Azgulor said:
The Scarred Lands books I bought with the exception of the Divine and the Defeated. The early releases of the series just screamed "COOL" to me and I really loved the whole gods vs. titans take on the cosmology. I waited in anticipation for the Ghelspad hardcover and then started poring through the books to create my campaign....
...and discovered the holes, warts, and flaws of the setting that seemed to grow with each subsequent release.
Now, while I do agree with you that Scarred Lands got ridiculous at it's later stages (I got fed up with Termanna), I simply don't see many problems with the Ghelspad hardcover in and of itself. Divine and the Defeated was decent and did indeed spend a lot on the gods vs. titans thing, but I found it mostly useless for one main reason: the number of pages spent on stats for the avatars. The avatars were insanely powerful (especially for the main nine) and no normal PC party could stand up to them. Now, while I don't mind very powerful avatars for gods, I'm not a big fan of stating them out simply because the bookkeeping bogs down play and my group gets bored at epic levels (just how many times can a party save the world/multiverse from some uber evil before it gets boring). Which is why I consider Dieties and Demigods to be totally useless (and to a large extent, the Epic Level Handbook).
My main problem with the Ghelspad HC is that it assumes you've bought every other Scarred Lands product. That's simply bad because supplements should at least stand on their own (like most of WotC's Complete .... line or Libris Mortis will make reference to other books, but you don't really need them to use the books). This issue mostly comes up when it comes down to Prestige Classes, most of which are not very well written IMO. Specific example: Hallowfaust. Great concept of the city. The city book is mostly well written. But the PrC's aren't well done IMO and given how they rely on ranks in "knowledge: undead" (when it should be religion), that shows that the designers of the classes lacked fundamental understanding of the Core rules. I also didn't like how they kept changing some of their PrCs: the Incarnate comes to mind as the most obvious example. Lastly, the Ghelspad HC introduces three major orders of Corean's knights: Gold, Silver, and Iron. They give the PrCs of the Gold and Iron but ommit the Silver. You have to get Termanna to see that. Which I don't like given how an extra two or three pages to inculde it.
In short, I agree with your larger point that Scarred Lands put out way too much material that few could follow the line without spending huge gobs of money per month. It's good in small doses (I can forgive the CC1 for it's mechanical flaws because it's got some inspired monsters with a dark flavor IMO). As for Forgotten Realms: I think the FRCS is one of the best 3.0 books ever written. While I don't play in FR normally, the FRCS has everything a campaign setting hardcover should have: domains, PrCs, geography, history, feats, setting specific rules, key NPCs stated out, how the world is set up, etc. It's the only book you really need to play in FR and is pretty darn complete. Just like Scarred Lands, FR is good the less you got of it.
BTW- Books I most regret buying are: Dieties and Demigods, Epic Level Handbook - mostly useless from my perspective. Then again, I'm pretty forgiving to books I buy and generally find use out of them (I also keep my collection small to avoid stinkers).
