In the interest of full disclosure, I will start by pointing out that I was the originator of a thread on the Open Forum regarding this exact same product at the beginning of January. At that point, I had merely looked through the book and posted my feelings about what the book was and wasn’t. In the intervening time, I have since purchased the book and delved into it in order to discern if it really was a good resource for those trying to, in the words of the book, “…add color, description, depth and incredible detail to his [sic] fantasy world.” (from the Forward).
I would also add, being a moderator on the Forums here, that the opinions expressed in this review are wholly my own, and in no way should be interpreted as a reflection of the general policy of RPG.net.
OVERVIEW
First, the hard facts: the book clocks in at a hardbound 176 pages, including a 3-page index and the OGL. The paper quality is OK, the binding is spot-on, and the cover art, while by no means evocative, is at least of good quality. The interior art is all black and white, consisting in large part of spot illustrations of objects or situations. There is a repeating corner piece of an ox-driven cart in the way of background images for the text.
I’ve found dozens of typographic, editorial or layout glitches; normally I don’t look for such things, but quite a few were clustered in the opening pages of the book, which struck me. Given the density of the material within, however, it’s easy to understand this.
The World Builder is divided into four sections: “Stock-in-Trade”, which covers everyday items; “Geographics”, which covers landforms, flora and fauna; “Dwellings”, which covers buildings and the things one might find in them; and a handful of Appendices. In the interest of keeping my review orderly, I’ll go through each of these sections in order, finishing with an overall assessment of the book.
BOOK ONE: STOCK-IN-TRADE
The first section (60 pp.) of the book is, in many respects, the least unique among the sections, dealing as it does with arms and armor, equipment, food, clothing and modes of transportation. The section covers a lot of ground, and as such, there is very little in the way of explanation regarding any one item. The lists of ships, types of medication and clothing, for instance, have one- or two-sentence descriptions of the terms used. Other lists, such as ‘Container, Large’, Jewelry and (my personal favorite) Dairy Products, simply has a list of terms under that particular category.
It’s here that I begin to wonder about the choices made in designing the book. While I understand the necessities of space (this book could easily be 300-400 pages simply by adding a one-sentence blurb to everything in it), I have a hard time understanding some of the choices that the writers necessarily made.
For instance, there are the “Comma Lists”. Under ‘Liquors and Liqueurs’, there are 13 versions of whiskey in what I call ‘commas’, as in: “Whiskey, (comma) Straight, (comma) Rye”. One of the biggest offenders is next door to Liquors, a list of “Cordials”, which proceeds as ‘Liqueur, Almond; Liqueur, Banana; Liqueur, Cherry’ for about three column-inches.
While I can understand (and even appreciate) the attempt at completeness in these lists, it brings up two an important points that saturate the book:
These entries aren’t necessarily evocative, nor are they necessarily important distinctions. In a book about detailing a fantasy campaign, there is a paucity of original entries in this list which could have made them more fun to peruse. There are a couple of fantasy metals given, for instance, and magic is discussed a bit in the second section. But the inclusion of fantasy terms (even including say “Gryphon” under the types of eggs listed on p. 55) would have made the book far more evocative for a setting than listing 11 types of Saw (comma).
Secondly, the choice of when to elaborate and when not to elaborate is also confusing. Certainly there is a need to not elaborate on every single entry in the book. However, when a new and different term is inserted (I’m looking at the word ‘narghile’ under “Smoking, Tobacco Pipes, Et Al.), there is no context or elaboration to help me use it correctly. Even a single word in brackets, such as [India], after the word, would help place an image with the word and increase its value. (A narghile, by the way, is a type of hookah pipe.)
As far as game material, there is precious little stat-wise in this section. The World Builder is dual-statted for d20 and Lejendary Adventures, so stat blocks exist for both games throughout the book. In this first section, however, the only stat blocks are for the weapons and armor bits and pieces presented in the book which are not also covered in the D&D PHB. I cannot comment too much on the stat material other than to say that it is in line with most other equipment lists and doesn’t present any ‘broken’ weapons that can be abused.
There is one thing that I intend to comment on, but since I want to create a sense of suspense, I’ll save it for a later section of the review. For now, onto:
BOOK TWO: GEOGRAPHICS
This section details the various elements that make up the environment of the game world. It is the smallest (38 pp.) and the one that offers the most information for a GM detailing the campaign setting. Approximately a third of the section is an excellent glossary of terms for everything ranging from atmospherics (which oddly goes through all the possible colors of cloud), through terrain features (such as the dingle, a “wooded valley” (p.65)) and the terminology associated with bodies of water. As a matter of course, I consider the details presented (and all elaborated) very important to know when detailing the terrain, and horribly undervalued in much of the setting material on the market today.
Gemstones come next, and are presented with a stat block concerning their use in magic, giving examples of spells which would benefit from the stone’s traditional properties. There are also optional rules given for modifying spell parameters. A stat block is also given for Lejendary Adventures. A strange table is also included in this section, dealing with the MOH Hardness Scale for minerals. While this is definitely good information, the fact that none of the gems or stones listed in the section are indexed by hardness makes the table interesting but unnecessary.
After a short section on flora (including a list of 32 Grasses, Comma) and trees, there comes a very long section (14 pp.) on herbology. While I understand that this material may be seen as ‘de rigeur’ for books of this sort, this much (nearly 10%) of the book being spent on this single aspect of a world is really unnecessary. In the time that I’ve been DMing (about 15 years now), I think that the number of times I’ve had to worry about herbs can be counted on one hand. In those times, I used one of two solutions: either making something up for the setting involved (the better solution in my opinion, since it can be used to evoke the fantastic aspect of a setting), or I simply said “You find what you need.” Fourteen pages of herbology information, including a table of their blooming season and the type of soil they inhabit, is a bit much.
Finally, there is a page and a half of fauna lists, including 12 column-inches of bird names, and a truly useful stat block for horses.
Again, there’s a hidden flaw in this section as well, but we’re almost there, so let’s consider:
BOOK THREE: DWELLINGS
This section starts with a listing of common building materials, a listing of metals (including five fantastic types), woods and other materials used for fabrication. This section presents some very good information, particularly when a given building material will be used (adobe in the desert, etc.). The section on metals breaks out into tables, giving the tensile strength and melting point. I’m not sure why I need to know the melting point of tin in order to build a setting, but OK.
Next comes a section on architectural details (doors, windows, roofs), again given either to (as in “Window Types”) Barred Comma Bronze, or terms which need some definition, such as a ‘mansard’ roof.
Following this a section on construction costs (and one last time, I will ask you to wait).
Immediately thereafter is a very good listing of building types, including commercial buildings and the occasional treat (such as the rat-killing arena!), temples, government buildings and finally architectural terms for rooms.
After this comes the final barrage of lists, dealing with objects that are commonly found in said rooms. These lists suffer even more from the Comma Syndrome (12 listings for “table”, 5 listings for ‘tumbler’ (6-14 oz), 9 ‘bowls’, and a record 25 listings of ‘spoon’), and provide items that are painfully obvious, such as dishes in the kitchen. Overall, however, if you were stocking a room that the characters were going to ransack and steal everything in, these tables would help to flesh out those details quite nicely.
Finally come the people that live in these well-appointed rooms. A shockingly familiar listing of types of government (which brought me straight back to the AD&D 1st Edition DMG), a list of royal offices and occupations. Again, the list of occupations isn’t quite helpful, being one of those that they chose not to elaborate on. Most of them are obvious, but there are some (such as webster) that beg for definition. And lastly a list of nicknames, just in case you have trouble coming up with Abelard “Mop” Tanner’s familiar.
AND NOW FOR THE REALLY BIG NEWS
So just in case you’ve not skipped to this part and need a recap: Parts of each of the last three sections have something so hideously wrong with them that I had to save up all this time and not contaminate the rest of this review with what may be, to many people, a minor glitch. To me, however, this rests at the very center of Why This Book Falls Down. And it may just be so off-center that you’ll want to disregard it entirely when using this review to decide on the product at hand. Which is why I’ve moved it all to one place.
And that is: Do NOT use a single shred of information in this book with regards to money.
Having done a great deal of research on the subject for my own games (and being in the process of writing one based on economics), I was heartened to see that there was a note in the beginning of a book about the prices contained within. The general gist of the ‘Silver, Gold and Money in a Fantasy World’ is that over the course of even the sliver of history that the book purports to represent (mid- to late-medieval Europe), the concept of coinage and money, let alone the intrinsic value of the coins, varied so widely and wildly that any attempt to represent money has to be taken arbitrarily.
This is absolutely true.
However, the solution of the creators of this book falls completely on its face when attempting to correct the problem.
First there is the problem of mixing currencies and the accuracy of their statements, starting with the opening notes on money. The book states that d20’s system of 10 copper pieces = 1 silver piece, 10 silver pieces = 1 gold piece (a ratio of 1: 10: 100) doesn’t reflect reality; supposedly Mr. Gygax’s system of (1 : 10 : 500) is more appropriate. Examination of the notes that they give in the forward and the table referenced on p. 103 doesn’t bear this out, however.
The chart on p. 103 gives the following conversions: 5 copper pieces (cp) per ounce of copper, 5 silver pieces (sp) per ounce of silver, and 25 gold pieces (gp) per ounce of gold. I’m not going to deal with copper pieces in the rest of this , because silver and gold notations are sufficient to point out the problems with the text.
Given these ratios, 1 sp is 0.2 oz of silver, 1 gp is 0.04 oz of gold. The first problem comes when the text in the forward mentions that a silver piece contains 0.5 oz of silver. This contradicts the table quite plainly, and may very well simply be a typo.
Further problems come into play when we consider the dollar-to-metal conversions given in the forward. According to that information:
$1 = 5 cp
$10 = 5 sp
$500 = 25 gp
1 oz gold = $240
1 oz silver = $4
These conversions don’t match at all with the d20 table in the back, nor with their supposed use of the 1:10:500 ratio. First of all, by simple arithmetic:
1 cp = 20¢
1 sp = $2
1 gp = $20
This is the standard 1:10:100 ratio of d20, not Mr. Gygax’s ratio.
Furthermore, taken their quote for the price of silver and gold, this gives us:
1 gp = 0.08 oz gold, or 12 coins to the oz.
1 sp = 0.5 oz of silver, or 2 coins to the oz.
While the silver price matches the statement in the forward that there is 0.5 oz of silver in a silver piece, it doesn’t match the statement that there is 0.04 oz of gold in a gold piece. Clearly there has been a great deal of mismatching between dollars, gp and the price of metals. It would appear that the inclusion of dollar notation (to work with the Lejendary Adventures stat blocks) has caused quite a bit of confusion.
However, for the rest of my analysis, I have simply disregarded the stat block entirely and worked under the assumption that the forward is the standard for writing the book.
First a quick word on how I did my analysis. While the book says that it is based on the late medieval period, I have used a method of conversion to the Carolingian monetary system, which was put in place by Charlemagne in 800 AD. Under this system, there are 240 denari, or pennies, which are struck from a ‘pound’ (livre) of silver weighing 422 grams at 950/1000ths fineness.
This seems unfair on the surface, comparing prices 500-600 years apart. However, this estimation creates a large buffer in favor of the book, by conservatively estimating the prices given in the book with a relatively high (comparatively speaking) value for medieval coinage. If I were to base the prices in the book against the monetary system of the period (late medieval), the problems that I found with the material are simply compounded, not lessened. I have erred in favor of the book in this regard. In any case, no matter the monetary conversion so involved, there are intrinsic problems with the system in the book that go beyond mere monetary conversion.
The first problem with the book is that it in no way mirrors reality in any way, shape or form. This holds constant for most gaming material, and so it is the easiest to forgive. D&D’s (and d20’s) system of gold pieces and silver pieces has never reflected the reality of medieval Europe, and this is simply something that must be acknowledged and then simply forgotten. (I would note the inherent irony in the book’s criticism of the d20 monetary system and the fact that said system was established by the main contributor to the book 25 years prior.)
The prices given for the arms, armor, lodging and board given in Book One, using the notes in the forward are overestimated (consistently) at 300 times their true value in the period. For instance, a set of three-quarters plate armor is given a price of 1000 gp. Converting this to the Carolingian standard, we get a price of 311,035 denier, or £324.20s.11d. To put this in perspective, the annual income for the Crown of England in 1300 was £30,000, meaning that this suit of armor would be 1% of the income of King Edward I.
Clearly this is off – but by how much?
Using a price list from http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/medievalprices.html and comparing those prices that fall into the same period, I worked to find a multiplier that brought the prices in question down to what they would have actually been in silver. The final multiplier was 0.015. This doesn’t fit exactly, but many of the items do fit quite well.
The problem of scale, as I said, it trivial. I no more expect this sort of accuracy from this book as I would from any other RPG material to date, mainly because there are other forces involved (such as game balance) which preclude accurate pricing of things like two-handed swords. The real problem with the monetary system in the book comes when you compare these prices with the incomes for experts and pricing for buildings in Book Three.
The section in Book Three dealing with building gives the ‘monthly income’ of a master mason at $10,000 a month. Translated into gold pieces, that’s 200gp a month. Now let’s compare that with the actual wage of a master mason, taken from the building records of York Minster, at 4d ($1) a day. This represents an overvaluation of 833 times in terms of salary.
Again, this is not a big deal in that the wage in no way reflects reality. The problem comes when this is compared to the item multiplier. This gives the medieval experts about six times their actual buying power. The real problem, however, is that the numbers for the experts seem to have been plucked out of the atmosphere, with no regard to internal consistency.
While the salary/price mismatch is fixed simply by reducing the salary to 10% of what is listed, or making the given value per year instead of per month, it’s a rather glaring oversight, made even more glaring by the fact that they are some of the only hard monetary numbers in the book.
This problem is further exacerbated by the fact that the cost of construction table, on the same page in Book Three (p.111) appears to have a multiplier of about 38 times the norm. (This number is harder to pin down since the prices are in large brackets ($20- $200 per square foot) – in my analysis, I used the median price to arrive at the 38x figure.)
The final set of hard numbers that the World Builder gives deals with the productivity of the land. This block comes with a caveat, namely that these figures are for “…purposes of developing a fantasy environment, and considering magical aids in agriculture and husbandry…”. With that in mind, the figures presented are also out of whack with medieval reality.
Due to the caveat in the paragraph, however, I have to reserve the harshest of my criticisms of this stat block. Suffice it to say that the numbers presented offer a very simplistic and distorted view of the ability of the medieval farmer to not only subsist, but prosper.
Also, the stat block makes mention of a conversion of yields to cash, but does not present the formula for doing so.
FINAL ANALYSIS
The central question behind the World Builder is: “What do I use it for?”
In the things that I have heard from the writers at Troll Lords, the actual title of the book, “World Builder” is a misnomer. They would have preferred to call it the “Descriptionary”, a title that would have fit the contents far better than the current one. In my original assessment of the book, I called it “essentially […] a book of lists”. I stand by this statement, and with good reason.
Most of the information that is presented in the book which is not a list or glossary has shown to be inaccurate, insofar as this is how I have analyzed it, I can’t recommend the book on the few pieces of information that actually would allow one to build a world with it. Taking this information away, you’re left with essentially that: a rather convenient but wholly context-free book of lists with relatively little utility.
In design-time, the book offers the most utility, but is hampered by the mundanity (or inapplicability) of the material. But more than that, it is hampered by the fact that by itself, it offers no advice to the person using it on how to put together the information in the lists in a coherent fashion. As such, it is a good beginning, a touchstone for building a world or perhaps finding a new detail that one would not have ordinarily thought of. While the back blurb offers that the “information within … stands legion.”, I rather find that the book takes a minor swipe at the challenge of actually designing a world, and rather simply stocks it, like a shelf in the back of a convenient store.
In run-time, the information presented that seems fit for that purpose (the breaking strength of rope or ice, for instance, or the hardness of a metal) is best handled by the GM by simply using common sense instead of the hard numbers given. If your group is travelling through the ancient forest of Thoom, do you really need to know the bole size of the trees? If it actually does come into play for some reason (say for cover), a common-sense judgement over referring to the charts in the World Builder seems to be the order of the day.
Where the World Builder gives depth, the depth isn’t always necessary. Where the World Builder gives breadth, the information is mundane, uninspired or needs further reference.
With a cover price of $30, I cannot recommend the World Builder to anyone serious about creating a setting with depth, originality or consistency.
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