Wildscape

 Before I started reading Wildscape (Mike Mearls) I was filled with a familiar dread - was this book going to explain weather to me? It's a well that has been visited many times, by many different rpgs. You're imagining a place, places often have weather, so you gotta imagine the weather too. Has anyone ever taught you how to imagine the weather? Maybe we can write an rpg supplement about that.

(And I realize I'm being something of a hypocrite here, explaining the practice of explaining weather, and then writing a parenthetical aside, explaining that, but the difference is that I'm being a cute little troll, who has never in his life done anything wrong).

However, upon actually reading the book, I am relieved to relate that Wildscape only explains the weather a little bit. There's a bunch of random tables for generating it, and those tables have little paragraphs explaining what the tables are for, but that's the extent of it. Most of this book is devoted to what the Wilderness Survival Guide from AD&D 1st edition should have been - rules for terrain hazards and fantastical environmental conditions. Each chapter is devoted to a different biome (desert, forest, arctic, etc) and is split evenly between mundane stuff like what DC Strength check you need to roll if you fall in a mud-hole (it depends on how deep the hole is) and magical stuff like the long-term effects of travelling through the blasted ruins of an elder civilization that was smote by the gods for its hubris (a minor, but cumulative penalty to all checks and a narrative effect of persistent bad luck).

Conceptually, it has the same basic problem as City Works - it's more of the DMG, the least essential of the three core books - but Wildscape has the advantage of being full of novel ideas. It's an entertaining read even if it undermines itself a couple of times when Mearls acts the buzzkill and warns us not to use all the ideas in the same campaign setting, because apparently "over-the-top features are memorable but using them too often can turn your campaign world into a mishmash of strange lands." 

To that, of course, I say "bah!" 

I mean, restraint has its place, but I see it more as a matter of picking elements that work well together and support your campaign's themes and genre aesthetics. It's good to have more options than I'd want to use, but I think "don't use too many colors" is unnuanced advice, and a poor explanation of the advantages of having a large palette.

Then again, I'm not the one who went on to be lead designer for D&D 5th edition, am I? (And even I don't know whether I meant to be humble or sarcastic just now).

Overall, I liked this book quite a bit and unlike its companion volume, that "like" is not the least bit qualified or whimsical. It's full of ideas that I would love to steal - a volcanic mountain that gets its heat from a slumbering dragon, a desert made up of tiny fragments of semi-precious gems, towering grasslands where dinosaurs roam free, a mountain range at the top of the world, whose peaks scrape against the dome of the sky and create extraplanar gates - and its only real flaw is that it's still basically a pre-game book. I'd be more likely to reference it than City Works, but I'd rather just copy its rules into my prep notes than carry it around.

I will close out this post by saying I'm still baffled that this book got made at all. I really don't understand FFG's strategy of releasing these unglamorous workhorse books about broad, abstract subjects aimed purely at GMs. This one proved to be worth it, but the only reason I ever found that out is because I saw it on a bookshelf 20 years after its release and said, "fuck it, it's only 5 dollars." Were people really that hungry for d20 content back then? And if so, why not just print more copies of Grimm (the book previewed at the end of Wildscape which continues what I can only assume is a series tradition of using these books to advertise more interesting books)?

Then again, I'm not the who went on to be bought out by Asmodee, so what do I know? (My price is 200k, btw, in case anyone's interested).

Ukss Contribution: Lots of choices this time. Mirror ice, that's so shiny it reflects spells? The brass dragon that's so starved for conversation it built a luxury resort at a desert oasis? Ghouls in underground ruins who create pit traps to capture surface-dwellers? This is a book that throws a lot at the wall, just to see if it will stick, and I love it for that.

However, I think I'm going to go with the giant grass. Ukss already has dinosaurs, so giving them some memorable flora to frolic around in is a no-brainer.