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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Messageboard Golem" data-source="post: 2008311" data-attributes="member: 18387">I opened Kingdoms of Kalamar expecting to find a generic fantasy setting with decent art, acceptable writing quality, and some new ideas to add to my home campaign. I don't think that was unreasonable. After all, it's 270+ pages: at least _some_ of it should be interesting and useful, right?Wrong.The art is basically terrible throughout, and it's not the fault of the illustrators. The designers (and presumably the art director) must have asked for all these drop illos that show static, generic fantasy buildings and city scenes. Not with people, mind you, or with anything interesting like statues or local temples, just ordinary buildings. The dull art is just one symptom of an almost morbid fascination with the pedestrian details of this most pedestrian of fantasy worlds. The color pieces are given a little more free reign, but they're still incredibly static, like chunks of fantasy caught in amber--a copse of trees that are interesting 'cause they're, well, really really big. And the battle scene that opens the book looks like it's full of action, but it's nothing we haven't seen before. Perhaps worst of all, none of the pieces tell me anything about what it means to live and adventure in this world; they fail to draw me in or make me want to roll up a character.The writing is just plain bad. I don't mean from some highfalutin' "style" standpoint, but just from the perspective of sentence structure and basic rules of composition. It's dull. It's repetitive. It changes tone and voice, and often tense, within the same paragraph. It can't decide whether it wants to be flowery and evocative or homey and personal. It ultimately falls down under the weight of its own pretensions and fails at its real task: selling the setting to the reader.To be fair, no amount of solid prose or vibrant artwork could have fixed the essential problem with this setting, namely that it sets a new standard for dull, typical fantasy worlds. Entries on the kingdoms and cities read like a 6th-grade geography textbook, where cities of the world are reduced to their main exports (City X produces grain. City Y produces wool.) The gods are typical and formulaic: add a slew of AKA's after the god's real name--some of these are unintentionally hysterical, like the "sodomizer of all" and the "bringer of rain, wind, snow, etc. whatever is currently the most threatening weather problem in that climate or region"--and draw a holy symbol, and you're done.But the real shame is that there's almost no d20-significant content. No prestige classes. No new domains (in fact in a gaffe or Relics & Rituals proportions, they forgot to include the domains for their own crop of gods). No new spells. No new feats or skill variants. In short, there is one new race (the half-hobgoblin, as dry as you'd imagine) and a smattering of--wait for it--new armor types. These bothered me more than almost anything else in the book, because the armor types listed in the PH are basically complete. They describe a nice smooth curve from low to high AC, and each is balanced within its category. If there's one thing D&D doesn't need, it's new base armor types. And the armor they've presented here doesn't fill any new niche--most have exactly the same stats as existing armor, and substitute some goofy name (like rope armor) to make it unique. It's as if the line developer suddenly realized that the setting was just 270+ pages of dull, poorly-written exposition, and in his ignorance started statting up new armor types to fill the gap. It's a poor substitute for real design work.There's an attempt to make the setting more "realistic" by giving us a bunch of languages (all suspiciously based on a 25-letter alphabet), constellations (a truly nice touch, and well-illustrated), and a list of NPCs laid out in the most skeletal form possible--they're done up in a chart, with just the bare facts of their existence given. No adventure hooks here, and the DM still has to do the hard work of generating stat blocks from these incomplete entries.The maps are good, nothing more. There are certainly a lot of them, but they're no better or worse than the maps in the FRCS. The fold-out map would probably look nice on a wall, but it doesn't have much use in a game.My overwhelming feeling while reading this brick was relief: relief that it would soon be over, and I could go back to raiding the FRCS for ideas and new rules and NPCs and adventure hooks. Kenzer & Co. may have weaseled their way into putting the D&D logo on the cover, but you won't find much D&D inside. Spend the extra $5 and get the Forgotten Realms--you get far more real content, better writing, better art, and more of anything you could want in a game setting. It's more than worth it.</blockquote>

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