Quite the disappointment. I'd heard good things about this as a setting, but it's only 1/4th poorly-edited setting material, with its game rules not power-balanced anywhere near where a sensible or typical 3.5 campaign would be (in my view). One canonically bad edit: the map doesn't contain half the cities described, and half the cities on the map aren't described. Two regions are given random encounter tables - but why? Again, one of them isn't even labeled on the map, although its general vicinity is alluded to in the text. Why those regions and not any of the many others? The book is heinously inconsistent; in just three paragraphs about the legal systems of Mesopotamia it manages to completely contradict itself. Editing matters!
The remaining 3/4ths is an adventure which at least tries to lay out a sandbox. It fails for classical 3e statblock bloat reasons. For example, the nominal homebase gets one page of description. The faction most commonly met there, who presumably will be the source of most social interactions, still has more space allocated to statblocks and combat statistics than description and hooks. The next faction, the Brotherhood of Kalab, gets three pages: half a page of art, a third of a page of description, a quarter-page of adventure hooks, and 2 pages of detailed combat statistics.
Any setting influenced by the real world that doesn't provide a bibliography or suggested readings loses a star in my book, dropping this from POOR to outright BAD. They allude to so many things in their setting, but leave me to start from scratch when I want to better understand the history to bring them into my campaign.
Rating: [1 of 5 Stars!] |