I've heard praise heaped on the Wilderlands boxed set.  Is the Player's Guide any good?

Quote from: jrientsI've heard praise heaped on the Wilderlands boxed set.  Is the Player's Guide any good?

For the record, I'll be running a WL campaign in a few months using Castles & Crusades and I will be using material from the Player's Guide.

The player's guide is pretty good if you want more "big overview" setting detail rather than the hex-by-hex detail the box gives you.  The plusses are:

+ A good map of the full Wilderlands, not the piecemeal ones in the box.
+ More recent history of the Wilderlands
+ A list of major and minor deities
+ Breakdowns of the various races and sub-races -- there's some major differences between WL and stock D&D
+ Overviews of the regions, major landmarks and politics at a player level -- i.e. stuff an intrepid adventurer would probably know if he listened to his elders every now and again.  The overview of the City State of the Invincible Overlord gets a major focus as its usually the main city of a WL campaign.

The minuses are:

- The statistical breakdowns of the races, particularly the humans, are pretty poor.  I'd keep the flavor differances and chuck the mechanical differences.
- I personally don't like how languages are handled.  There is no "common" language and everyone starts illiterate.  Skill points can be hard to come by as it is and I don't like spending them on too many languages.
- The Feats are okay.
- The book does kind of go against what the WL box suggests -- that this is YOUR campaign, fill it up and do what YOU want it to do.  The player's guide material starts to fill the WL with ITS material from OTHER campaigns.

In other words: if you already have a head full of campaign ideas that's just oozing out of your ears and need something to them in, then the box is all you need.  But if you want a guiding hand and want to see some material that was specifically designed for that box, then its a good buy.

However, seeing how things were done in the old days is pretty damn cool too and you might find that its worth the price of the book as well

Quote from: jrientsI've heard praise heaped on the Wilderlands boxed set.  Is the Player's Guide any good?

Honestly, I think that it's better, depending upon your preferred playstyle. Unless you're looking for a mountain of programmed encounters, the boxed set doesn't really offer much that the Player's Guide doesn't also contain (aside from the more detailed maps, which are available seperately).

Basically, the boxed set is an "encounter for every hex" thing, while the Player's Guide is more akin to the FR 1e boxed set in scope. I bought both, and ultimately ended up wishing that I'd just snatched the PG in the end (I was not looking for a bunch of programmed encounters).

I think that the Player's Guide is worth getting simply for the 'big picture' info that it includes (info on cultures, deities, recent history, etc.).

I'm credited in both books though my work on each was minimal. (Spiritual support & crusty grognard discussion for the whole project, about 80 of the encounters in the boxed set.)

I didn't need the player's guide because I don't play 3.14159 and I've been gaming in the wilderlands since the seventies.  That said, it gives you a much better setting overview than the boxed set.

The boxed set is a bit much but if you treat those programmed encounters as resources to riff off while your PCs wander around the map it's a pretty cool resource. (It's fun in the Wilderlands to just wander around the map and see what happens - maybe have PCs be guards for a merchant caravan, find treasure maps, whatever, just keep them moving around and then make up complications as they move around - it might start a little slow but not very, and it works great over the long haul).

The best thing if you don't play 3.14159 is to get the original JG maps, the four original Wilderlands supplements, CSWE, CSIO, and a random sprinkling of other products and issues of pegasus and just let the mix ferment into your own private setting. But that's an expensive proposition these days.

The Player's Guide is essentially a "how a modern designer would do the Setting" kind of product. The Boxed Set is the revision of the slightly random and occasionally head-scratchingly weird original products where you look at the big Rorscach pattern of it all and come up with something cool.

Personally, I thought the box set rocked, while the players guide offered nothing for me that I really wanted.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Moriarty- I personally don't like how languages are handled.  There is no "common" language and everyone starts illiterate.  Skill points can be hard to come by as it is and I don't like spending them on too many languages.

I checked the Player's Guide last night and this is incorrect!  There is indeed a Common tongue but not every race and culture is fluent in it.

I didn't feel the Wilderlands boxed set provided me with a complete setting.  It was great for the encounters, but the flavor was more between the hexes rather than part of it.

Sometimes it helps to have a high-level overview, and the player's guide is precisely that.

It also helps add any numbers of good details to the game, like skin colors, variant races, and whatnot.

-O

There's a few tidbits I liked about the players guide... mostly summaries of stuff in the boxed set. I considered using the human variant races therein, but more and more, I found myself forgoing that for the flexibility of basic humans, and preferred using other race/class material other than that it the book.