Shadow World Master Atlas

by Terry K. Amthor

The Third Edition Shadow World Master Atlas This completely revised atlas
• Expanded Plants, Beasts, & Demons sections
• Greatly enlarged Races Section
• 30 pages detailing the inhabitants of the western hemisphere, continent by continent with keyed locations, including the poles and new information about the East
• Vocabulary for Iruaric, Loari, Kugor and Erlin
• Descriptions of Good & Evil gods
• Profiles of important Loremasters and Navigators
• Newly updated timeline
• Massive Index
• New rendered illustrations
• Color western hemisphere map (bound-in)

Genres: Gaming

Spiral-bound

First published September 1, 1990

Reviews

[C. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Advertised as ne of the best, most detailed fantasy-worlds ever created, Shadow World largely lives up that boast. As a GM, I loved reading this and loved incorperating it into my campaigns, but I found that, as a setting, Shadow World was too detailed, too well-fleshed out to work in an actual game. There were so many cultures, so much history that players felt overwhelmed - one of the biggest challenges with gaming in a pre-made world is that players (unlike their characters), don't actually know the world, or the history, or the various cultures, and Shadow World, because of its level of depth, had a very steep learning curve. On a gaming level, the world was also very vicious, far to violent for entry level characters, as the monsters, artifacts, and traps were set impossibly high. Setting wise, the writer did very intersting things considering that the basic frame was basically a "formerly technologically advanced society that had fallen back into medieval fantasy times" (Pyrn, Shannara, etc.) premise, which I'm never been a huge fan of. Luckily its pretty easy to eschew the tech aspects of the game and just stick to the high-fantasy themes.