In addition to being like onions, opinions, and a$$holes, RPG campaigns are like ex-girlfriends. You love them one minute, hate them the next. Down the road you might miss their company, then maybe/eventually you get back together. Someday you might get married, but then again you might remember why you left in the first place and never come back.
As I bring forth my opinion on what has previously been posted I would like to say that while I am disappointed by some of the comments, all of them will be taken into consideration when moving forward with future Oathbound products. As Tom stated, BP does plan on continuing to expand upon Oathbound with future printed products and PDFs, and constructive and insightful comments *will* help us bring you a better campaign world down the road. That said, here are my two cents for this evening …
First off, I find it extremely disturbing that so many gamers in today's market judge a product by their tastes in art. So what if product is well written and original, if you don't like the art then by default the product sucks? Perhaps we should publish RPG products with Sesame Street-style pop-up in the future? Use words in 50pt print like “See Unga chop dwarf!” instead of being creative and grammatically correct? I remember the days when gamers would practically creme their shorts to see an Erol Otus original in the Gen Con Art Gallery, yet in the 21st century if a product's visual stimuli does not tickle a gamer's frontal lobe then it's not worth drek? Art does serve a purpose in RPGs, but it should not rule them with such pig-headed and opinionating bias. Give me a well written product with substandard art any day of the week. If a product helps me more with my game, then who cares if it's pretty or not. Were Oathbound some utterly ugly pile of dung that looks like it was laid out by a one-eyed color blind graphic school drop-out (sorry Jim, had to throw that in there), then I might be less critical of these comments; but the fact of the matter is we get more feedback on how pretty the book is *AND* how well it is written then we do the opposite. It just seems like if someone doesn't like art in a product nowadays they have some odd urge to tell as many people as inhumanly possible how much they think it sucks.
Also, I see many comparisons out there to other campaign worlds, especially Midnight. I own a copy of Midnight (my second copy actually, after the bind broke on the first one), and if you hold it up against all other campaign worlds in the most general of comparisons I'll be the first to admit that it is conceptually impressive like few others. Beyond that, Oathbound and Midnight have very little in common. If you're looking for a dark fantasy, you go with Midnight. If you want a higher-level campaign where you can use any character or race from nearly any game ever created going back to 1st Edition D&D, then you go with Oathbound. If you want high-fantasy with a rich history, you could go with Oathbound *or* Forgotten Realms ... or any other of a half-dozen different games. Direct comparisons, like those outlined in previous posts, are based more on taste than a realistic comparison. Oh, and for the record, copies of the Oathbound hardcover have never been recalled for poor binding.
Like art, comparing one campaign against another is a matter of taste *and* the taste of your players. While I loved Midnight when I bought it, my players had no interest in it. Some thought it was cool, but others had no desire to play it. On the other hand, Oathbound was a world they could resurrect old character and act out their power-hungry fantasies from years gone by. Oathbound is also versatile enough that if I wanted to convert it to a *darker* theme, that would be extremely easy to do. This world is constructed in such a manner that you can bring any race, and class, any monster, or anything else from any book and use it in the game. In an RPG/OGL/d20 culture where everyone has different tastes, buys different books, and wants to play different characters, Oathbound is about the only setting outside of PLANESCAPE that has that to offer. What other world can say that concept is built into the campaign? Few if any. Oh, and did I mention the really good binding on the book?
One other thing that struck a cord with me in the above posts was the whole "plot/medaplot" argument. Come one people, who out there runs a campaign or adventure EXACTLY as it is written. I would say that 97% of all Game Masters change or modify everything they run, whether it is published in DUNGEON or in the back of a campaign book. If I'm wrong and that is not the case, then the creative minds of the RPG community has degraded to a Neanderthal-like level in the past decade. If you don't like the plot then don't bloody use it, but you don’t have to throw away the entire setting for such a minor issue. If you want a campaign world that is laid out for you from beginning to end, with no room for adjustments or creative freedom, written for all possible types of players, races, and plots -- then you're going to have to write it yourself. You should be done in about 20 years if you start tomorrow.
Lastly, the comments regarding the "strange" races has me more than a bit confused. Last time I checked this was a fantasy world and game ... right? I don’t seem to remember that disclaimer on the d20 legal document that said all PC races needed to be one of the “sacred seven” from the PHB. Here is a news flash … if you don’t like the presented races, you don’t have to use them. Use them as monster races or NPCs then. And why is it up to the GM what races he or she doesn’t like or use? Do you *make* the people that sit at your gaming table play a specific type of race or class? Unless you’re playing with 4-6 clones of yourself, everyone is going to want to play something different. Shooting down Oathbound because YOU don’t want to play an asherake or dover doesn’t mean that someone at your gaming table feels the same way. On the same token, how many players out there that would love concept of Oathbound may never get the chance because their Game Master doesn’t like the art, metaplot, or races? The truth of the matter is that can be said for many campaign worlds, and it is sad to hear that such “campaign bigotry” is so common.
Everything aside, it all comes down to a matter of taste. For my money, the Oathbound campaign setting as a whole is one of the most *configurable* campaigns out there. With a bit of work you could take nearly any published module, DUNGEON adventure, or home-brewed quest and transport it into this setting. If you don’t want to play in the Oathbound campaign for a *legitimate* reason, that is your choice. However, many of the reasons in the above posts, to me, don’t hold enough water to really criticize the setting beyond the call of personal preference. I would take more credence in comments that said, “ … my group tried Oathbound for awhile then went back to the Forgotten Realms,” or, “… my players wanted to play Dawnforge instead, so we haven’t tried it yet.” over comments like, “I’ve never played Oathbound because I dislike the boney-looking art and strange races.” In the real world it is best to criticize something *after* experiencing it, and not in spite of it.
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Kevin W. Melka
Bastion Press, Creative Director
http://www.bastionpress.com
http://www.oathbound.net
kmelka@bastionpress.com
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