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Message: <blockquote data-quote="trancejeremy" data-source="post: 2008649" data-attributes="member: 924">Having been very impressed with two of the Kalamar modules, I had put this book on my to buy list. Many months later, I finally got around to buying it. Unfortunately, I was a bit disappointed. The Kalamar setting was apparently a stand alone fantasy game, now converted to 3E, but Kenzer did not do a great job of converting it to 3E.  The Kalamar setting book is quite hefty, and weighs in at 272 pages, plus two pull out maps. The maps are attached with some sort of stickum, so you can pull them out without harming the book. However, they do discolor the pages they are stuck do. But a minor matter. The maps are large, and in color, but are not that remarkable in quality.The bulk of the book (almost 170 pages) are the descriptions of kingdoms, and the main cities in each kingdom. It follows a standard format - a general overview of the kingdom, then for each prominent city in the kingdom, the population, government, economy, temples, mages & sages, underworld, interesting sites, and special notes. While all in all fairly interesting, and well crafted, it's very dry reading. Like a history text book or an almanac. Illustrations are very sparse, as are game mechanics. Every so often is there is a relevent bit of game info - a description of a spell or magic item. But it's very rare. This is followed by a small chapter on prominent organizations in the setting.  There apparently aren't many, only 12, and as I said, the chapter is quite short. They only get descriptions of a few paragraphs or so. Again, insteresting, but somewhat dry reading.Next comes a chapter on the languages of the setting. This includes alphabets and pronounciations. You get 15 pages of this! Flavorful, and gives a feel for the setting, but again, rather dull. The last chapter details the gods of the setting. There are 54 gods, although 11 of them have apparently died. Even so, that's a lot of gods. Not surprisingly, this takes a lot of space, a total of 40 pages or so. What is surprising, is despite all the space used, they didn't assign Domains to the gods. This is one of the areas that KenzerCo apparently forgot about when converting to 3E. Apparently this has been addressed by erata on it's website, but it's not easy to find...There are several appendices - the first is on the astronomy of Kalamar - an often neglected part of campaign settings, and also has info on the calender and has a timeline.  The second is on Kalamaran cities, and includes a reference chart of all the prominent cities. The third is dedicated to laws, and the fourth to armies.The fifth is just a country chart, the six a nomenclature chart (names of people in various countries), and the 7th and last is a chart of important NPCs. This runs several pages. Just glancing through it, the highest NPC appears to be a 17th level cleric. Lastly, there is a combination index and glossary, which is extremely nice.This is a nice book. But I have some problems with it. The back cover states in large bold letters, "An Epic, Ass-Kicking World!". That couldn't be further from the truth. Is the world epic? Not really, in scale or power, or even size (it's just one continent or so). It's certainly not "Ass-Kicking". That implies an in your face, or extremely violent, or edgy. The setting is none of that. It's well detailed, somewhat interesting, but also a bit on the pedestrian side. As worlds go, Kalamar is interesting, but not overly so. There are really no hooks that reach out and grab you. Like the city of Greyhawk of Greyhawk. Or Elminster and the epic scale of the Forgotten Worlds. Or the general wackiness of Mystara. The world is very bland. Not without merit, but the world is very subtle. Furthermore, the back advertises it as "The First Fully-Detailed World for the new Dungeons & Dragons universe.". Well, it's fully-detailed, but you could hardly tell it was for D&D 3E. There are literally only a handful of D&D specific things in the book. And none of it really has rules, or adapts the rules to the Kalamar setting. A fairly good comparison can be made with the Sovereign Stone campaign setting book. Like Kalamar, it adapted a pre-existing fantasy world from it's own rules to the 3e/d20 rules. But whereas the Sovereign Stone book concentrated on rules for the setting, Kalamar concentrated on the details of the setting. The Kalamar book feels more like an almanac - in fact, if you are familiar with the old Poor Wizards Almanac's for Mystara, then that is what the Kalamar setting book is like. (Only minus the events of the upcoming year)So ultimately, while not a bad book, it really fails as a d20 book, and as a campaign setting. It needs more d20 material in it. Unless you want to know more about the Kalamar setting, you have no use (at all) for this book. On the other hand, if you do, it's very good (though not great). I probably would have liked one or two areas provided in great detail, rather than the entire setting detailed in good detail. Rather than a D&D campaign sourcebook for Kalamar, it's more like a textbook for Kalamar 101.</blockquote>

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