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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mark Plemmons" data-source="post: 1820990" data-attributes="member: 1287">That's okay.  I don't mind a few slaps.   At least when I do promote, I'm pretty up front about it, right?    <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/laugh.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":lol:" title="Laughing    :lol:" data-shortname=":lol:" />  There's just too many people who still don't know about Kalamar, so I have to make sure they at least know it's a choice.  Especially when I see people who want realistic history, geography, politics, etc in their games.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />From what I've seen, most of the people who classify it as boring are those who try to sit down and read the campaign setting sourcebook straight through, like a novel, when it's written more like a history or geography book you'd get in school.  The Player's Guide is written with more obvious flavor, as are all the racial and smaller regional supplements, but the setting book is the one with all the "hard" world details.If you do pick it up, I suggest flipping at random through it, reading short sections and follow its threads into other sections.  There is a LOT of flavor and adventure buried there, but you have to do a little more work for it.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Watch - I'll give it a shot (random open and read).  No, I swear, this is random.  Okay, here goes....  (closes eyes, flips pages)All right, I ended up looking at the lower right hand section of page 119, which is part of the section detailing the city of Fymar, Gateway to the East, and says:Interesting Sites: Fymar's gates might be weak, but the city's ornamentation is brilliant.  New ideas taken from ruins in the Khydoban desert have inspired the local artists.  New gates of bronze have been erected at the eastern entrance, covered in pictoglyphs that mimic the ancient writing of the Khydoban, and adorned with colorful drawings of humans and animals engaged in chores both mundane and magical.Fymar's largest statue is a massive bull of a type no longer living in the area.  Herds of bright red bulls whose horns curled tightly in a vertical twist once roamed the plains.  Whether disease, hunting, or disaster brought them low, no local knows.  The eight foot gold statue near the flower gardens of the Parish of Love is life-sized, however, and the city's butchers often sigh and wish for their return.Special Notes:   Tethen also brought back a hacking cough that he attributes to dust from the ancient caves where he found his treasures.  He is partially right.  The dust did make him ill, but the illness has just begun.  In a few months he will waste away and become a wight under the control of the undead emperor.So, if I were a new reader, I'd probably want to go to the index and look up more about the Khydoban Desert, and the Parish of Love.  From there, I might end up going somewhere else.  Or I might read the rest of Fymar, or I might go to the maps and see where Fymar is, and look at other cities around it.  Another reader might decide to try the flipping thing again, and find something else.I really favor this method, since it avoids the reader feeling like they're back in school again.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Edit: Of course, I wonder how many people actually try to sit down and read the geography chapters of other settings straight through...   Maybe ours just seems more intense because there's so much more detail, and it's pretty much the whole book.  Crunchy stuff is reserved for the other books.</blockquote>

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