The Inside Scoop on Gaming

Most people I know have a fairly good idea of what their world will be like before they actually start to "create" it. They know, for example, about a couple of cultures and a continent or two. They may want a resource to add the extra details or realism that their imagination can't supply. I was hoping for such a resource when I purchased the World Builder's Guidebook (WBG). What I got was a slightly different product. The WHB aims to help you create every aspect of your world, from initial conception through how to design a city. Unfortunately, it fails. There is some interesting information within, but too often it is hidden within random tables and confused with instructions on how to randomly generate your world.

Although it claims that you can read the book from front to back, working from continents to cities, or starting small at cities and then expanding out to build continents, the book is written to start large then zoom in, and that's how this review will proceed.

World Building

The book starts off on a very perspicuous note: you are encouraged to begin designing your world by thinking up a "hook" that makes your world different from the "standard" fantasy world. There is a table to roll on, but I would consider the explanations of the entries to be far more interesting than the table itself.

The most useful sections on world building are those that refer to how the Earth actually works. Where to put plate boundaries and how they affect mountain and volcano development. How air and water currents circulate and interact. What the various types of terrain even are and how you would expect them to transition from one type to the next. How rivers flow and what you need to get a lake versus an inland sea. Of course, none of these topics are covered in great detail, but even a paragraph or two is enough to give an air of realism to your world.

The WBG does not try to say that your fantasy world needs to be totally realistic, however. Time and again it makes the point that you are designing a fantastic world, so go ahead and put disparate terrain elements together. The disparity can give your players a great place to explore, and they will also begin to explore the reasons why the glacier is descending down the mountain into the desert, for example.

For those of you who feel uncomfortable about creating your world, fear not, the WBG includes enough tables that you hardly have to make any decisions! You can roll to find out what percentage of your world is water, how many mountains there are in the world, where the prevailing winds are coming from, and even the shape of your world: sphere (Earth), plane (Discworld), or other fantastic shapes such as a polyhedron (4, 6, 8, 10, 12, and 20 sided). In case you couldn't tell, hardly a page goes by without a table or two.

To aid you in creating your world, the WBG includes map sheets. There is the standard polyhedral world display, which is used in all the examples in the book. There is also a polar display, of which there are no examples and, to be frank, I'm not quite sure how to go about drawing on it. It seems like there was little communication between the author and those who included the bundled maps.

Society Building

The next section of the book zooms in on a region of your world so you can go about creating a society. There are tables where you can roll what races inhabit your kingdoms, tables for modeling the societies after historical cultures, and tables for just about anything else you can imagine. From here on out, assume that if I mention something in the review, there is a table you can roll on to decide it for you.

There is a short section on the technology level of the society, which I found surprisingly good. In only a page it describes the general flavor that is achieved by switching from a Middle Ages setting to a Bronze Age setting, or to a Stone Age one for that matter. It talks about the dominant political institutions of the era, the actual technology level, and even peaceful advances, such as agriculture.

In a surprising move, the WBG talks on the nature of "good" versus "evil" races. It even says that a traditionally "evil" race may not necessarily be that, but that orcs may be "just crass and ill-tempered" or even live together in some sort of cooperation. This is a small section, but is surprising from an AD&D product. Of course, there is a whole section on selecting the "alignment" of your society, so I guess the two cancel themselves out. [Bias alert: In case you couldn't tell, I'm not a big fan of alignments or labeling one race "good" or "evil."]

Finally, we arrive at what I consider the best part of the book, a cursory look at the socio-economic factors that affect kingdoms. There is talk on the agricultural capacity of the land, and how much land is needed to support a city, or how many people can eke out a living through hunting/gathering.

There is a fast and dirty population density chart which is particularly useful. <sarcasm mode>An actual chart with information in it, not just a table that tells you the chance of a result occurring!</sarcasm mode> Anyway, this table helps you determine the maximum population that a given region can sustain. It helps you remember to add in enough farmland to support your sprawling metropolis, and not to put it smack dab in the middle of the desert. You can see how many villages there will likely be, how far towns are apart, and more. While I have found more detailed information on the web, complete with actual references so I can do more research, I would consider what the WBG presents to be quite sufficient for most purposes.

Finally, there is a good table/chart that shows the number of businesses in a city. This is given as a number per 500 residents, so there are 1d3 Taverns/500 people but only 1d3-1 Inns/500 people, or a 66% chance of having one. Thus a town of 2,000 people would have 8 or so Taverns but only 2-3 Inns. There is also a good reference of what each business provides, for those who didn't already know that a chandler made candles, for example. Of course, some of the percentages are simply made up, based upon no historical accuracy. For example, I would expect the chance of finding an alchemist (5%), a wizard (25%), or an assassin (20%) to vary wildly from campaign to campaign.

The final part of this section is how to fill in your kingdom with places to keep your PCs occupied. This includes a liberal dose of monsters, naturally. There is some attempt made to create a natural ecology, including making certain that there is enough food for each creature. There is a nice table showing the hunting range for carnivores, varying on their size and the abundance of prey. Looking at this, you can tell that you can only have one dragon lair per 50x50-mile terrain block. There is also a sample Encounter Table for you to complete. Oh, the joy!

In addition to monsters, there are guidelines on how to add places to explore. These include castles, ruins, and dungeons. While you are encouraged to place castles and ruins in a realistic manner, the WBG states flat out that dungeons are a convention of the genre that are illogical and exist solely for the PCs to loot. Surprisingly, there is a lack of information on any underworld. Considering the emphasis on the Underdark and the world beneath the world that AD&D helped popularize, I would have suspected there to be more than a passing mention that you could add an underdark to your world.

History Building

Finally, in the last major section of the book, you are encouraged to think of the mythology and history of your world.

This section actually has some interesting thoughts on religions. You can decide if there is one pantheon where each god has different names, whether the pantheons of each race or culture overlap or "talk" to one another, or, finally, if the various gods simply don't know that there are any others in the world. You can also decide how the various gods are connected to one another, what roles they take in the world, and how much action they take with mortals. If all else fails, you can always roll on the Random Deity table to generate your very own gods, complete with what alignments they must have! Why the god of the sky can't be lawful but the god of agriculture must be is simply beyond me, however.

You are also helped through creating the solar system, considering any other planes which interact with the world, and finally, creating myths. The WBG scores points here for pointing out that all cultures have many myths, and that this is an important part of generating the world.

We now begin to lay down the history of the world. You are encouraged to spend more time flushing out current events, as this is what people will remember. The older the event, the progressively more important it must be for society to remember it. Thus you can have vague tales of epic battles millennia ago, while the border war 200 years ago will be forgotten.

Finally, there are two pages worth of ideas for customizing your campaign. This is where radical topics are presented, such as diverging from the "standard" definitions of the races or changing how magic works. You can invent new monsters, change old ones, or make new character classes specific to your world. Of course, these radical ideas only get a page and a half and the implications of them aren't really addressed, but it is encouraging to see such ideas actually put forward.

Layout

While I like the substance of the book, the presentation leaves me rather cold. For some indescribable reason, they decided to print the book using blue and yellow inks. I don't know about you, but blue text starts to look funny after a while. The yellow section heads and page numbers are also quite difficult to read, making it difficult to find things in the book. Speaking of finding things, the book, although choked full of information, does not include an index. This would not be too disappointing, if not for the fact that the table of contents has numerous incorrect page numbers. Speaking of errors, there are a few more typos such as on page eight where it refers to a d161 instead of a d16, and yes, it does tell you how to make a d16 from 2d8.

The artwork in the book is all very good with the cover receiving especially good marks. There are numerous examples of maps and even a number of well placed half-page pieces of artwork. The artwork isn't particularly inspired, but does serve to break up the text. None of it stands out as exceptionally helpful in conveying a point that the WBG is trying to make, but neither is it a distraction.

My biggest complaint about the book is that they assume that you're creating your world by random die-roll! The book includes an example of "Kim" designing a world. She has absolutely no clue what she wants her world to be like. She then goes through the whole process, from rolling for a world hook, to rolling for the "flavor" of the world, to rolling for the temperature of the world, the rolling for the technology level of the world, to rolling up the civilizations that inhabit her world.

The text of the Guidebook certainly encourages you to do roll for everything. The Guidebook includes such gems as, "Unless you have a reason to decide otherwise, the region [of land] includes 0 to 2 (d3-1) dominant races, 1d4+2 major races, and 4d4 minor races." There are a number of assumptions that go into this statement. First, it assumes that you want to be running a world where there are 4d4 minor races! I don't know about you, but I certainly have played in a number of campaigns where there aren't anywhere near 16 sentient races in the whole world. Second, it assumes that you simply want to roll up what races are around, not try to decide logically which ones would likely be living there.

There isn't nearly enough emphasis given to designing a coherent world, where the history actually influences the current world. With the History section presented last, it is assumed that history is just stuff that happened a long time ago and not really something that influenced the present. Why not decide upon some history and use that to guide you in choosing which races live where? That is certainly a "reason to decide otherwise" from just rolling for random races to populate random lands.

My main complaint isn't that there are random tables that you can roll on, it is that there is the assumption that rolling is the way you should be making a world. To use the example above, the Guidebook doesn't present any alternative ways you could choose races. It does say that you can disregard any roll you make if you don't like it, or if you already know something about it. Of course, that sounds suspiciously similar to the old, "If you don't like the rules, change them," defense of bad RPG systems.

Now that I've finished that rant, let me commence my next: Length. While I know that there has been a large debate on the cost versus substance of RPGs, I'll try to avoid inflammatory statements here. The Guidebook is only 96 pages long and retails for $20. While it has a ton of information, and I don't begrudge paying for it, it does include something that I do wish I hadn't paid for: an entire pad of maps! This collection includes 4 Polyhedral and Polar World Maps, 4 Region Maps, 8 Generic Maps, 4 Kingdom Maps, 6 Area and City/Town Maps, and 6 Site Maps, all presented as a "pad" of paper complete with cardboard backing. As I count it, there are 26 pages of wasted space here. Whatever happened to including one copy of each in the main book with the assumption that people are smart enough to copy them and not write on their only copy? While the back of the Guidebook does advertise the fact that it includes the 32 "forms, mapping paper, and hex sheets," and thus can't be charged with deceptive advertising, I certainly would have liked to have saved the couple of dollars that went into the production cost of the forms.

Finally, as I mentioned above, the book is designed to be read from front to back or back to front. Thus, the geographical information is just as relevant when designing a small kingdom as when designing a continent. Rather than refer the reader to another section, the WBG summarizes the important information and charts at the beginning of each new section. This too is, in my opinion, more wasted space.

Summary

For those of you who have persevered your way all the way to the end, I salute you.

My largest complaint about the book can be summed up in the following quote, from the WBG, "Many campaigns run for years based around nothing more than a town and a nearby dungeon." This, from a book written in 1996! While it aims to help you build your world, it assumes that you don't really need any of this stuff, that your entire goal is to go and do standard dungeon crawls. I am not trying to disparage those who do go and explore dungeons, but I had hoped for a more open minded sourcebook, one that delved into general topics on how to create an effectively immersive world. Instead, the WBG assumes that you are either incapable of running more than a dungeon crawl, or else have little interest in doing so, for why else would you pick up a book to help you design your world. The insane number of random tables, 47 in a 96 page book, hint that you aren't really expected to develop your own world, but rather, you can roll on the tables and interpret the results. I find this attitude infuriating, for not only is it patronizing, it also wastes countless pages that could have been spent giving me more information.

While there is a good deal of information in the book, large quantities of space are simply wasted. As pointed out above, the tables and corresponding examples of how to roll them and interpret the results are blatant wastes of space. There is also some duplication in material from section to section. Finally, the included pad of mapping paper could easily have been shortened by 26 pages by getting rid of duplicate copies.

Conspicuously missing is information on magic. How does it affect the world? What is it? How does it interact with powers that the gods grant their followers? These are important questions that shape a world just as much as its geography or what monsters there are yet the WBG is totally silent on these topics. For those of you who would like to explore these questions further, I would suggest looking at Uncle Figgy's Guide to Good Fantasy, which focuses almost exclusively on the impact magic has on the world.

What is my final opinion? There is a lot of information buried in the WBG. The problem is that you have to dig through lots of junk to find it. The price is also quite steep for what you get. I would far preferred to have gotten rid of the random tables and examples, only gotten one copy of each hex sheet, and wound up with either a $15 book with just the interesting information in it, or else a $20 book filled with even more good information. If you want some quick and dirty guidelines on how to build your world, go ahead and buy this book, but don't expect too much. For the rest of you, I would suggest looking at the vast array of information available for free on the web.

Go ahead and use the Forum to tell us know what your favorite World Building resources are on the web.

Style: 2 (Needs Work)
Substance: 2 (Sparse)

World Builder's Guidebook
Author: Richard Baker Category: game Company/Publisher: TSR Line: AD&D Cost: $20 Page count: 96 ISBN: 0-7869-0434-8 SKU: 9532 Capsule Review by Matt Clay on 05/28/00. Genre tags: Fantasy Generic	Most people I know have a fairly good idea of what their world will be like before they actually start to "create" it. They know, for example, about a couple of cultures and a continent or two. They may want a resource to add the extra details or realism that their imagination can't supply. I was hoping for such a resource when I purchased the World Builder's Guidebook (WBG). What I got was a slightly different product. The WHB aims to help you create every aspect of your world, from initial conception through how to design a city. Unfortunately, it fails. There is some interesting information within, but too often it is hidden within random tables and confused with instructions on how to randomly generate your world. Although it claims that you can read the book from front to back, working from continents to cities, or starting small at cities and then expanding out to build continents, the book is written to start large then zoom in, and that's how this review will proceed. World Building The book starts off on a very perspicuous note: you are encouraged to begin designing your world by thinking up a "hook" that makes your world different from the "standard" fantasy world. There is a table to roll on, but I would consider the explanations of the entries to be far more interesting than the table itself. The most useful sections on world building are those that refer to how the Earth actually works. Where to put plate boundaries and how they affect mountain and volcano development. How air and water currents circulate and interact. What the various types of terrain even are and how you would expect them to transition from one type to the next. How rivers flow and what you need to get a lake versus an inland sea. Of course, none of these topics are covered in great detail, but even a paragraph or two is enough to give an air of realism to your world. The WBG does not try to say that your fantasy world needs to be totally realistic, however. Time and again it makes the point that you are designing a fantastic world, so go ahead and put disparate terrain elements together. The disparity can give your players a great place to explore, and they will also begin to explore the reasons why the glacier is descending down the mountain into the desert, for example. For those of you who feel uncomfortable about creating your world, fear not, the WBG includes enough tables that you hardly have to make any decisions! You can roll to find out what percentage of your world is water, how many mountains there are in the world, where the prevailing winds are coming from, and even the shape of your world: sphere (Earth), plane (Discworld), or other fantastic shapes such as a polyhedron (4, 6, 8, 10, 12, and 20 sided). In case you couldn't tell, hardly a page goes by without a table or two. To aid you in creating your world, the WBG includes map sheets. There is the standard polyhedral world display, which is used in all the examples in the book. There is also a polar display, of which there are no examples and, to be frank, I'm not quite sure how to go about drawing on it. It seems like there was little communication between the author and those who included the bundled maps. Society Building The next section of the book zooms in on a region of your world so you can go about creating a society. There are tables where you can roll what races inhabit your kingdoms, tables for modeling the societies after historical cultures, and tables for just about anything else you can imagine. From here on out, assume that if I mention something in the review, there is a table you can roll on to decide it for you. There is a short section on the technology level of the society, which I found surprisingly good. In only a page it describes the general flavor that is achieved by switching from a Middle Ages setting to a Bronze Age setting, or to a Stone Age one for that matter. It talks about the dominant political institutions of the era, the actual technology level, and even peaceful advances, such as agriculture. In a surprising move, the WBG talks on the nature of "good" versus "evil" races. It even says that a traditionally "evil" race may not necessarily be that, but that orcs may be "just crass and ill-tempered" or even live together in some sort of cooperation. This is a small section, but is surprising from an AD&D product. Of course, there is a whole section on selecting the "alignment" of your society, so I guess the two cancel themselves out. [Bias alert: In case you couldn't tell, I'm not a big fan of alignments or labeling one race "good" or "evil."] Finally, we arrive at what I consider the best part of the book, a cursory look at the socio-economic factors that affect kingdoms. There is talk on the agricultural capacity of the land, and how much land is needed to support a city, or how many people can eke out a living through hunting/gathering. There is a fast and dirty population density chart which is particularly useful. <sarcasm mode>An actual chart with information in it, not just a table that tells you the chance of a result occurring!</sarcasm mode> Anyway, this table helps you determine the maximum population that a given region can sustain. It helps you remember to add in enough farmland to support your sprawling metropolis, and not to put it smack dab in the middle of the desert. You can see how many villages there will likely be, how far towns are apart, and more. While I have found more detailed information on the web, complete with actual references so I can do more research, I would consider what the WBG presents to be quite sufficient for most purposes. Finally, there is a good table/chart that shows the number of businesses in a city. This is given as a number per 500 residents, so there are 1d3 Taverns/500 people but only 1d3-1 Inns/500 people, or a 66% chance of having one. Thus a town of 2,000 people would have 8 or so Taverns but only 2-3 Inns. There is also a good reference of what each business provides, for those who didn't already know that a chandler made candles, for example. Of course, some of the percentages are simply made up, based upon no historical accuracy. For example, I would expect the chance of finding an alchemist (5%), a wizard (25%), or an assassin (20%) to vary wildly from campaign to campaign. The final part of this section is how to fill in your kingdom with places to keep your PCs occupied. This includes a liberal dose of monsters, naturally. There is some attempt made to create a natural ecology, including making certain that there is enough food for each creature. There is a nice table showing the hunting range for carnivores, varying on their size and the abundance of prey. Looking at this, you can tell that you can only have one dragon lair per 50x50-mile terrain block. There is also a sample Encounter Table for you to complete. Oh, the joy! In addition to monsters, there are guidelines on how to add places to explore. These include castles, ruins, and dungeons. While you are encouraged to place castles and ruins in a realistic manner, the WBG states flat out that dungeons are a convention of the genre that are illogical and exist solely for the PCs to loot. Surprisingly, there is a lack of information on any underworld. Considering the emphasis on the Underdark and the world beneath the world that AD&D helped popularize, I would have suspected there to be more than a passing mention that you could add an underdark to your world. History Building Finally, in the last major section of the book, you are encouraged to think of the mythology and history of your world. This section actually has some interesting thoughts on religions. You can decide if there is one pantheon where each god has different names, whether the pantheons of each race or culture overlap or "talk" to one another, or, finally, if the various gods simply don't know that there are any others in the world. You can also decide how the various gods are connected to one another, what roles they take in the world, and how much action they take with mortals. If all else fails, you can always roll on the Random Deity table to generate your very own gods, complete with what alignments they must have! Why the god of the sky can't be lawful but the god of agriculture must be is simply beyond me, however. You are also helped through creating the solar system, considering any other planes which interact with the world, and finally, creating myths. The WBG scores points here for pointing out that all cultures have many myths, and that this is an important part of generating the world. We now begin to lay down the history of the world. You are encouraged to spend more time flushing out current events, as this is what people will remember. The older the event, the progressively more important it must be for society to remember it. Thus you can have vague tales of epic battles millennia ago, while the border war 200 years ago will be forgotten. Finally, there are two pages worth of ideas for customizing your campaign. This is where radical topics are presented, such as diverging from the "standard" definitions of the races or changing how magic works. You can invent new monsters, change old ones, or make new character classes specific to your world. Of course, these radical ideas only get a page and a half and the implications of them aren't really addressed, but it is encouraging to see such ideas actually put forward. Layout While I like the substance of the book, the presentation leaves me rather cold. For some indescribable reason, they decided to print the book using blue and yellow inks. I don't know about you, but blue text starts to look funny after a while. The yellow section heads and page numbers are also quite difficult to read, making it difficult to find things in the book. Speaking of finding things, the book, although choked full of information, does not include an index. This would not be too disappointing, if not for the fact that the table of contents has numerous incorrect page numbers. Speaking of errors, there are a few more typos such as on page eight where it refers to a d161 instead of a d16, and yes, it does tell you how to make a d16 from 2d8. The artwork in the book is all very good with the cover receiving especially good marks. There are numerous examples of maps and even a number of well placed half-page pieces of artwork. The artwork isn't particularly inspired, but does serve to break up the text. None of it stands out as exceptionally helpful in conveying a point that the WBG is trying to make, but neither is it a distraction. My biggest complaint about the book is that they assume that you're creating your world by random die-roll! The book includes an example of "Kim" designing a world. She has absolutely no clue what she wants her world to be like. She then goes through the whole process, from rolling for a world hook, to rolling for the "flavor" of the world, to rolling for the temperature of the world, the rolling for the technology level of the world, to rolling up the civilizations that inhabit her world. The text of the Guidebook certainly encourages you to do roll for everything. The Guidebook includes such gems as, "Unless you have a reason to decide otherwise, the region [of land] includes 0 to 2 (d3-1) dominant races, 1d4+2 major races, and 4d4 minor races." There are a number of assumptions that go into this statement. First, it assumes that you want to be running a world where there are 4d4 minor races! I don't know about you, but I certainly have played in a number of campaigns where there aren't anywhere near 16 sentient races in the whole world. Second, it assumes that you simply want to roll up what races are around, not try to decide logically which ones would likely be living there. There isn't nearly enough emphasis given to designing a coherent world, where the history actually influences the current world. With the History section presented last, it is assumed that history is just stuff that happened a long time ago and not really something that influenced the present. Why not decide upon some history and use that to guide you in choosing which races live where? That is certainly a "reason to decide otherwise" from just rolling for random races to populate random lands. My main complaint isn't that there are random tables that you can roll on, it is that there is the assumption that rolling is the way you should be making a world. To use the example above, the Guidebook doesn't present any alternative ways you could choose races. It does say that you can disregard any roll you make if you don't like it, or if you already know something about it. Of course, that sounds suspiciously similar to the old, "If you don't like the rules, change them," defense of bad RPG systems. Now that I've finished that rant, let me commence my next: Length. While I know that there has been a large debate on the cost versus substance of RPGs, I'll try to avoid inflammatory statements here. The Guidebook is only 96 pages long and retails for $20. While it has a ton of information, and I don't begrudge paying for it, it does include something that I do wish I hadn't paid for: an entire pad of maps! This collection includes 4 Polyhedral and Polar World Maps, 4 Region Maps, 8 Generic Maps, 4 Kingdom Maps, 6 Area and City/Town Maps, and 6 Site Maps, all presented as a "pad" of paper complete with cardboard backing. As I count it, there are 26 pages of wasted space here. Whatever happened to including one copy of each in the main book with the assumption that people are smart enough to copy them and not write on their only copy? While the back of the Guidebook does advertise the fact that it includes the 32 "forms, mapping paper, and hex sheets," and thus can't be charged with deceptive advertising, I certainly would have liked to have saved the couple of dollars that went into the production cost of the forms. Finally, as I mentioned above, the book is designed to be read from front to back or back to front. Thus, the geographical information is just as relevant when designing a small kingdom as when designing a continent. Rather than refer the reader to another section, the WBG summarizes the important information and charts at the beginning of each new section. This too is, in my opinion, more wasted space. Summary For those of you who have persevered your way all the way to the end, I salute you. My largest complaint about the book can be summed up in the following quote, from the WBG, "Many campaigns run for years based around nothing more than a town and a nearby dungeon." This, from a book written in 1996! While it aims to help you build your world, it assumes that you don't really need any of this stuff, that your entire goal is to go and do standard dungeon crawls. I am not trying to disparage those who do go and explore dungeons, but I had hoped for a more open minded sourcebook, one that delved into general topics on how to create an effectively immersive world. Instead, the WBG assumes that you are either incapable of running more than a dungeon crawl, or else have little interest in doing so, for why else would you pick up a book to help you design your world. The insane number of random tables, 47 in a 96 page book, hint that you aren't really expected to develop your own world, but rather, you can roll on the tables and interpret the results. I find this attitude infuriating, for not only is it patronizing, it also wastes countless pages that could have been spent giving me more information. While there is a good deal of information in the book, large quantities of space are simply wasted. As pointed out above, the tables and corresponding examples of how to roll them and interpret the results are blatant wastes of space. There is also some duplication in material from section to section. Finally, the included pad of mapping paper could easily have been shortened by 26 pages by getting rid of duplicate copies. Conspicuously missing is information on magic. How does it affect the world? What is it? How does it interact with powers that the gods grant their followers? These are important questions that shape a world just as much as its geography or what monsters there are yet the WBG is totally silent on these topics. For those of you who would like to explore these questions further, I would suggest looking at Uncle Figgy's Guide to Good Fantasy, which focuses almost exclusively on the impact magic has on the world. What is my final opinion? There is a lot of information buried in the WBG. The problem is that you have to dig through lots of junk to find it. The price is also quite steep for what you get. I would far preferred to have gotten rid of the random tables and examples, only gotten one copy of each hex sheet, and wound up with either a $15 book with just the interesting information in it, or else a $20 book filled with even more good information. If you want some quick and dirty guidelines on how to build your world, go ahead and buy this book, but don't expect too much. For the rest of you, I would suggest looking at the vast array of information available for free on the web. Go ahead and use the Forum to tell us know what your favorite World Building resources are on the web. Style: 2 (Needs Work) Substance: 2 (Sparse)