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05/06/2024 2:19 PM

I finished reading Magical Industrial Revolution last night. Reading the play reports and GM prep posts that Skerples has up on his blog convinced me to get the book. I think without those posts, I think I'd have a lot of trouble figuring out how to get it to the table, or even how to run it. It's not a must-have like his Monster Overhaul, but it's good. It doesn't capture the imagination as much as Into the Cess & Citadel (the other big, system agnostic, city setting I'm familiar with) because it's much less fanciful. C&C is "how to make a wacky, horrifying city sandbox to play in." MIR is an established city setting undergoing huge changes that the PCs will interact with.

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05/06/2024 3:29 PM

On a scale of 1-10 how much effort would you say has to be put in for it to feel like something you’d use? And is it very specific or very general?

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05/06/2024 5:35 PM

That's a surprisingly hard question.
It's a fairly specific setting but the pieces are modular. There's a map with the major landmarks. There are specific factions and NPCs that may be involved with them. Minor info about politics, the legal system and economics. The are eight magical innovation tracks with 6 stages each and accompanying info on the disruptions they'll cause. Lots of setting specific magic, economics around spells and items and tables for breeding and mutating spells.
If you're just using the city as a backdrop for an urban adventure, there's lots of stuff to draw on. If MIR is the adventure, it's got everything you need to run the city through many seasons/years. But it seems like a lot to track. Definitely a campaign - not a one-shot. I definitely seems more daunting than running a dungeon, but it's probably not too much more than a hexcrawl, if you're taking notes and using the checklist in the back of the book between each session.