http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=1016089
In that thread it became apparent that have a really hard view against City of Splendors: Waterdeep (CoS:W). I think there are several things going for why this is so. I wound up digging up some old posts of mine and combining them into this really long post. It got a lot longer then I thought it would be. While it is on topic, I felt this would derail the purpose of that thread. So I'm starting this thread and linking to this thread from there. Meh.
Firstly, I use City of Ravens Bluff (CoRB) extensively. My campaign is basically built around the city because whenever I was at a lack of an idea I'd just flip though CoRB and a new adventure idea popped into my head. My experience with CoRB was about as good as you can get. CoRB was the only city book that I had used previous. I knew the largest difference would be that Ravens Bluff had very many people contributing to the pile of information that was sifted by Greenwood down to what made it into the book. Waterdeep simply has not been worked with in that way. So I knew going in that it wasn't going to be like City of Ravens with all those wonderful details packed onto each page. I knew that the WotC product wasn't going to be as good as the TSR material, but I figured that it would be decent.
Secondly is the use I had in mind. I was running this Faerun spanning adventure where things the players needed were all over the place. I did this so that I'd have to deal with the larger realms. One piece of information would be in Waterdeep. I wanted my players to go through Waterdeep, because I hadn't actually played with the city before. I've read the Elaine Cunningham books around Waterdeep. They were good reads. The Waterdeep book had recently been just been printed and it billed itself as the first and last stop for all information about Waterdeep. So I bought it. I had in mind an adventure where the players get caught up in assorted plots as they try and find that piece of information. I figured that I could get a solid five sessions out of it and likely lay the ground work for returing to that city at a later time. I was about as primed as you could be to want to like CoS:W.
And then I started reading it.
And the city didn't make sense to me.
• In preparing the adventure I had looked up Waterdeep in all my other books. The little bit about Waterdeep that each of those books had held more life to them then what CoS:W had. I seem to recall that those same bits of info appeared in the Waterdeep book, but paraphrased. Somewhere along the way the life came out of it. All the life the material might have had was sucked out of it in the phrasing. When I read a gaming accessory I want something that's going to make me excited. It felt more like stereo instructions. The fact that the bulk of the book was paraphrased reprinted material didn't help.
• Why exactly does Waterdeep exist where it does? Baldur's Gate is a much more understandable location for a city that large. Waterdeep is supposed to be this huge trade city. Being a trade city is generally what causes a city's population to grow by leaps and bounds. So what if you have the best harbor ever? If that harbor is not between anything then the harbor is not going to do very much business. I can accept that a medium sized city would grow up where Waterdeep is because of the ore and being the last stop before you hit the North, but I cannot accept that it is the second largest city in Faerun. I am wholly unconvinced why such a city should be of the size and importance of Waterdeep.
• Why doesn't the city buildings burst beyond it's walls? Were when the walls built were they much more then needed and it's only just reaching maximum capacity? I think not. there is no explanation for this in the book. Another poster informed me that Waterdeep expanded it's walls 3 times in it's history. That's great, but it should have been brought up in the book. I've been told by that same poster that the city does not burst beyond it's walls "Because people like to be safe. There are many perils that abound the region from orc raiding groups to trolls to pirates and undersea menaces. You live outside the walls, you take your chances." that's nice, but it is suggested in places that Waterdeep exerts vast control for hundreds of miles, but somehow there's no towns or villages near it and there is so much danger outside it's wall that people are afraid to build outside the walls. If Waterdeep is really attacked so often that no one lives outside it's walls then exactly how can the surrounding farmland be maintained to provide food? Where is the detailing of the vast farmlands needed to feed a city this big? I found out from a poster here that Goldenfields is supposed to answer that issue, but I don't even know where it is. I couldn't find a Goldenfields on the big map. It's not near Waterdeep at any rate. If it's near Waterdeep then it should be laid to waste or something by all those nasty things that keep the people within the walls?
• What does the Ward System do? There are not actual walls separating them, nor is it a tax designation, so what exactly is this "Ward System" supposed to do? It was suggested to me by another poster that the Wards are for Admin purposes, but what does that mean? Different city guard precincts? Tax purposes? Exactly what purposes? the book doesn't say. Sure the Dock Ward is where a lot of trade happens, but all cities have a section of the city where a lot of trade happens. A city as large as Waterdeep should have bunches of little trade sections each with different characteristics.
Ravens Bluff, a city many times smaller then Waterdeep, has something like 20 or so different sections of the city. Each section of the city a different character and history from the rest of the city. Different parts of the docks had different characters history and purpose, that sort of thing. Waterdeep should have been divided into at least 30 sections.
• The place descriptions in the back for the individual locations has numbers and letters designating what kind of structure it is and a name. that's not much to inspire the imagination. Look in the back of The Living City and take the Walking Tour and see how the back of the book should have been done.
• Example: The Griffon Calvary entry takes up a little over half of a page. A good chunk of that is taken up by the stats for an average griffon calvery-man. This is useless info to me. All I need to know about the average rider is that they are fighters level 6. I'm a bloody DM. I can create my own stats. Stats are easy. It also wastes an entire line with "Authoritative Figure". I don't want to know who their Authoritative Figure is. I want to know who their leader is. Phrasing is important. "Leader" is more definite, more excitable then "Authoritative Figure". In another book they summed it up as "Who Rules:" and "Who Really Rules:" That was good. This is not. I don't need to know what the organizations GP limit is. Their GP limit is whatever I say it should be. There is a name of a commander, but nothing about how he leads. How long has he been the leader? What problems has he faced in running the Griffon Calvary? Where is he trying to bring the institution in the upcoming year or so? The entry takes up a little over a page and a half and provides maybe an 8th of a page worth of useable information. The rest is superfluous. That is a typical entry in the book.
• The chapter on nobles lists the names of 42 noble families and detail only four of them. These just happen to be families that have been featured in novels. That's ********. I want to know a bit about these families. If I wanted names I can easily generate some on my own or use a name generator. The Ravens Bluff book spent a couple paragraphs on some 30 or so families. Not exhaustive detail but enough to get a sense of where the family is, where's its been, and an idea of where it's going.
And that is really what makes the book suck. It tells you where Waterdeep IS. It doesn't give the trajectories of the people, players, and organizations of the place. It's too much superfluous information. Too much stats. Not enough soul. Not enough story. It is suppose to be THE Waterdeep product. Years have passed in the Realms. How have those years treated all those families? That is what I would consider core material that needs to be covered.
• The book was billed wrong. If a book says it's going to be all about X area that is be ALL about X area and give it it's best face. Primary type material should not be left for the supplements or in previous products. CoS: W was the first Waterdeep product in over a decade and billed as the be all end all Waterdeep book. I later found out that if I really want to find out about Waterdeep then I should look in FR1 Waterdeep and the North, Volo's Guide to Waterdeep, Volo's Guide to the North, the Ruins of Undermountain boxed set and the City of Splendors boxed set. I double checked this. I've been a picking up Realms products since 1999 and those products you mentioned came out in 1987, 1992, and 1991. I've not attempted to find those products to find what is in them. CoS:W did not make enough sense to warrant looking into older products for more. I have also since been directed by Waterdeep fans to the web enhancements for CoS:W, but if I need to get web enhancements for a gaming product to make sense, then it's not much of a product. Further, if the writers couldn't be bothered to make the core product of a location make a minimum amount of sense then why should they have been bothered to make it make sense elsewhere?
"But they could at least avoid phrases like "in-depth examination" etc. and make clear that the new Waterdeep supplement is just an update for those who feel they can't live without a Waterdeep book for the current edition. If they did this, authors wouldn't have to feel obligated to excuse certain shortcomings after release and point to out-of-print material not everyone has the means to acquire. "Cityscape was never supposed to be a part of the environment series." Whoops, Mat Smith reveals that the rest of WotC thinks different. "CoS could never cover the subject matter on the scale it deserves, how could you expect something like this?" Whoops, the ads say otherwise. In most of the cases it's not even the authors' fault, it's about the requirements of the bean-counters, the marketing and the expectations of the customers, I guess. Now, even admitting compromises would hurt sales, but in this case WotC must not complain about complaints *shrug*" - Dexter_Blacktyde
• There are some 3e problems that do affect this book. There is a larger quantity of images. There are more pictures. More pictures means less space for text. And the text is larger then 2e products. But I don't have a problem with it just because it is a 3e book. I'm basically fine with the books that cover regions. I think it's a matter of books that focus on cities. A region book I imagine to be much easier because everything is spread out. A city should be so tightly wound with so much local politics that it makes it a completely different beast.
And those were my problems with the book.
I still had to have an adventure for my players.
I continued to wrap my brain around the problem.
I made and discarded half a dozen adventure ideas.
Nothing worked in my head. Most of the time when I find something wanting, I either ignore it or do a small change or extrapolation of the source material. But Waterdeep is just so damn central to the Realms. I found more use in any quarter page of text from the The Living City then in the entirety of the CoS:W. I expected the book to be useful. I didn't expect it to be at the completely different end of the spectrum from CoRB. I did not expect the book to make no sense to me whatsoever.
Waterdeep had to go.
So I blew up Waterdeep.
When my players approached the city they found people leaving the city in droves. Something in Undermountain was sucking all energy from miles around. babies were dying, meat spoiling, plants withering, people just lying down in the street and not getting up again. This had been going on for a couple weeks and growing in intensity. As the players were leaving, an Akira type explosion destroyed Waterdeep and everything within a 5 mile radius.
Where waterdeep used to be can be seen from space.
Waterdeep is really useful to me now. Anytime I want some piece of knowledge or item to be unretrievable I say something like, "It was last seen in Waterdeep" or "That was kept at X place in Waterdeep."
If a new Waterdeep product is put out that sorts out most of the problems then cool. I'm not likely to buy it, because my Realms moves forward. Every game that that I've run has occurred in the same Realms over these past 8 years, and Waterdeep is kinda blown up now. If there is a new Waterdeep product that is really awesome and it sparked my imagination then it would not be inconceivable that a Waterdeep from a parallel Faerun though crazy wacky magical kablooyness gets transported to my realms. That would be really interesting considering it would be next to an Orc nation.
The Waterdeep book is now a paperweight in my house. I keep in around so I can brake it out should I fall into a discussion about Waterdeep. It's useless to me except for that purpose. In order to make use of the place and have that part of my campaign world make sense I had to blow it up so that it's a smoking hole. That's how useless the product was to me and that's why I put it at the top of my list of Worst FR Accessories from 3.0 & 3.5.
- kelcimer
Interesting to note, back two GenCons ago at the Secrets of the Realms seminar, WotC representatives asked if fans in the room would be willing to purchase a book on Waterdeep on the scale of Monte Cook's Ptolus: City by the Spire (a 672 page hardcover with posters, handouts, the works detailing a massive city as a self-contained setting on its own right). Those who were present reported many hands raised in interest. There is a desire for more information (perhaps something that can live up to what CoS:W claimed to be). Whether this is a small subsection of fans or not is debatable of course, but this level of detail worked before, not just for FR.
Still, I don't quite get why you seem so thoroughly annoyed by a fictional city. It is very much the same reaction I see from some poster against this or that NPC. Perhaps you begrudge that Waterdeep takes attention away from other places. Though I ask you, given the format of the current books (and the current design mentality), is that such a terrible thing that WotC doesn't directly interject their hands on places you game in?
If WotC covered Raven's Bluff today using their current format, you most likely would not like that book as much as the old ones either.
I agree with you. Just in terms of loosing word count, inserting more and larger pictures, and sacrificing pages for crunch. It would already be a vastly inferior product before finding out what changes or lack thereof they made.
Still, I don't quite get why you seem so thoroughly annoyed by a fictional city. It is very much the same reaction I see from some poster against this or that NPC. Perhaps you begrudge that Waterdeep takes attention away from other places. Though I ask you, given the format of the current books (and the current design mentality), is that such a terrible thing that WotC doesn't directly interject their hands on places you game in?
I really don't mind places being fleshed out in canon product. Let WotC flesh out the setting to their hearts desire! As I said in the other thread, I bought a pregenerated campaign setting because I don't have the time to detail an entire setting. I pick out what I need and what excites me. The rest I discard. Half of running the realms is discarding what is not needed for the purpose of your game.
Be clear, though I have no use for the place as written, I am not a hater of Waterdeep. I do have distain for CoS:W because I was burned by the product. As I said, if a fabulous product on Waterdeep were to be released "it would not be inconceivable that a Waterdeep from a parallel Faerun though crazy wacky magical kablooyness gets transported to my realms".
capnvan
since you also complained about not having enough information about the area around Waterdeep
You are missing the point. Why should I have to go find a free download to find the information I need in order to make use of a book that a paid cash for? I expected the information I needed to be in the book billed as the be-all end-all source about Waterdeep because it was billed as the be-all end-all source about Waterdeep. If the writers couldn't be bothered to include primary material in the core product then why should I believe that they would provide that information elsewhere?
As it is, it is a moot issue. Waterdeep blew up in 1375 DR and my game is into 1382 DR. I accepted that Waterdeep was a factor in the region. Without it there anymore, there was nothing to prevent Obauld sweeping south to Daggerford. Dispite being blown up, a great many people excaped Waterdeep. Some went to Neverwinter, the lone city still standing in the north. Many people dispersed inland. A great many moved south along the coast, with a great deal settling in Baldur's Gate. Baldur's Gate has taken on assorted roles that Waterdeep fills in other people's campaign settings. It is the most important city on the coast. A shadow on the horizon is that obauld is expected by many to move south again after consolodating his kingdom.
If something irks me in that book it is the extensive way of describing the PrC in there. Space, which could have been used for more fluff.Worst? Hardly! There is far more unnecessary stuff out there, e.g. the 3E Psionics HB.
Though I ask you, given the format of the current books (and the current design mentality), is that such a terrible thing that WotC doesn't directly interject their hands on places you game in?
Good question--for example, you (the OP) could just make up your own information about that Griffon Leader you mentioned.
But overall, I definitely enjoyed reading the topic post.
I've never had the displeasure of reading the the 3E Psionics HB and I'll conceed you have a powerful argument by virtue of the fact that it includes the word Psionics in the same sentence as D&D. Perhaps I should put in the disclaimer that CoS:W is the Worst Accessory that I've experienced?
Rinonalyrna Fathomlin,
Glad you enjoyed.
Fleshing out a Griffon Leader is one thing. Fleshing out an entire book is another. What is the point of buying a book if I then have to rewrite it?
As for the worst product.... Have you seen Mysteries of the Moonsea's? For me, it's the fact that they tried to pawn it off as a regional source book, instead of just a collection of pre-made adventures.
If you're happy with 3.0+ then you're happy with 3.0+.
For all I know it might be just as annoying going back as going forward.
I want to say that I took a gander at Mysteries of the Moonsea the year it came out. I wasn't planning on going there with my game, but it's an area I'm somewhat interested in. If I hadn't had the Ruins of Zhentil Keep box set in my possession I'd have probably picked it up on general interest. As it was I had Ruins of Zhentil Keep, an inclination to get the use out products I already have, and I seem to recall noting that a significant space in the book was taken up by an adventure.
As a DM, I loved the fact that it gave me so many hooks to explore, and mini-quests. Although it was set-up like one of those super-modules, you needn't follow it in any order, like you do with those. I have the earlier product on the region, so for me, all I really needed was some updates, and lots of stuff to do there, which that book DID in fact provide.
I would have just liked a little more regional information to round it out. Perhaps if I didn't have the expectations as so many of you did for a purely regional book, I would have been upset as well, but as is, I found the tome rather useful (if a little light).
Personally, I don't think 160 pages could do ANY region justice, be it Waterdeep, the Moonsea, or the Vilhon Reach. If they INSIST on giving us these less-then-adequate page counts, then the least they could do is refine the books a bit more.
How about 120 pg, $19.99 Softcovers for EACH country? Like they did in Mystara - that was awesome. Thay, Aglarond, Rashemen - all could have had their own books, with plenty of detail, and WotC would have made MORE money that way in the long run. Some places, like Vaasa and Damara, could have been lumped together, while others, like Waterdeep, could have been further split-up (the way Raven's Bluff was). I would rather have greater detail on a smaller geographic local, then very basic info on a large area (info I already mostly know from the FRCS).
One softcover sourcebook per nation/political entity, like the way they did the 2e Cormyr book, would have worked wonders. This extremely generalized crap does nothing to excite my imagination, or give me jumping-off points for adventures. I would trade a page of Greenwood text for most of the 190 pg books that were done in 3e - I would get far more campaign-goodness from it.
Rinonalyrna Fathomlin,
Glad you enjoyed.
Fleshing out a Griffon Leader is one thing. Fleshing out an entire book is another. What is the point of buying a book if I then have to rewrite it?
That's a good point. I understand why you didn't like all the stat blocks--I agree with you that they take up space that could have been used for more interesting setting detail.
How about 120 pg, $19.99 Softcovers for EACH country? Like they did in Mystara - that was awesome. Thay, Aglarond, Rashemen - all could have had their own books, with plenty of detail, and WotC would have made MORE money that way in the long run. Some places, like Vaasa and Damara, could have been lumped together, while others, like Waterdeep, could have been further split-up (the way Raven's Bluff was). I would rather have greater detail on a smaller geographic local, then very basic info on a large area (info I already mostly know from the FRCS).
One softcover sourcebook per nation/political entity, like the way they did the 2e Cormyr book, would have worked wonders. This extremely generalized crap does nothing to excite my imagination, or give me jumping-off points for adventures. I would trade a page of Greenwood text for most of the 190 pg books that were done in 3e - I would get far more campaign-goodness from it.
-That'd be nice, but the softcover line "died" a while ago. That, and then there'd be even more people complaining about the fact that there are "too many sourcebooks".
-Hardcovers are so much easier to put on the bookshelf, too...;)
-That'd be nice, but the softcover line "died" a while ago. That, and then there'd be even more people complaining about the fact that there are "too many sourcebooks".
-Hardcovers are so much easier to put on the bookshelf, too...;)
Frankly, and this is targeted at WotC and not you LK, I loathe the hardcover trend. Sure, they're nice on a shelf, but they're incredibly expensive for the material you get. Seriously, from a gaming store... $29.95 for Shining South, which had very little additional material on Halruaa and surrounding areas.
Start to add up the multiple hardback sourcebooks that you usually buy, and it can jump to over $300 pretty darn quick. That's a significant amount of money for a game that's theoretically targeted at teenagers, particularly when most teens need money for other social activities as well. I really hate the hardcover trend.
Not to mention the fact that those expensive hardbacks all become outdated (and nearly useless) if you lose access to a gaming group - or if a company decides to update the game edition.
Frankly, and this is targeted at WotC and not you LK, I loathe the hardcover trend. Sure, they're nice on a shelf, but they're incredibly expensive for the material you get. Seriously, from a gaming store... $29.95 for Shining South, which had very little additional material on Halruaa and surrounding areas.
-I completely understand, and agree. They are heavy, as well.
-That said, I'd still prefer hardcovers, for the aestetic appeal. Even though the 2e "boxes" had plenty of information in them- a lot more than a hardcover book ever could- I just never liked the softcover format. Too flimsy.
Given the choice, I prefer softcover myself. True that hardcover looks better and is much easier on the shelf, I'd rather have substance over an aesthetic (preferably both really) when it came to gaming books.
-Even though the majority of the information in 3e sourcebooks is already in 2e sourcebooks?
...and quite a bit of it could use some dusting off and updating regardless.
-I agree, but, admittedly, this hasn't happened too, too much. I mean, look at Faiths and Pantheons, for instance.
Not to mention the fact that those expensive hardbacks all become outdated (and nearly useless) if you lose access to a gaming group - or if a company decides to update the game edition.
Sometimes they become outdated very quickly, such as if a novel comes out that "updates" the area. In fact, I think Mysteries of the Moonsea was notorious for being "dated" pretty much right when it came out, because of the upheaval in Hillsfar in the Last Mythal trilogy.