Ep 28: Magical Industrial Revolution

[misha]

I think I can guess how y’all will respond to Electric Bastionland in this regard, but curious if any of you have read Andrew Kolb’s Oz which is his take on a city crawl.

I do love EB, but it basically gives you nothing on the 'what do adventures look like' front. I still need to look at Oz.

I think the dream of a fully playable out of the box module is nice (or at least the just read/skim version) but even the quintessential "well made" modules do not reach that for me in a campaign environment.

For me, I think the distinction is between prep that I can do and prep that I have to do. Adjusting to taste is great, but it's pretty opt-in. If there are big bits of information that are simply missing, it's something that I don't have any choice but to add onto my mental load--this might be something relatively simple and low-stakes like "what does the village look like as you walk into it" or something more high-stakes like "how many devils are in this room at any given time". I'm already spinning a lot of plates in my head when I GM, so I really appreciate it when the book anticipates the types of mundane questions that come up in play and has an answer for them--especially if they're tied to bigger subsystems, like treasure quantities, regional politics, or thematic throughlines.