A Magical Society: Ecology and Culture
A Magical Society: Ecology and Culture is a reference and a tutorial for GMs who want to create a fantasy world in reasonable accordance with real-world biology, geology, and physics. It is primarily an ecology and sociology textbook, with less geology and surprisingly few pages on mapmaking for a world-builder's guide.
It is marketed as a d20 product, but that system's cameos are pretty much limited to sample prices in gold pieces and passing references to the bookworm and the disenchanter. I, who have not read a single page of d20 rules, was in no way hampered by the d20-ness of this product.
This is a 160-page, 8½×11″ soft-cover, retailing for $27.00. RPG Now sells the PDF version for $10.00 and a free demo of just the mapping chapters. Free registration required for both options.
The book has one long chapter each on ecology, biomes, and culture, separated by short chapters on mapping the world. Although this splits geology and mapping into three sections, they are united by the example fantasy world that is created and grown over the course of the book. A long appendix provides real-world examples of ideas introduced earlier, and acts as a glossary of sorts.
Each of these chapters is further separated by a few pages of fiction. It is utterly peripheral to the work at hand, and may be safely skipped.
Mapping Your World, Part 1 introduces the basics of continental drift, and the rifting, suturing, and mountain-building that take place as tectonic plates move across the globe. The maps in this chapter show major land masses, mountains, and archipelagos.
The next chapter, Ecology, covers food webs, predator-prey relationships, succession, and a theory on the “flow” of magical energy (including ley lines) that might or might not match how you want magic to work in your world.
Ecology is followed by Biomes, by far the slowest read in the book. Dozens of Earthly climates are described with Tolkien-like lists of their associated flora and fauna. Each biome is dryly described, in detail ranging from barely sufficient through excruciating. For instance, I now know more about tundra than I ever wanted to, but the difference between a fen, a bog, and a moor eludes me. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then this chapter could easily do with a few thousand fewer words and a few more pictures. A tedious chapter, but its knowledge is required by the serious world-builder.
Back to the maps. Mapping Your World, Part 2 focuses on air and water. Sample maps show climate zones, rivers, and atmospheric and oceanic currents induced by the Coriolis effect of the planet's rotation.
Culture is divided more or less evenly between the physical and the ideological. It starts by showing how differing environments alter the intelligent species living in them, from physiological changes to differences in building materials and crops. Hunting and gathering, herding, and agriculture each get a brief overview, as do clothing, shelter, art, and technology. Magic is considered to be a subset of technology, and again the authors' magical theories (“the body magic is sentient, with its own will”) might not match what you had in mind.
Ideological culture starts off with a few paragraphs on alignment — one of the few times the Dungeons & Dragons system butts its nose in — and then moves on to more universal topics like language, rituals, and myths. Legal issues like distribution of wealth, hospitality, and settling disputes get a few paragraphs each, as do major life events like birth, coming-of-age, and death.
Mapping Your World, Part 3 covers briefly how cultures expand from their sites of origin, following rivers and coastlines, and then populates the example world with a handful of intelligent species. As they migrate and interact, some species rapidly split into competing sub-races, while others evolve very little from their original form. (Elves, orcs, and humans all come from the same proto-species, in this example, while kobolds remain kobolds.) Sadly, the maps in this section range from unclear in indecipherable, but the text should provide more than enough ideas on its own.
The Appendix is the longest section of Ecology and Cultures, and by far the easiest reading. It is a mini-encyclopedia of real-world geological formations, landmarks, plants, animals, trade goods and precious minerals. This is easily the biggest idea mine in the book, and I consider it almost pure gold.
Finally, there is a two-page Bibliography, which includes titles and authors, but not ISBNs or publishers.
The book supports the needs of a realistic low-magic Almost-Earth, while deliberately leaving room (and sometimes making excuses) for a high-magic fantasy world. Both kinds of GM will find bits that support their style of play.
I normally have little patience for art in RPG books, but the illustrations in Ecology and Culture serve a purpose. In fact, this is one of very few books that could be improved by more art, especially in the Biomes chapter. Grasslands, forests, marshes, and mountains all get detailed, realistic sketches, but there are plenty more climates that need illustration.
Other chapters get simple illustrations, or at least relevant mood pieces.
Diagrams throughout the book are clear and informative. Good examples are the suturing and mountain-building effects of continental drift on p. 13, the food chain diagram on p. 26, and graphs plotting biomes and crops vs. altitude.
The best of the whole book describe the Coriolis effect, on pp. 62–63. One page shows the simple prevailing winds Earth would experience if it were motionless, and the second starts the globe spinning, showing the easterlies, trade winds, and convergence zones of the real planet Earth. This is the first time I've really understood how prevailing winds and currents work.
The Ecology chapter contains a life-saving rationale for GMs to fill their Dungeons & Dragons worlds with, well, dungeons and dragons: the magiotroph.
While autotrophs grow by absorbing sunlight and chemicals from the environment, and heterotrophs eat autotrophs and each other, magiotrophs — mostly bacteria — grow by absorbing the magical energy which flows through their environment. The magic they consume gets concentrated as you go up the food chain, culminating in dragons and giants at the top.
There are a few larger magiovores hiding at the end of the Appendix. “Lifegiver moss” is a fungus that excretes oxygen, while the crystal grazer is a cave growth that filters carbon dioxide.
These magically-occurring first links of the food chain allow a GM to place a sustainable ecology anywhere on the planet, no matter how inhospitable. They are a blatant concession to the adventurous GM, and a damn good one.
Unfortunately, I have plenty. Combined, these dropped the “style” rating several points, saved mostly by the art and diagrams mentioned above.
The most striking aspect of Ecology and Culture is also its greatest flaw. The layout, while attractive, does the reader no favors.
Every page has a background image of a ragged parchment. This medium grey background nicely camouflages the dark grey text. In fact, there doesn't seem to be black ink anywhere in the book. While the grey tones make the art look wonderful, the text is almost illegible. I had to read this book in fits and starts, as prolonged reading resulted in fierce eye strain and a headache.
The text is surrounded by a huge margin, disguised by the illusion of two page edges: the “parchment” and the real page. A large vertical bookmark graphic down the outside edge of each page increases the effect, resulting in nearly two inches wasted.
Speaking of margins, the bookmark-style border graphic is replaced in the appendices by a column of four oriental dragons. Each dragon is larger than the one above it, so the margin shifts as you move down the page. The appendix entries are separated only by a slight indent on the first line, so entries that begin just as the margin stair-steps inward flow directly into the entry above. Several times I thought I'd lost my place, only to realize that the subject had changed without warning.
Ecology and Culture is a reference work given the trappings of a narrative, presumably to make it an easier read. Both front and back covers promote the fiction more than the real contents of the book.
The wrap-around story follows Kierian the Bold, a recently-mortal warrior who has killed the God of War and taken his place in the heavens. As a bizarrely convenient test for godhood, the clueless warrior is required to create from scratch an inhabited world, in which his divine meddling with natural processes must be kept to a minimum. Playing the Doctor to Kierian's Companion is Noj, an industrious gnome sent to guide him through the process. (Every god gets a gnome, don'cha know.)
Aside from a few stray first-person comments from Kierian about gnomes and other gods, the fiction is confined to two- to four-page interludes between the non-fiction chapters.
I am puzzled by their attempt to sugar-coat a reference work, one which would only be picked up by the most dedicated GMs in the first place. The wrap-around story contributes nothing to world-building, and I found myself sorely wishing those 15 pages had been dedicated to mapping or illustrations instead.
Sadly, the maps in Ecology and Culture are as confusing as the diagrams are informative. They are the most obvious victims of the monochrome format, and of a pallet that ranges from medium grey to dark. The maps circumvent this limitation by using cross-hatching to represent different terrains and cultures. This works to a point, but the climate map on p. 69 has eight different cross-hatch patterns, all hand-drawn. The result is a blurry mess.
The maps also have a serious problem with legends and labels. The cultural maps have large globular designs surrounding most continents and seas, with no indication what they mean. Most seem to represent cultural boundaries, but… in the middle of an ocean? Other maps have no legend at all.
Continent labels mysteriously vanish after the first three maps, although the text still refers to “Continent A” and “Continent D”. You'll go from reading about the human ancestors on Continent E on p. 105, back to the continental drift map on p. 20 to figure out which one is E, and then ahead to p. 110 to see where on E these people are.
Titles are also no help. All maps are called “Mapping Your World — Step 1”, “Step 2”, and so on.
As a final aggravation, the maps can appear a half-dozen pages after the text describing them. The first time I read “Please reference the map provided.”, I thought I had a bad print, as there was clearly no map provided. A simple “see p. XX” would have saved much grumbling. Better still, since the maps are low in detail, they could easily have been reduced to a half-page and put directly above the relevant text.
The ultimate expression of all this is the last map in the book, on p. 111. It's got the useless title, the crazy cross-hatching, the unidentified globs, and a legend I am convinced is simply wrong. I have no idea what it represents.
The RPG book format has one major drawback, which the authors admit in their afterword: visually, it does not do the subject justice. The greyscale sketches, while well done, simply aren't numerous enough to convey the geography, weather patterns, and climates the book describes. The authors recommend Internet searches for photos of real-world examples as a necessary complement to this book, and I agree.
Since Ecology and Culture is mostly a reference work, it is best compared to other reference works rather than to other RPG supplements. Most textbooks cost far more than $27, and inexcusably do not focus on building your own fantasy RPG world. Likewise, an atlas would blow this book's mapping attempts away, but would do so at a cost; atlases with a good primer on geology and weather go for twice the price.
To get a similar GMing value out of reference works, one would need the best bits from a sociology and an ecology text, and the first few chapters of a good atlas. Unless you can find all three at a fraction their usual cover price, you're better off with Ecology and Culture.
Just be sure you read it under good lighting, and keep that Advil handy.
Review Summary