So who knows anything about the "Wilderlands"

[Mystery Man]

City State of the Invincible Overlord is probably the best city setting book to come out since Waterdeep (the first). Can't get enough of it.

So I'd love to hear about the Wilderlands setting if anyone is familiar with the new boxed set. Looking for info from those who have had a look on pantheon, geography, nations and whatever else.

TIA

 

[jester47]

There is a sample chapter found on the necromancergames website along with the map that that chapter covers. The region covered is the Lenap map. There is also a link to the Judges Guild site and there under the downloads page are some more free samples from the Players Guide to the Wilderlands. These are the rough draft chapters on Gods, Languages and Cities. The Rorystone Road download details the areas around the citystate.

The cool thing about the Wilderlands is that it gives you a bunch of ideas and locations but does not try to write any story less than the huge broad strokes of the setting. By Huge broad strokes I mean pretty much who the overlord is and his background. And even that can be ignored fairly easily. It is a setting that makes it easy to do what you want.

 

[PatrickLawinger]

City State of the Invincible Overlord is probably the best city setting book to come out since Waterdeep (the first). Can't get enough of it.

So I'd love to hear about the Wilderlands setting if anyone is familiar with the new boxed set. Looking for info from those who have had a look on pantheon, geography, nations and whatever else.

TIA

Thanks for the complement on CSIO.

As for the Wilderlands, the simple answer is that it is whatever you want it to be.

The Wilderlands Boxed Set due out in September (or early release at GenCon in August) is a combination of 4 sets of maps and support material put out by Judges Guild years ago as well as adding information from other Judge's Guild products. It is a massive product with 18 maps and 2 books with hundreds upon hundreds of pages of information.

Most of the information is both specific, yet general. In other words, we give you enough information to run a game there, but not so much information that it traps you into doing something you don't want to do. The basic rule in the Wilderlands is, "If you want to change it, well, change it." Villages, towers, people, items, lairs, and more are all presented with enough information to get you going, but not so much that you can't easily change things to match with your campaign style.

We actually ended up with very few stat blocks in the books simply because it would have gotten so large that publishing it would have been insane. This means that the most basic stat information is presented (or you reference the MM). Creatures that are advanced or special do have d20 stat blocks, but really, this setting material can be used for just about any fantasy gaming system.

I look at the boxed set as a "Toolbox," it gives you everything you need to run an exciting campaign. We try to provide as many tools as possible, but in the end we realize that you want to run YOUR campaign, not ours, so we try to simply provide the tools to make your job easier not to try to do the job for you.

If this didn't completely confuse the issue, then I got more sleep last night than I thought I did. If you liked the level of detail in City State of the Invincible Overlord, imagine that type of product, but for a campaign world.

Patrick

 

[Mystery Man]

Thanks for the complement on CSIO.

As for the Wilderlands, the simple answer is that it is whatever you want it to be.

The Wilderlands Boxed Set due out in September (or early release at GenCon in August) is a combination of 4 sets of maps and support material put out by Judges Guild years ago as well as adding information from other Judge's Guild products. It is a massive product with 18 maps and 2 books with hundreds upon hundreds of pages of information.

Most of the information is both specific, yet general. In other words, we give you enough information to run a game there, but not so much information that it traps you into doing something you don't want to do. The basic rule in the Wilderlands is, "If you want to change it, well, change it." Villages, towers, people, items, lairs, and more are all presented with enough information to get you going, but not so much that you can't easily change things to match with your campaign style.

We actually ended up with very few stat blocks in the books simply because it would have gotten so large that publishing it would have been insane. This means that the most basic stat information is presented (or you reference the MM). Creatures that are advanced or special do have d20 stat blocks, but really, this setting material can be used for just about any fantasy gaming system.

I look at the boxed set as a "Toolbox," it gives you everything you need to run an exciting campaign. We try to provide as many tools as possible, but in the end we realize that you want to run YOUR campaign, not ours, so we try to simply provide the tools to make your job easier not to try to do the job for you.

If this didn't completely confuse the issue, then I got more sleep last night than I thought I did. If you liked the level of detail in City State of the Invincible Overlord, imagine that type of product, but for a campaign world.

Patrick

Sounds great, I'll be looking for it then!



Thanks for the info Jester, I knew about the Lenap sample but not about the rest.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

I think you can say that the Wilderlands is both specific and general for a couple of small but very important reasons.

First is that it does not have a timeline that was/will be continually advanced by subsequent releases. An adventure written for the Wilderlands might destroy cities and kill thousands, but you won't find a later adventure that relies in any way on your having altered your own campaign to conform to that.

Second is that the very detailed pieces of the setting all stand on their own merits, rather than requiring large parts of the rest of the setting to make sense. The wilderlands has thousands of years of history and hundreds of highly powerful and important NPC's, but the setting won't break even if you start trimming them all with a chainsaw. You can wipe both the CSIO or Viridistan off the map and out of history entirely and it likely will have a minimal effect (if any) upon cities like Valon, Thunderhold, or Tarantis. The remaining cities and history will stand on their own.

These things make the Wilderlands wonderfully detailed, while still being capable of extreme degrees of customization that other settings couldn't dream of.

Just thought I'd throw that out there.

 

[Turjan]

Ever since I bought the "Player's Guide to the Wilderlands" I had the feeling that this was an open setting that is wonderful for adventures in a Conan-like atmosphere, less as far as the power level is concerned, but in the sense of an open, unknown land that's ready for discovery. Just imagine that one of the handful of larger cities does not always know where the other is located on the map . I like the setting, and I've already pre-ordered the box .