Having read half way through both SoW and WotBS let me give you my take on it.
Scales of War works well for a DM that wants to take the basic structure and Characters presented and to flesh them out with his own personalities and details. The Basic structure of the story is there, and the mechanical elements of the encounters are laid out so that combat is interesting, but most of the characters are just begging for the DM to add depth and to hang details around them that fit the party. The series also focus mainly on the combat portions of the game with some social type encounters thrown in.
War of the Burning sky on the other hand has much more of the details laid out already on the characters and uses a more coherent background world. It also strives to be more balanced between social and combat encounters.
Part of the difference has to do with the difference in format. The SoW adventures seem (for reasons I haven't figured out) to compete for space in the pages of Dungeon with all the other articles, so the adventures end up being shorter (50 to 80 pages) then the WotBS adventures that fill up an entire 100 page booklet by themselves. This shorter format means that many of the "fluff" details of the world and complex social encounters have to be dropped from the module.
The question of which format is better (assuming you take the SoW wiki changes into account) depends on what you are looking for.
As an adventure path that I would run as written, I personally vastly perfer the WotBS format. The adventure path is well thought out and plot points/characters are highly interconnected module to module. However that also makes it harder to drop portions of the adventure path and to replace modules with different adventures if you do not like what you were presented with. (And don't get me wrong, there's at least one module in the WotBS that I think needs some work)
SoW on the other hand is much more in raw format that clearly lays out the basics of each adventure and points out what is needed for the next adventure. This format makes it easy to customize or even totally replace the adventure for your group of players with far less effort.
I personally would never run the SoW adventure path directly as written, and as such I find myself often going to that adventure path and stealing concepts and encounters for my own homebrew. The reason being that I know that if I ever do run that series, I can pretty easily replace the encounters I've taken with new encounters while I'm fleshing out the story to fit my group's characters.
WotBS I'm much less likely to draw on for inspiration as I have the hope to someday run the modules pretty close to directly as written and I don't want to spoil the series for my players.
Anyway that's my 2cp
Scales of War works well for a DM that wants to take the basic structure and Characters presented and to flesh them out with his own personalities and details. The Basic structure of the story is there, and the mechanical elements of the encounters are laid out so that combat is interesting, but most of the characters are just begging for the DM to add depth and to hang details around them that fit the party. The series also focus mainly on the combat portions of the game with some social type encounters thrown in.
War of the Burning sky on the other hand has much more of the details laid out already on the characters and uses a more coherent background world. It also strives to be more balanced between social and combat encounters.
Part of the difference has to do with the difference in format. The SoW adventures seem (for reasons I haven't figured out) to compete for space in the pages of Dungeon with all the other articles, so the adventures end up being shorter (50 to 80 pages) then the WotBS adventures that fill up an entire 100 page booklet by themselves. This shorter format means that many of the "fluff" details of the world and complex social encounters have to be dropped from the module.
The question of which format is better (assuming you take the SoW wiki changes into account) depends on what you are looking for.
As an adventure path that I would run as written, I personally vastly perfer the WotBS format. The adventure path is well thought out and plot points/characters are highly interconnected module to module. However that also makes it harder to drop portions of the adventure path and to replace modules with different adventures if you do not like what you were presented with. (And don't get me wrong, there's at least one module in the WotBS that I think needs some work)
SoW on the other hand is much more in raw format that clearly lays out the basics of each adventure and points out what is needed for the next adventure. This format makes it easy to customize or even totally replace the adventure for your group of players with far less effort.
I personally would never run the SoW adventure path directly as written, and as such I find myself often going to that adventure path and stealing concepts and encounters for my own homebrew. The reason being that I know that if I ever do run that series, I can pretty easily replace the encounters I've taken with new encounters while I'm fleshing out the story to fit my group's characters.
WotBS I'm much less likely to draw on for inspiration as I have the hope to someday run the modules pretty close to directly as written and I don't want to spoil the series for my players.
Anyway that's my 2cp
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