Mini-Review of Kingdoms of Kalamar Atlas

[AnthonyRoberson]

Here's a short review of the Kingdoms of Kalamar Atlas:

Maps of fantasy campaign worlds tend to fall into two categories; realistic and ugly or attractive and unrealistic. The nearly 140 color pages of topographical maps in the Kingdoms of Kalamar Atlas manage to be both good-looking and realistic. Turn to a random page and for a minute you might think you are looking at a map of Western Europe instead of Kalamar. The shades of brown, green and blue jump off the page. The Vohven jungle looks suitably vast, the Elenon mountains soar majestically and hundreds of villages dot the lands of Kalamar.

As an appendix to the main topographical maps, you get twelve more pages of maps that show everything from ocean currents to wheat production. It’s topped off with a mercator projection of Tellene for the purists. Other appendixes contain a pronunciation guide for those funky words like Svimohzia, a discussion of Tellene’s land types, a table of languages and words, a language tree, an index and finally a list of population centers.

I haven’t extensively cross-checked the Atlas with other Kingdoms of Kalamar resources yet, but it looks refreshingly free of errors and typos. The only downsides that I can see are that it IS an atlas and so unless you are a map lover (and most gamers are) you may find it a tad dry. Also, since the maps’ colors represent only elevation, it might seem a bit strange to see the Elos desert colored all in green. Finally, since the maps are realistic, you won’t find any notes like “here be dragons” or fantastic terrain features like 500-mile wide canyons. As an added bonus, if you don’t play D&D, the Atlas contains no game statistics and so it’s immediately portable to HackMaster, GURPS or any other system you enjoy.

 

[JacktheRabbit]

Yep, I looked at it yesterday and it was beautiful.

1. It was also 99% useless. The maps are very detailed but give the feel of being a chopped up wall map.

2. Roads and trails it appears were printed in a very faint color the guy behind the counter and I had a veyr ahrd time finding them.

3. No maps of cities. My old 2E FR book had overview maps of the cities that I found very useful. This atlas gives you a population total and nothing else.

This book has zero usefulness outside of a Kalamar campaign which I admit is what its designed for. On the other hand if they had included item #3 along with page long detailed info on particular cities then anyone could grab this book and steal the ocassional city out of it to plop into their world.

I was planning on picking up this book when I heard about it. Now that I have looked at it I am not too sure.

 

[Outlaw]

Kalamar Atlas

3. No maps of cities. My old 2E FR book had overview maps of the cities that I found very useful. This atlas gives you a population total and nothing else.

They actually have forty different maps of cities already done and those were supposed to be included in the Atlas. Unfortunately, the price was rising higher than they wanted so the cities were removed. Instead, they'll put out a city book. Suggestions have been made to publish them individually at first in KoDT and then as a whole in a bound book. Nothing definite has been announced though.

This book has zero usefulness outside of a Kalamar

For the most part that's true. But actually, the pages that appear most useless at a cursory glance are the ones that I'd steal for any other campaign. They give depth and current charts for the different seas that could easily be applied to any campaign. You have your party flying along over an ocean and they drop something? Now you can see how far down it will sink and how far it will drift.

I also enjoyed the basic description of the different types of roads. Allows for a more defined ability/hindrance of travel and adds a little bit more depth to my game.

--Joe