AD&D Dungeoneer's and Wilderness Survival Guides - are they good buys?

[Nyeshet]

(( I hope I used the right category description, as the books in question are of the stated category, but note that I would likely use this information for d20 games.))

How useful would it be to buy the AD&D Dungeoneer's Survival Guide and Wilderness Survival Guide? I am considering buying the two pdfs of these books from the ENWorld Download shop, but my main interest / concern is adding realism and interesting challenges. Some conversion of the information within the books [to d20] would be necessary, of course, but is the basic information in it useful, realistic, easily adaptable, etc?

Some books I've bought in the past were either hard to convert or focused mostly on fantasy dangers / creatures rather than more realistic ones (or at least more plausible ones).

Should I buy these books, what can I expect from them? Also, if these books are worth buying, are there others in the series?

Dungeoneer's Survival Guide (TSR 2019)
http://enworld.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=1038&

Wilderness Survival Guide (TSR 2020)
http://enworld.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=1039&

 

[Ogrork the Mighty]

The WSG has a fairly extensive weather system. IIRC, the DSG has some good info on mining and air supply underground.

 

[Starglim]

I'd certainly recommend the Wilderness Survival Guide. Its details on weather and survival are really still unmatched, as far as I know. The former system will fit right over any particular ruleset and the hunting, gathering and weather damage systems should be relatively simple add-ons to Survival, depending on how far you want to go with it.

The Dungeoneers' is a good read for campaign ideas and you might decide to take up some of the skills for 3e. There have been other products detailing caverns, dungeon environments and ways to operate within them.

 

[Arnwyn]

Another nod to the Wilderness Survival Guide.

Need to know how a forest fire spreads? Done. Need to create weather for for any season in any climate and terrain? Gotcha. Need to know the number of daylight hour depending on your latitude? Uh-huh. Want to know the mechanics of getting stuck in a tornado? Hurricane? Hail storm? Thunderstorm? Taken care of.

Large amounts of the book won't be useful (since a lot of it is already covered in 3e), but for some esoteric nature-related possibilities (and c'mon - what party hasn't tried to burn down a forest?) it's great and easily convertable to 3e [I've done it].

 

[Crothian]

While there are plenty in those books that can be useful, nothing in them really made me think playing without them was a bad idea.

 

[Arnwyn]

While there are plenty in those books that can be useful, nothing in them really made me think playing without them was a bad idea.

Was there any book that has really made you "think playing without them was a bad idea"?

 

[Mark Hope]

I'll take the other side of the fence and recommend the DSG over the WSG, and less for its environmental information than for the latter parts of the book, which give some excellent advice on running games and DMing in general.

I found the WSG interesting and it certainly has a wealth of information on climate and terrain. But this information can largely be summarised by the set of tables that are found at the end of the book. To me it felt like I had just bought a large collection of weather tables, and I rarely ever referred back to the main text itself. I also feel that the environmental information in the 3.5 DMG does a fine job of dealing with this subject, leaving little need for the WSG as a whole. The WSG has a level of detail that the 3.5 DMG doesn't have, but I always felt that it was a level of detail that I didn't need. It's not an awful book - just overlong and a tad superfluous.

The DSG by comparison has a great look at subterranean terrain, including a great mini-Underdark gazetteer that I still use to this day. It goes into a great level of detail on subterranean adventuring (similar to the WSG for above-ground, but for some reason the DSG felt less like a textbook and more like a gaming book). It also has a sweet little section on running games in general (a sort of precursor to the kind of material that is in Robin's Laws of GMing and the 3e DMG2) that crystallised many vague concepts into solid advice. Much of the stuff in the DSG was reworked and expanded in the excellent 2e book Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb Guide, so if you have that there is less value to the DSG, but it gets my vote nevertheless.

 

[Philotomy Jurament]

I'm not a big fan of either book, but if you made me pick one, I'd recommend the DSG over the WSG. Weather tables just don't have a whole lot of appeal, for me, and I found the WSG pretty useless. I have no use for the cumbersome rules the books present, nor for non-weapon proficiencies. The DSG's one redeeming feature is its underdark stuff (campaign-level maps, examples, et cetera). Its underground info (cave types, hazards, etc) is also useful, if you don't already have a source for information like this.

 

[TerraDave]

They are two of the AD&D books (Oriental Adventures was the other, I think) that introduced non-weapon proficiencies (the precursors of 3ed skills). DSG also picked up on the 3D maps from Ravenloft.

BUT, if you wanted to introduce skills into a AD&D campaing, the 2nd ed PHB would probably be a better route, and both those books contain material that is not so easy to work into a typical campaign (from memory, WSG was particularly problematic for intorducing all sorts of systems that meshed with nothing else).

AND, I can't believe I just recomended the 2nd ed PHB. I guess there is a first day for everything.

 

[Psion]

My underdark is the DSG sample underdark.

It's got some great adventure locations and predates the hostile FR underdark takeover.