Introduction

            Palladium Fantasy has been one of the most detailed and long standing fantasy settings.  Like any lengthy series of works some of it has been great, some of it has not.  Land of the Damned One: Chaos Lands (furthermore referred to as Chaos Lands) falls mostly in the later category. Chaos Lands has some nuggets of good solid ideas but fails to deliver a consistent and well thought out addition to this long running setting.

The Usual Stuff

            Chaos Lands is a standard Palladium perfect bound 192 book costing $20.95.  Palladium is probably one of the few companies that still yields good page counts with a fair price.  Something they have consistently done over the years. 

            The cover art is a less than impressive piece by the usually solid John Zeleznik.  It portrays a bunch of being who inhabit the Chaos Lands.  There is nothing about the cover that suggests anything beyond some really fearsome creatures can be found inside.  Maybe that is a good thing to appeal to the muchkin in all of us, but it left me slightly disappointed. 

            The interior art of Chaos Lands is adequate with some above average pieces thrown in.  The author contributed a few pieces, while far from great, it is a nice touch (and better than a few games I have had to review…).

Critical Thoughts

            The Chaos Lands have a great deal of potential as the first book of a trilogy dedicated to the Land of the Damned.  Basically it is a region that was sealed off from the rest of the world by the Gods of Light to seal off the servants/minions/followers of the Old Ones.  The region is quite difficult to break into (and out of) due to the nature of the god enhanced geography and some less divine reasoning (i.e. an ocean dwelling empire off the southern coast).  Left to their own devices the creatuires that were left behind would seemingly find some semblance of coexistence or manage to capitalize on one of the routes out.  But then enter the Deevils and Demons who are using a great rift, that has irregular portals to other realms also, as a means to conduct their own warfare on the Palladium World. This is a harbinger of a greater campaign of the Demons to fight the Deevils directly.  The two are evil, but only live to fight the other, or so it has been for 10,000 years…

            That entire premise is a great swan song to the nearly completely covered Palladium world.  The problem is that the world has not been completely covered.  There are still a couple of huge swaths of land to cover, namely the Old Kingdom and Land of the Southwinds.  Chaos Lands feels out of place and really unnecessary.  While Bill Coffin might have had fun writing the supplement it is has numerous continuity issues and has a munchkin feel that I could not shake through my readings.  The biggest continuity is that it is stated as an incredibly tough place to get into, yet it seems that everyone has been there.  While deadly the inverse that none of the races that live there have gotten out.  The incongruity is there, but this is not an exercixe to reverse engineer the book either.

            One handy bit of information covered in Chaos Lands is the section on mountain survival and navigation.  Being a native of Colorado I have been lucky enough to learn a great deal about mountains by proximity, osmosis and experience.  But for many gamers and similarly many gaming products mountaineering is a gap in knowledge.  Bill Coffin does a good job describing the environments in terms and with mechanics that could be ported over to virtually any other game.  Basically the premise is mountaineering is tough, slow and deadly.  It happens to be true, before the advent of the a transcontinental railroad, much less highways, travel through mountains was serious business.

            Like any Palladium book there are all sorts of random tables of stuff in Chaos Lands.  An interesting one is the lengthy lidt of places that portals in the region lead to.  Because the portals are unstable (save for the ones leading to the Demon and Deevil realms) a party may never see the same one twice.  It would prove difficult to roll a similar result twice.  Just enough teasers are described in the portal’s destination to open up a campaign should this book be used to springboard into a new setting.  Also there is a fun set of tables on randomly creating monsters in the Choas Lands, but could be used for a quick monster design as well.  Really too many random things can be disastrous to a campaign, so random monster creation is a little ridiculous, but it could have good applications.

In Summary

            Choas Lands is a book that just does not fit in well with the Paladium Fantasy setting but resembles a design more appropriate for Rifts.  Some of that is just bad timing by trying to top off the world with a swan song when it isn’t complete, much of it is due to the nature of the book.  The Chaos Lands have no compelling hooks to encourage exploration, even if one ignores the incongruous design of the land..  This is shown in the last section of the book with plots hooks for this area of the Palladium world.  They are just inadequate and could have been flushed out or tied together to create an outline of a campaign. 

            Chaos Lands is not so bad as it is disappointing.  Palladium Fantasy would be well served by books that finish off the main area of the world as mentioned earlier.  Had this been the last books for the setting and had much better editing it would be an intriguing book.