I really thought I was going to hate Poor Wizard’s Almanac and Book of Facts. It is, after all, a support book for the campaign portion of Wrath of the Immortals, which I don’t really like. It also doesn’t feel like an enthusiastic TSR product at a glance — it is digest sized, for one (maybe the first time TSR returned to that sizing since the original D&D?). And that’s Forgotten Realms’ Wulfgar on the cover there for another. I really hate it when TSR recycled art of identifiable characters like this. And yet, I really dig it!

The bulk of the book is given over to establishing the new status quo in the wake of the Immortals campaign. This is the least satisfying part of the book — though the info is necessary, it just doesn’t have the space to rise to the level of the Gazeteers series (or even the Princess Ark articles in Dragon Magazine). This stuff isn’t bad, it just isn’t awesome, and it takes up two thirds of the book.

The final third, though, is the good stuff. It’s a day by day chronicle of every noteworthy event in the Known World following the conclusion of the Wrath of the Immortals campaign. Each event has a synopsis followed by notes on what the players, if they’re in the area, can do about it. So on one level, it is just a massive list of adventure seeds (though, using the gazetteer information in the first part goes a long way toward fleshing them out), but it also turns the proceedings into a sort of (but not quite) living campaign world (the Great Pendragon Campaign does something similar). It reminds me a lot of the news dispatches in each issue of the Journal of the Travellers Aid Society, pushing events of the war Traveller’s Spinward Marches forward, in real time, every three months.

There are two more of these, the third of which makes the transition from Challenger to the AD&D Mystara campaign setting. I need to snag them.