Has anyone used any of the information/descriptions/spells/monsters/items/alternative rules from this beautiful book for their 5th edition game?
Having just read it cover to cover without putting it down, I am drooling over the writing and wonder what other’s thoughts are re 5th edition usefulness. I am inspired to extract some of this into a new campaign and wonder who else here, already has.
I was excited about the book and planed to buy the pdf of it, but...
Every review I've read of the book has dampened my enthusiasm for it. Ironically, the most glowing reviews of it by people who really admire the book are the reviews that ultimately made me decide the book was not for me.
And I say that before I've even read the link that's in this thread, which sounds like it's of the same sort.
Whether it's the books fault or the reviewers fault I don't know, but the impression I've gotten from 'Veins of the Earth' is that it is a text designed for DMs that think the game is ruined when the PCs gain some ability to control their own destiny.
There are a certain percentage of GMs out there whose enjoyment of the game is based on their ability to mess with the PC's and leave them helplessly responding to the actions of the GM. These GMs tend to enjoy games when the PCs are low level and have few resources, where the players don't know the rules, where the rules can always change in ways that the players can't predict, and where the players are always at risk of a gruesome death.
Or in other words, these GMs enjoy the game most when they are in the role of that bad guy in Saw and the PCs are victims of their own torture porn. They then justify this mentality under terms like 'grim and gritty'.
In my opinion, a very little of that goes a long ways. There is nothing wrong with putting the PC's under pressure and challenging the players to "step on up", but you shouldn't be playing a deliberately rigged game.
And that's just one of the bad impressions I got of the book based on the high praise it was getting. For example, the treatment that the book gives to the problem of light seems to ignore the actual reason that GMs ultimately end up deemphising light levels in the long run, and that is that you can't really give separate narration to each member of the party to what they see. Nor can you actually expect a player to not metagame if you've actually given the player information. It's utterly unfair to ask a player to imagine how they'd behave if they didn't have the information and second guess themselves. Realistic lighting tends to be one of those 'good ideas' that has to go the way of realistic languages, realistic currency, and numinous magic. It might be possible in a game where the book keeping was handled in an automated fashion (such as a video game) or if you were running the game only for a single player but it isn't really functional in a social table top game.
