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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Faraer" data-source="post: 1027699" data-attributes="member: 6318">Maztica is a total white elephant, detritus from a novel trilogy which didn't add to the Realms and was a much less interesting story than that of the real conquistadores (same problem as with The Mage in the Iron Mask and Once Around the Realms). The Al-Qadim products are very good -- assuming you want a campaign setting based on Hollywood Arabia -- but neither setting benefited from their attachment to the Realms, which already had an Arabian-influenced region. Rick Swan's pseudo-Inuit that he put on the Great Glacier are garbage. Douglas Niles's Moonshae Isles, which took the place of Ed's original Earthsea-like archipelago, are a better fit, if only because the culture was closer to that of the core Realms and could be more easily fudged (as in FA1 Halls of the High King) to stand out a bit less jarringly).I had an argument with Jim Lowder on another board about Ed's Realms vs the TSR/WotC Realms, and Jim -- who ran the book department for a while in the 90s -- weighed in in favour of the latter without telling me exactly where the supra-Greenwood consistency lay or why that version was better.I think the reasons not to use the Realms are if you don't like the taste of their core, which is fair enough, or if you don't want to have to wade through this diversity of material that veterans can identify clearly but which is very opaque to newcomers, which unfortunately may be fair enough too.<a href="http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Castle/2566/wellmet.htm" target="_blank">Here</a>, by the way, is the text that best sums up what the Realms is about.</blockquote>

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