Never seen or owned any of [the initial releases for the Scarred Lands]. But how did you have books set in a setting without having the setting?
The setting was referenced implicitly, with a 2+ page section at the end mentioning the gods and titans. While flavorful, it was inadequate to detail the setting itself. This sounds very similar to what people describe how the setting is detailed in the current Spelljammer product.
See, the Kingdom of Thrane effects all the other countries in Khorvaire. Same with Zilargo. You can be in Breland and feel the effects of these countries and their policies, because everything is tied together.
However, if you are on the Planet of Hadir, are you affected at all by the stuff going on on the planet of Toril? Do these two places even have contact with each other? THIS is the thing I don't think people are realizing about the Spelljammer setting in comparison. All of these locations are disparate. All of them are disconnected. Even if they are connected by spelljammers, they don't have shipping lanes or the like.
And if they do... then that is something you are adding and building. If you want to build a collection of "island nations" that are affecting each other, that's fine, but that isn't how this Spelljammer is organized.
Then I submit that is a failure of the published setting. Wherever there are collections of people there will be interrelationships and trade, hostile or otherwise. Even
Traveller and
Lancer, games set ostensibly in our galaxy, have worlds at great distance affecting others, chart trade routes, culture clash/shock, &c.
And you are going to visit the continents.
Not necessarily. For this point I was thinking of the
Bajau, a nomadic sea people. Also, if I was tracking the expansion of the Polynesian peoples, that would cover many tiny to moderately sized islands dispersed in the South Pacific.
Even so, I understand your point of focusing where the people and points of interest are. Those should be presented with an appropriate amount of detail, including interrelationships. My understanding is that this wasn't done, and was present in the previous presentation.
They made specific decisions with how they made this setting. All I am trying to do is point out that the setting book seems to me to be working as intended, and most of the responses telling me I am wrong start from the premise that we should have the same or very similar amounts of content as 2e had. Which seems to me to be a bad assumption. I can make a setting in less than a paragraph that would be plenty for people to run a game in that setting. They would need to come up with NPCs and such, but it would still work as a setting. And these books seem to provide plenty for the setting to work.
You are missing part of the point of a purchased setting. When you are buying a setting you are looking for inspiration and time savings. If you are presented with "a setting in less than a paragraph that would be plenty for people to run a game in that setting" you don't have a lot of time savings, do you? There is no reason why Spelljammer should or is better by having a paucity of detail when compared to other settings.
All that said, for those who purchased the product and are happy with it, then it's all good. I don't believe that Spelljammer sales are particularly supportive for the format. The community judgement comes with the next supplement that uses the same format, which I believe is going to be Planescape. We'll see how that does. Personally, I love planar adventuring so I am planning on picking that one up. (The only 5e purchase I'll make beyond the core three.) I'll present my feedback then on my purchase.
