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CASTLE OLDSKULL - Game World Generator $2.99
Average Rating:4.3 / 5
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CASTLE OLDSKULL - Game World Generator
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CASTLE OLDSKULL - Game World Generator
Publisher: Kent David Kelly
by A customer [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 03/16/2017 17:02:10

I just took this for a spin, and I am glad that I purchased it. I've been kicking around ideas for a new campaign world for a few years now, based on a map of Eurore during the last glacial maximum. From a bunch of ideas splashing around my head, this product helped me to forge a coherent world map and detailed initial setting in less than a week. The tables and charts also helped me to avoid many of the pitfalls that have plagued my past homebrewed worlds, most of which felt shallow, like movie sets with nothing behind them. My newly-designed world already feels more real than any I've designed in the past, and I lay the credit squarely at the feet of this book.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
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Creator Reply:
Hi there, thank you for the kind review! I appreciate it. I hope you're enjoying the campaign world design tools so far. ~Kent
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CASTLE OLDSKULL - Game World Generator
Publisher: Kent David Kelly
by A. T. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 01/30/2017 12:59:15

130-150 pages of actual of content. Please note that this review is from skimming the book. Take it with a grain of salt. Short: Some interesting tables and ideas. Descent top down creation for the physical world; however, the world generated feels like a foundation that needs to be built on. Art is terrible. Weird layout doubles if not tripples the page count. Worth about a dollar as is. You'll need other resources to build out your world's religion, politics, factions, magic, and history. Long:

  • So far I've only skimmed the book, but I can tell that this is someone's passion project. I think the author needs to take a step back and refocus his efforts into a streamlined version. The long and short of this book is that it is not 330 pages of content. Many of the pages will contain a line or two of text followed by 2-3 blank lines. Others will be full blocks of text. I'm not sure why the author is trying to make the book seem longer than it actually is. There is probably 130-150 actual pages worth of information.
  • The book goes into great detail about map creation and topics such as where to place cities in a logical manner. Lots of useful information about population size, political hierarchies, titles from various cultures.
  • The art is terrible; MS paint level. However, it gets the point across. Some pieces are confusing.
  • The author switches between hexes and squares part way into world creation. Which is really weird.
  • The book generates worlds from a top down perspective, but in the end many parts of world building are missing such as; religion, politics, factions, magic, history, etc... The book makes general suggestions about these things that one would hope would have whole chapters devoted to them in detail, but they don't.
  • Over all there are areas of the book that contain useful information, but in the end you'll be left with a fairly generic and in my opinion empty world. You'll have lots of locations, ideas about the local economy, the alignment for a country, the political hierarchy for a region, the regional climate, etc. However, in the end you'll need to expand out the details of areas yourself when it comes the gears of adventure.
  • I'd say Dungeon World is a better product for building a world for actual play, or the DMG from any addition, or the Gamemastery Guide from Paizo, but this makes a nice supplement at its price point.

With that said this book has a number of interesting tables and information in it that can make determining various factors of your world easier and for that I don't rate it a 1. If the author would condense his layout and add more chapters on the missing topics noted above I could easily see raising my rating. I would say its worth about a dollar as is.



Rating:
[2 of 5 Stars!]
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