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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Scarogoth" data-source="post: 2009094" data-attributes="member: 3507">I'm adding this review rather late in the day, and many others before me have detailed the book in depth, and I direct you to the full, balanced reviews Psion and Tuerny in particular for the nitty gritty.I'm here to try and explain to myself, as well as any others that might be interested, why this particular campaign setting has taken such a hold on my gaming life, and also because I felt I needed to rate this product.A confession... the first time I picked this book up in the shop, I hated it. At that stage I was looking for variants, new feats, new skills, prestige classes, new races and the whole caboodle to expand my D&D playing options. (This was before many of the WotC supplements had come out, remember). I was expecting to pick this book up and discover another version, if you will, of the "Forgotten Realms", my favourite setting at that time. This is certainly not that. This is, as some have pointed out in a less-than-complimentary fashion, a historical text book/gazzeteer. It is, more or less, the complete history of a world, where the politics, religions, racial diversity, cultures, geography, organizations and languages are all laid out in painstaking detail. Barely a table in sight, and hardly a "modifier" to be added to anything at all within the whole book.But, what I'd failed to realize at the time was, that although this book didn't expand particularly the nature of the games I was playing, it expanded the content 200-fold. This world is believable. Suddenly, there is a multitude of reasons why a certain character would want to do something because of an event in his/her history -- not because they would get a +2 to this particular skill or whatever. This book enabled my character creations to breathe on the page -- to step out, if you'll forgive the poetic licence, of the numbers the dice had given me and become "real" people. People with lives, homes, friends, enemies, histories. Now, of course, many would say that the purchase of this book just happened to coincide with my personal Damascene revelation about this aspect of role-playing, but personally I think it was far more likely the cause. Naturally, I had created mental backstories for the characters I used in the Forgotten Realms, but they never seemed as real or believable, and I never cared about them in the same way I have cared for my Kalamaran creations.Besides, Kenzer have now released the Player's Guide, which in a sense was the book I was looking for that very first time around. I certainly commend that to you (indeed, I have reviewed it fully within this very site), but I'm delighted that I happened to come across this book first. From a personal point of view, it has improved the quality and enjoyment of my role-playing so much, that I have nothing but praise for the setting. I cannot possibly know whether the setting will be as good for you, but speaking personally, all I can say is that those people that enjoy playing in the Kingdoms are so very much the sort of players with whom I would wish to play, and the style of game that they play, so very much the style that I would wish to adopt, that I find it hard to envisage a time when I stop enjoying playing. If I do, it will only be because I've given up roleplaying altogether -- here's hoping that that's when I'm blind, deaf and senile, (a long way off, I trust!) and not before.</blockquote>

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