Customer Reviews

Gary Gygax's World Builder: Gygaxian Fantasy Worlds Vol. 2

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The book is not titled correctly. This is a book of lists, and a great one at that! This book is great for writers to break through writer's block and it is good for dungeon masters and world builders to help them add detail and depth to their worlds. Unless you must have d20 or LA stats for everything, you will not be disappointed by this book. This book is not very useful for players, but is very useful for DMs and writers.

I first learned of this book when passing by Monte Cook's website, the author of the Players Handbook for 3rd Edition D&D. He had written, "I've heard some people put down this product because it's not a guide to help you build a campaign, but instead a book of lists. Well, as it turns out, I think a book of lists is pretty cool. I used to love the appendices in the back of the 1st Edition DMG that were just lists of things, and that's basically what this book from Troll Lord Games is. They make for great idea generators when you're stuck as a DM or as a writer."

So, I picked up a copy. The layout could be improved no doubt, and there were some obvious typos, but there is still an enormous amount of generic information useful to a fantasy writer or Dungeon Master. I would have to spend hours digging around a library or Google to find this sort of material.

Not perfect, and not what the title might imply, but good.

I bought this product mostly because I have a soft spot for anything written by Gary Gygax, and secondly, because what I read about the product sounded like something that might be of interest. I have been playing role-playing games for about 20 years, and started out with Dungeons and Dragons, for most of those years I have been a GM, and have been running my campaigns in a world of my own devising. This book has loads of useful input for that kind of setting, listing loads of stuff that you might find a use for in fleshing out your own world. If you need something to develop your world-setting, this one is highly recommended.

There are two types of people in the world, those who are inspired by random lists of words, and those who aren't. If the tensile strength of rope inspires you to create a world, then by all means, go for it. If, however, you require more motivation, then don't buy this book. It's nice if you are stuck and using something like Tablesmith, but other than that, the book is fairly useless.

First let me explain what this book is. Remember all of those tables in the first edition AD&D Dungeon Masters guide that listed medieval titles, gem stone types, dungeon 'props' etc. This is just one whole big book full of them. Thankfully the random number generator column is missing this time and there is usually some explanatory text to go along with each table entry - a vague sentence or two explaining what the thing is. There's really not much more to it than that. There is a section on weapons and armor but the descriptive text does not match up with the game statistics tables. For example many forms of armor are listed and described briefly and some even have pictures but for many game statistics are not provided or the armor is given a slightly different name in the tables so you can't find it or aren't sure if you have. There is a picture of Japanese armor with all the parts labeled but no game statistics or associated descriptive text. The layout of the book is also terrible. It looks like the whole thing was written in Microsoft Word using the default document template.

Overall a trashy product that both Troll Lord Games and the authors should be ashamed of. If all you want to do is publish a dictionary of medieval and fantasy terms and put this little effort into copy editing then you might as well run it through a photo-copier, staple it together and charge for the cost of paper and toner. At $... this is appalling. I expect better from a free product on the Web.