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Message: <blockquote data-quote="giant.robot" data-source="post: 5326393" data-attributes="member: 93119">I'll echo the sentiment that the current model for published settings better follows my buying habits. I'm likely to buy a Campaign Setting and Player's Guide but far less likely to buy Cobblers of Baldur's Gate. Once you get out of the high level details of a CS book and into locale specifics you're getting into material tha simply is not useful at the gaming table. Such books are like a coloring book that comes from the store mostly filled in, each page only has a small portion left blank for you to color.One of the best D&D books I've ever owned is the Dungeon Master's Design Kit. It's like D&D Madlibs. It let's you build dungeons and whole adventures by rolling dice and looking things up in tables. It doesn't cover any setting specific minutiae but instead strings a bunch of hooks together to build a surprisingly cohesive narrative. What I really want from new CS books is DMDK sections with setting specific entries in the tables. I'd settle for a list of 101 adventure hooks specific to the setting. I have dozens of Forgotten Realms books and while they have proven to be filled with interesting fiction I've used very little of their contents in actual games. Part of this is the books don't have a nicely presented list of adventure hooks and the end of a chapter so it's up to you to take meticulous notes on various derails. I just don't have that kind of time. Second is back to the coloring book analogy, the Forgotten Realms setting just feels too colored in. It's not quite Dragonlance colored in (where you played a specific named character) but it was pretty close. I think this is why FR jumped ahead a century in 4E. There was too much published fiction to keep the setting straight with. Dark Sun saw this as well, the 4E setting doesn't bother sticking with the published canon of the Prism Pentad and I think is much better off for it. Splatbooks are fine but I don't want or need an encyclopedia of the setting. I want adventure hooks in the flavor of the setting. I want material that helps me build campaigns that are unique to the setting, stuff made possible because I dropped $30 on the book. I think the 4E books have managed this for the mos part. You're given the Reader's Digest fluff and then some crunch unique to t setting. You can take any generic story, add on the setting's fluff, and voilà you've got a Forgotten Realms or Dark Sun adventure.</blockquote>

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