanced ideas that WotC themselves, ahem, took inspiration from, in their own works later on.

The setting fluff was top notch, very classic/epic fantasy, a world pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, back from the brink of annihilation, were good vs evil takes a backseat to god vs titan. I hoped that post 4th ed it would survive, but it seems it was not to be.

 

[Treebore]

Never ran the setting, I really did not like the Titans angle, but I stole liberally from many of its supplements. Lots of great supplements just full of usable ideas to steal. Not to mention entire cities.

 

[Keeper of Secrets]

Never ran the setting, I really did not like the Titans angle, but I stole liberally from many of its supplements. Lots of great supplements just full of usable ideas to steal. Not to mention entire cities.

I liked their world, but like you, Treebore, I never liked that Titans thing, either. The cosmology was something that I could tell they put a lot of work into but it almost seemed, well, contrived. Like they were forcing some kind of complex story.

But at the same time, I liked their countries, races and so on. Scarred Lands is one of those worlds I would love to use, but there are a few worlds I think I would end up using first, and then there are the self-made ones I would use before Scarred Lands, too. But I would certainly love to play in it.

 

[Crothian]

I borrowed from it in the day but I'm not sure I've kept many of the books. I never had a lot anyway. I was tempted to get them all a couple weeks ago when a used book store near me had all of the books priced fairly cheap.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Interesting...I was just looking at my SL stuff.

 

[Achan hiArusa]

Simply another result of White Wolf's retirement from the hobby, or did it never catch on enough to stay?

-Havard

White Wolf didn't retire from the hobby cough*Vampire*cough, they just stopped making d20 supplements after losing the Gamma World and Ravenloft licenses.

 

[fett527]

Google Nightfang ad nauseum.

 

[Hussar]

I loved me some Scarred Lands. I have almost all the books.

I loved the cosmology to be honest. I thought it was great. What I didn't love was that a lot of their flavour had MASSIVE gaping holes in it that I kept getting tripped up in whenever I tried to run a campaign there.

For example, Shelzar is meant as the hub of trade for Ghealspad. Ok, fair enough. Only problem is, Ghealspad is basically a wheel, with all the major centers on the outside of the wheel, including Shelzar. How can the hub be on the circumference of the wheel? Never minding that you cannot sail west from Shelzar without running into pretty much impassible waters and you cannot sail east from Shelzar because the Calastians aren't going to let you trade with anyone east of them. Oh, and if you want to travel overland, you have demon infested deserts and whatnot to contend with.

Isolated communities a thousand miles out of the way are not hubs of trade.

I loved their fluff, but, man, did they DESPERATELY need a fact checker before people wrote books.

 

[jdrakeh]

I loved the setting. It was the only 3x setting that I felt compelled to buy the entire product line for. A year or two ago I sold it all and kinda wish that I hadn't. It didn't disappear overnight, either, dude. It had a long life as far as non-WotC RPG settings go, with a sizable catalog of products dedicated to it and active print support that spanned several years. It's still available in PDF, too.