robconley
Hero
Mercurius said:
The original wilderlands was presented as a series of maps, a list of villages , castles, lairs, ruins, and islands. The Villages had basic stats like population, alignment, resource, leader name, level, class and alignment. Castles had population, leader class, level, and alignment. Lairs had monster name and quantity. Ruins and Islands had short two to three line descriptions with abbreviated stats if they appeared. Monster-HD-HP.
This is very similar to GDW's presentation of the Spinward Marches for Traveller. Remember that when the Spinward Marches was released there was virtually no Setting info. Nobody really knew what the Third Imperium, Sword Worlds, Darriens, and Zhodani were like aside from a few notes in the Spinward Marches, in the Journal of the TAS. But behind the scene Marc Miller had a lot notes on his Third Imperium and these were published in later supplements.
The same for the Wilderlands Bob Bledsaw had his own background and history for the Wilderlands. Bits and Pieces came out in various products like the City State of the Invincible Overlord, City State of the World Emperor, the various Wilderness Books, and so on. But they were just that, bits and pieces. Judges Guild never collected Bob's world into a coherent whole like Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms.
Many of us who ran the Wilderlands had wildly divergent campaigns. Some of this was due to the length of time that there were nothing published for the setting, but mostly because the spareness of the original material encouraged us to make the Wilderlands our own. Example include James' Wilderlands of High Adventure, and my own Majestic Wilderlands.
Published many years later, the Player's Guild to the Wilderlands is Bob's version of the Wilderlands. It has some contributions from those of us who ran Wilderlands but the vast majority is from Bob's writings and notes.
The boxed set in contrast is more in the spirit of the original Wilderlands. There is a ton of local detail but it keeps the high level stuff pretty vague. The idea is to make the Wilderlands your own. The value of the product is not just in running a hex crawl. It saves you a ton of work in the most tedious area of creating a campaign. Writing down every what every little location has over and over again.
By doing this work for you it frees you for the fun stuff making the plots that will drive the adventures for your characters. Plus it also makes it easier for you when the players decide to go off the beaten path. You are not staring at a blank 30 mile hex wondering what is in there. That ok the first few times but when you have to think of something for the 20th or 30th time because somebody wants to go through Perrenland to get to Ket then it gets a bit tedious.
And because most everything is written to focus on the local level it is easy to rip out what in the boxed set for that hex or area and put your own idea in.
Finally there are previews and sample available here
http://www.judgesguild.com
For James Mishler's Wilderlands of High Adventure look here
http://www.adventuregamespubs.com/
For notes on my own Majestic Wilderlands look here
http://home.earthlink.net/~estar
Hope you have a lot of fun with the setting.
Rob Conley
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