Evil Hat Productions Karthun Lands of Conflict Role Playing Supplement Board Game

A very in depth and lovingly crafted world perfect for anyones rpg table.

Karthun is a complete system-neutral setting for any fantasy roleplaying game. It includes a detailed mythical history of the continent of Karthun, a pantheon of Karthun's gods and goddesses, a gazetteer of Karthun's major regions and cities, a listing of the continent's most important factions, brief biographies of many leading or prominent citizens, and an impressively-detailed fold-out map inside its back cover. The book is well-written and beautifully illustrated in a sort of vivid comic-book style. The setting presented here is a unique, richly detailed, complete game world, ready and waiting to be inhabited by your player characters.And that's sort of the problem with Karthun. Did I mention that this book is system-neutral? With such a unique setting-- a place where wizardry and magic are the result of humans bonding with elemental spirits, a land where each elven tribe's personalities and powers wax and wane with one of Karthun's three moons, and a world plagued by a growing epidemic of sentient oozes, able to mind-control an ever-increasing number of infected humans-- it's hard to jump right into Karthun and utilize every aspect of this rich setting without some sort of rules structure in place to support these story elements. While, yes, experienced GM's should be able to come up with house rules for elementally-bonded wizard magic, for example, having to come up with these rules yourself more or less undercuts the value of Karthun as a fully-realized, ready-to-run game world. If I'm going to spend the time and do the work to come up with my own rules systems to support story elements like this, I'm going to invest that effort into developing my own story elements, and not something that somebody else has created.So Karthun isn't really something that you can jump right into, as written, which is a shame, because it's really a nice fantasy roleplaying setting. I like it a lot.I understand that a series of Gamemaster's Guides for Karthun are being written with rules for D&D 5e, Fate Core, Savage Worlds, and a few other systems, and if these guides are ever published, they'll make Karthun a much better resource for GMs. As things stand, though, I absolutely love the look and feel of Karthun, but don't really see myself using it as a game setting anytime soon.

Karthun Lands of Conflict is an excellent addition to anyone's RPG library. The lore is deep and compelling, the artwork is absolutely mesmerizing. This book will work for anyone interested in delving into some amazing worldcraft, it earns its 5 stars merely for that, but for those who want to actually run a game in this world you will need a system as a backbone. By all appearances 5th Edition D&D will work nicely but any edition of D&D would as well. The details for characters and such look to cover the basics of what anyone would need for other systems as well. This book would make for a very worthy skin to most any system. I can't wait to actually try this setting out!