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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Psion" data-source="post: 2011372" data-attributes="member: 172">A Magical Society: Ecology and CultureA Magical Society: Ecology and Culture is a follow up to the widely lauded Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe. The book is a rules light format, examining aspects of a fantasy world of the sort that exist in many d20 System fantasy games, with an eye towards design of such game worlds. The book is written by Suzi Yee and Joseph Browning of Expeditions Retreat Press.This review is of the print format, though PDF format is also available through RPGnow.A First LookA Magical Society: Ecology and Culture is a 160 page perfect-bound softcover book available for $27.00 US.Cover and interior are illustrated by Ravindra Rana. The cover has a wrap around illustration of the book’s iconic fledgeling god of war and his gnome assistant with an image of the wilderness of a world unfolding behind him.The interior is black and white. Some art is nicely detailed though others are a bit simplistic.The book uses a variety of sketched graphs to illustrate concepts. While helpful, these sketches appear hand-drawn and photocopied; it seems that they could have been more professionally rendered.A Deeper LookThe book has sections in three major types, interleaved throughout the book. The substrate of the book is the descriptive text chapters, which provide the basics of geology, topography, ecology, and culture of a typical Earth-inspired fantasy world. After every few chapters is a brief “building your world” chapter which describes how to apply the materials in the preceding chapters to the task of world building. Finally are a number of interludes, telling the story of a world building project being undertaken by an erstwhile god of war.The informational chapters cover Ecology, Biomes (topography), and Culture. These sections bear a great resemblance in style to Expeditious Retrat’s first offering, A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe, in that they present a great deal of well researched actual information on the respective topics (selected to be most useful to the prospective world builder), but then expounds on this to theorize about the role that magic would play in the makeup of a world. This includes theorizing on classes of creatures that feed on magic and their role in the food chain, and even a few idea for samples of such creatures (and references to exisiting creatures, some from third party works, such as the Disenchanter from Tome of Horrors.)The “building your world” chapter describes how to apply the information herein, and provides direct advice on what to do to create a world in a fairly realistic fashion from the ground up. This begins with descriptions of how to draw continents taking into account factors such as continental drift, placing geography taking into account the geology, climate, and wind bands of the world, and placing races and cultures, assuming they originate in certain regions and expand.An appendix in the back provides a miscellany of entries for things you might find in a world: trade goods, plants, and animals. Most of these are items from the real world, but the authors extrapolate to describe a number of magic-feeding (magiovore) life forms that might exist in a fantasy world. This is where the majority of mechanics in the book come in, providing resolution mechanics where appropriate for entities such as “spy grass” and “spell moths”.ConclusionsThe biggest boon of this book is that it collects the sort of material that would take the dedicated world builders extended visits to a library to uncover, along with the boon of several well thought out takes on the role that magic will play in the societies and ecology of an otherwise earthlike world.I must say that I did not find this book as easy to create immediate results with as I did Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe (with which I sat down with a question in my mind about what estates would be like in one of my fantasy worlds kingdoms, and by the end of the evening had a working model of what the whole kingdom was like.) Now that may be a tall order for a topic like this, but I believe it can be done to some extent, as was done in the AD&D 2e World Builder’s Guide. I think the authors sabotage themselves by telling us (and themselves) that we would not want a book like this with a lot of tables. As I consider that book to still be the definitive resource on world building, I obviously believe that statement to be wrong.Still, it’s a potentially useful book that, if I would have had it a few years back, would have saved me some hours in the library. It’s a nice resource for a dedicated world-building DM.Edit: After reviewing my thoughts on this book and it's general utility, it seems like it is more representative of a "3". You do have to do a little work to get actual use out of this book, and much of it seems more likely to be read than used.Overall Grade: C+ -Alan D. Kohler</blockquote>

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