Re: (TFT) Land Beyond the Mountains Thoughts

[Marc Gacy <marcgacy@earthlink.net>]

>Date: Tue, 29 May 2007 15:24:42 -0700 (PDT)
>From: pvk@oz.net
>Subject: Re: (TFT) Land Beyond the Mountains Thoughts
>
>Without any basis other than imagination and impressions from reading the
>two LBtM modules, my guess is that they didn't have much more than got
>published, and if they had been funded to develop the other two nations,
>they would've just made up the details to fill in.
>

I was hoping to see Soukhor as it would have been as aspect of TFT that would have differentiated it from other fantasy worlds.
Security Station was somewhat disappointing in that regard.

>The maps in particular seemed highly lame, with their great lack
>of detail or terrain information.
>

Yeah, I guess I thought the dark area in the Dihad map WAS the forest, but now I realize it was just shading, as Darok, which is mostly plains, has the same shading.

>The best aspects of those books seemed to me to be the handful of detailed
>situations and characters they described, some of which were interesting,
>imaginitive and detailed. 

I agree. I like it that they took a game mechanic and actually tried to make it relevant (e.g. Gargoyle livers)

>On the other hand, it leaves more room for GM's to customize the nations,
>or import characters and situations to their own developed worlds, and/or
>to avoid players gaining too much information on the world their GM is
>using by buying the books. But from that perspective, I wonder why even
>bother forming them into books in that style.
>

Maybe if it had been titled Forest Lords of Dihad with a subtitle of <Overview and Kindler's Glade> or something like that, it could have been a series. Not that they were planning that, but in hindsight...

>As for the specific reason why the strongest nation would have no
>fortifications, several things come to mind. ... lazy lack of detail and/or authors who didn't see the
>point in detailed maps, ...

True, although the bigger maps matched the detail of the smaller one exactly (with the exception of adding names), so I figured it would have been the same for the other two. 

Ah well, you're probably right that the best thing to do is extract the detailed parts, toss out the back story and put them in your own world.

- Marc
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