Customer Reviews

The Epic of Aerth (Mytus/Dangerous Journeys)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Badly organized, dated and confusing and longwinded in places, with mediocre art and a sometimes hard to read layout that gets lost in reams of unrelated or tangential tables of dubious usefulness--but in its concept so revolutionary it really can take fantasy roleplaying in a whole different direction.

The idea is an exciting one. Earth is just one of a number of connected worlds, the most mundane of the bunch--its classical pantheons dead, its great heroes long passed into legend, magic relegated to superstition. But in the various mirror worlds of Earth magic is real, monsters and gods from mythology walk the world. Some things are direct reflections, while other aspects of the worlds are like murky, skewed reflections, while in other ways the worlds are totally divergant.

Of all these worlds: Greyhawk (Gary Gygax's first fantasy world, the Dungeons & Dragons setting that started it all Gazetteer (Dungeons & Dragons, 3rd Edition)), Learth (from Lejendary Adventures Gary Gygax's Lejendary Adventure: Essentials), Yarth and Ureth; Aerth, the fantasy world from Mythus' Dangerous Journeys setting, is like our world's closest twin, perhaps the world cosmologically right next door to our own. The landmasses are very similar, the names of nations and historical figures match up like an echo of our own world. Yet in that world Lemuria and Atlantis are real. Forms of magic, called Heka are real. European kingdoms worship Keltic, Skandian and Roma gods. The enchanted world of Phaeree: full of elves, dwarves, centaurs and stranger things lies just across a thin curtain from the normal world. At the center of Aerth, deep underground is a primal land of dinosaurs and jungles--with seas that correspond to where lands are in the world above and are massive continents where on the surface world there's water.

It's like our world, but a fascinating step away. It makes a wonderful way to play historical campaigns with monsters and powerful magic, but also keep it within a lush and detailed setting, and provides a fun new way to link together campaign settings you may never have explored before.

That makes it totally worth it for our group, and worth the four stars easily, despite some pretty glaring weaknesses in its presentation. It's just such a cool idea.