Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Blackmarsh and Majestic Wilderlands Reviews

Zombie Cowboy has some good things to say about Blackmarsh in a short review of Blackmarsh.

Over the RPG.NET Zachary of RPGBlog2 gives glowing review of the Majestic Wilderlands. Also in the comment sections I replied to a customer about the reasons why the Majestic Wilderland supplement was made the way it was. Some of you may find it useful for your own publishing plans.

3 comments:

Akrasia said...

Good to see that Blackmarsh and Majestic Wilderlands are receiving some much-deserved attention!

Akrasia said...

And my own review of Blackmarsh can be found here:
http://akraticwizardry.blogspot.com/2011/04/blackmarsh-review.html
Cheers!

john said...

So, I have the free download of blackmarsh, if that makes any difference (I don't know what's different between the free download, the printed version, aside from the color cover). I posted this on Chicago Wiz's blog review earlier today (and I'm including it here because I want to be sure you get both the good and bad of my review, but please understand that my complaints are included as constructive criticism, not as jeers against the product -- I like the product):

I downloaded it a week or two ago (whenever it was that it showed up on RPGNow's RSS feed). I mostly like it. For free, it's great. But even if it cost a few dollars, it would have been a good buy.

I do have three small complaints:

1) you have to pick between a completely blank JPG map, or a completely GM-level of information marked up PDF map. It would be nice to see the GM-level map (as a PDF) without the X encounter marks. Sort of "what level of information a PC from the area would know", to use as a players map.

2) the highest rev # for the guide is RTF, and not PDF. It'd be nice to see the most up-to-date guide be PDF (or both PDF and RTF ... though I'd rather see .doc or opendoc than RTF).

3) like #1, I'd like to see separate "player" and "GM" versions of the guide.

4) not really a complaint, but curious question: it'd be nice to know what software was used for generating the maps, and also get the map source for that editor.


But, those are small complaints. There's enough richness here to seed a nice medium size campaign setting. I'm currently pulling together a few adventures (some published, some of my own) into a setting, and been thinking about using a published campaign setting for that. But then I have to shoe-horn my stuff into that published setting.

[...tangent omitted...]

Anyway, that whole tanget was about that I liked Blackmarsh enough that I decided I want it to be _somewhere_ in my campaign setting, and not too far from the main action (if not being one of the centers of the main action). I just have to figure out how to bring it all together. And finish writing up my Fudge variant.