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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 8217305" data-attributes="member: 5948">The Gazetteers are not pretty books.  They're softcover and black and white throughout.  The only art is in the appendix, for new monsters or to go with NPC profiles. The maps are awful, it looks like they're muddy greyscale fragments of a larger map blown up and with a few extra placenames stuck on, if you're lucky.  They didn't even bother scaling the border lines etc in the magnification process, so they're so thick it looks like someone's scrawled all over the thing with a permanent marker.  It's hard to tell the difference between roads and borders and goodness knows what else.  And of course there's no scale.  They really are some of the most useless maps I've ever seen in a RPG supplement.This is not entirely unusual for when they were made though.  I think Gaz I dates back to 2001, which is not that long after the release of 3e.  Even WotC was doing a lot of their sourcebooks (Sword and Fist etc) in black and white softback at the time, colour hardbacks were reserved for rare major events like the 3e FRCS.  And the majority of White Wolf's own WoD line was done in B&W softcover.  However, the lack of art, and the mess that is the maps, does tell me that these were done on the cheap.  Certainly compared to WotCs similar FR regional sourcebooks, like Silver Marches and Unapproachable East, which came along the year after this and were full colour hardbacks with beautiful production values, they look distinctly second-rate.  I think they were very much labors of love for the Kargatane, they're huge Ravenloft fanboys and completists (in a good way) and being able to write for the setting must have been a dream come true.  These are books you get for the substance rather than the visuals.They do have the feel of being written by fanboys though.  There's a distinct completionist note to this book, little mentions of all sorts of minor trivia and NPCs and sites from all sorts of Ravenloft adventures etc, which work as a nod-and-wink to loremaster readers, and do function to imply a deeper, wider world than the authors have word count to actually cover, but they perhaps don't add that much to the piece as a standalone book.  Also I think the Kargatane's undoubtedly vast knowledge of the prior material means that in some cases they were perhaps a little too unwilling to just retcon stuff when doing so would have improved the setting.  Or perhaps they were obliged to scrupulously respect canon as part of the S&S licence agreement with WotC, I don't know.The preferences of the authors re how to run a Ravenloft game is very clear here.  The clear assumption is that PCs will be natives rather than dragged by the Mists from another plane.  For each domain we have a sidebar talking about the most characteristic PC classes, skills, feats, names etc for a character originating there, and there's no talk at all about basically anyone who's arrived via the mists since the Domains showed up.  There's not even discussion of the possibility (perhaps not 100% surprising because this is, after all, a regional sourcebook focusing on local matters, but still).  For the people who like Ravenloft as a one-off adventure destination - "the mists rise, and when they dissipate again you see a tall ruined castle before you against the night sky..." - there's basically nothing for them here that they can't find in the 2e modules designed for that sort of thing.Also, the authors have their clear favourites in Azalin/Darkon and Malocchio/Invidia.  This will become more clear as we progress through the Gazetteers, but even in the first, which covers neither of these places, it shows a little.  I want to one day read a Ravenloft sourcebook by someone who really, really loves Paridon and Har-Akir.One thing i do like for its campaign potential is the emphasis on Mistways.  In a weekend-in-hell type story they're pretty much irrelevant, but in a campaign where the world is a living place, then they do offer cool possibilities.  Think of them as a secret mostly-reliable teleportation circle that can't be dispelled, and then think of the possibilities.   Shepherding refugees through them.  Smuggling or trade, if the PCs are into that kind of thing.  Spies or military forces trying to use them.  Monsters seeping out through them - there's a speculative mistway from Kartakass to Bluetspur, if you get sick of sausages and wolves and schlagermusik and want a bit of alien brain-eating in your Kartakan campaign without having to travel too far, then it's right there waiting for you.  Hell, even from a mate point of view, if you're interested in say, Sithicus and Nova Vaasa (or two other widely-separated domains) but nothing in between particularly interests you, then just invent a mistway between the two and you're set to play a game in the bits you like without either having to spend time on the bits you don't , or fiddle about rewriting the setting to your tastes.</blockquote>

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