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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Raven Crowking" data-source="post: 3689922" data-attributes="member: 18280">One book on Worldbuilding (and it could draw heavily from the pages of Dragon magazine, going back for years), followed up by "focus" books that focus on building cities, dungeons, wilderness, particular types of cultures, and particular campaign styles.  I would actually say that only the Worldbuilding book should be hardcover; you'd get more mileage out of the others if they were softcover.While all of these books would be fluff-centric, each would include both example crunch, and --most importantly -- a lot of information on how to develop your own crunch.  For an example of this approach, think of the Encounter Trap section in Dungeonscape.  Rather than merely providing crunch, that section gets you to think about what you want to do, why you want to do it, and then create appropriate crunch.  Similarly, a Focus book on jungles might include some templates for "junglifying" existing monsters, might include some ideas for creating lost civilizations, and might include some very real crunchy bits....with a lot of fluff suggesting how those bits could be used, why the DM might include them, and how they might be presented.IOW, the fluffy bits exist to psych the DM up so that these things need to be used.  I'm sure we can all remember the feeling of cracking a book and reading something that drips so much flavour that we had to do something with it right now, and chuckled happily while we did that work.  Then grinned big goofy grins while using it in an actual game.Preferably, each Focus book would contain 16 pages or so describing an iconic-type location that used the material in the book, with all maps and keys, so that the DM could see how the material was to be used.  The iconic locations should, ideally, be site-based "adventures" adaptable to more than one game need.  They should possibly be things that can be fleshed out by the DM to create full campaigns, such as a cool large-scale map of a lost city in the jungle that could be worked into greater detail if the DM so desired.(The idea here would be to not only increase the "cool" factor, but to create something to draw in people on the outskirts.....as in, "Dang, I don't really need a book on designing forests, but the ruined city in WBF: Jungles was so cool that I have to see what they did in this one....."  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />)I don't think that you want all fluff without crunch, but I do think that fluff should whet the appetite for crunch.  When you sell Worldbuilding Focus: Deserts, the book should not only generate its own profit, but should fuel sales of Sandstorm as well.RC</blockquote>

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