Last year Suzi Yee and Joseph Browning of Expeditious Retreat Press published "A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe", a book that answered the need for data on medieval society. The second book in the "Magical Society" series was recently released, and it also deals with topics usually left aside in D&D supplements: ecology and culture.
"A Magical Society: Ecology and Culture" presents the information as a paper in world building. Chapters are framed by short fiction passages that tell the story of a soon-to-be god given the task of creating a world to prove his aptitude at divinity. The assignment will force him to learn about subjects as varied as tectonics, geology, weather, climate and culture, which he then presents to us in the book. In parallel to the theory the book suggests how to use this knowledge in drawing the map of our own world. No information is given on cartography (which would have been most welcome), but rather on how geographical factors determine the shape of continents, weather, and population distribution. The chapters on mapping are available in their entirety as a 37-page supplement that can be downloaded free from RPGNow ("A Magical Society: Guide To Mapping").
The first chapter of the book deals with the shape of the world, rotation around the sun, the seasons, the formation of mountains and archipelagos, among other subjects. The authors explicitly decided to take the earth as reference; though the existence of magic is assumed, it's supposed to have little or no influence on geography. Ring worlds, flat worlds floating on top of giant turtles and other fantastic creations are probably incompatible with earth-like physics, so they’re well outside the scope of this book. This chapter is mostly focused on providing facts to support our decisions when drawing a map of our world and yet I found the amount of detail given excessive. Many of the decisions that may be inspired by this chapter (regarding the tectonic plates, axial tilt and such) won’t be relevant during our game, and the book doesn’t suggest they should be.
The chapter on ecology explains the function of every living being in the energy cycle according to its place in food chains and webs. Other subjects touched upon include depredation and succession (the way in which, along time, a community of species replaces another). I found this chapter interesting, but hard to apply in the game, in part due to the lack of concrete examples. It doesn’t make the task of creating an ecology any easier, and it will still require intensive use of external reference (particularly to find the right place in the food web for each living being). No special considerations are made on ecologies with traditional D&D monsters (dragons, aberrations, giants, etc), which I expected, since they’re usually much harder to rationalize. The only fantastic creatures mentioned are the “magiovores”, various living beings that feed on magic. A subchapter titled "The Inner Workings of Magic" gives pseudo-scientific justification to magical forces (which is not completely generic, since it contradicts justifications given in some campaign settings).
The subject of the following chapter is biomes: the associated units of climate, plants and animals. Nine types of biome are extensively described, through observations and interesting bits of information. Most of the material could give some character to wilderness adventures, but it should be used together with a reference book since it’s not exhaustive. I strongly feel this chapter is lacking correspondences between the biomes presented and those used in D&D books, which would make placing monsters and environmental dangers easier.
The final chapter is about culture, and how the environment determines it. It includes explanations on subsistence patterns, ideology, technology development and other cultural productions (writing, myths, taboos, etc.). It’s possibly the one that will prove to be the richest source of ideas for adventures, but it has a big shortcoming: no geographical region or historical age is established, so most descriptions are too general.
The design of "A Magical Society: Ecology and Culture" shows big improvements compared to the previous book in the series. Even then, the typesetting and the use of grays in page backgrounds make it unattractive [the PDF edition of the book includes a printer-friendly version which uses white backgrounds]. The book also has some editing problems: in many cases concepts are used which haven't been explained, and the lack of a glossary is inexcusable for a book of this sort.
While “A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe” provided some hard facts that could instantly be put in use in the game, this book works more like a research guide. It helps focusing on generally overlooked aspects of world building, but still requires the use of external reference material to make ideas concrete. Probably no more than a fraction of the amount of verisimilitude and rationale this book aims to provide will be noticed during the game, so the amount of hours of work left for the DM is excessive.
If you aim for just a little bit of inspiration on real world science then this book is too much; I couldn’t possibly recommend it to anyone who wouldn’t consider using a regular text book on any of the covered subjects. On the other hand, if you would spend hours researching about foreign cultures or geology to add something extra to your game, then you might consider this book, but just like any other textbook (and probably not the best). “A Magical Society: Ecology and Culture” tries so hard not to be like other role playing game supplements, that it fails in helping us bring all this knowledge into play.
