Since then it has made me feel very old.
This is the sort of supplement you want to get when you are a teenager and think your weekend is busy because you have two hockey games and six hours of homework. This is the sort of supplement that you really want to pour through for hours on end, reading snippets, looking up the cross-referenced entries finding them all the map, and letting the cool ideas flow through your head like a tide of dreams.
This is not the sort of supplement that you can make a lot out of during a ten minute bus ride to work, or even in half an hour between "Christmas open house" commitments. In short, despite the initial impression of being the perfect type of book to fit into an over-scheduled adult life, this is really a book custom made to awe and inspire the wide eyed kid I once was.
Aside from a few framing pages, the book consists of a huge number of entries, ordered alphetically. Sometimes related geographic features have similar names, such as a valley named after the river flowing through it. But very often they do not, or at least there are five other cool things in that immediate neighborhood that are alphabetically completely distinct, even though if you read them all you gain something of a holographic picture of the area.
The previous paragraph is a comment, not a complaint. Any other way of ordering the information would have been even more arbitrary, and would have required so much index checking that you would have had to laminate the back pages.
So, you can try reading through cover to cover, or you can look at the map and go area by area, or you can sample at random. I really think this is the sort of reference that you will pick up three years from now, and still find new bits that you hadn't quite absorbed until then. There is a tremendous amount of detail, but what is best is that only about half of the information is interpolated from what is already known, the remainder breaks new ground. So not only will this settle various detailed questions that you may have, it will help raise new questions--the sign of a good book!
Besides purely geographic subjects, the book tackles a number of realted topics, in text boses. These test boxes seem to be distributed roughly randomly, but do all seem to be worth reading.
I'm still far from grokking the whole book, but my impression so far is that is the sort of book HQ really needed, the sort of book that gives enough detail to let the communities creativity flower in Dragon pass that way that it has in Prax. I can't offer any sort of guaranty, but I have a really good feeling about this.
--Bryan
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