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Ados: Land of Strife Campaign Setting $7.50
Average Rating:3.3 / 5
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Ados: Land of Strife Campaign Setting
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Ados: Land of Strife Campaign Setting
Publisher: Tangent Games
by JK R. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 03/31/2013 09:27:37

This is a large book, with over 200 pages, detailing a vast continent in a fairly typical D&D world. There is very little distinctive about the setting, with the only real theme being a battle between the followers of various members of an unusually large pantheon of deities. This particular book, however, doesn't elaborate too much on that, instead focussing on the geography and politics of the world. There are also three new races - monkey-people, bird-people, and cat-people - and some fairly standard prestige classes and feats. The book concludes with a bunch of house rules that confirm the feeling that this more a collection of campaign notes than a cohesive book.

Having said that, there is a lot of detail here, and if you're looking for a standard world without too many twists, this will at least save you a lot of work. Weather, geography, and earthquake risk are all covered for each region, and there's a full list of cities and towns. Much of this is quite good, but the tables of racial and class composition for the populations of the key cities is arguably overkill. Nor are the implications of the tables thought out; they're presumably just outputs from a calculator. Why, for example, are cities with multiple nobles of 15th level and up nonetheless ruled by aristocrats of only 6th level? Why does a city with a population of 1,900 apparently only have about 50 children in it? (I'm assuming here that the children are the ones without a character class or level listed - if not, who are they?)

There isn't a lot of variety, either. For a continent nearly twice the size of Asia, there's no real sense of cultural variation. Perhaps this is just detail that got left out in favour of class/level demographics. I'm all for information on the weather (something that sometimes gets left out of such books), but I'd also like to know what the people look like. I think they're all caucasian (albeit some are more Arabic than Aryan), but I'm even not sure of that.

To be fair, much of this can be brushed aside by not thinking too hard about it, and it's not as if they're likely to affect a game too much. And it does save you the trouble of rolling up the tables yourself. There's obviously a lot of effort that has gone into this, and there are a number of plot hooks, useful NPCs and so on scattered through the book that are certainly handy.

The art content is fairly minimal, and varies from good to embarrassing. The maps are basic and rather pixelated, and could do with a key, as could the colour scheme used in the towns and cities apprendix.

Overall, this is basically a collection of someone's campaign notes. It's not bad for what it is, and $7.50 isn't really a bad price for the sheer size of the thing. There may be some good things in here to make use of elsewhere - if nothing else, there's a good selection of deities. But, on the whole, it's more average than impressive.



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[3 of 5 Stars!]
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