[thurgon]

Just adding my voice to those who were disappointed with this review.

It says little about the product, draws no useful comparisons to other products (the reference to R&C just introduces more tendentiousness), and appears to me to show little insight into what the product might have to offer.

As someone who skipped R&C but bought W&M, I believe that the latter has a lot of very interesting things to say about the design of a campaign world for heroic fantasy roleplaying. In particular, it explains quite clearly (if never quite as expressly as it might) the various metagame functions of the default Points of Light setting for 4e D&D, and also the metagame logic of monster rebuilding. This shows that the D&D designers are paying a degree of attention to the connection between the gameworld and the play of the game that has been missing in earlier editions.

Whether W&M is worth the pricetag is for each individual to judge. But I believe it signals a new approach to world design for D&D, and has a lot to offer players and GMs of other mainstream fantasy RPGs.