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Message: <blockquote data-quote="2WS-Steve" data-source="post: 2892682" data-attributes="member: 3289">Today I found the Gazetteer at Half-Price Books for... er, half-price.Nice for me -- the maps of the Northeast will work well for my, ah, home campaign. It's good to have North America as wilderness, with lots of terrain. The maps also include notes for navigable rivers, which could be handy for more campaign settings.There's small sections on the various nations and organizations in the region, Spanish, French, and Albion, then a handy bit on different terrain types -- including wandering damage charts for each. The terrain types are convenient since they're linked to the gazetteer (each location has a terrain type). I'm a tad concerned about the makeup of the tables -- encounter levels are all over the board and I tend to think that would be both dangerous for players, and a little unstable as an ecosystem.The gazetteer section includes a long list of points of interest all over the frontier. These include a little boxed-text style description, plus some GM info, and often a little feature or hook -- that last part I like since it helps make the place distinctive and can help inspire an encounter.There's some notes on using monsters from other sources in the setting, then a list of creatures specific to the colonies -- headless horsemen, killer scarecrows, and so on. Actually these give a nice feel for a Johnny Tremesne (sp?) era setting -- but the Wendigo should have gotten a drawing! Wendigos are famous!Then some magic items and a number of types specific to the First Ones, which is the analog for Native Amercians. The charms, like memorized scrolls, are interesting.There's also a section on inventions -- which are made somewhat like magic items, but don't have an xp cost and aren't magical. You need a special feat but I'm not sure what else since the rules for creation are in the other book. Many of these seemed fun but GM's can't just let the whole book in -- the arcanostatic rod is way too cheap for something that can block magic the way it does.The book closes out with statblocks and descriptions for some famous characters -- again, you'll need the other book to get full use since they use some of the new classes.It's definitely useful for me since I already run a game in north America.Probably my strongest disappointment -- and perhaps not a wholly fair one -- is that it doesn't include rules for colonization. Back when, one of my friends wanted to run a colonization campaign, where the player group loaded up with a small band of settlers and established a foothold of civilization in some untracked wilderness. Given that these were books about the colonies, I hoped that there'd be some attention given to that sort of campaign.I figured some sort of loose rules for feeding a small village, setting up water, finding various mineral resources, surviving the first few Winters, and so on. Plus some encounter ideas or how to handle meeting new civilizations.There's no treatment of that (in the gazetteer at least), but since I take it that wasn't a design goal I'm not sure how much of a legitimate gripe this is.</blockquote>

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