akr71
Hero
I also own it, but I don't consider it bad, just overpriced. It has the shortest page count by far but the price didn't really reflect that. Bigger maps, especially for cities and towns, would have been nice.I've read many times that the Sword Coast book for 5E was not great. I own it, I read it but I don't understand what's wrong about it.
Back to the question at hand. What do I think makes a good setting book?
- Maps, lots of maps. Maps of cities and towns, maps of regions and nations.
- Organizations. General descriptions of the organizations at play - nations, powerful guilds, trade groups, priestly orders (or knights, or whatever) - organizations that have an agenda and may span nations. I don't need to much detail - a bit of history, their motivations, their allies and adversaries.
- People & Culture - what makes the people that live here different from the ones that live over there? It can include species or ancestry breakdown, but I will likely ignore that.
- How is it different? What mechanics or things make this setting different from any other vanilla D&D fantasy setting?
- Hooks. Lots of adventure hooks. Spark my imagination. When I read about a thing, I want my imagination to take over and say "Oooh, that would be a fun adventure! I could do this, or this, or this."
- NPCs and interesting folks for the PCs to interact with. This is a very low priority item, but sometimes 'drag and drop' items are useful when under the gun to get a session prepped.