OD&D As a DM Instruction Manual
3 hours ago
Friday, November 25, 2011
The Kara-Tur Boxed Set
I just picked up the Kara-Tur boxed set at Half Price Books and I'm glad to see it sitting on my shelf. It's something that I've wanted to look at for a long, long time and now I'll be able to devour bits and pieces of it at my leisure. I know that I'm probably in the Old-School minority, but I've always like the 1e Oriental Adventures hardback and I'm intrigued to see what type of setting they supported it with.
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4 comments:
Our minority continues to grow! It's not bad, not great, but not bad. It offers more than what was in the Kara-Tur overview (obviously) in the OA book, and actually adds a bunch of countries that weren't mentioned at all in the OA book, thus expanding Kara-Tur into an entire fantasy East Asia. That being said, it's pretty much just a fantasy East Asia, with the exception that there are two Chinas and two Japans, placed to represent different time periods in their history. It gives a much more detailed look at each of these nations and provides major NPCs and adventure hooks. The maps were nice, I guess, but I prefer numbered hex-maps like Greyhawk had or most old wargames, so they were less useful to me. It's not very hex crawl friendly, from that perspective. Purely on a production values level, I'd put it as slightly less than the Forgotten Realms Gray Boxed set, just because it is less inspired by fantasy and more by history, but still attached to the Realms, not as bad as the Horde or Maztica by far, just not as good as FR Gray box.
Welcome to the mad-house that is OA fan-boydom.
It is a pretty interesting boxed set, for sure. On a related subject, you might be interested in this session report thing I wrote for your module Frozen Wave Satsuma last month.
Thanks for the write up of Satsuma, Matthew! It was a fun read.
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