OSSR: The Divine and the Defeated

[angelfromanotherpin]

The Scarred Lands setting was White Wolf's foray into the OGL, and it debuted the year before Exalted came out to try to kill D&D hard and rolled a fumble.

The big problem with the Scarred Lands was that there was no player's guide. Think about that, about what that means. From my perspective, what it meant is that if someone browsed through a Scarred Lands book and was intrigued, it was anyone's guess what the next step was supposed to be. If they wanted a proper introduction to the setting, there was no product for that. The Scarred Lands didn't need an alternate PHB like Arcana Evolved put out, but it totally needed something to lay out what the whole deal was in one place, ideally well-organized and in plain English. But White Wolf.

In 2000, the only Scarred Lands product was the Creature Collection, which had some interesting ideas and very little mechanical rigor.

In 2001, six more Scarred Lands products were released. The Creature Collection 2 was another monster book. Mithril: City of the Golem was a city sourcebook that you might have cared about if it didn't have serious editing and layout problems. Relics and Rituals was a spells and magic items book that had very little mechanical rigor and ensured you were even more of a sucker for not playing a druid. The Serpent Amphora was an introductory adventure that didn't understand how CR worked. The Ghelspad Gazetteer...

The Ghelspad Gazetteer was the closest thing to a general guide that you got. You got some of the myth, and some of the history, and a decent picture of what the region looked like now in terms of nations and organizations. What you didn't get was focus on characters. Some of the races and classes in this setting come with an entirely different set of baggage than you were familiar with, and this booklet (48 pages) was no help with that. The Ghelspad Gazetteer was very interested in Ghelspad, and not at all interested in you or your character. That's not unreasonable for a gazetteer, but it does mean it can't stand in for a proper setting guide.

There was a lot of setting material in all of these books, and some of it was pretty cool, but you were cobbling together an understanding of the setting from notes distributed across and throughout second- and third-tier products. Products that did not have indexes. It was bullshit.

Now, it seems that an actual proper setting guide came out in 2002. I've never read it, because by then it had been over a year and it was clear that the whole thing was a total shit show and I had moved on. I will say that just looking at reviews, it seems like Scarred Lands Campaign Setting: Ghelspad might not actually be a proper setting guide, just a longer hardcover version of the gazetteer, and I can totally believe that White Wolf would fuck up that hard.

The sixth book that came out for the Scarred Lands in 2001 was The Divine and the Defeated, which is the book I'm going to delve into.


Cover... art? I know both words, but...

Look at that subtitle: 'A sourcebook of Deities and Demi-gods,' they could not be trying harder.

Like most of the Scarred Lands stuff, there's good and bad in this book, and the bad vastly outweighs the good. The most obvious flaw is that they waste an enormous amount of space statting up godly 'avatars' that have very big numbers and no conceivable use besides MC masturbation. They're also really bad for the setting because they are so absurdly powerful that it's not even plausible that the Scarred Lands are still a shithole unless they want it that way. I'll get into that more, next post.

[hogarth]

In 2000, the only Scarred Lands product was the Creature Collection, which had some interesting ideas and very little mechanical rigor.

In 2001, six more Scarred Lands products were released. The Creature Collection 2 was another monster book. Mithril: City of the Golem was a city sourcebook [..] Relics and Rituals was a spells and magic items book [..] The Serpent Amphora was an introductory adventure [..]

Some of the races and classes in this setting come with an entirely different set of baggage than you were familiar with, and this booklet (48 pages) was no help with that.

Okay, I'll bite -- which of the above products introduced the races and classes with "baggage"?

[angelfromanotherpin]

Okay, I'll bite -- which of the above products introduced the races and classes with "baggage"?

That depends on how you look at things. My preferred answer is 'none of the above,' because a proper introduction to all of that was exactly what was missing. But almost all of the products included something in that vein, even if it was only sidelong.

Let's take the Creature Collection. One of the entries is Elf, Forsaken, and describes a particular regional variant of elf that lost their patron demi-god and much of their fertility and extended lifespan during the Titanomachy. Forsaken elves kidnap human children and raise them as breeder-slaves in an attempt to use human-elf interfertility to restore their subrace's population growth (why there was a shortage of human volunteers for elf-sexing is not addressed). As a result, 95% of all half-elves have Forsaken Elf parentage, and are caught up in an ongoing kidnap-rape controversy between the two peoples.

So if you wanted to play a Half-Elf in the Scarred Lands, there's a lot of setting-specific shit associated with you that's tucked away in an entry in the monster book. Also, if you wanted to play an Elf, there's a big racial-relations shitstorm you should probably be aware of, because there are parts of the setting where it could get you lynched. But if you were getting into Scarred Lands out of the setting product with a map and shit, you didn't know any of that.

On the other (class-related) hand, Relics and Rituals tells you that Druids are followers of the Titans (who lost a setting-defining war and Are Hitler in the pubic consciousness) and even the Druids who follow the one nice Titan face prejudice for that. It also mentions that arcane magic is mistrusted because it seems to be the power of one of the Titans and might be reviving him, and also that it generates a lot of waste heat so that most arcane casters dress like Vallejo characters and take double ASF. I think both of those are mentioned in passing in other materials, but that the actual rules for arcane heat and associated cold resistance are only in R&R.

And so on.

[hogarth]

So if you wanted to play a Half-Elf in the Scarred Lands, there's a lot of setting-specific shit associated with you that's tucked away in an entry in the monster book. Also, if you wanted to play an Elf, there's a big racial-relations shitstorm you should probably be aware of, because there are parts of the setting where it could get you lynched. But if you were getting into Scarred Lands out of the setting product with a map and shit, you didn't know any of that.

But I thought you said there wasn't any setting product, let alone "the" setting product. Or are you talking about "Mithril: City of the Golem"?

[angelfromanotherpin]

But I thought you said there wasn't any setting product, let alone "the" setting product. Or are you talking about "Mithril: City of the Golem"?

In a sense they were all setting products, although I was referring to the only one with an overland map and a rundown of the various nations (Ghelspad Gazetteer). What was missing was a setting guide for players, to lay out all the setting-specific assumptions (and rules) about the races and classes in one place so you could make informed decisions without having to jigsaw-puzzle it together from every product in the line, especially since the average number of indices in those products was zero.

[amethal]

It also mentions that arcane magic is mistrusted because it seems to be the power of one of the Titans and might be reviving him, and also that it generates a lot of waste heat so that most arcane casters dress like Vallejo characters and take double ASF. I think both of those are mentioned in passing in other materials, but that the actual rules for arcane heat and associated cold resistance are only in R&R.

The waste heat thing is mentioned in the Players Guide to Wizards, Bards and Sorcerers. If there was a book to have all the class related stuff in the same place, that would be it. Whether it does or not I couldn't say, because I stopped reading at that point.

[hogarth]

I certainly agree that it's annoying to have setting information presented in random books in random order.

For instance, the Pathfinder Core Rulebook states that Erastil is the Lawful Good god of community and family and then some random other book explains that he's actually the god of "women should be kept barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen" (or whatever).

[Antariuk]

Oh, Scarred Lands! Consider me hooked.

A few years ago I had a brief interest in the setting because I bought three Player's Guides (Clerics and Druids, Fighters and Barbarians and Wizards, Bards and Sorcerers) for next to nothing. They were somewhat interesting, but also super confusing, and I couldn't find a setting book for reasonable price so I moved on.

I am now looking at those three books and from the OGL entry, they must have been released in 2003. Seems that Scarred Lands would really have benefited from a Line Manager...

[talozin]

This book is sort of the Scarred Lands in a nutshell: excellent production values, nice graphic design, and some clever ideas ultimately let down by an at least equal share of terrible ideas, plus the fact that no one on the design team seems to have had a clue how to actually play the game.

I keep four or five of their hardbacks on my bookshelf anyway, because they're pretty to look at and some of the ideas are worth stealing. But realistically speaking, that's a pretty crap return on $125+ of investment.

[Creighton]

Talozin, I believe that White Wolf published theses really really early in 3.0's life. Like so early that their Creature Collection came out before the Monster Manual. So they probably actually didn't know how to play the game.

[angelfromanotherpin]

AFAICT, the 3.0 MM is 8 days older than the Creature Collection, but they were clearly in production concurrently. I would not be at all surprised if WW were trying to corner the D&D audience by establishing the Scarred Lands as the default setting for 3e before any Forgotten Realms or whatever support could be published. It would explain a lot about their weird production schedule if the actual procedure was handing out assignments and publishing them in whatever order they happened to get finished in, just to be on the shelves before anyone else.

[angelfromanotherpin]

0: Before Chapter One

This book has ten authors, helpfully listed next to the gods and titans they wrote up, two editors, and then also two producers and a developer, and I don't know what those last two titles mean on an RPG book.

There's a page given over to the developer's preface, which I kind of want to quote in its entirety. I'm going to restrict myself to two passages. The first one is about how to include the gods in your game:

Although the gods of the Scarred Lands combine some of the worst features of the Greek pantheon with the ability to have real, physical effects on the world, this book helps you tame them and keep them in their rightful place – as ever-present observers, objects of worship, and, in extreme cases, deadly enemies or powerful allies. But for all their importance, the gods should not be at the center of your game – that spot is reserved for your group's Player Characters (PCs).

That second sentence is a nice sentiment, let's see how it works out. The first sentence is just bizarre. If you wanted gods who were mostly behind-the-scenes creepers, why would you write them as narcissistic jackwagons who can rearrange the landscape? This book seems to be addressing a conflict that only exists because nobody in design bothered to think about whether the setting elements that they were writing were compatible with the tabletop experience they wanted to produce. It's baffling.

The second passage is about the goals of the book:

How does one create comprehensible gaming statistics for the nearly omnipotent beings? How can characters interact with them? How are they worshipped, and why do they bother with the affairs of mortals? What gifts and spells do they grant their worshippers? All of these things are, hopefully, answered in the pages of this volume.

Not addressed: why this preface is written in British English. As for the ones they do bring up, it's nice that they set some benchmarks we can see if they succeeded in meeting.

Page four of this book is the word 'Introduction' in giant type on a background graphic, like it's introducing a full chapter. That chapter is one page long because the title page for Chapter 1 is page six. It's weird.

Page five is an intro to the book's material written from an in-setting perspective by a priest, telling you that a lot of the following material is written from a different in-setting perspective, that of a hired sage. The whole thing is a waste of space because the priest doesn't have a particularly distinct perspective and all the relevant information in his statement is repeated elsewhere. The only thing it does is set up the occasional comments he scrawls on the sage's work, mostly complaining about how annoying the sage is, and I'm right there with him. That punchline almost makes the setup worthwhile. Almost.

Next up: History!

[Voss]

How does one create comprehensible gaming statistics for the nearly omnipotent beings? How can characters interact with them? How are they worshipped, and why do they bother with the affairs of mortals? What gifts and spells do they grant their worshippers? All of these things are, hopefully, answered in the pages of this volume.

Spoilers:

1- Sadly, same as ever. Giant penis-extension stat-blocks.

2- Obey or be squished. Or be jerked around like toys (see next)

3- Abjectly. They bother because mortals are literally designed as toys and playthings, and they collectively decided to steal all the toys from their insane parents, before the playroom got set on fire and rebuilt from scratch.

4- Eh. A pile of shit with a few pieces of 'what are you smoking?' from what I recall.

5- Oh, yeah. They're bad answers, but there certainly are a lot of pages wasted on them.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Chapter One: History

From an ungenerous perspective, almost this entire chapter is wasted space. All of the described action took place at least 150 years ago and is basically irrelevant to any actual game. The level of detail isn't even high enough to let you know where any of the major events happened so you could ad-lib ongoing consequences for them. But even from a less-strict view, this chapter wastes a lot of its space.

Including the title page, this chapter is 12 pages long. 1.5 of those pages are devoted to a brief overview of each of the gods – about twice as long as the mini-intros you got in other products and also completely redundant with the extended treatment each of them gets in the next chapter. Also, three pages get spent on speculation regarding which of the various gods and titans made which entries in the Monster Manual (and Creature Collection). Seriously, it's just the in-setting sage guessing most of the time.

The only tidbit that's actually worthwhile in all that is a couple of lines about how the PC races were made by the titans. See, there's a whole setting conceit about the distinction between the 'divine races' and the 'titanspawn,' where supposedly the gods made all the good guys, and the titans made all the baddies, but it turns out that's mostly propaganda and the labels have a lot more to do with which side of the God vs Titan war your tribe was on. That's part's actually pretty cool, putting a layer of messy politics just under the morally reductive narrative.

Anyway, the history may not be very useful, but it's cool enough. The only thing I'll mention is that the lack of understanding of how CR worked is right here in the fiction, where armies of tiny mortals are supposed to be something that might conceivably threaten a Titan, and if the one surviving Titan's stats are anything to go by, they totally would not be (she has DR 50/+5, for fuck's sake). It's not like this concept was new to 3e, either, magic weapon or GTFO goes back pretty far in D&D.

Next up, the gods.

[Omegonthesane]

The only thing I'll mention is that the lack of understanding of how CR worked is right here in the fiction, where armies of tiny mortals are supposed to be something that might conceivably threaten a Titan, and if the one surviving Titan's stats are anything to go by, they totally would not be (she has DR 50/+5, for fuck's sake). It's not like this concept was new to 3e, either, magic weapon or GTFO goes back pretty far in D&D.

While I have less than no faith that White Wolf intended this, maybe DR "fuck you" / +5 is why it's the one surviving Titan.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I think distinguishing the titans by having them work off a very different mechanical chassis than the gods would have been interesting. Something like DR 5/- and a million hit points would have made them vaguely vulnerable to mortal armies and still a job of work for the gods to chop them into burger. But the place to showcase that would have been in Denev's stat block, and she's built more-or-less exactly the same as the gods.

[hyzmarca]

Anyway, the history may not be very useful, but it's cool enough. The only thing I'll mention is that the lack of understanding of how CR worked is right here in the fiction, where armies of tiny mortals are supposed to be something that might conceivably threaten a Titan, and if the one surviving Titan's stats are anything to go by, they totally would not be (she has DR 50/+5, for fuck's sake). It's not like this concept was new to 3e, either, magic weapon or GTFO goes back pretty far in D&D.

Next up, the gods.

That depends on how your mass combat rules work and interact with giant monsters. If being hack at by a formation of 50 little guys counts as a single attack with 50 times the damage, that would work. I would also work if having 50 guys in your formation counts as having a +5 bonus on your weapon.

[angelfromanotherpin]

That depends on how your mass combat rules work and interact with giant monsters. If being hack at by a formation of 50 little guys counts as a single attack with 50 times the damage, that would work. I would also work if having 50 guys in your formation counts as having a +5 bonus on your weapon.

...What's your point? I'm not critiquing their understanding of how the system works based on mass combat rules that have never existed in any edition of D&D that I'm aware of (and that would lead to 5e-style adventurer obsolesence). That would be weird. The game had actual rules, their backstory was egregiously and obviously counter to those rules, the end.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Something I just noticed is that the table of contents numbers the Introduction as 1 (well, I), the History chapter as 2 (II), and so on, but the actual chapters use the numbers I'm using. It's a small thing, but it's just amateurish. Anyway...

Chapter Two: The Divine

The Scarred Lands has eight major gods, one for each of the alignments except Neutral (that slot is filled by Denev, who is a Titan). I think they missed a huge opportunity to redefine the alignments as the religious creeds of the respective gods. Although given that there are no religious creeds of any kind in the book, I guess that wasn't a thing they were interested in.

It boggles my mind that the book has page after page of ridicu-stats, but no gorram elucidation of what the worshipers of a god actually believe in. The former are somewhere between bad jokes and masturbation, and the latter is supposed to inform every PC (and most NPCs) in the game. I can't believe I'm reading a White Wolf product and demanding a higher fluff-to-crunch ratio, but here I am. It's not even like Mr. Lawful Good asks his followers to be generically LG, because he'll take NG and LN people as well.

Instead, the gods just seem to be [Ethical] [Moral] like everybody else, which is to say: incoherently. For example, Madriel is the Neutral Good goddess, and her whole thing is mercy, compassion, pacifism, and so on. And yet the one religious order she has sanctioned is described thus: 'To the order, the ends truly do justify the means. They do anything within their power to strengthen the people's opinion of Madriel.' Seriously, the extra-hippy NG goddess only put her official stamp on one organization, and it's an amoral propaganda operation.

There's are similar incoherences in the gods' relations with each other. See, because they represent almost the entire alignment spectrum, many of them don't get along. To avoid the possibility of destroying each other, they have all 'sworn' to not confront each other directly, and contest each other through proxies. Which is a decent setup, if 3/8 of the signatories weren't Chaotic and therefore not reliable. Also, the LG god is also a paladin, and I think it's very strange for such a person to stand aside for the sake of his own safety while thousands die fighting in his place.


Anyway, time to gripe about CR some more. The text tells us that the eight major gods are supposed to be 'equally powerful.' That appears to be bullshit. Each of the gods has an Avatar, which seems to be like an astral projection without the silver cord vulnerability. The highest listed CR for a major god's avatar is forty-motherfucking-three, and the lowest is twenty-frickin'-five. Now, both those numbers are in incoherent crazy land anyway, and I don't believe they managed to put together stats that reflect them, but by their own claims, Hedrada is supposed to be literally over five hundred times more powerful than Tanil.


I'm not close to done with this chapter, next up I'm going to delve into one of these full writeups and look at the madness close-up.