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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Daztur" data-source="post: 6065075" data-attributes="member: 55680">It's indeed a great resource. I'm shocked at how large it's gotten. As I said a few pages back, I want to start spamming this around a few places once we hit the one year anniversary (not in an annoying way, I don't want to do rude things like register on a forum and have my first post be "hey, check out the Shrouded Land!").You're right, it's unwieldy as all hell. It's a mess organizationally for the same reason that spaghetti code is annoying in computer programming (built piece by piece from the ground up with no organized plan). One thing I'm doing as a stop-gap is putting in regional hex listings (like what I've already done for the various subhexes of places like Shuttered). Then what I'll do over the course of the next year is, like you said, move a lot of general stuff into the appendixes and have hexes reference that instead of other hexes. For example it's a bit bizarre that whenever I want to place a connection in the compilation to the sun god I have to refer to an obscure inn because the previous owner worshiped that god and that was the first time the god was mentioned. That'll mean both fleshing out the appendixes that you already have with a lot of text and moving stuff out of hexes and to there. That'll take a while but any long job isn't bad if you do it bit by bit. Hell, we've just passed Watership Down in word count and if we can do that in under a year with two lulls in activity that shouldn't be too hard if I stretch it out over a bunch of months.But even if we do that, the Shrouded Lands write-up is a pretty crappy in-play reference. We're just way too wordy, some hexes open with a story from a thousand years ago that goes on for hundreds of words before getting into any detail about what's in the hex now. That's radically different that any other hexcrawl setting out there (or any other published setting period). They're usually quick laconic entries that you can refer to quickly in play while, for me at least, the point of the Shrouded Lands is that whenever I come across something in a blog, book or my own thoughts and think "that would be fun to use in a D&D campaign one day" I can just slot it in somewhere in this setting and it'll always be there waiting for me and any D&D campaign I ever run in the Shrouded Lands will have that idea ready and waiting for the PCs to stumble over. Other hexcrawl settings tend to be practical tools, while the Shrouded Lands is more like this:<img src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-221f8ElAqtY/TsP4O58ORDI/AAAAAAAAAwM/sqQgMCI5aKE/s1600/indiana+jones+warehouse.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />A vast storehouse of ideas there to satisfy my mental packrat impulses.Probably the best way for other people to use the Shrouded Lands isn't so much to run a campaign in it but to skim around looking for ideas to steal, which I think it's great for.However, as a final step after fleshing out the appendixes and moving stuff there I'll take a stab at rewriting the whole thing from the ground up in the format that's use by more normal hexcrawl setting books with a lot of practical play tools like stat lines, encounter tables, population figures, etc. that we've mostly been ignoring. It'll be far more concise and probably look a lot like this:<img src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ddSGAUgU9gU/UNDffAEznxI/AAAAAAAAI9Q/4I72uB3lyws/s1600/carcosa_format.tiff" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />But for right now, the Shrouded Lands in all of its sprawling, rambling, bizarre, spaghetti-organization glory is pretty damn cool.</blockquote>

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