Tell me about: Kingdoms of Kalamar

[Firechanter]

I have the chance to snatch an exhaustive collection of 3E Kalamar books, but I know nothing about the setting. Can you tell me about the highlights, positive and negative?
Is it rather high-, mid- or low magic, for instance?

[Gamer Girl]

It's a nice fantasy setting. As Ed Greenwood wrote a lot of it, it has tons and tons of fluff and detail.

It's fairly high magic, compared to Core D&D, but still less magic then FR.

[Firechanter]

Does it have stuff like warring religions and stuff, or in short, would it be suitable for a kind of "Crusade" setting?
What pantheon is used?
Cuz that's what I'm after for our upcoming campaign, and if I found something where I didn't have to make up everything on the fly, that would be a boon.

(When I homebrew a world, it usually ends up looking like Europe / Eurasia)

[Kylarra]

Kingdoms of Kalamar has the deliciously broken irresistible spell feat.

[Jerthanis]

I played a Kingdoms of Kalamar game once, and the setting really didn't leave much of an impression on me. It had a lot of fluff, but none of the fluff stood out as REALLY interesting. There were quite a few gods, and different regions worshipped them under different names and had different rituals praising them, which was cool but... I remember one of the gods was the god of getting a good night's sleep. Perhaps unique... but not that interesting.

A couple other unique things I remember was that Hobgoblins were closer to a legitimate nation interacting with its political neighbors than a monster subgroup, some human nation had basically conquered the primary dwarven nation and dwarves were a sort of slave culture, and different cultures of humans actually got various stat bonuses and penalties and had more languages than just "common, the language of Humans". I don't remember for sure if there wasn't a common tongue, or if it was supposed to be a simplistic merchant's tongue, good only for communicating simple concepts related to value... but inevitably this would break down to there just being a common language anyway because language barriers are just annoying in RPGs.

I wouldn't recommend it highly, but it wasn't abjectly awful either. It's good for a setting which is pretty close to generic fantasy, but has some degree of fleshed out politics to it, but without the backstory and baggage that comes with the bigger names like Faerun or Krynn.

Also, yeah, some of the feats were ridiculous. Irresistible spell is simply the most blatant offender (+4 levels, no save), but I remember others being gobsmackingly overpowered.

[faceroll]

I don't like the setting at all. It's stupidly grimdark, the creators have no grasp of mechanics, it's full of broken and poorly written mechanics, and is extraordinarily low-magic, despite not actually excluding anything magical (ninth level spells still exist, etc).

It's big selling point, according to them, is that deserts and oceans are in the right places, relative to each other. Cool, rain shadows! Glad you spent development time on that!

[Doc Roc]

I don't like the setting at all. It's stupidly grimdark, the creators have no grasp of mechanics, it's full of broken and poorly written mechanics, and is extraordinarily low-magic, despite not actually excluding anything magical (ninth level spells still exist, etc).

It's big selling point, according to them, is that deserts and oceans are in the right places, relative to each other. Cool, rain shadows! Glad you spent development time on that!

They do realize that rain shadows are dependent on prevailing winds and a few other significant factors, right? And aren't the only source of desertification?

[faceroll]

They do realize that rain shadows are dependent on prevailing winds and a few other significant factors, right? And aren't the only source of desertification?

Considering that "realistic geography" was their selling point, I sure hope so.

[nyjastul69]

It's a nice fantasy setting. As Ed Greenwood wrote a lot of it, it has tons and tons of fluff and detail.

To my knowledge Ed Greenwood only wrote the Geanavue: Stones of Peace supplement.

I'm a big fan of KoK and own almost all of Kenzerco's D&D products. I've run 2 long term (1.5 yrs+) campaigns in this setting.

I find it to be a mid-fanatasy setting. Similar to Greyhawk in that fashion. Many others call it low-fantasy, but I disagree with that assertion. I've never heard it refered to as high-fantasy, as FR is generally considered.

I've found KoK products to be amongst the best 3rd party products availabe. From both a balance perspective and physical product perspective. Kenzerco is also a very fan friendly company.

The core setting itself is almost all fluff, it has the barest minimum of crunch, only enough to qualify for the d20 stl. It's usable for any fantasy system.

Kenzerco, because they were officially licensed, had to submit all of their products to WotC before publication for a vetting a process. Take that for what it's worth.

As with all products by all companies some wonkiness exists. The wonkiest things I can recall off-hand are the anti-feats in the Villian design Handbook. On the flip-side, Salt & Seadogs is arguably the best D&D product I've ever purchased, and I own hundreds of them.

I highly recommend purchasing these products. If you don't want to, please contact me by PM. I may want to purchase them from you, or from whomever you're going to purchase them.

Are these 'on the cheap' items, or are they cover/premium prices?

As always YMMV.

[Amphetryon]

To be fair, I think the anti-feats predate WotC introducing flaws, so they were a (sometimes amusing) precursor to a similar design idea.

[Blackhawk748]

KoK is gotta be my favorite setting, ive got all the updated 3.5 material and its quite nice, i love all the info i get in the campaign guide and the goods a gear book has a lot of useful items, theres just a lack of mage prestige classes that interest me.

Anything bad this setting has is balanced out, at least for me, by the fact that Hobgoblins have the empires and not orcs which makes so much more sense to me

[Za'hynie Laya]

I have very few of their books, but I do have the KoK DM Shield. By far this product is the best 3.5 DM screen I own. (I have 11 different 3.x screens.) I don't care for the cover art, but the charts and list on the DM's side of the screen are outstanding. Somebody at Kenzer Co really hates looking up charts out of the core rulebooks. It's all there. They placed random matrixes for NPC names, tavern names, and also a pizza matrix for your players' favorite pizza toppings. :thog: