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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 8427571" data-attributes="member: 5948">Disclaimer: I haven't read Wildemount, Theros, or Ravnica.Eberron for me.  It's not my favourite setting, but it's the best book by a long way (partly because it's just plain bigger and can fit more stuff in it).  I think the bit I like the most is the section which lists all the possible antagonists, their likely strategies, plot hooks, location, what sort of campaign they'd likely to be a part of.  Really genuinely useful stuff.  Same with the gods etc, it was brought back to a really down-to-earth level, how the material affects the everyday lives of peopel in the setting, how it'll affect your PCs, and related plot hooks.  At every step, there was a really deliberate focus on how to use it in a game.  SCAG is just profoundly inadequate.  It covers a tiny fraction of the setting, a small fraction of the pantheon, and does none of it very well.  Its one saving grace is that it doesn't waste pages on an introductory adventure ... but it just cuts those pages out completely rather than fill them with something useful, so it's all a wash in the end.  Ravenloft I was originally very keen on, but it gets worse every time i re-read it, unfortunately.  I profoundly despise that 90% of the population are soulless automata made by the dark powers to help torment Darklords.  It was stupid in Curse of Strahd and it's worse here.  These are the PCs family and friends and the people they should be protecting!  I HATE that, it's literally psychopathic game design - 'nobody is REALLY real except us...'.  The book completely cops out on covering the gods or religion at all.  There's no attempt to address how the realities of D&D mechanics interact with the world as presented - Protection from Poison, for instance, is a 2nd level spell that lasts for 8 hours without concentration, and it makes everything in Borca about 87% less scary.  Again, a lazy cop-out which makes running the setting as written harder.  I think the Carnival is a poor choice of domain to cover in depth when there were better options.  I think the later small writeups of domains later in the book are abbreviated to the point of uselessness, which annoys me more when i think of all the pages wasted on the adventure.  I think there was some good stuff in here - the advice on different genres of horror gaming was great, and i really liked the new Har'Akir, but this isn't a fuctional, gameable setting in my opinion.  As a toolkit to steal stuff from, yeah sure.</blockquote>

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