When I first saw gazetters I was frustrated as all heck with them. They to me seemed like unplayable nonsense. “In this part of Eberron the hobbits ride dinosaurs” gee thanks! Where is the game! That’s how I felt.
I was overwhelmed. I didn’t wanna learn a bunch of stuff before we could even get going. That’s why I loved wainscot settings like Feng Shui or World of Darkness; you could just start playing because it was basically a world similar to ours. And that’s one of the reasons we got into Magic, because you learn the setting card by card, no need to study beforehand.
And then when the OSR came around with it’s table-driven city books and its location-specific bottom-up campaign books like the Trilemma Adventures compendium, I was in heaven!
But…
…and now you’re getting hot-off-the-presses insight here because this is something I’ve only recently been realizing.
We’ve been playing the aforementioned Trilemma Adventures and it has a li’l history section in the back with the very most super important background info also summarized in the front. Works great. But…
There were no info about what types of being lived there, so I was like “guys, roll up humans” only for us to then later run into a bunch of all kinds of fun creatures like gnomes, automatons, orcs, half-demons, martoi wraiths etc that are playable. We’re used to that, our (maybe a bit videogamey) word for it is “unlocked”, as in “OK from now on you can play an automaton! Use the ‘warforged’ stats for it!”. That’s fine but the initial offerings were a bit too limited because of this setup
Stuff outright contradicts itself! Like, I needed a calendar so I generated one with some online app and ended up with a ten month calendar but then in some of the adventures it turns that nope, the winter is three months out of twelve. Nothing that can’t be hacked—now it’s canon that our Tristhmus has ten months so that adventure site’s dates now is hacked to be three months out of ten. A minor issue, don’t worry—but it goes to show that a good index or a good way to find info can be golden!
I still overall prefer the bottom-up, location-first approach but I’m coming around to how gazetteers can be great!