Review: Star Trek Adventures

Just last year, Star Trek celebrated its 50th anniversary, and this year is the 30th anniversary of Star Trek the Next Generation, likely close to the air date of Star Trek Discovery. It’s certainly a good time for a new Trek RPG. Such as Star Trek Adventues by Modiphius Entertainment.

Modiphius is a British game company known for Achtung! Cthulhu, Mutant Chronicles, and Conan. Previously, the company relied at least in part on Kickstarters, but is releasing Star Trek Adventures based on preorders rather than the Kickstarter platform. Star Trek Adventures was playtested over the course of the last 10 months in a public open beta, which included pregenerated characters and ships along with adventures.

What It Is

The hardcover core rulebook of Star Trek Adventures is a 364-page full colour book with drawn colour illustrations and no photographic art.

The book begins with an 11 page description of the Federation and local galaxy followed by 30 pages of “history”, split into early history, 23rd Century (aka TOS era) and recent history. There’s a wealth of other flavour content in the book, including information on stars, space phenomena, and planets. There’s also rules and advice for running the game, building and managing combat, and creating NPCs. This is all you need to play and run the game.

Included in the book are eight species (Andorian, Bajoran, Betazoid, Denobulan, Human, Tellarite, Trill, and Vulcan), each of which has two species Talents, which are the mechanical special abilities characters can use. There are also 8 generic talents in the book and 4-5 for each department (command, conn, security, engineering, science, and medical). There are also rules for starship combat and creating your own starship using a number of provided  “space frames” aka classes of starship. There are nine starship classes provided: Akira, Constellation, Constitution, Defiant, Excelsior, Galaxy, Intrepid, Miranda, and Nova. There are also pages of alien adversaries, creatures and space monsters, information of planets and galactic phenomena, and more.

The book ends with the eight-page adventure, The Rescue at Xerxes IV, which is the same adventure that went out with playtest packets.

This review is based on the PDF as the physical book is due to ship in August/ September 2017.

Assorted Background Info

Science Fiction is arguably as popular as fantasy in terms of books and novelists. And yet sci-fi lags far, far behind fantasy in terms of RPGs. Science fantasy does much better. I’ve argued that one of the issues is having to explain the tech in addition to the rules and the setting: the players need to know what is and is not possible. One way around this hurdle is a licensed setting, such as Star Trek. Despite this – and being one of the holy trinity of geek franchises (along with Lord of the Rings and Star Wars) – Star Trek has never had a lot of lasting success in terms of RPGs. There were a couple small attempts in the late 70s and early ’80s before FASA‘s popular line set the bar, and that ran from1982 until the licence was cancelled in 1989, leaving several planned books unreleased. Last Unicorn Games‘ RPGs followed this in 1998-99, with three lines that each focused on an era: The Next Generation, The Original Series, and Deep Space 9. LUG lost the licence with over a dozen books planned and being worked on. LUG lost the licence to Decipher, who launched a franchise wide game that ran from 2002 to 2005 until Decipher shut down it’s RPG line, cancelling several planned books. Ominous…

Modiphius is following the “shotgun” release schedule of past Trek publishers, with lots of products in the works. In addition to the Core Rulebook, there are four sets of miniatures, tokens representing Threat and Momentum, a GM screen, three sets of dice, and deck tiles. Already in the works is These Are the Voyages Vol. 1, a collection of eight “missions”. Planned for the fall and next year are the Command Division Supplement, Beta Quadrant Sourcebook, Operations Division Supplement, Alpha Quadrant Sourcebook, Sciences Division Supplement, Gamma Quadrant Sourcebook, Delta Quadrant Sourcebook. And there is talk of era sourcebooks, with a The Original Series book planned and books for certain key races, such as one for the Klingons. Certain elements of the setting, such as time travel, and factions, such as Starfleet Intelligence, are going to be detailed in the above secondary sources.

Currently the core rulebooks is available with the “regular” cover and a “collector’s edition“ with spot UV (like the covers of all the 4th Edition D&D books) and ribbon bookmarks. There are also a wide variety of assorted bundles with both print and PDF options. The PDF is available now on DriveThruRPG. 

The Good

Right off the bat, the book looks great. The pages are a dark, dark navy blue (almost black) with white lettering, designed to resemble a LCARS display from The Next Generation era. Sidebars are delineated by TNG curved bars. Every page is unmistakably Star Trek. LUG’s Trek RGG did something similar, but in greyscale with white pages. Decipher also tried for the LCARS look, but the art there was distinctly early 2000s RPG and the layout a little busier. Here, the layout is a tad simpler, and art in is excellent. There’s some amazing pieces.

The white-on-black pages can be a little hard to read digitally, such as via a tablet. Thankfully, the PDF has both the regular dark background book but also a “printer friendly” version that’s white paged with black text (but retains the coloured bars and light sidebar text). The PDF has bookmarks, but the title page for each chapter has list of subchapters, which are hyperlinked. A neat little feature and pretty handy when navigating through the book. (Nitpick: a few links don’t go to the right place, but that’s easily fixed in an updated PDF.)

While focused on TNG eras, in theory the RPG allows for play at multiple points during the history of Starfleet. There are regular notes on how technology has changed over the years and the different types of story told during each era.

The book uses a neat little system. On the surface it seems pretty rules lite. You have a set of Attributes and Disciplines (read: Ability Scores and Skills) that you combine together to get a target number. Then you roll a couple d20s and compare to that number. So if you have a Presence of 10 and a Command of 3 you need to roll under a 13 on a d20 to get a success. The target number doesn’t vary, but instead the number of success varies. So there’s only very simple math involved, and if you do a favoured action, you have an idea of the target number.

It’s simple but it also encourages you to play to your strengths. If your best stat is Daring (being bold and impulsive) then acting in a way that lets you use that Attribute rather than Control or Presence is mechanically beneficial. This subtly encourages roleplaying.

Added onto this simple core is a variety of ways to modify the roll. Rolling a 1 counts as 2 successes, and you can pay to add extra d20s, gain extra d20s from talents, apply a Focus to treat a success as 2 successes, reroll dice, etc. Additionally, each extra success on a Task (read: ability check) grants a spendable currency known as Momentum that can be used to generate additional effects. If you succeed well on a Task you might be able to take another Minor Action or deal extra damage or manipulate the initiative order. Or you could save that for later, adding it to a pool of Momentum usable by the entire crew. This has the neat benefit that you’re encouraged to roll for Difficulty 0 Tasks when there’s no *reasonable* chance for failure, which builds that pool of Momentum (and sets the mood), but also adds the potential for a complication.  

Alternatively, if you need Momentum but barely succeeded, you can generate “Threat” instead, which is the GM’s version of Momentum. Threat is spent for similar bonuses or to add complications. I’m less fond of this; in theory it’s used to limit the GM’s ability to manipulate the story and cause problems or generate enemy reinforcements, but in practice you always have to trust that the GM will play fair. It artificially limits the GM’s ability to work with the narrative: if not enough Threat has been generated, it’s harder to add tension and pace the session. It’s also a second spendable currency, albeit very similar to an existing one. Thankfully, it’s pretty easy to downplay Threat in play, letting it build for the early parts of a mission when people are learning the rules. As the GM, you want it to build up for a while. It’s almost an advanced mechanic.

The extra benefits of Momentum run the risk of option paralysis for some players, but there are enough simple options that they should be able to find one they like and stick with that. However, for people willing to learn the options, it provides a nice tactical depth to players who like that sort of thing. And the bankable pool is useful for players who don’t know what to do, but it’s of a finite size, so you’re encouraged to use banked Momentum regularly or risk losing extra from a good roll.

Ships are handled pretty elegantly. While Tasks and ship combat works almost identically to personal actions and combat, the ship is not controlled as a separate character. Instead, you roll ship checks using your own abilities, and then the ship assisting you on the Task, rolling an additional die and potentially generating an additional success. The game even encourages another player to roll for the ship, which might not only speed up play, but means more people at the table are involved and engaged with the one Task. So in the tense escape from the collapsing star when the engineer and helms officer are frantically saving the ship while the captain boosts their efforts, instead of the tactical officer sitting and watching they can be rolling the assists for the crew at the comm and engineering.

Often in licensed products like this, there’s the assumption you’re going to “play” established characters. Star Wars RPGs often include statistics for the protagonists, often varying by movie. While it could be fun to play the adventures of the Enterprise on year four of its five year mission, I think most players will want their own original characters. I always find devoting pages to sample characters sheets to be a waste of space. That said, established crewmembers would be a pretty fun web enhancement or cheap PDF-only product.

The Bad

I’ve spotted few typos and some english anomalies as a British publisher using US English. So there’s a few references to “alien artefacts” in the book. Many of these were quickly spotted by the fans reading their preorder PDFs, but apparently the books had already gone to print. Sadly, has Modiphius delayed going to print by even half a week, there’d be far fewer errors in the book. (I imagine they *really* wanted to have physical books at GenCon.)

Most of these typos are small errors: missing letters or similar words. Stuff that will get missed on a casual reading as your brain will fill in the gaps. Not a big deal. There are some larger errors, such as terms that changed following the playtest that were not updated. A few ship profiles don’t have the correct point totals, a few Talents refer to actions that don’t exist, and the rules contradict themselves in a couple places. The largest error is the difficulty for using ship weapons changed at one point, and not all instances were corrected. The difficulty for attacking both energy weapons and torpedoes is unclear! Heck, there’s even a spelling mistake on the character sheets!

PDF includes the map presumably included on the end papers of the physical book. This is cool and useful. The Alpha Quadrant is at the front and the Beta is at the back. It seems to be the map from Star Trek: Star Charts, which is one of the more well designed maps of the Federation. However, it’s separated into four pages and split between front and back. And doesn’t seem to line-up well if you try and combine it. It also very visibly tacks-on the “Shackleton Expanse” – the location of the ongoing metaplot of the Living Campaign – as the map label is a totally different font.

Moving onto the system itself is the dice complaint. The game makes use of specialty d6s, called Command Dice. These have a result of 1, 2, -, -, effect, and effect. If the entire system relied solely on unique custom dice – like the Fantasy Flight Games Star Wars system, then requiring you to buy new dice is less annoying. Slightly. But this feels fiddly and not entirely necessary, and the unusual odds and lack of a pattern make it awkward to use a regular d6.
Similarly, while Momentum is interesting on paper, there’s a lot of things it can be spent on. More than can be easily remembered. Similarly, you have generic actions you can take and additional actions unlocked by each Bridge station. You pretty much need a cheat sheet. Sadly, none are provided. And really, any game where you have to consult a table during play is problematic.

At first glance this game seems like a simple rules light game (or even a rules medium game) it’s surprisingly complex. Character creation is simple and characters don’t have a lot of moving parts, but in actual play there will potentially be a lot of choices, decision points, shifting elements. There’s not binary success, as succeeding can chain a whole bunch of different potential decisions. This is a game system that you will likely need to play two or three times to really get a handle on, making it better as a primary game and not a palate cleanser mini-campaign.

There are a number of ads included in PDF: 5 pages of ads with one curiously stuck between the playtester credits and index while the others follow the index. These are pretty graphically intensive adds and slow down my PDF reader when I hit them. I hope they’re not all in the physical book, for reasons I’ll get to in a later section.

The book has a sidebar that encourages miniatures, which conveniently are sold by Morphidius. However, the related series of crew minis only has figures of established crews: there are no generic heres, or even several of the races featured in the book. With the non-generic minis provided, you’d think Morphidius wants or expects you to use established characters. But as mentioned, no character sheets are provided for established characters. This is doubly odd as the game really doesn’t need minis, using a “zone” system. Positioning is a non-factor. And there’s no comparable line of ship minis, with those rights owned by WizKids.

(While I’m nitpicking the miniatures, I’m not a fan of the uniform choice for the Next Generation crew. Half seem to be in their classic TV uniforms, while the rest are curiously in the Deep Space 9/ casual uniforms. Why?)

The overview of the Federation that begins the book feels padded. It’s very much a tour of the key parts of the established series, devoting half a page to Bajor (and then mentioning Cardassian Union for much of the next page, beginning with “It is impossible to discuss Bajor without discussing the Cardassian Union”… except they just did. For half a page. And half of the Bajor section is on Kai Winn and the religious situation on Bajor just in case someone decides to play on Bajor during the 6-year window she’s Kai and somehow isn’t familiar with Deep Space 9. This tour of the galaxy also makes special mention of the Miradorn, Nyberrite Alliance, Tzenkethi Coalition, and the Talarians. The Miradorn were throw-away background aliens in one episode of DS9, the Talarians were the bumpy headed alien of the week in an episode of TNG while the Nyberrite Alliance and Tzenkethi Coalition are just mentioned in throwaway lines and never appear on the damn show. Not exactly pages well spent…

While it’s arguably useful for GMs to have information on the major players and empires in the galaxy – even the ones just mentioned but not seen – Star Trek is also blessed with not one but TWO very comprehensive fan wikis. Memory Alpha contains very detailed entries on all the canon facets of Trek, while Memory Beta drifts into all the non-canon elements, such as novels and video games. Turning to a book for details on a region is less necessary and will never be able to devote as much space to the subject as a wiki.

The “timeline” of the book is a mess. The book includes 30 pages of history told in many small 1/2 page in-character sidebars detailing semi-important events in Star Trek history, ala primary sources. In theory this sounds like a fun way to introduce the setting, but in practice it’s thirty pages of easter eggs and subtle references to the world. Fans of Star Trek won’t need this to refresh their memories and people new to the world won’t learn anything from this – if you can even get them to read 30 pages of winking references. This normally wouldn’t be a big deal, but they could have done a more useful history in a third of the pages. freeing up space for other topics.

Focusing on a single very specific era made sense in the 2000s, when the show was ongoing and the best era was “the modern one”, it seems less appropriate now when Star Trek: Enterprise has been off the air for over a decade. It dates the RPG and its target audience. While this book *says* it’s designed for all eras of play (such as the races, which state what eras they’re available for use), it is really a Next Generation roleplaying game (much like the LUG version) albeit one that gives you some freedom to you to hack the system for Original Series play. The book *really* wants to take place in the niche era in the middle of DS9, the end of TNG, and start of Voyager. Right at the peak of the Dominion war. This is a decent era, having a lot of conflicts going on, but the era following Nemesis would also be good, being open for the GM to tell their own stories and shake-up the status quo. Or set in the gap between the TOS movies and TNG. Really, everyone favours their own prefered era, and this book feels like the author played favourites. For example, while the book makes regular mention of the “Birth of the Federation” era around Star Trek: Enterprise there’s no art of that era, the Xindi and Suliban aren’t detailed as adversaries, and the NX class ship (the Enterprise or Columbia) aren’t even included in list of ships!

Similar to the above, the Sovereign class ship (aka the Enterprise E) is noticeably absent. I wonder if this is because of the a potential rights split between the films and TV shows, the former being owned by Paramount while the latter is owned by CBS. This might be why there’s no images of the crimson TOS movie uniforms or the black/grey TNG movie uniforms. (Someone similarly, the licence doesn’t including the forthcoming Trek show, Discovery.)

Regardless, the absence of two of the bigger ships in the franchise segues into the next section…

The Ugly

The big complaint I have with the book are the limited options for both players and GMs.

The number of options just seem small. There are only 8 species and a little over 50 talents to choose from, of which each character will begin with 4, potentially gaining another talent or two during play. Two Vulcan science officers will seem very similar. For example, while there’s a couple different pictures of Efrosians in the book, the race receives no stats. Similarly there are no Romulans, Cardassians, Ferengi, Orions, Bolians, Caitians, Deltans, Saurians, Talaxians, or Tholians. To say nothing of Klingons, Androids, or human Augments. A few of those are somewhat detailed in the GM section so you can muddle something together.

I acknowledge that no one book can contain everything, and that a franchise as large as Star Trek will inevitably require expansion material, but I dislike it coming at the expense of the core product. But it does make the pages wasted on advertisements or awkward history lessons more painful. A tighter timeline that was half the size could have doubled the included races and allowed for three more ships.

However, I’m uncertain if freed pages would have increased the content. In the 376-pages of the PDF, only around 25 pages are devoted to player crunch. It’s a surprisingly small amount. I imagine the intent is to leave room open for expansion in other books. Want to play a Klingon? Get the Klingon Defence Force book. Want more than four choices for your science officer? Get the Science Division book. Want Tholian adversaries and more Cardassian NPCs and ships? Get the Alpha Quadrant book. Want to play an espionage game as Section 31 agents, get… okay, I’m not sure about that one. Operations Division?

While I’m whining about the product line, let’s discuss prices. Now, the core rulebook has been singled out for its high price point in other reviews, being $60 USD. Which is painful, but not unreasonable for a large full colour hardcover from a small publisher. So no complaints there from me. Books are expensive and you pay for quality. However, asking $20 more for the collector’s edition feels like a cash grab. I’m happy to pay for a fancy leatherette collector’s edition from time time time, but asking more for an online exclusive cover is less appealing. Adding insult to injury is that the regular cover just isn’t very good. It’s probably one of the least interesting pieces of art they could have used, with several pieces inside being much more evocative. The cover is just dark & uncolourful, and doesn’t really convey a story.

Books aside, so much else in the Modiphius store is expensive. The minis are expensive, the plastic tokens are expensive, the dice are super expensive, etc. They’re asking $40 for a GM’s screen and a similar price for deck tiles (which would be expensive if they were as thick and sturdy as a Dungeon Tiles or Pathfinder’s pawns). There’s also the $500 borg collector’s cube: the all-in boxed set for people who want everything. It’s priced that high because that’s it’s suggested retail price – the price physical stores will sell it for – but it feels like something that should be a web exclusive purchased from the Modiphius store, which would have allowed them to significantly reduce the price point. It’s an expensive product to expect stores to stock: I can’t imagine many game stores fronting the cash to have one of the Cubes on the shelf on the *chance* it will sell. Roleplaying games are not a cheap hobby, and they attract fans willing to spend a lot of money, but even then $500 feels extravagant. Okay, I’ve spent more than that on D&D 5th Edition… but over a period of three years. (And most of that was books, not $50 of dice.)

I’m really not a fan of how advancement is handled. Now, Trek characters shouldn’t be expected to increase in efficiency by 5% every couple sessions like D&D PCs. And I like how it allows a more frequent lateral progression where you can shift your Attributes & Disciplines about, allowing you to focus on different skills or adapt to changes in your character’s position on the ship, perhaps accommodating how you’re playing the character, respond to the group dynamic, or simply have the character grow and change roles. However, real advancement requires first having two spotlight milestones, which are handed out every 2-3 sessions, followed by an arc milestone. This is designed to mimic character development in a TV show where each episode focused on a single character’s growth. This makes sense on paper, but ignores the idea of A and B-plots on TV shows that might advance two character’s, but also forgets that players don’t like losing out. Following the guidelines, one character can complete an arc and advance every 5-7 sessions, so at best an entire table of four players will all advance after 20 sessions, with one gaining their bonus fifteen sessions after the first character. That feels longer than many campaigns.

The Awesome

The Disciplines of both PCs and ships are: Command, Conn, Security, Engineering, Science, and Medicine. Which are the big departments in TNG. They’re nice and broad, and easily cover what you’d expect characters to be good at. It certainly doesn’t cover everything, such as Picard’s interest in archeology, but those miscellaneous skills are Focuses, which you can petty much make up as needed. Want your science officer to be really good at identifying alien fungi, then you take the astromycology Focus.

The abilities of species are handled by Talents, but each character also has species Trait, which are similar to Aspects in FATE. Traits allow characters to make a check when they wouldn’t normally be able to or reduce the difficulty of a Task. It’s elegant: rather than giving a list of potential racial abilities, you’re just allowed to roll for otherwise impossible feats. Trying to pull apart sealed doors? Nope. But, wait, the character is a Vulcan and thus super strong, so roll away. Characters get to do what you expect them to, without having to mechanically balance Humans against Vulcans.

While mentioning FATE and modern story RPGS, characters also have Values, which share Aspects’ ability to be triggered by the GM and serve as a roleplaying hook. These can be tricky to think of at times, but Trek provides lots of examples. And they can be as evocative as Kirk’s “I don’t believe in no-win scenarios”.

There’s a lot of currencies being generated and spent in the system: Momentum and Thread and the heretofore unmentioned Determination. Determination is the big roleplaying reward, akin to Fate Points in that the GM can bribe players with it to compel them to do problematic things based on their Values. It’s nice and big, but mostly detached from the other features and also in the hands of the GM, making it a good advanced mechanic. Something you can skip until players get a handle on play,

Because Star Trek assumes large ships full of expendable Redshirts, the rules allow you to make a secondary cast. These aren’t just NPCs but “support characters”, and the rules inform you how to quickly generate said expendable crew member as well as how many you can include in a single scene. The rules even encourage you to reintroduce support characters by improving their abilities for each additional mission they reappear. The rules reward you for involving a regular supporting cast!

A noted advantage for the secondary cast is that players can take over one of said expendable crewmembers during scenes where their character would not be present. The classic TNG example would be beaming down to a dangerous planet, where the Captain should not go. Instead of the Captain sitting out the session, they can play the support character Engineer or Security officer.

I love how the game handles initiative. Players choose who goes first and then each player picks who goes next. I’ve seen a slightly similar approach in Marvel Heroic, and like the adding strategic feel. This varies that system by mandating swapping sides, which adds a slight limits but prevents the players ganging up and quickly ending battles or reducing the number of combatants.

While the art of the book features a lot more combat than is typical of Star Trek episodes, the book thankfully includes sections on other forms of gameplay. There’s a section on R&D and sciencing, with the steps of the latter invoking the scientific method. There’s also a section on social combat, breaking down the options for diplomacy and intimidation but also using facts.

Morphidius released the PDFs early for people who preordered the books (hence this review). I know lots of publishers who hold back PDFs until physical books ship. I like getting the product earlier rather than the publisher just sitting on the book.

EDIT:

A Twitter comment on the review asked abut accuracy of the fluff and I realised I never really commented on the lore in the book. Lower case. There’s no Lore in the book. But there is a lot of Star Trek lore. Which didn’t really click because it was omnipresent. There really wasn’t anything that took me out of Trek or made me say “hang on, that’s not right!” Ironically, because they did their research, because they really nailed the flavour, it all slipped under my radar. Nothing ever took me out or made me stop and question. Even when I noticed something not *technically* canon it made sense. Like Movie/TNG Klingons in TOS art but wearing TOS Klingon uniforms. Sure. Why not.

And while I complain about the presentation of the history, it all looked correct. Heck, there were some deep cuts so obscure I had to double check the reference. Morphidius DID their homework.  

Final Thoughts

I love me some Star Trek, and after Beyond and with Discovery coming in the fall my interest has been renewed. I can’t help but think it’d be cool to do a short Trek mini-campaign between D&D campaigns, or even between “seasons” of an ongoing campaign. With that thought in mind I was excited by the idea Star Trek Adventures.

I’m not sure how well this system works for me in that regard. There’s a lot to remember in the system, such as knowing the action options for both your character and their bridge station, or the choices for spending Momentum, all of which need to be quickly processed and have the potential for option paralysis.

The system seems better suited to dedicated play, but at that point the purposely limited options become a factor (and uneven character progression). Buying more books is always an option, but given how the last three Trek RPGs have ended with unfinished products – the last two being unable to completing the products planned at launch – banking on still theoretical future books feels like a gamble.

At the end of the day there’s the Big Question: How does it work as Star Trek roleplaying game?

Well, it sure as heck looks like a Trek game. And you can be part of the crew of a starship. And the rules equally accommodate fighting Klingon warbirds as they do researching stellar phenomena, rescuing colonists, or beaming down to make first contact. But neither does the franchise seem to trump the game system. The game doesn’t contort itself to exactly replicate events that happen on the screen. And the system itself is interesting, even removed from the Trek branding. There’s a strategic game element during and after Tasks, but you’re regularly encouraged to roleplay. It’s certainly not a clunky unplayable game buoyed by a popular licence. 

I like a lot about the system, but really want to see it in play, to watch how it actually handles in action. There’s a lot of small details and factors that I worry could bog down play but might work just fine at the table. The Dragon Age/ Fantasy Age system shows that a set list of stunts can give people fun choices at play, while not slowing down things too much. Realistically, just making a few cheat sheets for players might help dramatically. After all, GMs have screens for that very same reason. As for the content gaps, the system is simple enough that making your own content will likely be pretty easy, and I imagine the Trek fan community will quickly step up and make some of the missing content.
But… if I do run a Trek game, I’ll probably end up buying some cheap dollar store dice and taking some paint to them for the Challenge Dice. Or putting some stickers on Fudge dice.

EDIT 2:

Geek & Sundry has my back with this, doing a livestream of a Trek RPG game: Shield of Tomorrow

http://geekandsundry.com/meet-the-crew-of-our-new-star-trek-rpg-show/

Shameless Plug

If you liked this review, you can support me and encourage future reviews.

No, really. The sole reason I could justify pre-ordering this product was because of PDF sales. This review literally would not exist if not for the awesome people who bought my writings.

I have a number of PDF products on the Dungeon Master’s Guild website as part of the 5 Minute Workday Presents line. Such as Artificer Specialists, Rod of Seven Parts, Traps, Diseases, Legendary Monsters, and Variant Rules.

Additionally, my book, Jester David’s How-To Guide to Fantasy Worldbuilding, is available for purchase on DriveThurRPG or Print on Demand through Amazon. The book is a compilation of my worldbuilding blog series, but all the entries have been updated, edited, and expanded to almost two-hundred pages of advice on making your own fantasy world.

Review: Tal’Dorei Campaign Setting

Spinning out of, Critical Role, the hit Geek & Sundry Livestream* D&D game, is the Tal’Dorei Campaign Setting book. This product details the main continent of the campaign and it set roughly a year after the Chroma Conclave arc of the show (coinciding with Episode 95 onward). The few included rules elements are designed for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition.

Published by Green Ronin, the book is written by the setting’s creator & DM of the CR, Matthew Mercer, with some help from James Haeck (of En5ider fame). Unlike some of Green Ronin’s more recent books, the Tal’Dorei Campaign Setting was not funded by Kickstarter. PDFs are available now on the Green Ronin e-store, and hard copies are soon to be available in game stores. Pre-orders *were* available online, but copies ran low – despite being an anticipated high seller – and a new print run is expected. 

* Critical Role is also now available as podcast, so if you hate the sight of human beings, or want to listen during a commute, now you can.

Disclaimer: I’m totally a Critter. I have also worked with co-author James Haeck at least once and think of him as a cool dude. And I might have ended up working with him more, had this book not happened and occupied his time. So there *could* be some bias.

What It Is

The book is a full colour 143-page book focusing on the continent of Tal’Dorei on the world of Exandria. This review is based on the PDF, but the physical book will be a hardcover. The book includes four new subclasses (Blood domain, path of the Juggernaut, Runechild sorcerer bloodline, and way of the Cobalt Soul). There are also nine new feats, five backgrounds, and sixteen magical items.

The book begins with eight pages of history, a page-and-change on campaigns, eight pages on the Pantheons, seven pages on the local races, and eleven pages on assorted factions. The bulk of the book is spent on the fifty-eight pages devoted to the setting, which is subdivided into 7 regions and ends with two pages devoted to other lands/ contenders, which will likely be the focus of future books.

The book ends with a section on monsters, including how existing monsters fit into the world and over a dozen new monster stat blocks. While most of these are new humanoid NPCs, there are a couple new inhuman foes.

The Good

The world of Exandria is fairly simple. It’s your generic fantasy world without a “twist”, and complete with your standard “near apocalypse” in the distant past that provides ample dungeons, forgotten lore, and magical items that can no longer be recreated. Nothing particularly exciting or noteworthy here. But if you want or need a generic kitchen sink world, this will fill that need. It’s a solid alternative to Greyhawk or Mystara. While some neo-grognards will chafe at the idea of this potentially replacing the world-that-Gygax-built, it’s just as useful of a world and far more detailed than the old ’80s folio that launched a hundred campaigns. While the world includes some of the classic tropes of fantasy RPGs, such as elves and dwarves that don’t like each other, the setting at least tries to explain and justify this hostility.

The design of continent works. Mostly. There are no impossible rivers (rivers running uphill, splitting, or not going to a lake or sea/ ocean), which is a personal pet peeve. The only unnatural bits of geography that leap out are the random mountain of Ironseat Ridge and Frostweald, with the former being a place of myth and possible throne of a titan, while the latter described as being affected by a perpetual winter. This is just fine; “because magic” works wonderfully when it feels purposefully and not done as a justification for poor foresight. (“Why is there a jungle in the rain shadow of this mountain?” “Umm…. MAGIC!”)

The gazetteer section is broken up by region, which is a reasonable way of organizing a campaign setting without large nations. Each regional section also includes a large accompanying map, making it easy to locate the region on the larger poster map. The start of each of these regional sections makes mention of the prominent religions in each nation as well as discusses trade. I always appreciate when a campaign setting considered the natural resources of a region.

Throughout the book are small sidebars. Some of these contain new crunch, with magic items, vehicles, some drugs, and at least one monster. But most contain small snippets of world lore, such as quotations, poetry, prayers, and local legends.

The book ends with six pages on how the various monstrous races fit the world. This is a useful, interesting and often forgotten part of campaign settings. While many will devote pages to how their elves and dwarves are different, often times the place of orcs in the world or history of goblins is forgotten. The monsterous races are just there. So I always appreciate some lore and history given to non-playable creatures.

In terms of presentation, the book is well-written with decent description and nice turns of phrase. It’s also well edited; a few typos snuck in, but nothing worth mentioning and mostly related to punctuation. The layout of the book is solid, which is unsurprising given the experience of Green Ronin. The book has an ink splattered look with its headers and footers, and subtler spatter behind images. This is certainly reminiscent of the 5e books, so it feels consistent with the source books without also attempting to copy the trade dress or mimic the style.

For a product driven by a single campaign, the presence of the adventuring party Vox Machina is surprisingly muted, which is appreciated as a heavy focus of the book should be on “your” campaign more than “theirs”. And while almost every PC is mentioned somewhere in the text (Pike and Taryon are omitted), Vox Machina are not on every page. The focus is on new heroes and stories. There’s certainly a few small side references that might be less necessary (where the text could have used “adventurers” rather than name dropping VM) and a few alternate adventuring companies would have been nice, to give the impression of a living world with lots of heroes and champions.

The new character options are decent. Nothing really blew me away. The feats seem good, but a few seem a little weak, while some others might be too good. I think, if asked, I’ll allow most in my home game. Similarly, the new subclasses all seem relatively balanced. The Blood Domain and Runechild sorcerer bloodline really seemed designed for the setting, but the barbarian Path is pretty generic, and the monk Way doesn’t leap out as inherently part of Tal’Dorei. However, this does make those options a little more useful for other campaigns.

There are three pages of optional rules, including the resurrection variant seen on the show, which is totally going in my home game. The other house rules are decent, and give some options and alternatives. I expect a lot of people will be happy to use the rapid quaffing rules.

There are few new magic items in the book apart from the fairly epic Vestiges of Divergence. These are nigh-artifact items, but require additional steps (determined by the Dungeon Master) to unlock their full potential. There’s some neat stuff here. And as a nice feature, these don’t just include the Vestiges seen on the show (and worn by Vox Machina) but items merely mentioned but not recovered.

The Bad

I’m not entirely sure how the various regions were organized. It seems East to West, but that’s awkward with the more northerly and southerly regions. It feels arbitrary really. A somewhat related nitpick, the PDF of the book was missing a bookmark for one region, “the Bladeshimmer Shoreline”, which also made navigating the regions and finding a location I wanted to re-read somewhat awkward. (I’m sure this will be fixed soon enough.)

The names of several gods had to be changed. Sarenrae, the Raven Queen, and Pelor – the big gods frequently named in the show – do not appear in this book under those terms. This is understandable as the old gods were pulled from the generic 4th Edition D&D pantheon with a couple additions from Pathfinder, so their actual names could not be used for legal reasons. The new names are presented as titles (the Everylight, the Changebringer, etc), so the old proper names can still be used in-world, but for a few it’s not immediately obvious who was who.

Curiously, the book still uses “genasi”, the elemental race descended from genies and mortals. Which isn’t an SRD race. (That’s why the race is divided into five separate races in Pathfinder.) Oops.

There’s precious little history in the book. Three major events are really covered, all massive continent spanning events. Some smaller history is included in the regional sections, but you’re really left to invent a lot of the past. This is a feature-bug, as you’re more open to make the setting your own, but the likely reasons someone is buying this book is to learn more about the Critical Role world for the livestream, so there’s less here to learn. And if you’re inventing vast swaths of history or adding details, there’s diminished benefits for buying a book, and you feel less like you’re playing in the same setting as Vox Machina.

The book doesn’t include the popular gunslinger fighter archetype or the blood hunter class (which is mentioned repeatedly in this book, being a big part of the Claret Orders, which inspired the Blood Domain). Green Ronin apparently couldn’t negotiate an agreement with the Dungeon Master’s Guild that would allow them to keep those document online there and reprint them in this book. I imagine they opted to keep the files where they were and where people had already purchased them rather than pull them and risk having someone lose access. Very commendable, but annoying for anyone who was hoping for a hard copy. (Like me. Oh well… guess I’ll just use Lulu. 

The Ugly

Things be small.

I’m not just referring to the book – however, at just 144-pages, this product does feel rather svelte compared to other campaign settings – but I’m also thinking of the world itself. At 500 x 1000 miles (somewhere between 500,000 and 400,000 square miles) Tal’dorei is small for a continent. Technically it’d be a large island. The total landmass is roughly the size of France, and a little bigger than the island of Madagascar. Now, the much smaller land of England is tiny, but still manages to house all the stories of King Arthur, Robin Hood, the War of the Roses, and a third of Shakespeare’s plays. But, when you’re expending a full continent, being given something roughly the size of California, Oregon, and Nevada crammed together is a tad misleading. There’s also the issue of the northern areas being cold and snowy and the southern being jungle. While California could house a jungle, last time I checked southern Washington wasn’t regularly blanketed snow, let alone with blizzards “so thick that no human unprepared for their chill can survive”.

Problems with scale are a common flaw with fantasy worlds. Dragonlance is famous for its equally small continents. But it’s still unfortunate.

(Arguably, this can be hand waved by having the northern stretches a higher altitude while the lower stretches being warmed by temperate breezes and some kind of warm ocean drift. Which would also explain the lack of deserts where there’d otherwise be an arid horse latitude. But, I’m a worldbuilding nerd.)

The book is fairly detail-lite in a lot of places. Most locations receive only a single paragraph of description. There’s very often more words devoted to adventure hooks (that might be used once or not at all) than locations that are expected to be used. I wouldn’t have minded a little more detail in some places.

The Awesome

While I complain about the sparse details in some entries, the book is bursting with adventure hooks. Most of these aren’t just a vague story hook that the DM then has to flesh out and complete, but the skeleton of a full adventure complete with suggested adversaries. There’s some fun ideas in there. Even if you never plan on running an adventure set on Exandria, there are some fun adventure seeds and plots here to pillage for ideas.

The book uses a lot of fan artists in the Critical Role community (or “Critters”). There are some really great pieces, and I hope Green Ronin taps a few for future projects. It’s great that fan art drawn for fun and love of a show segued in paying work for some artists.

Drow are presented as ashen and grey rather than pitch black. It certainly makes more sense for a subterranean race to be colourless, and removes the ugliness and negative stereotypes of associating black with evil. Totally stealing that for my world.

I enjoy the naming throughout the book. I have trouble with good names for NPCs and places myself, which is not an uncommon weakness among gamers. As so many names in Critical Role have to be spoken aloud (in front of an unseen audience), it makes sense that most sound like real names and not random keystrokes.

The map is sweet. It’s presented as an in-world piece with texturing and a fold-line. It’s pretty and detailed but easy to read.

Final Thoughts

If you’re a Critter that plays Dungeons & Dragons, and is looking for a new campaign setting to make your own, then this book is for you. (And given how Green Ronin ran out of pre-order copies, you might already have it…)

Even if you’re not a fan of Critical Role, if you’re looking for a nice generic setting (or need a large island for your world) then this book is a good choice. It’s a decent alternative to Kobold Press’ Midgard or updating a setting from an earlier edition. Especially if you’re just looking for a framework for the world and want to design the plot and recent history around your players and their characters.

However, if you want a highly detailed world where 90% of the world creation is done for you, there are better choices. And if you’re tired of generic medieval European fantasy settings, then this book is probably also not for you.

There is a few new crunch options, so if you’re desperate for new additions to your D&D campaign, then this might be a worthy PDF purchase. Similarly, if you just need a big book of adventure hooks to use for inspiration and brainstorming, this book certainly checks that box. That might end up being my favourite use for the product.

Lastly, if you’re a fan of Critical Role and haven’t taken the plunge into Dungeons & Dragons and somehow are reading this review… this book could be a fun purchase. If won’t tell you how to play the game, but it will give you a look at the larger world behind the scenes of the campaign and maybe get you a little more excited to try D&D. The D&D Basic Rules are free online, so there’s no reason not to try. Get some friends together and play an adventure in Tal’Dorei as rookie adventurers inspired by Vox Machina and have some fun.

Shameless Plug

If you liked this review, you can support me and encourage future reviews.

I have a number of PDF products on the Dungeon Master’s Guild website as part of the 5 Minute Workday Presents line. Such as Artificer Specialists, Rod of Seven Parts, Traps, Diseases, Legendary Monsters, and Variant Rules.

Additionally, my book, Jester David’s How-To Guide to Fantasy Worldbuilding, is available for purchase on DriveThurRPG or Print on Demand through Amazon. The book is a compilation of my worldbuilding blog series, but all the entries have been updated, edited, and expanded to almost two-hundred pages of advice on making your own fantasy world.

Review: Starfinder Core Rulebook

Starfinder is a stand-alone roleplaying game, being advertised as “Pathfinder in Space”.  Starfinder is created and publisher by Paizo Inc, which made its name after licensing the classical magazines, Dragon and Dungeon before switching to 3rd Party adventures and then adapting the 3rd Edition of D&D into the Pathfinder Roleplaying game.

Starfinder is a science fantasy roleplaying game. Equal parts science fiction and pulp fantasy, it’s far more like Dragonstar than Spelljammer. The pulpy origins of Starfinder are pretty visible, as the old sword & planet influenced Pathfinder as much as sword & sorcery. There are spaceships, robots, artificial intelligence, and FTL travel. But there is also magic, spellcasting, enchanted weapons, undead, and the like. So, in theory, you can fight alien invaders and escape spacial anomalies as easily as you face cyborg dragons and goblin space pirates.

Originally teased as compatible with Pathfinder, Starfinder diverges slightly from the source game but retains much of the base mathematics. The core mechanics of rolling a d20 and adding modifiers are untouched. There are some significant differences between Pathfinder and Starfinder, such as the twin defences of EAC and KAD and how health is tracked, but far, far fewer than the differences between 3rd Edition D&D and 4th Edition D&D. I’ve seen other variants of 3e that diverged more from the base rules than Starfinder. (Heck, a homebrew game of Pathfinder I ran using armour as DR and wound points rules diverged more than Starfinder.) Things are close enough that a remotely experienced Gamemaster could probably include a monster or NPC from Pathfinder, updating the statistics on the fly for Starfinder.

What It Is

The Starfinder Core Rulebook is a 524-page hardcover book containing all the rules necessary to play in Paizo’s science fantasy roleplaying game. Also included is a section for Gamemasters on running the game, as well as setting information. Not included are monsters, which will be featured in the forthcoming Alien Archive. 

Included in the book are seven races: humans, along with androids, kasathas (four armed people, likely inspired by the green Martians of John Carter), lashuntas (humans with antenna from the Venus analog), shirrens (insect people), vesk (reptiles/ klingons), and Ysoki (ratfolk). There are also seven character classes, the envoy, mechanic, mystic, operative, solarian, soldier, and technomancer.  

A new addition to the ruleset are character themes. At first glance these might be mistaken for Pathfinder’s traits or 5th Edition D&D’s backgrounds, but are probably closer to being a combination of 5e’s s background and subclasses. They provide a small boost of proficiencies to help you fulfil a role, but also give additional benefits at higher level. 9 themes are included as well as a generic “themeless” option that lets players design their own character. The included themes are the ace pilot, bounty hunter, icon, mercenary, outlaw, priest, scholar, spacefarer, are xenoseeker. I anticipate themes being one of the more commonly added bits of crunch in future expansions, being a neat way to customize your character, but also compact (fitting on a single page) with some restrained design.

As one might expect, the book includes a number of weapons (both ranged weaponry but also advanced melee weapons) and armour. There are also vehicles (with accompanying rules) and starships. Space combat is given its own sizable section of the book. Starships have their own scale, mirroring the PC scale of Tiny to Colossal. Tiny starships range in size from that of a car to a bus. Huge starships are equal to the U.S.S. Enterprise (Kirk’s at the small end of the scale and Picard’s at the high end) while Colossal is anything over 4500 meters, which is 1 1/2 Borg cubes.

The hard copy of the Starfinder Core Rulebook is available right now, and PDFs are available on Paizo.com. Like Pathfinder, the core book is just $10 (less with a subscription), being surprisingly cheap and probably below the market average for PDFs.

The Good

Starfinder is very Pathfindery. If Pathfinder type games are your jam or it’s your system of choice, you’ll probably like Starfinder. If you got tired or 3.X or dislike games with high amounts of crunch, then you’ll dislike Starfinder.

While there are some subtle rule changes might trip you up if you’re really accustomed to Pathfinder, most of the game seems to run the same. To me, the switch from Pathfinder to 5th Edition is recent enough that the changes seem minor. If all you’ve ever played is Pathfinder, then some of the smaller rules changes might trip you up (there’s some subtle changes and tweak), but you can probably dive right in and discover the changes as you go.

Character classes in Starfinder follow the model set by Pathfinder, with most having some form of talents. These provide decision points during advancement, allowing you to build and customize your character. Some of these are free form while other decisions are more static and based around a theme, such as the soldier choosing their fighting style or the mystic choosing their form of magic (but the soldier also gets to pick through feats while the mystic gets to choose spells, allowing a decision point there).

The above means there’s some nice variety to the classes, and lots of choices and options for people who enjoy the lonely fun character optimization. In addition to the classes, there are feats and the rank based skill system, which allows you to pick-and-choose where you focus your skills.

The two spellcasting classes (the mystic and the technomancer) are both 2/3rds spellcasters, reaching a maximum of 6th-level spells. Magic less present, even at high levels. Which makes sense, as technology replaces magic to some extent: why study more months to learn scorching ray when you can just pick up a laser pistol? This also allows for more class features to fill that void, making for more interesting classes that do something other than just hurl spells.

As mentioned above, you can use monsters from Pathfinder with very minimal conversion, which is included in the book. This allows you to play right now, without having to wait for the Alien Archive. It would also be easy to just run a game with NPC humanoid opponents, using just this book, possibly with some additional space goblins, who are described the the free First Contact book. From that perspective, the game is pretty complete.

Ability scores seem to be more restrained. You can’t start with a score above 18, and ability score boosts are less common (and you’re encouraged to put them into secondary stats). And there’s no magical headbands that boost your Intelligence or cloaks that jack your charisma, meaning characters are less likely to have ability scores pushing 25.

Ship combat looks fun, albeit different from a lot of other Pathfinder combat. It’s complex, but it’d be doable to port over into 5e or classic Pathfinder. I can imagine this section being very useful for a twist on Expedition to Barrier Peaks. The rules are also designed with multiple roles in mind, so three to five people can cooperate to command a ship, with one person managing the engineering while another controls the guns, and a third pilots the ship. And it should work equally well for small scale fighter combat or slow Star Trek naval combat. Heck, with some DM permission, half the party could remain in a large Galactica carrier while the other half launches inter intercept fighters, mixing the two styles together.

Miniatures or tokens are pretty much required for ship combat, as the rules assume a hex battlemap. Thankfully, minis are coming from a 3rd Party and Pathfinder is doing a pawn set for Starfinder.

Ships and tiers are dissociated. So you can have a big Colossal dreadnought ship that is bare bones and might only Tier 5 or 6, and thus could be challenged by your plucky but band well-equipped Medium ship.

The default setting is funky and unique. The assumed world is the Golarion solar system, the same effective setting as Pathfinder, only an unknown number of years in the future. Likely hundreds or thousands of years. The planet Golarion is missing, along with all memories and records for an uncertain number of years prior to the dissaperance. Because reasons. Why? That’s the big mystery of the setting that will never be solved because it’s not a story based mystery, but a necessity based mystery. Having Golarion missing means nothing that happens in a Pathfinder game can affect a Starfinder game, and they’re not restricted in what they can do to the world in future Pathfinder adventures… Regardless, because the world is a future version of a fantasy world there are all the standard tropes of fantasy but in a world of space opera.There’s all manner of alien races and every planet in the solar system has something going on. Plus there are ancient star empires, evil merciless insectoid aliens, space pirates, and more. There’s a lot going on, leaving a lot of room for very different campaigns. It sidesteps the problem of Star Wars where there’s the one big story going on and everything else is tacked on or added. And also avoids the Star Trek utopia problem, where there’s this giant nation of good with no problems at the heart of everything.

Because the world and setting is so gonzo – being a funky mix of technology and magic – it’s a little easier for players to understand. One of the problems that science fiction roleplaying games often struggle with is conveying the technology. When I ran some Eclipse Phase I came across this problem, where the players were uncertain if they scan ships, didn’t know if there was artificial gravity or not, and generally fumbles with how technology worked. Hard science makes for a hard roleplaying game. You don’t need to worry about powering artificial gravity or the power requirements of FTL when you can literally just say “because magic.”

There’s a fair amount of Starfinder coming. They have the first Adventure Path, with new volumes every other month. They have pawns sets for the Core Rulebook (aka PCs and ships) and then the Alien Archive. An initiative tracker, some battlemaps (the space ones I’m rather excited for… when they’re back in stock). Apart from that, the schedule seems surprisingly light. Probably because they wanted to test the water, but also I think Paizo released they overdid it with Pathfinder: too much too fast. Three books a year seemed “slow” in comparison to WotC, but after three or four years they add up. But, for people who really want more, Paizo has opened Starfinder up to the community. While they’re not sharing the setting (like Wizards of the Coast is over on the DMsGuild), the rules are all open content. And there’s already some content released: http://drivethrurpg.com/product/219461/Starfarers-Companion

The Bad

Races and classes each receive their own chapter but character themes (which you’re told to pick after your race) are folded into the the character creation chapter that comes before races. It feels like they didn’t want to give them their own chapter but couldn’t think of a better place. And so it awkwardly rounds out a chapter…

The inclusion of the solarian is kinda weird. The other classes are very iconic and broad concept,  working equally well with the default Starfinder setting or any combination of fantasy and sci-fi. But the solarian is non-generic and very setting specific. It’s a little like having a fantasy game with a hunter, warrior, priest, mage, rogue, druid, and dragon shaman. (One of these things is not like the others…) The hook of the solarian is that they get their power from the life of stars, and use that to form energy armour or weapons, while also generating various magical effects. Which seems odd until you realize their energy weapon is basically a lightsaber, making the solarian the counterpart to the Jedi. Still… since laser swords exist in the equipment chapter, a more generic warrior/monk with psionic powers would have worked equally.

I don’t think all of the mechanical changes to the Pathfinder system work.

One of the bigger additions is Resolve. This is a pool of points that increases with your level and your primary ability score. This is probably around 4-5 at level 1, and increases at higher levels (levels 4, 6, 8 or whenever you boost an Ability score). It’s a small pool but it’s used for a lot of things. Some abilities from classes, feats, and even ship combat actions require you to spend Resolve. Regaining Stamina uses Resolve. However, Resolve is also what keeps you alive when you fall unconscious, and you lose points each round you choose to remain unconscious. On paper, this has the neat effect where you tire yourself out by spending abilities making you more vulnerable, while also meaning the more time you spend unconscious the closer you are to dying even multiple encounters later. And it adds this tension between using a cool power or saving it in case you get hurt. But, in play it also means if you take a few bad hits and get knocked down, you lose the chance to do something cool later. It encourages you to rest frequently rather than having prolonged adventuring days: the more time you’ve spent adventuring before a boss fight, the higher the chance being knocked unconscious will kill you. Enemy NPCs don’t have this same limit, and are able to nova with resolve or repeatedly stabilize after dying.

Having both energy AC and kinetic AC seems needless. I imagine this was done because it should be easier to hit someone with a laser (where just contact is needed) opposed to a sword, where you need to penetrate armour, EAC replacing “touch” AC. (Which was done because wizards wouldn’t have the high Dexterity or BAB required to hit in combat.) But EAC is typically only a couple points lower than KAC, so the difference is negligible. If there was some worry about spellcasters being unable to hit the lower AC, then why not use their spellcasting ability for attacks with spells? Or give all classes the same attack progression? (Mechanical innovations that actually predates Pathfinder.) After all, why would the highly skilled assassin operative be less accurate than the soldier? EAC and KAC feels needlessly complicated for very little gain.

Similarly, when reaching 3rd level of a class, the character gains the Weapon Specialization feat for every weapon they know through that class. Which feels awkward. I wonder why not just let characters add their level to their damage? Why make it a feat? I imagine out of concerns of multiclassing for proficiencies, but it feels like more could have been done to find a simpler (more elegant) solution.

I’m not a fan of the change to combat maneuvers. Combat Maneuver Bonuses/ Defence was a fun rule in Pathfinder. It was useful, because whenever someone wanted to improvise or attempt something outside of the rules, it was easy to have them attempt a Combat Maneuver. This could be balanced by having the attempt provoke an opportunity attack, so you had to balance the need for the maneuver versus taking a hit. Here, the AC for opposing Combat Maneuvers is 8 higher than your regular AC in place of the attack of opportunity. So instead of “anyone can bull rush, but you get attacked if you try” it’s “anyone can bull rush, but you have a -8 penalty”. And instead of the feats cancelling the extra attack, they give a +4 bonus… so you’re still suffering a net -4 penalty on the attack. This feels annoying, because if you’re sacrificing an attack in an attempt to bull rush or disarm someone without building your character around the action, you likely really need that to succeed. A -8 penalty to hit means for many classes you likely need something close to a 20 to succeed, so it’s not really worth doing. The rules might as well have said you can’t even attempt it without the feat. It’s a trap for the inexperienced.

Through the book there’s a distinct lack of focus on aspects of gameplay other than combat, such as roleplaying and exploration. It’s worth noting that none of the character creation steps encourage you to define the personality of your character. Even the “character concept” section is very focused on mechanical implementation of concept. Heck, while there is a place for “gender” on the character sheet and gender is mentioned in vital statistics (in relation to how it might impact height or weight) you’re never actually told to choose a gender for a character. Or pick a name for that matter…

There are no roleplaying rewards or plot manipulation mechanics, no character aspects or personality traits. Most modern RPGs have some way of rewarding roleplaying or include character compels, such as Fate and its aspects, but also 5th Edition D&D (personality traits & flaws with Inspiration), Fantasy Flight Games’ Star Wars RPG (with Motivations, but also Duty and Obligations), and even Modiphius’ Star Trek game (values). This feels like an unfortunate omission.

Similarly, the vast majority of the character traits are focused on combat. (It’s rather telling that the one section of roleplaying on page 9 mentions skills and skill checks as much as acting in character.) There’s precious few exploration based powers and precious real flavourful/ fluff abilities (what Wizards of the Coast’s designers refer to as “ribbons”). I’m curiously reminded of 4th Edition D&D in this regard; as I’ve said about that edition, when a game system gives you a toolbox of hammers, every problem seems like a nail. Yes, you don’t need rules for roleplaying, but if you’re not incentivized to play your character and incentivized to choose combat (because you want to use the cool new power you got) then you’re going to default to attacking.

The Starfinder Core Rulebook is organized like a generic rulebook, not a single volume RPG that combines setting and rules. All the setting lore is tucked away at the end. You’re seemingly expected to read through 425 pages of unfamiliar nouns and references before getting to the barest explanation of what anything means. There’s going to be a lot of unfamiliar nouns. The book begins with the standard introduction to RPGs, but it really also needs an introduction to Starfinder and not just the d20 system.

The book includes two archetypes, which feel rather vestigial. Arguably, these are included to present the rules for archetypes for potential later use in splatbooks and accessories, with the two included archetypes being token examples. But it feels unnecessary. Themes do the same job and should probably have just replaced archetypes. These feels like prestige classes in Pathfinder, which were included because they were big in the previous version of the ruleset, and not because they were truly necessary.

There’s very limited art through the first chunk of the book. The majority of the art is the standard body shots of people in a semi-heroic pose. There’s precious few shots of the world or setting, and no little bits of technology or elements of the world. This is especially noticeable in class section where there is the one picture of the iconic class member at the start and four adventurers posing with the sample builds but no other art leaving walls of pure text.

As I just mentioned, each class has an iconic member, like the classes of Pathfinder. However, there are no details on these iconics. Like Pathfinder, their backstory (and even names) remain a web exclusive. This is unfortunate as their stories would give some necessary flavour to the world and the class. The start of each chapter is also missing the token bit of flash fiction, so there’s not even that big of flavour and personality.

Having just come from reading Modiphius’ Star Trek Adveventures (and just starting to browse through a copy of Tales from the Loop) I wonder what the book could have looked like with small narrative sidebars. Little bits of lore or flavour breaking up the rules.

The book uses pronouns curiously, randomly alternating between pronouns. Both “he” and “she” are used interchangeably and inconsistently, alternating even within a single chapter. (I believe I even noticed a transition on a single page.) I know Pathfinder tried to use the gender of the iconic in the class sections, but this book doesn’t following that style. I don’t mind she/her, but some consistency would be nice. Or a nice singular “they” to also include the intersex and gender fluid crowd.

Starfinder retains some D&D-isms, sacred cows like ability scores ranging from 1-18(+), where the odd numbers do nothing. D&D can’t get away from that, as that numeration is iconic. However, Starfinder could have dropped ability scores entirely. (After all, they did so for the monsters.) The difference between “Ability Score” and “Ability Modifier” is a big hurdle to most new players I’ve introduced to the game, and it’s entirely needless.

Other small things didn’t change. Swift actions are very present in Starfinder, but haven’t spread beyond class features. Swift actions were added late in 3e and were never a big part of the core rules, and also thus never really did anything in Pathfinder’s combat rules. Actions like drawing or holstering a weapon, reloading some weapons, opening doors, and the like could have easily been swift actions.

The Ugly

There are lots of abilities that recharge “once per day”. What that means is not explicitly defined. After all, a “day” on Idari is 27 hours while on Aballon it’s 12. To say nothing of being in deep space or the Drift where day and night are meaningless. It’s a grey enough area that some people will argue the point.

I dislike the use of the term “race” to refer to the different types of aliens. “Race” has uncomfortable real world implications and there’s been a move away from it in gaming. “Species” tends to work as a solid replacement in science fiction/ fantasy gaming, but there’s no shortage of alternatives, such as “origin” or “heritage”.

Because Starfinder keeps the foundation of 3.X, the remnants of the magic item Christmas tree remain in the game. Characters are as much a hero because of their gear as their class, if not more so. Damage and AC is heavily dependant on having better (and more expensive) gear, which is explicitly given a level. As a result, there are a LOT of weapons. Pages of weapons and armour that exist solely to be +1 level higher than the previous model. (This has more in common with Borderlands than Star Wars.) This repeats the loot cycle of Pathfinder where you adventure to find treasure to spend entirely on gear to adventure in more dangerous places to find treasure… Overlooking how you could take the money that would be spent buying level 8 armour and just live off that for a couple years.

This also means you can’t really play a Firefly style game where the heroes are always broke and willing to take foolish jobs just to keep the ship flying, because each mission has to give a small fortune in rewards to keep the gear the appropriate level. And because gear equates with power level, you can’t award extra money because it breaks wealth-by-level and makes the characters too powerful. Similarly, you can’t give your players a sweet asteroid base, because it’s tempting to just sell it and buy a better laser pistol that does an extra couple d6 damage. (Which is why starships components have a cost in “build points” rather than credits, so you can’t capture enemy ships to sell them, or sell off your ship for better armour.) It also means you can’t have a situation where the party dons stormtrooper armour and blaster rifles, because then the players are either ineffective (as their equipment is scaled for lower level NPCs) or proceed to loot every stormtrooper (to sell of the valuable super gear). And heaven help your party if they ever get captured and lose their equipment…

The math of the game seems poorly thought out. Starfinder retains the math porn aspects of Pathfinder, where the numbers for everything increase every level or two. So you continually get better. However, as the numbers in the world tend to increase at the same rate, you’re not actually any better or more successful, creating the illusion of progress. This is likely because they retained the monster math from Pathfinder, the numbers in the free preview monster document matching pretty closely with the “simple monster creation” from Pathfinder Unchained. But the Pathfinder RPG character math assumed characters had tens of thousands of gold pieces worth of magical items increasing their ability scores, save DCs, saving throws, and attack rolls. While higher level items in Starfinder can increase your damage and AC, accuracy doesn’t really increase, nor do saving throws or ability scores. The soldier should do okay in terms of attacks, keeping pace with foes as their defences steadily increase, but other classes might fall behind.

This especially hurts the solarion who suffers heavily from mutual attribute dependence. They rely on Strength to hit with their signature weapons but Charisma for determining their saving throws and Resolve. They also need Constitution to boost their Stamina and Dexterity for their Armour Class – both very useful for a melee oriented class. Solarions either have to choose between missing in combat a lot, or not using many other their class features while also having precious little Resolve.

Starship math is also a little funky. Many checks made while crewing a starship require a base DC 15 skill check further increased by 2x the starship’s tier, ranging from 1/4 to 20. The rules assume a party has a starship with a tier equal to the average party level, so the DC increases by 2 every level, but the character will only increase 1 skill rank each level. It also means if your party finds a starship Tiered significantly above their level, they’ll be unable to effectively fly. Useful in preventing low level PCs from stealing an enemy dreadnought, but hard if you want a Blake’s 7 style campaign.

It’s also somewhat funky that your ship just improves at the exact same rate as the characters as they somehow find upgrades at regular intervals.The book doesn’t even pretend that starship Build Points are a form of treasure or currency, and there’s no option to award that as treasure. Instead the improvements just appear when the party gains a level.  It’s a power boost for the sake of boosting power rather than because it makes sense for the ship to be improved.

The Awesome

The end of the book gives conversion advice for Pathfinder classes and full stats for the Pathfinder Core Rulebook races. So you can play an elf or have elf NPCs as easy as a vesk.

I love goblins in their fishglobe spacesuits, ala Flash Gordon. It’s cheesy and fun. Being able to mix-and-match Pathfinder favourites with pulpy sci-fi is one of my favourite parts of Starfinder.

Repeating something I said earlier, character themes are just cool. They’re a neat third way of customizing characters. I like how they give you a small bonuses at higher levels, so they’re not just something you take at level one and forget. They’re also a nice way of differentiating between PCs who might have the same class and providing a simple story hook or bit of backstory with associated mechanics. And I like how, unlike D&D backgrounds, they have a feature that comes up at later levels so they don’t just fade into the background.

Similarly, the execution of archetypes is nicely done. As you can apply archetypes to any class, you don’t need multiple archetypes covering a single theme, and replacing set features prevents abuse through mixing and matching archetypes. You also can never replace all your class features by taking two different archtypes that swap out different features. All operatives or technomancers will retain some iconic class features, and have something in common with other members of that class.

I like the simplified encumbrance system. “Bulk” is an easier descriptor than pounds, and means the rules toe around being metric or imperial. It also involves less math and counting, as small items have no weight until you certain thresholds. It’s abstract but works. It’s worth stealing for any game system with lots of gear.

The distinction between stamina and hit points is nice. And stamina heals pretty quickly (provided you spend precious Resolve points), but also goes up to full overnight. This means a “healer” class like a cleric is less necessary in the party between adventures. (Although the absence of wands of cure light wounds is rather noticeable: magic being replaced by technology only works if there’s readily and cheaply available comparable technology).  

The range of different starships is fun: there are the standard sci-fi vessels and then some pretty darn funky alien ships, like the eoxian vessels. The coffin-like fighters are amazing, and really highlight how a more fantastic science fantasy setting should be distinctly different from something like Star Wars that is just sci-fi with terrible physics and telekinetic monks.

At the side of the pages is a tab that lists the chapters and highlights which chapter you’re on. I always like this in RPG books as it makes flipping through the book to find something easier. At a glance you can tell if you’re in the section you need.

Iconic of the hybrid nature of magic and technology are fusion seals. Fusions are basically enchantments that you slap onto a weapon to make it magic. And fusion seals are similar things that can be moved between weapons. Like materia in Final Fantasy VII or gems in the Diablo series. And they’re a nice way of handwaving moving enchantments between weapons, since you’re going to be buying newer and better guns every other level (rather than adding more and more enchantments to a favoured weapon).

Final Thoughts

In some hypothetical reality in the multiverse there is a world where Hasbro decided to just end D&D after 3rd Edition. In this world, Paizo – now having a monopoly on the RPG market – decides to release Starfinder right after Pathfinder, in early 2010. That reality’s Starfinder, would look very similar to our reality’s Starfinder. It’s a game right out of the early 2000s, and taking very little inspiration from the veritable renaissance of new RPGs produced in last ten years. If there was a term like “OSR” or “retroclone” applying to 3.X styles games rather than 1e, that term would apply firmly to Starfinder.

I wouldn’t say that Starfinder is a step backwards. But I don’t think it’s really a step forwards in gaming either. The system is playing this safe, retaining the monster math and keeping the relentless gear treadmill. The one innovation in the game system is Resolve, which ties limited use character abilities to the death mechanic in a way I don’t particularly like. And more often than not, the game defaults to complexity.

I recall a Paizo staff member (I believe it was Jason Bulmahn) discussing the design of Pathfinder with the Know Direction podcast. He mentions how there were a lot of things they could have changed in the rules, and possibly should have changed, but chose not to because when they were launching the product being backwards compatible with 3.5e D&D was a huge selling feature. Similarly, I look at Starfinder and wonder what else they could have changed, had they decided not to make the monster math functionally equivalent to the monster numbers generated waaay back in 2000 for the 3.0 Monster Manual. A middle ground between Pathfinder and 5e…

But snide crabbiness aside, how is Starfinder? I think the complex classes will appeal to fans of character building and optimization, and the crunchy ruleset will continue to entertain fans of that style of roleplaying game. For fans of Pathfinder who need a break from fantasy but not the rules, this is a fun alternative. And for fans of science fantasy or science fiction who can’t handle technobabble of questions about time dilation or foreign diseases, this is a way to have a little space opera without the physics. And the setting itself is fun. And there’s just something unique and different about fighting goblin space raiders in an asteroid belt.

And for fans of Pathfinder who just feel overwhelmed by the options, Starfinder is also a way to get back to a less heavy version of the rules, without having to ban content or place limits on books.

Shameless Plug

If you liked this review, you can support me and encourage future reviews.

I have a number of PDF products on the Dungeon Master’s Guild website as part of the 5 Minute Workday Presents line. Such as Artificer Specialists, Rod of Seven Parts, Traps, Diseases, Legendary Monsters, and Variant Rules.

Additionally, my book, Jester David’s How-To Guide to Fantasy Worldbuilding, is available for purchase on DriveThurRPG or Print on Demand through Amazon. The book is a compilation of my worldbuilding blog series, but all the entries have been updated, edited, and expanded to almost two-hundred pages of advice on making your own fantasy world.

Review: Tomb of Annihilation

The seventh large storyline adventure for the 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons is the Tomb of Annihilation. Advertised as an reimagining of the “classic” deathtrap dungeon, the Tomb of Horrors, the adventure features the return of the infamous D&D villain Acererak (formerly a demilich but now an “archlich” for… reasons). The book also draws inspiration from Isle of Dread and Dwellers of the Forbidden City, featuring hexploration through a steaming tropical jungle while searching for ruined cities and confronting the undead, dinosaurs, and undead dinosaurs.

This is not the first update or expansion of the Tomb of Horrors. A sequel was published for 2nd Edition and a mini-campaign was released for 4th Edition. There was an additional follow-up written for Dungeon Magazine (but damned if I can find which issue).

As the summer release, Tomb of Annihilation has a lot of cross-media products. The Tomb and Chult are in the Neverwinter MMO, there’s a board game, there’s dice, and more. Plus WotC has partnered with a bunch of authors on the Dungeon Master’s Guild to product tie-in products with the Tomb of Annihilation, with the new “Adept” program. 

What Its Is

The Tomb of Annihilation is a 256-page hardcover adventure. As one expects from Wizards of the Coast, it features full-colour illustrations and well-drawn maps (all of which are done by Mike Schley, who sells high-resolution copies on his website). The adventure is also available in digital formats, including Roll20, Fantasy Grounds, and the new platform D&D Beyond.

The book features 79 pages detailing the jungle peninsula of Chult, 20 pages on a ruined “forbidden city” and its various denizens, 14 pages on a large yuan-ti temple, and a little over 70-pages on the new “Tomb of Horrors”. The book ends with 7 magic items (including a couple Name items from Forgotten Realms lore) and 59 monsters – including several NPCs. (17 or so monsters in this book are reprinted from Volo’s Guide to Monsters, so that book is a nice accessory to own but not required). Also included in the book are two new backgrounds: the anthropologist and the archeologist (the latter background, of course, making no less than six references to Indiana Jones).

The Good

I really like the story of this adventure: the hook of the Death Curse is just excellent. And what Acererak’s final intentions with the stolen souls feels appropriately epic (and is a pretty neat and unexpected throwback to a fun and disgusting monster that was introduced in 3e, which I never expected to see again).

For those unaware, the hook is that resurrection magic is failing: the dead cannot be brought back to life and those already raised from the dead are beginning to decay and rot away. It’s a “Realms-Shaking Event” that has zero impact on the geography, politics, or lives of everyday people. It’s a lovely evil scheme, because it doesn’t overtly threaten “the world” but imperils adventurers old and new.  The story literally puts the heroes of previous campaigns in danger! (Plus iconic characters in the Realms, like Volo, Elminster, Wulfgar, and so many others that have died and come back.) It’s also a dangerous shift in the expectations of D&D, as there’s no coming back from the dead during the adventure.

The plot also means there’s a strong motivation to go into the Tomb beyond just “fortune and glory”, which was always a sticking point of the original module: there was so little motivation to push forward rather than calling it a day after half the party wiped. Acererak’s plan is also nicely passive, not requiring the lich to do anything active beyond sit around and let people die, which feels very much like the Acererak’s modus operandi. Acererak isn’t an active figure in the adventure like Strahd is in Curse of Strahd or omnipresent threat like the elemental cults or demons like in Princes of the Apocalypse or Out of the Abyss. Just like Acererak the demilich didn’t wander around his Tomb causing problems and instead just let adventurers walk to their doom, Acererak the archlich just sets things in motion and lets souls accumulate in his Soulmonger.

The adventure also jumps right into the story. There’s no mini-adventure in Waterdeep setting up the Death Curse, or ocean going precursor scene. Half the story isn’t finding out where in the world the problem is originating. (If this were a Paizo Adventure Path, I would fully expect the first adventure to just set-up the main story, while also getting the PCs to a level they can survive in the jungle.) The adventure just assumes the DM can make-up those scenes or describe that set-up in an opening crawl/ monologue, and the book instead just throws the party right into Port Nyanzaru. Heck, the adventure even includes some advice for starting at level 5 or 9, making this easy to add after Lost Mine of Phandelver or some homebrew adventuring.

The climactic centrepiece dungeon feels appropriately deadly. There are a lot more monsters than the original, and combat plays a much more central role, but there are still a lot of traps. As well as a few puzzles and hidden areas to be discovered. Despite being full of deadly traps, it doesn’t seem as cheap as the original Tomb of Horrors: there aren’t as many “gotcha!” traps that attack you for just opening a door or walking down a hallway (although, there are a few) – and I didn’t see any areas where the dungeon penalizes you for not falling for a trap – and instead the traps are tied to obvious items or places. Which also means exploring the tomb doesn’t descend into poking each square of the floor with a 10-foot pole.  Many of the traps aren’t the 3e/4e style traps that can be defeated through a quick skill check: you can’t just throw dice at the problems to solve every trap. Some thought or problem solving is often required. And the adventure seldom mandates the solution, allowing clever players to think of their own way of bypassing the trap rather than explicitly requiring a particular spell.

There are fewer instant kill effects, and instead more traps that just cause significant injury. In place of the instant kill, many traps simply kill PC outright when they reduce a character to 0 hit points, so they only insta-kill injured characters (or ones with low hit points). It’s a nice compromise and makes the dungeon deadly while also not having a single poor decision or bad roll result in death.

There’s also several nods to the original; players experienced with the original tomb who know what to do when confronted with a Green Devil Face full of blackness or a four-armed stone gargoyle might find themselves either rewarded or caught by a dirty trick for assuming things work the same. These homages feel unintrusive, as if they really were signature elements done by a common craftsmen rather than nostalgia driven throwbacks.

I quite like the design of dungeon, with its large central staircase that lets delvers freely move up and down between the levels, adding a slight element of non-linear exploration. While you cannot leave the dungeon after you enter, moving throughout the dungeon and between floors is not hard. There’s a nice freedom to the exploration, and you’re able to skip a room that is perplexing you and move onward (and downward), coming back to it later, rather than becoming stuck and unable to make any progress through the adventure. And in the (likely) event the party needs to backtrack, the DM doesn’t need to struggle to figure out how they manage to navigate through the entire dungeon again.

There’s even an undead maintenance crew in the dungeon, that moves around resetting traps each day. This is a pretty cool idea, and solves the “problem” of how the famous dungeon that has been explored multiple times still seems pristine. And might result in an ugly surprise when the players encounter a trap they disarmed, only to find it repaired and fully operational.

(Really, in general, the new Tomb solves a lot of problems and complaints I had with the original Tomb. It’s what I hoped they would have done with Tales from the Yawning Portal rather than a straight reprint.)

The adventure retains the list of key NPCs at the start, last seen at the beginning of Storm King’s Thunder. And the Fane of the Night Serpent chapter has a roster of all the occupants of that temple: a summary of who is where, which is pretty damn useful. Sadly, this roster is only done here, and there’s not a matching roster for the other large dungeons. I quite like this “dungeon statblock” approach.

The adventure is very steeped in Realmslore. It’s really feels like a Forgotten Realms adventure and not just a generic adventure that happens to be set in the Realms (or one forced into the Realms). I’ve commented before that Tyranny of Dragons made more changes and retcons to the Realms than it actually used canon,  Princes of the Apocalypse pretty much used the Realms as a source of proper names, while Storm King’s Thunder used a lot of established locations (and a few characters) the plot and events didn’t really tie into the Realms. In contrast, Tomb of Annihilation is a “best of” tour of Chult, including a few characters and locations from past novels and adventures, while also giving several key characters an NPC write-up, including the surial paladin, Dragonbait.

(Shout-out here to the DMsGuild product Surials of the Lost Vale).

Despite the heavy Realmslore, I don’t think moving Tomb of Annihilation to another setting is an unreasonable amount of work. And the main story (the Death Curse) and the Tomb itself could probably be lifted wholesale from this module and dropped into any homebrew world with very minimal effort. Alternatively, if you hate the Death Curse and Acererak, this could also work as a Chult jungle crawl to the city of Omu to defeat the yuan-ti and stop the release of Dendar the Night Serpent, ending with  Fane of the Night Serpent as the “climax”. Heck, the inclusion of “fabled treasure” in the Tomb also means you could just run this as an old school treasure run, dropping the Death Curse and jungle entirely and just having the party start at the dungeon entrance.

The Bad

Spinning off the above, the adventure is Realms-ian. Yes, this is a feature/bug. For those hoping to use this adventure not in the Realms, a little more work is needed than previous adventures. So be warned. And while a brief mention is given about placing this adventure in other worlds, this is very brief and not very detailed.

Similarly, because Acererak is not present throughout 99% of this adventure, much of the adventure is unrelated to the actual Tomb. There could potentially be a lot of wandering and exploration throughout the jungle. Which would be fine if not for the ticking clock of the Death Curse causing people to waste away a little each day. There’s a paradoxical disconnect between the urgency of the main story and the desire to wander in the big sandbox.

The Isle of Dread-style hexcrawl feels like an afterthought. The scale feels too large: one or two hexes each day feels slow for exploring the jungle and means even a direct route to the ruined city might take several weeks. There’s also no method given for determining the terrain of neighbouring hexes: you can’t choose to walk around a swamp until you’ve spend a day trudging through it. However, the rate or travel and frequency of random encounters doesn’t change regardless of the terrain being crossed, so there’s little reason for avoiding swampland or wastes. With the scale, it also means larger sites of interested with be separated by several days in the jungle (and easily missed, again because there’s no way of “seeing” something in an adjacent hex) so there will likely be a lot of filler random encounters. There are quite a number of fun random encounters in the back of the book (which is good, because your players might end up seeing them all) but with a day or two between most encounters, player characters will be at full strength for every encounter and able to very effectively nova: using all their powers that recharge after a long rest in a single encounter.

The centrepiece dungeon is fun but is lacking some of the wild and wacky creativity of older dungeons. There’s a few inventive and original traps and puzzles, but it just lacks the complete gonzo creativity of 1st Edition modules for some ineffable reason. (A subtle constraint on imagination by tighter rules?)

The dungeon has a heavy reliance on poison damage, which is one of the more common immunities heroes can gain. Thankfully, the adventure should end before the adventures hit level 11 and gain heroes’ feast. But druids and monks with have a nice advantage in this dungeon. (Monks especially. Kill monks before they reach the Tomb.)

I didn’t see any obvious locations for “resting” inside the Tomb, or mention of what happens while resting. Given the party cannot teleport out of the Tomb, and cannot leave through the sealed doors, they’re going to be spending their last level or two exclusively in the Tomb, and constant healing might be required.

At the back of the book are a number of handouts that contain clues, riddles, and puzzles as well as spirit granted boons and hireling guides. This is slick, and a nice throwback to the picture booklet from the original Tomb of Horrors. While photocopying these is an option (or “scanning” via a smartphone app), it’s not desirable and PDF copies of these would be nice. However, PDFs of the handouts are currently absent from the website. Hopefully these will be added shortly, like the appendix of NPCs from Storm King’s Thunder. So this complaint might be negated. But people playing the adventure at the time of this writing are out of luck.

The Ugly

There’s no reference to Acererak being a demilich. Instead Acererak is an “archlich”. However, archliches are not to liches like archangels and archenemies are to regular angels and enemies. Archliches are *technically* a rare good lich and not a super lich. Lore fail. I don’t desire much: just a throw away line about his original body becoming a demilich or something. Or a reference to the Dungeon adventure where he became a lich again. Preferably something where it explains how he stopped being a vestige as seen in the 3e book Tome of Magic. This not only feels lazy (like they couldn’t even be bothered to make a halfhearted attempt at continuity), but also deprives the DM of some story. And means Dungeon Masters pressed with the question will have to come up with an answer on their own. But complaining about lore/ continuity problems and massive backstory plot holes in 5e is pretty much unending: for an edition so built upon nostalgia and the past it sure likes to play fast and loose with what came before…

Reiterating my Volo’s Guide to Monsters whine: grungs instead of grippli… booooo! Grungs are also a Greyhawk monster – originating in products from that setting.

Like Storm King’s Thunder before it, Tomb of Annihilation features a sprawling sandbox full of interesting locations, but the average party is likely to only encounter two or three by chance, maybe gaining hooks for a couple more in Port Nyanzaru. A large chunk of the sandbox chapter will be skipped.

Curiously, this adventure also makes use of experienced based levelling rather than milestones, like the previous adventures. (I like this, as DMs can always choose to ignore the xp if they want to use milestones, but adding encounters if they want to use xp rather than milestones is annoying.) However, I’m not sure if there are enough encounters to reach the 5th/6th level expected before characters begin exploring Omu.

Seeing the hexes on the map in the book is a pain in the ass. They’re very light in the jungle sections. While there is the larger poster map, this isn’t useful if the players are using said map.

The Awesome

The adventure justifies the existence of the original Tomb of Horrors, implying it was designed to attract and kill adventurers, trapping their souls so Acererak could “feed” on their deaths to sustain himself. (I believe this was also an element of 2e’s Return to the Tomb of Horrors.) I love this because it fixes the ridiculous trolling nature of the original Tomb, as a tomb actually designed to safeguard an immortal being and its treasure wouldn’t include clues or riddles. Or breathable air for that matter… It justifies why Acererak would allow adventures into his tomb at all.

In addition to Acererak, the big villains behind the story are a coven of hags, each of which is given a unique and fantastically creepy description. There’s some great imagery associated with them, not the least being the trio of messed up and horrific dolls that I just adore. To me, the Sewn Sisters are almost worth the price of admission.

There are quite a few obscure and deep cut monsters. Like the almiraj, lobsterfolk, kamadan, su-monster, yellow musk creeper, and zorbo. Despite the relatively few monster books, there’s a surprising number of “bad” monsters that have been updated for 5e. Plus there’s a wealth of new dinosaurs, which is excellent (especially for wild shaping druids and ranger looking for a different beast companion). This includes both the deinonychus and velociraptor, with the former being Medium and the latter being Tiny: the book eschews the Jurassic Park mis-naming trope! And there is a T-rex with feathers! Who is also legendary! That’s pretty awesome.

As mentioned, the book includes advice for starting the adventure at levels other than just 1st, including suggestions for 5th and 9th levels. I like this, as Tomb of Annihilation really feels like it would work nicely as a faster paced 5th to 10th level adventure. Or employing a “best of” approach and running it for 9th level PCs who are much more likely to have a character suffering under the Death Curse. I’m tempted to do the latter… Or even run it at level 12 or 13, with fewer rests permitted in the final Tomb.

The book includes a list of adventure hooks for various backgrounds from the Player’s Handbook and Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide. There are fifteen hooks in all, so not every background is hooked, but the average party should have a couple PCs given an additional motivation to push them on this adventure. I like this much more than generic hooks, and they really feel much more tied to the characters. It’s a great idea.

As mentioned earlier, there is a poster map. It’s a little tricky to remove without tearing (like all perforated poster maps) but it doesn’t have the discoloured spots caused by the removable adhesive they’d otherwise use. Go slow, be careful, and a ruler can be very helpful.

Like most of the FR adventures, this book has a small section on the five Organized Play factions, all of which seem to operate as far away as Chult. Meh. But this subsection is also put to creative use by detailing three other factions that have a role in the adventure and can be found in the jungle. It’s cool but also useful, since that information is all in one place, and it’s not just trying to force that role onto an existing faction.

An appendix in the back is crammed with random encounters. Crammed! Often, these can be either combat or roleplaying encounters, but also included are small discoveries (such as useful plants or caches of goods) but there is also a random treasure table. Nice! I like the idea of adventure specific treasure. And there’s also a random table of dead explorers that can be discovered in the jungle! So rather than being told again and again that the jungles can be deadly, the players can be shown how deadly the jungle is!

As the adventure is fairly lethal (and prevents you from resurrecting fallen characters) there are suggestions for replacement characters. There are a few locations in the titular tomb were you can get slip in a replacement PC, and there is even advice for doing so. But my favourite is in the jungle, where the witch doctor/ Voodoo priestess stereotype Nanny Pu’pu can “resurrect” a dead characters as thinking zombies. That’s just cool. (Part of me wishes there was a few more options for either offsetting the Death Curse for those players who really don’t want to start a new character, or a means to resurrect multiple characters after the end of the module, but I imagine the finality of death is part of this adventure’s appeal.)

Final Thoughts

The Tomb of Annihilation adventure is not for everyone. It’s an update of the very old school killer dungeon crawl, applying modern design standards to the deathtrap dungeon while retaining much of the lethality. If you’re a player who *likes* your character it’s not an adventure to play in, and if you’re a DM that hates killing characters it’s not the best adventure to run. Similarly, if you hate the idea of a big sandbox or exploring an unmapped wilderness hex by hex, it’s also not a good adventure.

Except… if you hate deathtrap dungeons, there’s still a lot of pulpy lost world goodness in the first half. And if you hate hexploration, there’s a lot of standard dungeon crawling in the second half. While the product aimed at fans of both styles of play, you’re not required to use the entire adventure. If you skip half the adventure, there’s still a decent amount of content to be found. That is, if you’re okay with buying content that might not see use at the game table.

The adventure isn’t perfect, but it has a lot going for it: it’s taking three classic modules and reimagining and integrating them seamlessly while also telling an original tale with a unique hook that is very tied to the tropes of D&D and almost perfectly involving a classic villain. It’s a really great adventure that should easily become a modern classic. It’s challenging and deadly without being unfair or taking cheap shots, while encouraging clever solutions and careful play without requiring checking every square in a dungeon. It even manages to have a deadly grinder that still includes a few interesting NPCs while also providing an opportunity to learn much of the backstory without an NPC descending into a prolonged monologue.

Shameless Plug

If you liked this review, you can support me and encourage future reviews.

I have a number of PDF products on the Dungeon Master’s Guild website as part of the 5 Minute Workday Presents line. Such as Artificer Specialists, Rod of Seven Parts, Traps, Diseases, Legendary Monsters, and Variant Rules.

Additionally, my book, Jester David’s How-To Guide to Fantasy Worldbuilding, is available for purchase on DriveThurRPG or Print on Demand through Amazon. The book is a compilation of my worldbuilding blog series, but all the entries have been updated, edited, and expanded to almost two-hundred pages of advice on making your own fantasy world.

Until now, rules support for the 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons has been limited to the small handful of classes in the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide and the races of Volo’s Guide to Monsters, with the majority of classes being expanded through homebrew options (such as on the DMs Guild) http://www.dmsguild.com/ and the Unearthed Arcana series of articles on the Wizards of the Coast website.

Xanathar’s Guide to Everything is the “first major rules expansion” for 5e, with new material for players and the Dungeon Master.  

What It Is

Xanathar’s Guide to Everything is a 192 page hardcover book. It’s full-colour with a fair amount of art and features the standard binding of WotC’s books. (Like all WotC books of the last decade, not being saddle stitched, the book may need to be gently broken in.)

The book is divided between content for Players and content for Dungeon Masters.

The player-focused first chunk of the book includes 31 subclasses (27 of which are new) as well as twelve pages of random backgrounds for characters – which are mostly random tables of personal details and familiar backgrounds – 15 new racial feats, as well as advice on tool proficiencies (including suggested uses and DCs) and twenty pages of spells. The book ends with eighteen pages of random names for characters of the PHB races.

For the person behind the screen, there’s  some suggested rulings for common situations – such as sleeping in armour and tying knots – variant rules for encounter building, awarding magic items, and creating traps; twenty-one pages of random encounters; revised downtime rules that do things like expand carousing and shopping; and 48 common magic items that are mostly flavourful.

Like Volo’s Guide to Monsters there is an alternative cover, done by the same artist, Hydro74

The book is also available digitally on the virtual tabletop Fantasy Grounds, as well as the new character builder and compendium, D&D Beyond.

The Good

All of the subclasses in the book were first seen in Unearthed Arcana, where they were concept tested by the community and playtested by private playtesters. Some of the subclasses are designed to fill a mechanical role in the party akin the formal roles in 4th Edition: the ancestral guardian barbarian and cavaliers fighter are tanks/defenders, the celestial warlock and divine soul sorcerers are healers/leaders, etc. However, each of these are flavour heavy options and seem to exist as much for story reasons as to fill a niche in the party. And others subclasses don’t have such a formal role, such as the zealon barbarian or the arcane archer fighter. Similarly, there was no attempt to “fill the grid” by providing an options for each role for every class just to ensure there were no gaps.

Each class section begins with a number of tables. These are generic and untied to the new subclasses, offering some potential class-specific background flavour for each class, such as a fighter’s method of fighting, a bard’s greatest embarrassment, the type of temple the cleric was trained in, and the monastic icon of the monk’s monastery. 

There is art for each new subclass, often all on one page. While having generic pieces for archetypes is nothing new, being common in Pathfinder books, having each subclass receive it’s own art is nice, and grouping them together creates a lovely visual comparison of the differences in the characters despite all three being the same class and “type” of character. Thankfully, there’s also other art and small flourishes when possible, so the first quarter of the book is not just generic figure shots.

Many of the art pieces also include a lttle bit of the background. I like this as it adds a little extra flavour to the art, and makes it seem a little less like the character is striking a pose: there is a scene unfolding and events are occurring. For example, I love the shot on page 116; just the figure and trap would have be fine (and is the kind of piece I would have expected in 3rd/4th Edition or from Pathfinder), but the addition of the background adds so much to the narrative and so much depth of emotion.

Another art comment refers to the full-page piece of art that begins each of the chapters. All three feature the same band of adventurers in different situations. This is neat, and makes me wish there were more chapters, so there could be more of a meta-narrative. It almost makes me miss the iconic adventures from Pathfinder and their mini-stories in that game’s hardcover books. (Which could also have benefited from a meta-narrative.)

While the book is called “Xanathar’s Guide” it’s not deeply tied to a thieves’ guild, Waterdeep, or the Realms. The lore and flavour of the classes and options in the books is largely generic and setting neutral. It is very literally a Forgotten Realms book in name only. A few FR deities and places get name dropped in the text, but these are usually in conjunction with Greyhawk gods or other locations. As the majority of D&D games are not set in the Realms, this is appreciated.

There’s a surprising amount going on in random backstories. Some tables have additional modifiers, such as how you rolled on another table or based on an ability score. For example, your childhood home is modified by your social status. And it ends with a bunch of generic supplemental tables that are used by the other tables, but a clever DM could also use these to generate an NPC or random detail in an adventure. Heck, this whole section could be used to generate NPCs, such as a hireling or a rival.  

The book features so very many tables. Tables for backgrounds, magic items, random encounters, and names. The most tables you’ll see in a non-OSR book. This is certainly a feature-bug as there are a LOT of tables, but when you need a random encounter or quick NPC name, this book is super helpful.

I quite like the new common magic items in the book. These are small little items that don’t increase a character’s power in combat, but still confer a small bonus. Little things like a mug that prevents you from becoming drunk, dice that roll how you wish, a cloak that billows dramatically, and clothes that repair themselves.

The end of the book features a sizable number of spells. While several are new, including some nice flavour and utility spells, many classic spells also see their return. Just a few names I recognize include: horrid wilting, enervation, transmute rock, flame arrows, Melf’s minute meteors, magic stone, pyrotechnics, and Tenser’s transformation.

The Bad

With over 50 pages of random tables, the book feels small. A full quarter of the book is devoted to tables for backgrounds, random encounters, magic items, and names. Some of those (like the magic items tables) could have been handled via a downloadable PDF Web Enhancement. And while I appreciate the idea of including a few extra random names for the humanoid species, there’s no shortage of websites for generating random names from human ethnicities.

As all the subclasses were playtested, I feel like I’ve seen most before, so nothing feels *really* new. There’s few real surprises in the book. Heck, in the trap section we don’t even get new complex traps, just getting a couple we reviewed before.

During the Unearthed Arcana public playtest, I always assumed WotC wasn’t bothering to test the “easy” options, the ones where they didn’t need to concept test the appeal of the option. As it turns out, thiswasn’t the case. There are some pretty traditional options that are still missing subclasses. To name just a few there’s the pet druid – especially as every single picture of a druid in the PHB and this book feature an animal – as well as the evil blighter druid; an Archomental/ Primordial or genie warlock; draconic warlock; fey, fiendish, and genie sorcerer; two-weapon dervish barbarian; urban ranger; charismatic swindler rogue; shield-focused fighter; dragon disciple monk; a generalist wizard, and so very many more.

Similarly, with so many other subclasses previewed in Unearthed Arcana that didn’t make the cut, everyone will have a favourite that doesn’t appear. The Protection Domain for the cleric feels absent, and I lament the absence of the jester-esque College of Satire.

Despite the above gaps and non-appearances, four subclasses in the book are reprinted from the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide, and many (if not all) the spells from the Elemental Evil Player’s Companion reappear here. SCAG was already a tough sell for players to buy without diminishing its content, and that space *could* have used for brand new content. I imagine the sublcasses were included to rounding out pages, filling in a half-page gap. I’m sure some other new content could have been added just as easily, especially for the sorcerer who sees the pretty unremarkable Storm Sorcerer repeated. The sorcerer is one of the classes that really needed more new and somewhat generic subclasses.

Some content that could have been included was also not added. There’s no updated ranger class features; requested as that class has been less than popular. The revisions were updated and tested a couple of times, but – at the time of this writing – it has been a over a year since the ranger was last updated. While WotC has said they don’t want people to pay for those revisions and want them to be free, it’s useful to have them in a book and thus easily referenced at the table. Including them in a physical product doesn’t also preclude releasing that content on the DMsGuild, while also having the advantage of makes it more visible and less forgettable several months after the buzz of the re-release fades.

Similarly, the the artificer & mystic are also a no-show, being held back for more testing and revisions. Again, these were released as free PDFs and work continues, but is seemingly being done very slowly behind the scenes as there hasn’t been an artificer update in ten months and the mystic in eight. Likewise, there’s also no mass combat subsystem (or subsystems) in the book, likely because that was not well received. This was something teased for the DMG so it’s continued absence is unfortunate. Heck, there’s a pretty hefty list of potential DMG topics or rules modules that could have easily been worked into this book.

The racial feats included in this book don’t include races outside the Player’s Handbook. This means there are no goliath, kobold, or catfolk feats here. Similarly, the random encounter tables don’t include monsters from Volo’s Guide to Monsters, even as an option (i.e. they could have said something like “2 mummies or 1 bodok“). And the druid’s beasts-by-CR table is also limited to the Monster Manual, making it significantly incomplete and pretty much rendering it useless in favour of a fan one that also includes beasts from the adventures and VGtM. There’s a catch-22 situation here. It’s problematic to assume everyone owns every book released for a game system, but it’s also frustrating if every book exists in a vacuum and cannot later be expanded upon.  

The expanded downtime rules features new rules for magic item crafting and selling. This is nice, but I don’t think these rules are robust enough to really appeal to people who crave a functioning magic item economy and crafting rules akin to 3rd Edition. For everyone else, the rules in the DMG are probably sufficient. Nor is there advice for making crafting easier or harder, or making magic items more or less common.

Likewise, the pages devoted to the myriad sets of tools seem curious. It’s nice that we get a full description of the contents and some suggested uses, but I’m uncertain people who wanted tools to do more won’t be satisfied with the couple suggested uses and the unrelated DCs for suggested tasks.

The title is somewhat misleading. The Xanathar, the beholder head of a Waterdeep thieves’ guild, doesn’t do much guiding and isn’t even particularly relevant. They’re in a paragraph in the introduction (with art) and they’re the “author” of the three-dozen or so sidebars in the book. There’s probably all of a page or two of “Xanathar” in the book. The three unnamed adventurers in the chapter illustrations likely have more page space devoted to them. You could paste over the Xanathar sidebars with other notes and this book would instantly become Elminster’s Guide to Everything or Van Richten’s Guide to Everything. Made worse by the fact “Xanathar” is hard to spell, harder to remember, and likely awkward to ask for at a bookstore or type into Amazon. (I expect a lot of people typing “Xanthar” or “Zanathar”.) The unnecessary title is made worse by the fact it doesn’t really do a good explaining what’s in this book. It sounds more like a travelogue or Waterdhavian guide book, or perhaps even a sequel to Dungeonology (which is literally what I thought when the title was first teased). It doesn’t sound like a rules accessory with subclasses, spells, and variant rules.

The Ugly

The alternate cover. Art is subjective… but so are reviews. And this is my review and I really don’t like the double goldfishes on the cover. It’s just silly. The stylized beholder through gem-like eyes is neat, but the goldfishes just ruin it for me. Hard pass.

(Why is there a goldfish there? Because the Xanathar has a pet goldfish that is the only thing he cares about. Which is something I can’t find an earlier reference to prior to this book, having checked Volo’s Guide to Monsters, the FR wiki, and several 3e and 2e sources. The goldfish seems like an addition for this book. Which suggests someone thought of the goldfish joke, and was so amused by themselves, they put the goldfish prominently on both covers of the book.)

Also, one alternative incentive cover is a neat treat. A talking piece for collectors. Two is okay, but back-to-back makes it feels less special. If they do a third these will really feel like a cash grab targeting collectors, encouraging them to buy two copies (gamers, in general, tend to be obsessive that way). I hope this is the last alternative cover we see for a while. Every two or three years is frequent enough. (Honestly, I’d rather see them go back and release special collector’s edition alternate covers for the Core rulebooks instead.)

Xanthar’s sidebars are just goofy. They’re not particularly insightful or necessary, adding nothing to the book but bad jokes and ananacronistically modern dialogue that will just seem embarrassingly dated in five years. I found most of the sidebars more distracting than amusing. They could have provided some in-world thoughts on the subjects, but mostly felt wasted on cheap jokes, while also reducing the Xanathar to a goofy, foolish character. And not even a goofy but menacing character like the Joker, but a goofy ineffectual evil villain for a kids TV show. Likely one voiced by Will Ferrell. Honestly, it will be a long while before I can take beholders seriously as a villain again…

When it was launched in January 2016, one of the selling features of the Dungeon Master’s Guild was that it would allow WotC to “identify the best creators for additional publication opportunities”. Xanathar’s Guide to Everything is probably the first book where WotC could have tapped into the authors of best selling products from the Dungeon Master’s Guild for content. They could have gone to them for a subclass or feat or entries for a table. Maybe some spells or traps. Heck, they had Chris Perkins writing common magic items at the last moment when they could have instead looked to PDFs or tapped the community. But they didn’t; the credits list the regular pool of contributors.

The Awesome

The very first page of the book (following the introduction) is an FAQ on the core rules, clarifying common problems and commonly missed rules. There’s nothing new here, but it’s nice to have some clarifications. While I knew *most* of these rulings, there was at least one that surprised me.

Each class’ section in chapter one begins with the logo of that class in the corner presented nice and prominently. I like these icons and enjoy that they weren’t just forgotten after the PHB.

In the background section, there’s a series of four connected illustrations giving the origin of a wizard. I quite like this little micro-narrative in four pictures, and it’s a fun example of how someone could take three disparate elements (stole something of value, became a sailor, sole survivor of an accident) and weave them into an interesting tale.

There’s a few callbacks in the subclasses to 4th Edition subclasses. The druid’s Circle of Beasts is effectively the circle of spirits, pulling ideas from 3e’s spirit shaman and 4e’s shaman class. And the Storm Herald barbarian invokes thoughts of the Thunderborn barbarian. While 4e was my least favourite edition, I’m always glad when they bring back elements and have nods to it; while I didn’t like it, every edition was someone’s favourite. Similarly, several of the new racial feats are nice pull inspiration from 4th Edition racial abilities, meanwhile the drow racial feat has some nice nods to old 1e drow powers.

Speaking of forgotten classical elements, adamantine weapons return here. I was disappointed they were omitted in the core rules, especially after being mentioned in the Monster Manual. Their effects are nice and simple, and I can seem them working nicely with a few class features.

There are variant rules for wild shaping, making it easier to adjudicate what forms and shapes a druid might have learned rather than opening up the entire Monster Manual. Having done a short mini-campaign with a high level druid, deciding what animals they had and had not seen was always tricky.

The new trap guidelines add spell levels to the table of trap severity, providing some guidelines for effects similar to non-damaging traps. This encourages more creative and imaginative spell-based traps, or provides a magical inspiration for mundane traps.

One small bit in the expanded magic item creation section that caught my eye was the table of Magic Item Ingredients, that associates the CR of creatures with item rarity, so you need to potentially harvest a creature of that challenge to gather necessary reagents. (Or simply overcome, but gathering components is much more cool).

Shouting out a few spells that caught my eye, ceremony brings back atonement, albeit at a much lower level, along with bless water. Where holy water comes from it so often forgotten. I like the various home base creation spells, like druid grove. Getting the players attached to a location can be fun. And there’s the pet spells, like find greater steed and the adorable yet fairly useful tiny servant spell. Want your players to do ridiculous things? Give them a wand that casts tiny servant once or twice a day.

Final Thoughts

The two biggest problems with Xanathar’s Guide to Everything is the limited amount of content and unexplanatory name.

For a book that costs as much as the Player’s Handbook but has 128 fewer pages, limiting its usable content is a big drawback. The book features slightly tweaked subclasses we’ve already seen, misses some pretty iconic options, and devotes a quarter of the book to random tables offering services that existing websites already provide (like random names) or that could have been free PDFs (like WotC has already done, as apparently with the list of spells, the monster by rarity chart, or the magic item rarity index). Or even left for DMsGuild products.

But it’s the first non-adventure product WotC has released in a year, and will likely be the only accessory for players released for many months, if not another year or two. There’s been plenty of time to save money, and with so little official content released this small smattering of appetisers feels like a feast.

All this makes the book difficult to judge.

The actual content in the book is both well-balanced and well-received, being the best-of-the-best previewed in Unearthed Arcana. And I do very much like that they’re only adding a restrained number of new player options to the game. Those 50-odd pages will be great for my group eventually, as new campaigns start and/or replacement characters are brought into the game. The spells are also good, plus some of the DM variant rules will be useful: I can see using a few of the downtime options. But there’s so many more rules modules they could have added, so many more types of content. Looking back to my review of the DMG, rules modules missing from that book included encounter-based PC resources, alternate methods of gaining experience, fantastic firearms (i.e. non-historical), managing strongholds, kingdom building, mass combat, variant critical hit rules, critical fumbles, hit locations, armour as DR, and vehicular (especially naval) combat. All of those topics could have easily been at home here.

Many players will be happy to roll randomly for a background, either to save themselves some time or brainpower, or simply to challenge themselves to work with the random results and reconcile any irregularities. But just as many might happily ignore those sections, preferring to devise their own backstory. And while some Dungeon Masters will be happy with random encounter tables, I suspect just as many prefer not to leave their encounters to chance. And for groups who primarily run one of the storyline adventures, these tables are also less useful, first because most of the encounters are scripted, but also because those books also feature random encounter tables (as such, I technically already own many, many pages of random encounters). While theoretically useful if an encounter goes off the rails, I have yet to pull of Storm King’s Thunder for a random encounter, and don’t think it likely I will do so with this book.

After a few days with the book I’m reminded very much of the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide, in that it’s a book with a smattering of crunchy content and a lot of other. Only in this case, instead of being a campaign setting-ette and a guide to the Sword Coast, it’s just page after page of tables. Which, clearly, did not wow me. But, if you are a table junkie who makes regular use of random encounters while also favouring some random chance in your character’s backstories, this third of the book might make you incredibly happy.

Shameless Plug

If you liked this review, you can support me and encourage future reviews.

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Review: Star Trek Wave 2

Following up on their release of the Star Trek Adventures Core Rulebooks and its adventure anthology book, Modiphius Entertainment is working on the second wave of their (robust) product line set in the futuristic world of Star Trek. Coming up is two new books: the Command Division sourcebook and the Beta Quadrant sourcebook. Currently available as PDFs, these books are planned to be released in May as physical books (but given Modiphius is a small company, I would bet on June before they’re found in stores). In addition, there is a tile sets and more resin miniatures, which are forthcoming.

This blog focuses on the two sourcebooks.

What They Are

Both products are 128-page books. At the time of this review, only the PDFs are available, but the books are advertised as being hardcover. Both books are full colour with illustrated art rather than photos. The books have black backgrounds with coloured highlights resembling LCAR controls (the touchscreens in The Next Generation). So a head’s up for anyone who doesn’t like white text on dark pages.

(There is a print-on-demand white background version of the Core Rulebook available on drivethrurpg.com for those who cannot stand white-on-black. No word if these accessories will receive the same treatment.)

The Command Division book focuses on that subgroup of Starfleet officers, the commanders of starships (both captains and first officers) as well as conn officers (the pilot/ helmsman and navigators). The Beta Quadrant book is about that quarter of the galaxy, the region to the southeast. Despite most Star Trek shows referencing “the Alpha Quadrant” much of the action takes place in the Beta Quadrant, which is the home of the Klingons and Romulans. Hence why it was released before the Alpha book.

Command Division

The Command Division sourcebook describes the command structure of Starfleet, gives some rules for playing as a member of the admiralty, includes starbase/ space station rules, a few new talents for command & conn characters, and has sixteen new spaceframe for player starships: Daedalus, NX-class, Hermes, Oberth, Sydney, Centaur, Ambassador, Nebula, New Orleans, Olympic, Steamrunner, Norway, Saber, Sovereign, and Luna. The Constitution refit (aka the Enterprise-class) is described, but isn’t given stats (telling people to use the standard refit rules). The book also has a few medals and optional reputation spends to improve a character rather than giving them a promotion.

The Good

This ships in this book were much desired. There were a decent number of ships in the Core Rulebook, but there’s always room for more.

For a game advertised as being set in all eras of Trek, there was initially a serious absence of ships from the Enterprise era. That gap is corrected here with the Daedalus and NX-class along with rules for their weaponry (spatial torpedoes and the like). These rules are also useful for presenting ships in TNG era build by technologically inferior species. Additionally, there were a lot of classic ships that were previously absent from the game, which we now have official rules for, such as spaceframes for Enterprise-C and -E.

The rules for the Nebula-class’ mission pod are also very nicely implemented, being flexible and fitting the modular nature of that feature. Very nicely done.

There’s a surprising about of world detail crammed into the book, such as the descriptions of the command structure of Starfleet, the hierarchy/ chain-of-command in starships, as well as the default duty watches on starships (who starts work when). There was even some advice on standing orders. It’s a good book for the person playing the captain to skim.

The middle of the book really focuses a lot of attention on the Command and Conn departments, which are the focus of the book. There are at least ten new Talents for each of those Departments, which more than doubles the talents for characters focusing on those areas. There’s also examples of how characters might act with either a high or low Command and Conn score, as wells as examples of personality traits for characters with high score in Command or Conn and another Department. Such as what a character with a high Command and Science might act like, often paired with an example from the series. Similarly, there is a breakdown of sample Focuses, both explaining what they do and when they would apply. This is certainly useful for players might might be hazy on their Trek lore.  

The book features several alternate campaign ideas, including one where the players belong to the admiralty, including alternate position in place of bridge stations. There’s also rules for managing fleets (including some limited variant rules for fleet mass combat), as well as some description of Federation law that could serve as the foundation for a JAG campaign. There’s also a pretty length description of the Prime Directive, which should be a source of tension and conflict in a games.

There are a number of plot elements for Command and Conn stories, which could serve as adventure hooks for the gamemaster. Useful and it adds value for GMs. In addition to the plot hooks, there are a number of NPC statblocks, such as admirals, diplomatic NPCs (including Sarek and Lwaxana Troi!).

Plus, there are a couple art pieces in this book make use of the red uniforms from the original cast movies. There were overlooked in the Core Rulebook. I’m a fan of these uniforms and am happy to see them get more love.

The Bad

The first complaint may or may not be true of these books, but is true of the Core Rulebook. The black inked background of the book is sensitive to skin oils, and unless I meticulously dry my hands, I tend to leave fingerprints on the pages that linger.

The bookmarks on the PDF are terrible. Not every heading receives a bookmark and there’s a lot of curious choices. This makes navigating the digital product awkward. There’s also no hyperlinking in the index, which is unfortunate. There’s an attempt at hyperlinking on the chapter pages, but these are all dead links that just give me an error message.

There are a few typos and errors in the book. Thankfully, not as many as the Core Rulebook whose first first printing was especially bad. (They fixed most of the typos in subsequent printings.) The most noteworthy error is the Sovereign-class being given the wrong stats, copy the Attributes from the preceding Saber-class. (I have been told that the PDF will be updated to correct this, and fixed stats will appear in the print product.)

In general, the editing of both books is a little weak, and certain phrases and bits of information are repeated. There’s redundancy. Which hurts in a regular book, but is especially noteworthy in a book where every line matters. Because…

The book is small. At 128-pages, it’s small for a major gaming accessory. Because it’s also hardcover book, this also makes it very pricey for the content. A softcover might have been less durable, but it could be half the price.

Because of it’s small size and the number of different topics, this means there’s a lot of elements that only receive a cursory glance. Such as space stations, where there are only two examples. Additional reputation rewards and fleet maneuvers both only receive three pages, being given the minimum content. And even with sixteen new spaceframes there are a lot of starships that are not detailed. For example, there’s only a single new ship for The Original Series era.

There’s limited art throughout the book, including a few recycled pieces. There’s not even art for all ships, which is problematic for a few of the lesser known ships like the Deadalus, Sydney and Centaur.

Beta Quadrant

The core of the Beta Quadrant book is the histories and description of the Federation, Klingon Empire, Romulans, Gorn, and Orion Syndicate. It has new NPC starships for most of the aforementioned hostile powers as well as a few civilian ships. Also included are a bunch of “encounters” or mini-missions that include numerous NPC statblocks, including sidebars for designing Gorn, Orion, Reman, characters. The book ends with a description of the Shackleton Expanse that is the centerpoint of the Living Campaign. For players, there are Ardanan, Benzite, Bolian, Deltan, Efrosian, Klingon, Rigellian-Chelon, Rigellian-Jelna, Risan, Xindi-Arboreal, Xindi-Primate, Xindi-Reptilian, Xindi-Insectoid, and Zakdorn.

The Good

This book is much more focused on its topic than the Command Division sourcebook. It focuses on describing the major political & military powers in the titular quadrant, gives some new ships for those species, and then describes a few extra species for players. There’s not a lot of side topics, with the only divergence being the civilian ships, but this is a useful addition.

The history in this book is solid, covering the known history of the Federation, Klingons, and Romulans. This doesn’t just focus on the canon (which is often very limited) and builds on the lore when necessary. I imagine it’s referencing novels and past RPG products. These histories feel complete (to the extent the space allows) and even makes some references to Star Trek Discovery, which likely had not finished by the time this book went to layout. (It does have a few oddities, such as repeatedly mentioning the old beta canon that Klingons didn’t have cloaking devices until they traded with the Romulans, which was the assumption for decades prior to Discovery’s change.)

The last fifth of the book is a chapter on “Enemies & Adversaries”, which are basically a bunch of micro-adventures. These are just an adventure hook or two, a location, and a bunch of NPCs that can be used. Really, it’s just a way of having additional NPC statblocks, but providing a context. There’s some Orions, Romulans, Klingons, and a Reman or two. While not as easy to reference as a traditional monster book, they’re separated enough that it’s easy to find what you’re looking for, and there’s the added benefit of a few having a personality and proper name.

The final five pages of the above chapter are devoted to the Shackleton Expanse, which is the region far to the galactic East—prior maps denoted this as Federation territory, but it has been retconned in STA to be an explored region of space with generically mysterious anomalies. There are some more NPCs and some new space hazards rules, so it doesn’t feel entirely superfluous for people skipping the living campaign. I do like that they’re trying to inform people of the living campaign, as joining that does net you a couple free adventures every few months.

Modiphius reached an arrangement with Cryptic Studios, the creators of Star Trek Online to use their designs for Gorn ships. This is pretty cool, and I hope they can do more work together, providing more ship designs or species (such as their Tzenkethi). I quite like how much Modiphius and Cryptic seem to be coordinating and hyping each other’s products: it’s nice to see licence partners working together rather than competing for fan dollars.

There’s also a picture of Andorians playing hockey against Klingons, and I love it so very much.

The Bad

Only a few planets are described in the book. It details Earth, Andoria, and Vulcan as well as Benzar. Which is a curious choice, not being featured on the show and Benzites only having a couple speaking roles. A related problem is that only planets associated with the big factions are described. There’s no list of miscellaneous unaligned world and their inhabitants, such as the Yridians or El Aurians. This also leads to the weirdness of the planet Nausicaa is listed in Federation section while the planets of the Deltans, Bolians, and Efrosian are not. Of course, as they lack an empire, this also means Nausicaan bodyguards or pirates & their ships aren’t described.

A few of the species could have used a little more lore and description. Such as the Xindi who are a nice addition but how they fit into the 24th Century only receives the briefest mention. Also, none of the Xindi recieve art; this is unfortunately common: of the fourteen species, only four have an illustration.

Of the new species, Ardana is a very curious choice. These were from a single late season The Original Series episode that was unremarkable, and one where the original author of the script was critical of the final product. They’re a super rando inclusion, especially in place of Nausicaans, Suliban, Romulans, El Aurian, or Axanari.

While the book details Nerendra Station, no stats are provided. (Or even a reference to which statblock from the Command Division book that it would use).

While statblocks are provided for many members of other hostile species, there are no Gorn NPCs in the book. Thankfully, there is a brief racial write-up so you can adjust existing NPCs.

Final Thoughts

I quite like Star Trek Adventures and the system, which really allows you to focus on the science and investigation as much as the combat. And I’m happy to see additional content. But, man, this game really leaves you wanting more. Each book feels like an appetiser of content rather than a feast or full meal. Following these books, it’s going to be a long wait for the follow-up Alpha Quadrant book, let alone the Sciences Division book I’d like for my character. As far as complaints go “I wish there was more” is a good one.

However, while more species will be coming, the species overlooked likely won’t be included. And it’s likely there won’t be many more spaceframes in the future. The content missed in these book will remain absent from the game.
I can’t help but wonder if the game would have been better served with a single 250-page Department book followed by a starship & starbase book. Or a galaxy guide sourcebook with an aliens and adversaries sourcebook. Four larger and comprehensive books rather than seven smaller books. Or, as I mentioned earlier, softcovers.

But I have to judge the books we have not the books I’d prefer we have.

The books are a solid read with lots of good flavour that really demonstrates authors that know their Trek and did their research. This is especially noteworthy in the various in-character sidebars, which are occasionally pretty deep cut Easter eggs. And the focused nature of the books make them easy to recommend: if you’re playing a helmsman or command officer or want to know more of the organisation of Starfleet, the Command Division book is a good choice. It’s also good if you want some more ships, especially if you want to set a game in the 22nd Century. If you want more history of the Federations and some new species, then the Beta Quadrant book is your best bet. If you’re a GM more than a player, the Beta Quadrant book is also a better choice with the extra adversaries. However, if you’re a chief engineer or doctor, or playing a game against the Tzenkethi or set in the Dominion War, there’s little here for you. You have to wait for future books. 

(And if the included content still isn’t enough for you, there’s the Continuing Mission fansite with lots of resources, tools, as well as homebrew species and spaceframes.)

Shameless Plug(s)

First off, I play in a Star Trek Adventures game every Saturday at 3:15 EST, streamed on Twitch and archived on YouTube.

If you liked this blog, you can support me and encourage future reviews.

I have T-shirts available for sale over on TeePublic!

I also have a number of PDF products on the Dungeon Master’s Guild website as part of the 5 Minute Workday Presents line. Such as Artificer Specialists, Rod of Seven Parts, Traps, Diseases, Legendary Monsters, and Variant Rules.

Additionally, my book, Jester David’s How-To Guide to Fantasy Worldbuilding, is available for purchase on DriveThurRPG or Print-on-Demand through Amazon. The book is a compilation of my worldbuilding blog series, but all the entries have been updated, edited, and expanded to almost two-hundred pages of advice on making your own fantasy world.

Review: Midgard Heroes Handbook

Kobold Press, the midsized RPG publisher, is famous for several things: crowdsourcing before it was cool, a fascination with Kobolds, being run by a guy legitimately named “Wolfgang”, and their campaign setting of “Midgard.” (Which has lots of kobolds. Because of course it does.)

The Midgard setting was originally created as a city to serve as a backdrop for adventures being published by the company (then known as “Open Design”), which soon expanded from a city into a region that grew into a subcontinent that became a world. Midgard is heavily inspired by Norse Mythology but has a wealth of other inspirations, both real and fantastic.

A version of the setting was originally compiled for Pathfinder in 2012, but in early 2017 Kobold Press Kickstarted an update of this campaign setting, raising funds for an expanded and updated campaign book along with PC focused accessories: one for Pathfinder (The Midgard Player’s Guide) and one for 5th Edition D&D.

This review focuses on the latter, the player splatbook Midgard Heroes Handbook for 5e.
(A blog reviewing the Worldbook will come later, when I’ve had more time to digest that massive freakin’ book.)

What It Is

The book is a 211-page hardcover with full colour art and coloured page backgrounds, and also available as a PDF on the Kobold Press site.

Included in the book are eleven new races (bearfolk, centaur, dhampir, gearforged, gnoll, Midgard kobold, minotaur, ratfolk, ravenfolk, shadow fey, and trollkin). Also included is the winter folk halfling subrace and a variant ethnicity for humans. The book has a wealth of new subclasses (1 barbarian path, 2 bard colleges, 17 cleric domains, 1 druid circle, 6 fighter archetypes, 2 paladin oaths, 2 ranger conclaves, 3 rogue archetypes, 2 sorcerer bloodlines, 3 warlock pacts, and 11 wizard traditions). In total, there’s a staggering fifty new player options!

The book also includes 16 feats, 19 backgrounds, and weapon combat styles. There’s several new spellcasting rules and variant forms of magic (including ring magic, key lines, and runes) and well over a couple hundred new spells.

Heroes Handbook is a giant book of crunch. It’s basically what would have been considered a “Players Handbook 2” in earlier editions.

The Good

After the Kickstarter, the content of the book was divvied up and released to backers of the Kickstarter for playtesting, concept testing, and general review. A lot of the more problematic or egregious mechanics were quickly caught, leaving this product fairly well balanced. There are a few warts here and there, but in general the balance of 5e leans to “close enough” that nothing I saw in the book would break a game. I’ve seen more egregious elements in Xanathar’s Guide to Everything.

Several of the archetypes seem surprisingly generic for a book ostensibly aimed at being a guide to a particular setting. To call out a few, there’s the the shieldbearer fighter, duelist and whisper rogues, elementalist wizard, shadow and genie bloodlines, and the great machine and light eater pacts. All could easily fit into the Forgotten Realms, Eberron, or even Greyhawk with minimal work. And several of the new clerical domains also have a generic feel, such as the apocalypse, darkness, dragon, hunting, justice, prophecy, and travel. There’s a lot of gaps filled in this book, making it useful to players in a homebrewed campaign setting or even running through one of the published adventures set in the Realms.

Even a few of the races are generic. The Midgard kobold is a nice alternative for someone not wanting to use the version in Volo’s Guide to Monsters, and absence of the gnoll in that book was frequently commented on. The gearforged will do nicely until an official warforged can be released. And quite a few settings make use of minotaurs, such as Dragonlance. And more esoteric races like the dhampir, shadowfey, and trollkin wouldn’t be too hard to work into a setting. The ratfolk and bearfolk are more of an exception, but they’re both pretty cool. I’m surprised I never realized how much I dug the idea of a humanoid bear person.

Early in the book is a sizable table with the random ages, heights, and weights of the various species covered in the book. Very often this is forgotten, so kodos for Kobold Press for remembering!
The table of contents is fully hyperlinked. Handy.

At the start of the “Divine Characters” chapter, there’s a table with a brief summary of gods. This is a big chart that quickly tells you who worships which gods and their primary domain. This is always handy for clerics (and paladins).

The Bad

There’s no index. Sadness. But, as there’s a solid table of contents, which covers pretty much all the bits you’ll want to find, so this is an exceedingly trivial complaint.

While the book is a lovely source of player crunch for Midgard, it doesn’t function very well as a player’s guide to the setting. For example, while a chart for the gods is included, there’s no details and expansion of the gods and their churches.

I’m not sold on the arrangement of the classes. The book divides the classes into “Martial and Roguish”, “Divine” and “Arcane”. It works, but it feels odd that the classes aren’t alphabetical. And someone looking for the bard might end up looking in the wrong section (they’re roguish not arcane) or wonder where the “rune magic” is located. This formatting also places various side elements, such as magical options and new weapons, in the relevant class sections.

Several of the subclasses are a little more complex and fiddly than some players might be used to. These are not always “newbie” classes. I’m not always convinced the payoff of the subclass is worth the added complexity. But for someone who wants a rogue with some more moving parts then the Duelist might appeal to them.

The book is missing some character. As much as I disliked Xanathar’s meta jokes and modern commentary in Xanathar’s Guide to Monsters, having in-character sidebars makes for a more enjoyable read. This book could use a little more in-world touches and personality.

The big problem with this book is that it’s reprinting a lot of content previously put out by Kobold Press. If you’ve already purchased several of the racial PDFs, like Unlikely Heroes, then seven of the nine presented races are reprinted. Several options for the Deep Magic series of PDFs have been partially or almost completely reprinted. And a large percentage of the Beyond Damage Dice PDF has been copied as well. (But if you haven’t purchased those products, or don’t have hard copies, then this probably isn’t a big issue.)

There’s a fair amount of recycled art, which is shared with the Worldbook. And the aforementioned PDFs. This isn’t unusually with smaller publishers, as good art is expensive. What art is in the book tends to be the generic quarter-page figure shots with larger half-page scenes at the start of chapters. There’s few pictures of gear or locations. And the pages don’t have little artistic flourishes, like items or bloodstains or inkblots (or the national crests that fill the Worldbook). This is especially noteworthy in the magic section with its many pages of straight text.

The Ugly

The absence of a map at the beginning is problematic. There little bits of world lore slipped here and there, but there’s no context for what is where or the scale.

(There is a lovely minimalist map in the ley line section on page 129, but this might not be the first place you check, and a lot of the detail is covered by the red ley lines; I’d love if the book had a cleaner version of this as a map the players/DM could print and cover in notes.)

There’s a heading for “Elemental Magic Feats” but none exist. Instead it goes to “Negotiator”. Similarly, a few feats in the “Dragon Magic” heading are only tangentially related to dragons (specifically Fortifying Healing and Unthreatening).

I’m still not a fan of how the trollkin is designed. It can use a bonus action to spend Hit Dice. I dislike this design. How fast you can spend Hit Dice is meant to be variable so you can have faster or slower healing (heroic games or gritty realistic games). Plus, being able to spend HD in combat doesn’t increase your overall health or extend your adventuring day. The trollkin doesn’t end up feeling like it heals more.

The feats section in general feels pretty anemic and heavily focused on magic.

There’s an uneven number of options in the book. Before this, the cleric was already well served, while the barbarian, bard, and druid had few options. After this book, the barbarian, bard, and druid are still under supported.

The Awesome

The book starts with brief explanation of the setting, and there’s a little description of how each race fits into the world. So this serves as a player’s guide to Midgard. (Except, sadly, certain PC races aren’t mentioned, like dragonborn, tieflings, and half-orcs.)

The Martial chapter includes variant options for using weapon, effectively giving fighters different abilities based on what weapon they’re currently wielding. This is pretty darn awesome. It *might* make said characters a little more powerful by giving them more options to use each round, but the effects in play should be minor.

There’s a lot of awesome subclasses that just bring me joy. The Vampire Slayer ranger is probably a little too focused to be a “good” subclass, but dammit I love the idea. (It’s also not *really* a full subclass being a variation of the Hunter, adding more options to that subclass.) And the Beer domain just lends itself to fun character concepts. Who doesn’t want to play a high cleric of hooch? (Or the priest of the oh God of Hangovers?) The bardic College of Entropy is luck stealers. That’s cool. The Clanking Mercenary option for fighters are effectively gearforged cyborgs, which is messed up but fun. Half-warforged. And, lastly, the Ghost Knight fighter is a dash of Ghost Rider (or the Headless Horseman), which is enjoyable.

The haunted villager, miner, and prophet backgrounds are fun and should fit most worlds. The rest of the backgrounds are much more world specific, which is an excellent way of making your character fit the setting.

There’s not many new monsters in the book, but there are some variant horses for famous breeds in the world with neat new traits. I like the idea of being able to “reward” a player with a unique horse. Similarly, there are mounts for kobolds, which would also serve as faithful steeds for other Small sized PCs.

Final Thoughts

A lot of gamers have been anxious for more character options for 5th Edition, with the official releases just whetting the appetite. Even Xanathar’s Guide to Everything barely quenched the continual desire for splat. The Heroes Handbook should help alleviate that, providing a wealth of balanced options for the game. A couple year back, when I was looking at the couple racial PDFs from Kobold Press and wishing they’d do more rules options… well, they delivered what I was hoping and more. Oh so much more.

This book isn’t perfect and there are some small quirks and imperfect rules. A few bits of awkward design. But it’s close enough and nothing should break your game. And if anything proves to be a tad imbalanced, it should be easy enough to tweak at the table.

This is simply a must have book for any 5th Edition table. (Excluding those running Adventurer’s League.) It’s great if you’re running Midgard, but there’s also more than enough to make it a solid purchase for games using other setting. And, for DMs, the options here can enrich your world with new people and factions. You might buy it and decide to add ley lines to your world. Or gearforged and related cyborg mercenaries.
Or a god of alcoholic drink. Because every setting with an adventurers needs a deity of beer and spirits.

Shameless Plug(s)

First off, I play in a Star Trek Adventures game every Saturday at 3:15 EST, streamed on Twitch and archived on YouTube.

If you liked this blog, you can support me and encourage future reviews.

I have T-shirts available for sale over on TeePublic!

I also have a number of PDF products on the Dungeon Master’s Guild website as part of the 5 Minute Workday Presents line. Such as Artificer Specialists, Rod of Seven Parts, Traps, Diseases, Legendary Monsters, and Variant Rules.

Additionally, my book, Jester David’s How-To Guide to Fantasy Worldbuilding, is available for purchase on DriveThurRPG or Print-on-Demand through Amazon. The book is a compilation of my worldbuilding blog series, but all the entries have been updated, edited, and expanded to almost two-hundred pages of advice on making your own fantasy world.

Review: Midgard Worldbook

RPG Publisher Kobold Press (née Open Design) is twelve years old, as is their campaign setting of Midgard. The campaign setting was created for 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons before elements of it were converted to 4th Edition then Pathfinder before being just recently updated to 5th Edition D&D.

The first full campaign setting book was released for Pathfinder back in 2012. Last year, Kobold Press Kickstarted an updated version of the book, revising the world for use with both 5e and Pathfinder. This is not just a reprint of the 2012 product, as it incorporates lore from the dozens of adventures published since that date, greatly expanding the world. A small portion of the Southlands hardcover  is also included, and the timeline of the world has advanced.

What It Is

The Midgard Worldbook is a 461-page full colour hardcover. Because it has the thick matte pages of other Kobold Products, the book is huge. Much, much thicker than the Player’s Handbook. This is not a book you want to be carrying to a game session in a backpack.

The vast majority of the book focuses on lore and the setting. The 40-page first chapter is an overview of the setting, and the next 292-pages are entirely focused on regions of the setting. Included are chapters on the following regions: Zobeck & Crossroads, Dark Kingdoms, Rothenian Plain, Dragon Empire, Southlands, Seven Cities, Wasted West, Grand Duchy of Dornig, Northlands, and the Shadow Realm.

The book also has a sizable chapter on various gods, a 36-page 5th Edition Appendix, and a 26-page Pathfinder Appendix. Both contain material deemed “GM material” opposed to the player focused products released separately. For 5e this includes antipaladin, oath of the giving grave, lust domain, serophage sorcerer origin, blood magic and void magic wizard traditions, some drugs, a few magic items, some variant magic rules, and a few spells. Pathfinder has the hunger domain, and alternate lust domain, a gnoll focused fighter and rogue archetypes, and void based archetypes for the wizard and occultist plus some feats, magic items, and spells.

An associated online tool is the interactive online map which is pretty darn slick.

What Midgard Is

It’s tricky to review a product like this. A review of Midgard Worldbook *should* focus on the presentation: how well the product presents the world, how it compares to prior campaign settings, and how usable it is as a setting book. Especially as the appeal of the world is deeply subjective and one of personal tastes: I can’t easily classify a particular region or aspect of the setting as either “good” or “bad” let alone “ugly”, because what I find “ugly” someone else might find “awesome”. However, someone who dislikes the foundation and assumptions of the setting will likely be inherently displeased with this book regardless of how well it does or does not present the setting. So some discussion of the setting is necessary.

Midgard is your standard European fantasy setting with a twist. In this instance, the twist is fairly minor compared to other worlds: locales have a Northern & Eastern European feel rather than Western. As the name suggests, there is a distinct Norse tone to much of the world, with Loki, Thor, and Woden/ Odin being influential gods. There’s several real world analogues, especially to the north and south. And the folkloric character Baba Yaga is an important figure throughout much of the eastern lands. It’s also a much darker setting than other worlds, with some pretty grim themes running throughout the book. This is demonstrated with how the Romania analogue is overtly ruled by a kingdom of vampires. But it’s a moderate level of dark, and the setting isn’t universally bleak or as grimdark as, say, Midnight or Ravenloft, and PC heroes won’t necessarily live short, pointless lives.

That said, there’s a lot of unique elements that don’t align analogously to Europe, such as the Magocracy of Allain or the Wasted West where Lovecraftian Great Old Ones were used as nukes in a magical war. This makes the setting as a whole significantly less generic.

Midgard is a little more focused and less of a kitchen sink than other fantasy worlds (while still accommodating all of the races from the Player’s Handbook), but there is no shortage of humanoid races and places to tuck new people and options. But this is mostly due to its size: each region could function as their own micro-setting with very different styles of campaign. It’s a half-dozen small campaign settings that all fit together.

The Good

The book starts with seven key facts of the world. These are presented as “secrets” but I think a few of them might be somewhat known or rumoured. Presenting how a campaign setting is different (how it varies from the baseline assumptions of fantasy gaming) is a good way to start.

Following the introduction is a timeline and history of the world. While the timeline has advanced since the previous product, there is no “Realms shaking event” or major reworking of the world. Time has passed and several of the adventure hooks built into the setting have assumed to have occured. I appreciate a reluctance to “blow up” the world or otherwise overhaul large sections to “fix” perceived problems.

After the timeline is a summary of how the various player races fit into the world, with most being given a solid role. There’s not a lot of information against playing against type for some races (like non-Winter halflings or non-Cursed gnomes) but I imagine that’s intentional and part of the thematic aspects of the world.

Unsurprising for such a massive book, but there is a tonne or lore here. So much lore. Almost an overwhelming amount of lore, especially as so many pages are unbroken walls of text.

The book is organized in the least offensive way: by large regions. There’s no perfect way to organize a campaign setting. Alphabetical can work, but that gets lengthy with lots of small kingdoms and city-states, and often means associated kingdoms are seperated. It helps that several of the regions are used in-world, such as “the Crossroads”, making it feel less arbitrary. This method works better with settings divided into large fantasy kingdoms, like Greyhawk or Dragonlance. Each region is fairly easily identified. Mostly.

There’s a fair amount of art throughout the book. Less than one might wish for, but honestly more than I was expecting. (Art is expensive.) There’s a few recycled pieces from past Midgard books—especially the Heroes Handbook—but that’s to be expected. Each nation or kingdom is also given a crest: a little emblematic shield with the symbols of the nation. These are cool, and decorate the summarizing sidebars of each nation allowing quick details of that land to quickly stand out. It also adds some instant depth to the setting, emphasising each nation feels the need to formalize their iconography.

In addition to the summarizing sidebars, there are quite a few other sidebars in the book. Most detailing little notes, potentially describing magic in the area or the role of certain races or classes. Additionally, each region gets a sidebar describing adventuring in that region, giving the assumed tone of adventures as well as some hooks. There are great little additions that give you a quick and useful description of what the land is like and the type of stories you’re expected to be telling.  

I quite like the status rules included in the book. They’re fairly simple but a nice way to represent how well known the characters and an adventuring party are.

While the vast majority of the book concerns itself with the moral world, it does provide a description of the larger cosmology, with some descriptions of the planes. The Shadow Plane gets the most attention, being a full region with its own character. There’s some great stuff on the Plane of Shadows and those aspects would be pretty useful in many different campaigns. I plan on stealing some elements for my homebrew campaign setting.

(I also plan on stealing ley lines, which are a big part of Midgard. I’ve had ley lines in my world for years, but it’s nice to have rules and more details to be inspired by. I quite like how ley lines are important enough to warrant a place on the map.)

A note should be made about the map. The book comes with a gorgeous poster map that is included in the book as  a two-page spread. It’s a lovely naturalistic map with some great attention to detail. (If you plan on running Midgard, I would recommend just tucking away the poster map that comes with the book and getting the rolled version Because why not spoil yourself?

The Bad

I love the map. But there’s no separate map PDF included with the digital copy of the book. I like having a seperate file so I can just swap tabs while reading. And it’s useful when running to zoom in on regions and areas, or use for reference.

After the introduction the book jumps into a history followed by description of the races. There’s no introduction to the regions and places in the world, so newcomers have a place to start or idea of what might appeal to them. (Thankfully, this is in the player’s books. Look there.)

While having each region have its own chapter works most of the time, some of the smaller kingdoms are a little fuzzier in placement, possibly fitting into a couple different chapters—such as the Mageocracy of Allain, the isle of Kyprion. And finding specific cities in the book can be tricky at times. Often a keyword search through the PDF is the easiest method.

There’s an absence of NPC statblocks. In the national summaries, important NPCs are given a name, class, level, and alignment. But that’s not a lot to go on. And also means there’s no unique little traits or powers included.

There’s no index at the back of the book. The table of contents is pretty expansive, but a good index can direct you to particular NPCs or cities. And there’s no glossary either. While non-standard, I’ve always thought a glossary of world terms and locations would be nice.

The Ugly

The big complaint with the book is that it contains crunch for both Pathfinder and 5th Edition. Regardless of whom buys the book there’s 20+ pages of superfluous material.

Curiously, the gnoll caravan raider background is reprinted, being both here and in the Heroes Handbook. Odd… And a waste of precious page real estate.

It’s always interesting to look at total populations of species in a product like this, which gives full demographics for each region. It seems like there’s less than 6,000 hugin/ ravenfolk across Midgard. (A small number to be sure, but technically sustainable without genetic drift.) Medieval populations were pretty small, so the numbers in the book probably aren’t unreasonable, especially in the northern reaches. But damn does it feel sparsely populated…

The book describes how the various races fit into the setting but doesn’t do the same for classes. It’d be nice to know the place of sorcerers vs wizards, notable bardic colleges, or how monks work (if at all).

One thing I like to see explained in a book is where dungeons come from. It’s nice to have some common default explanation for who or what created the many myriad implausible dungeons and/or filled them with ancient magical items that can’t be easily replicated. The book hints at this in a couple places (especially in the Wasted West, which is pretty much “dungeonland”) but it’s not quite as firmly stated as I would like.

The Awesome

I adore that there’s a chart with travel times between locations. That’s fantastic, and something more campaign setting books should do. Idea stolen.

There’s also a list of famous mage colleges across the land, with descriptions. This is gold. I love this idea and it reinforces schools of magic are an important aspect of the world.

As someone who likes his dark worlds, I like the Blood Kingdom ruled by vampires. It has a fun Ravenloft/ Castlevania vibe. But I was surprised to enjoy the Empire of the Ghouls even more. Ghouls are intelligent undead but are often relegated to being mindless scavengers barely more than animals, which feels like a missed opportunity. The Empire somewhat brings ghouls back to their Lovecraftian roots.

I do love that the large island in the middle of the token central sea—the Crete analogue in the Mediteranean—is the heart of a minotaur society. That’s fun. Plus it associates minotaurs with navies, which is something I enjoy; sailor minotaurs are a big part of Dragonlance, which helped get me into D&D.

Oh, and in one of the sections there’s a page on acquiring a barony in Dornig. Additions like that are why I like having an “awesome” section in my reviews.

Final Thoughts

As a campaign setting, Midgard is a little awkward. It’s not quite thematic and distinct enough to completely different from other kitchen sink fantasy worlds. But neither is it generic enough for published adventures to be dropped in without modification or used without explanation. It’s a dark setting, but not so dark as to be bleak & morally grey enough to appeal to fans of grim-and-gritty worlds. It almost feels like a stepping stone between a generic heroic fantasy setting and other more distant worlds.

However, a middle ground world could have some strong appeal for people looking to move away from the Realms or Greyhawk (or even Golarion) but not ready to go “full Dark Sun” or entirely abandon the conventions of D&D. It’s not a world that only reluctantly uses the tropes of D&D, or remakes the game. In this regard, the setting is just right (like bear-made oatmeal); Midgard is a large world with room for many, many different campaigns, each with a distinct tone. It easily matches the Realms in baseline scope and variety, and far surpasses the Tal’dorei Campaign Setting in pretty much every metric. It’s also a solid world that feels internally consistent without random additions that feel tacked-on or even illogical placement of nations, cities, rivers, and the like.

In terms of presentation, the Midgard Worldbook falls a little short of the highest bar set by previous campaign settings. It’s not going to dislodge Ptolus from its long-held spot at the top of the ranking. And while it’s easier to navigate than the 3e Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, it lacks that book’s inclusion of key NPCs. But, in exchange, it’s more comprehensive and detailed than the FRCS and much less cookie-cutter. And there’s more than enough lore to run a campaign in every nation in the book. While you sometimes long for more, that’s a common complaint that would be hard to avoid even for a book twice the size of this one. The largest problem is the book itself: there’s so much information, reading through the book and parsing all its details is a daunting task. 

Having looked through quite a few campaign settings over the years, Midgard holds up fairly well in comparison. It’s a deep and engaging world that should more than satisfy Dungeon Masters looking for a campaign setting to make their own. It has enough generic regions that most published adventures can fit in the world with minimal modification. Meanwhile, a few hundred miles away, there are other lands wholly different in tone. A DM that gets bored with their current campaign can send their party to the north or south, dramatically changing the feel of the story without having to restart with new characters.

Anyone complaining about the absence of published campaign settings from Wizards of the Coast should look no further than this book. As should anyone who thinks WotC should publish a brand new setting. If either of the previous statements describes you, then this is the product you’ve been asking for. 

Shameless Plug(s)

First off, I play in a Star Trek Adventures game every Saturday at 3:15 EST, streamed on Twitch and archived on YouTube.

If you liked this blog, you can support me and encourage future reviews.

I have T-shirts available for sale over on TeePublic!

I also have a number of PDF products on the Dungeon Master’s Guild website as part of the 5 Minute Workday Presents line. Such as Artificer Specialists, Rod of Seven Parts, Traps, Diseases, Legendary Monsters, and Variant Rules.

Additionally, my book, Jester David’s How-To Guide to Fantasy Worldbuilding, is available for purchase on DriveThurRPG or Print-on-Demand through Amazon. The book is a compilation of my worldbuilding blog series, but all the entries have been updated, edited, and expanded to almost two-hundred pages of advice on making your own fantasy world.

Review: Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes

In a somewhat surprising move, Wizards of the Coast opted not to release a new storyline adventure in the spring of 2018, and instead released another sourcebook: Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes. The spiritual sequel to Volo’s Guide to Monsters, the Tome of Foes is divided fairly evenly between being a book of lore and a collection of new monster stat blocks, with a few other odds and ends slipped in.

Unlike the other titular named characters featured in this edition, Mordenkainen is  a character from Greyhawk and not the Forgotten Realms. Not merely one of the greatest mages in the world of Oerth, Mordie was also the player character of D&D’s co-creator, Gary Gygax.

What It Is

The tagline of the book is “Discover the truth about the great conflicts of the D&D multiverse in this supplement for the world’s greatest roleplaying game.” A 256 page hardcover book, unsurprisingly Tome of Foes is full colour with many illustrations. It features background on the Blood War between devils and demons, the conflict between elves and drow, the feud between dwarves and duergar, and the continual gith civil war. Plus details on halflings & gnomes. For reasons. Mixed into these chapters are eight new tiefling subraces, three elven subraces, and a gith race with two subraces. The dwarf and gnome subraces from Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide are also reprinted in this book.

The last half of the book includes over 140 new(ish) monster stat blocks, half of which are CR 10+ and a sixth are CR 20 or higher.

Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes also comes with a limited edition cover exclusive to hobby stores. Sadly, a packing error apparently damaged a high percentage of these, forcing many to be recalled; get them while they last.

The Good

There’s a lot of fun lore in this book. As the book’s cover says, there’s some good background provided on classic D&D conflicts, which were only briefly mentioned in the Monster Manual. The Blood War, the gith civil war, and… well, those are the big two.

There’s a little on the evil (and unfortunately all dark skinned) variants of the elves, dwarves, and gnomes. While the drow received some good lore in the Monster Manual and Out of the Abyss, the duergar really needed the expansion provided in this product. This book gives a nice foundation for building on that conflict in homegames set in Greyhawk or the Realms, or inspiration for the cultural schism in a homebrew world.

This book has surprising value for players, detailing the culture, mindset, and gods of most of the non-human races in the Player’s Handbook. Paired with the orc section in Volo’s Guide to Monsters, dragonborn are the only race not expanded culturally. There’s even some references to how these various races differ between settings, although these are mostly confined to sidebars.

The new elven subraces are fun. Included are sea elves (a nice option for some campaigns), eladrin, and shadar-kai. I quite like eladrin as D&D had previously lacked a “high fae” people, and they fill that role perfectly. The shadar-kai also return to their fey roots, having originally been fey in 3e before becoming a human subspecies in 4th Edition. Shadow fey have popped up a few times through the editions, being in Mystara in Basic and Ravenloft in 2e/3e. While I’m not keen on some of the past emo/edgelord aspects of the shadar-kai, they fill a solid niche of shadow focused humanoids. I’m quite pleased to see their return. (Sadly, the spiked chain and related weird exotic weapons weren’t updated as well.)

Included in the Blood War chapter are additional traits to give to devilish cultists. There’s an option for each of the archdevils. Similarly, there are eight boons that can be given to followers of demon lords. I love these little customization options, which make generic cultists more evocative.

In terms of monsters, there are a bunch of new non-human NPCs. We have additional stat blocks for drow, gith, duergar, and shadar-kai. Plus a few new ogres and trolls. The trolls are especially fun.

There’s a lot of great monsters that have been updated to 5e. A quick list of select monsters includes: allip, astral dreadnought, berbalang, boneclaw, cadaver collector, choker, deathlock, derro, leviathan, phoenix, zaratan, elemental myrmidon, giff, grey render, howler, kruthiks, marut, meazel, nightwalker, retriever, skulk, and larva mage. There’s also some more yugoloths (typically the forgotten outsiders). And making their physical product debut are tortles, a surprise after their appearance on the Dungeon Master’s Guild. (But if you need PC race stats for the tortle, you still need to look online.)

The Bad

Let’s start with the obvious. This book has a terrible name. Based on the title it’s unclear what is inside, and the name doesn’t accurately reflect much of the contents. Even the blurb doesn’t give an entirely accurate picture. The inclusion of elements like the eladrin and shadar-kai are nice, but this is not the book I’d expect to find that content. And working in those elements comes at the cost of extra focus on drow fighting surface elves.

Plus the name “Mordenkainen” is somehow harder to spell than “Xanathar”. I’ve written the name a few dozen times since the book was announced and I still can’t get it right. I can’t imagine a new player trying to pronounce it in a game store or enter into Amazon. What’s next? Blibdoolpoolp’s Guide to Planes?

The theme of the book is incredibly unfocused. It’s a book on conflict. But there’s a hundred pages of new monsters. And gnomes & halflings for some reason. It’s simultaneously the high level monster expansion and a book on major racial conflicts and the PC racial sourcebook. The aforementioned halfing & gnome chapter doesn’t even try to match the theme of conflict, with no strife presented between surface gnomes and deep gnomes. 

Because it’s so poorly focused, it doesn’t give any of the lore in any of the first few chapters the space or attention it deserves. Wizards of the Coast could (and have) written an entire books just on hell and the archdevils & the Abyss and demon lords. (Ditto Paizo.) Big players, like the Yugoloths, only receive a two paragraph sidebar. Perhaps some more details on how the Blood War can (or has) spilled out into the mortal world, and thus how a DM could use it in non-planar adventures. If looking for lore on the Nine Hells or the Blood War there’s a half-dozen other books I might turn to first. (Such as two Fiendish Codex books: Hordes of the Abyss and Tyrants of the Nine Hells. ) Similarly, while there is an entire chapter ostensibly on elves and elven conflicts, the sea elves come out of nowhere and their major conflict—which is every bit as relevant as the drow fight—is given the smallest of sidebars. It’s an afterthought.

Meanwhile, the racial sections give a lot of information on the gods. The elf, dwarf, and gnome & halfling sections almost spend as much time on the gods as the race’s conflicts. And the elf section goes into a lengthy tangent for the Raven Queen, who has a brand new origin story for some reason. Four times as much space is devoted to the Raven Queen’s story as the shadar-kai’s lore. It really feels like someone fell in love with their Raven Queen story and couldn’t bear to edit it down, at the expense of the elven chapter as a whole. 

While the demon lords get reprinted from Out of the Abyss and several archdevil also appear here, Vlaakith the gith lich queen doesn’t. That’s a pretty irritating omission.

Over two dozen stat blocks are reprinted from prior products. Almost a fifth of the monsters in the book. I’m somewhat okay with the humanoids—like the derro and the choker—but reprinting the demon lords really diminishes a major selling point of Out of the Abyss. (But, frankly, they still are a selling point: several demon princes have been weakened here compared to Out of the Abyss.) Similarly, I would rather have seen brand new duergar blocks rather than reprints, increasing the maximum number of drow and duergar a DM has access to.

The Ugly

The book features another alternate/ collector’s cover. It looks beautify, but it instantly becomes a book I don’t want to use out of risk of cracking the spine, ripping the pages, scratching the cover, or staining places with greasy fingerprints. It ends up sitting on my shelf and I don’t use the content until I break down and get a copy with a regular cover from Amazon. One alternate cover was a special treat. A third is no longer special and instead feels like a cash grab trying to milk completists and collectors.
I feel exploited.

The book goes into a decent amount of detail of the Githyanki city of Tu’narath. But it never provides a map for the city. There’s never really been a great map of this city in the past, so you can’t even turn to online maps.

Several monsters lack art. There’s no molydeus demon art, and half of the star spawn lack illustrations. I can Google the former, but not the latter as they’re effectively new. There’s no consensus on what a “grue” looks like, and I would have appreciated an official one.

As the third “monster book” this product has a few more filler monsters. I’m not a fan of abishai, as they’re just more devils, albeit with a weird dragonic flavour. And the sorrowsworn, stone cursed, and sword wraith are wholly unremarkable page filler.

There’s also far too many new demons & devils. I’m always jaded when monster supplements have multiple new demons and devils, as we have more than will readily see use, and new additions seldom serve a purpose unfilled by the ones we already have. A couple new additions go a long way, but 11 new demons and 11 new devils are far more than was needed. That’s the same number of devils as in the Monster Manual!

Instead, I would much rather have seen more ways of customizing existing demons and devils. Especially demons, which the book calls out as being varied and are unique. Volo’s Guide to Monsters had a several entries that tweaked and modified existing monsters, such as beholders and yuan-ti, and something similar would have been an excellent addition to this book. (Admittedly, there is a table of unusual features, which is pretty awesome, but it could have easily been much more substantial.)

The Awesome

After being disappointed by the silly jokes of Xanathar’s Guide, I was quite happy with the little in-character notes here. The text really nails the voice of Mordenkainen and brings a lot of character into very little text. They’re snarky and pragmatic, but also often give a good perspective on the subject. I’m really impressed.

There’s some fun monsters. While less a “monster” and more a unique trait, I loved the ogre howdah and its ability to carry goblins on its back.

The star spawn were a curious grabbag of monsters loosely connected together by their ties to “Elder Evils”. But the Elder Evil themselves get some nice shout-outs and a dash a lore. And there’s blessings for their cultists as well! This makes me wish they’d gotten more of a place in the book.

I have a fondness for kruthiks, so I’m glad to see them back. I’m amused that two monsters I updated for my game in the last six months are in this book. (Kruthiks and the boneclaw.)

I’m critical of new monsters (with 40 years of D&D history and 5000 years of mythology, it’s usually better to look to existing monster than try to create something new). But the oblex is pretty cool. It has “token ooze” written all over it, but it’s creepy and has a neat hook.
-edit-
Okay… the backstory behind the oblex is beyond awesome. 

There are no less than 26 monsters in this book with legendary actions. If you’re looking for more examples of how to build boss monsters, this is a great source.

Each of the racial sections includes more random personality traits, supplementing those found in the backgrounds. This is a nice addition for people looking for more character inspirations. There’s often also an extra tables for adventure hooks, trinkets, or motivations.

Final Thoughts

For D&D’s 5th Edition, Wizards of the Coast committed not to releasing books that players might have purchased before. They didn’t want to just do the same book they’d done two or three times previously but with new rules. Instead, they’re experimenting with format a little. And in this case, the experiment didn’t work.

Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes is somewhat of a mess. It tries to be several things at the same time, attempting to be a monster book and a racial sourcebook for players and a DM’s book of lore and the book on demihuman deities, with multiple new subraces on top plus an introduction to the Raven Queen. And as a result, it does nothing particularly well. It wastes an entire chapter for no good reason and has lots of content you wouldn’t expect while omitting several things you would expect. While more demons, devils, and drow make sense and gith racial options fit perfectly, having this be the book with shadar-kai is unexpected, and the sea elves come out of nowhere. And I in no way anticipated this would be the halfling and gnome racial expansion book (let alone the third book I’d have with the svirfneblin write-up). And having well over a dozen pages of the book devoted to non-human deities is just a curious choice.

It really feels like they had half of a planar version of Volo’s Guide to Monsters and half of a book on the various PC races and just smooshed the two Word files together. Given the tagline I was really hoping to see more multiversal and planar conflict. Maybe more on the Modrons, and perhaps some details on angels and the good planar being’s conflict with the planes below. And it’s easy to imagine what a book on the player races could be with more room to work in feats, campaign setting variants, magic items, and more.

This is biggest selling feature of the book is the new monsters. More monsters is almost always a good thing. Tome of Foes is 135 pages of new monsters and some other stuff. Between this, Volo’s Guide to Monsters, and the offerings from Kobold Press I think I’m good for 5th Edition monsters for, well, the rest of the edition.

If you’re running Out of the Abyss and want some quick extra lore on demon, duergar, and drow, then this book is a good choice. If you want more lore on pretty any other subjects on in this book, I’d direct you to the Dungeon Masters Guild. And if you want more monsters that can pose a challenge to your party, try the Tome of Beasts instead. 

Shameless Plug(s)

First off, I play in a Star Trek Adventures game every Saturday at 3:15 EST, streamed on Twitch and archived on YouTube. I  also regularly post STA content on Continuing Mission.

If you liked this blog, you can support me and encourage future reviews.

I have T-shirts available for sale over on TeePublic!

I also have a number of PDF products on the Dungeon Master’s Guild website as part of the 5 Minute Workday Presents line. Such as Artificer Specialists, Rod of Seven Parts, Traps, Diseases, Legendary Monsters, and Variant Rules.

Additionally, my book, Jester David’s How-To Guide to Fantasy Worldbuilding, is available for purchase on DriveThurRPG or Print-on-Demand through Amazon. The book is a compilation of my worldbuilding blog series, but all the entries have been updated, edited, and expanded to almost two-hundred pages of advice on making your own fantasy world.

Review: Wayfinder’s Guide to Eberron

In a somewhat surprising move, Wizards of the Coast has released a 5th Edition update of the Eberron campaign world, written by the setting creator, Keith Baker.

The Wayfinder’s Guide to Eberron is a $20 PDF released in the Dungeon Master’s Guild website. Currently, only a digital copy is available and the mechanics are considered “playtest” quality. It has been confirmed that the artificer will be added to the document in a month or two, and following the playtests results a Print-on-Demand option will be added.

Effectively, WotC is offering an early access Eberron book.

What It Is

The Wayfinder’s Guide to Eberron is a 175-page PDF. The last four pages are House Crests and maps.

The book starts with a twenty page introduction to the setting followed by thirty-eight pages describing the various nations and the world. Each of the sixteen regions gets a one-page write-up. The book continues with rules and lore for the four Eberron races (changelings, kalashtar, shifters, and warforged) along with lore on most of the Player’s Handbook races. The next twenty-four pages focus on the twelve dragonmarks and various dragonmarks Houses. There’s ten pages on magic items and finally fourthy-odd pages on Sharn, city of towers.

New Races

Four new player races are added in the PDF. Since these are playtest material, I thought I’d give these a tiny extra bit of attention

Changelings. I like how this implementation avoids having Change Appearance be the sole power. While the signature power of changelings, it’s almost a ribbon/ flavour ability. The combat variant, Unsettling Visage, needs flavour: how is it working? Conversely, I love the flavour Divergent Persona. It’s just fun.

Kalashtar. The implementation of this race feels nicely psychic without overly tying it to the psion. I like Dual Mind, but this could probably also apply to Charisma saving throws instead of just Wisdom. Mind Link being limited by sight is awkward: you can speak telepathically with people you are also able to gesture or signal. This means you can’t use it with the party’s rogue or when trying to signal an ambush. I wonder if it could be a creature you saw at the start of your last turn, or if you could instead link people as a ritual.

Shifters. With its 1 Minute duration, shifting feels short. You almost need to track the duration, and is only an in-combat thing only. I wonder if it might work better as 10 minutes. Also, perhaps instead of temp hit points, shifting could increase your current and maximum hp, allowing you to be healed. It’d be nice if the longtooth could be rephrased to encompass razorclaw shifter: giving people the ability to choose slashing instead of piercing. Wildhunt’s Mark the Scent is written too mechanically for my tastes, with “marking” rather than and actual description, like “identify the unique odour”.

Warforged. I’m quite happy subraces are included with this design, and things like immunity to disease and not needing to sleep. Their AC is a bit much, especially at high levels. It keeps pace with magic armour, but magical pluses are not assumed, even in Eberron. Having it be ½ proficiency would be better, perhaps with the option for integrated magical armour plates in the warforged components section.

The Good

As a product idea, this is gold. Since the launch of 5e, I’ve been saying PDFs with recycled art would be a simple and cheap yet effective way of updating classing settings. Because it doesn’t actually take much to update content for play.

At over 150-pages, this is much larger than I expected. Because it not only updates the PC options but gives an overview of the seizing in a low secret manner, it also doubles as good player’s guide. (Albeit a slightly too large one.) It could even work as an introduction to Eberron for players using a different system.

A big plus is that the book is written by the creator of the setting: Keith Baker. While I’m sure not everyone likes Baker’s take on Eberron, he is the authoritative voice. He knows the setting’s background and the intended tone of the world. He also knows where the setting failed and could be improved.

That the book is a living document is also nice. It can be tweaked to respond to the feedback of players, while adding elements like the artificer.

I like a lot of the small details in the book. Such as the magic item crafting, tweaking the rules originally presented in Guide to Everything. The various nation summaries also give suggested character traits and personalities. That’s nice. And there’s additional details for the PHB Backgrounds presented in the Sharn section, giving an idea how one can make a character that fits that city.

The Bad

That WotC is releasing a digital book that will maybe go Print-on-Demand does mean they’re unlikely to do an Eberron book in stores now. That’s going to make a lot of people sad, and does mean Eberron is unlikely to get noticed by people who only look in stores and don’t shop on the Dungeon Master’s Guild.

The book is pricey for a PDF. At $20, a book of comparable size would run $10 to Print on Demand. So, if you wait, you might be able to get both for just $20. Unless they jack up the PoD copy. Getting it now is asking to pay more over the long run as you can’t get a bundle and WotC/ DriveThru is unlikely to give a bundle discount if you already purchased the PDF.

There’s only a couple maps, and these are low detail. There’s no separate poster map, even as a different file.

I’m not a fan over how dragonmarks are handled. (In fairness, this is likely because I did my own take on dragonmarks—and spellscars—and people do tend to favour their own ideas. So bias alert.) In this product, dragonmarks are alternate racial traits, effectively being sub races. An elf with a dragonmark is not a high elf or a wood elf and instead a dragonmarked elf. I don’t like how it reduces the impact of races, which are already often have an overlooked effect on gameplay. But, it works and it’s both balanced and something you can take at first level.

The warforged armblade is always cool. But having it require attunement for what is basically a favourful item is a bit much. It’s penalizing players with one fewer magical items to use an iconic warforged element. Not being disarmed is nice, but almost no monsters actually do so, and picking up a dropped item is inconsequential to the game. Ditto wand sheaths, which are also so-so for similar reasons. They’re actually objectively worse, as they give you the ability to draw a wand as a bonus action when drawing one from wand from a belt is just an object interaction.

The Ugly

The book isn’t entirely finished. There’s a few errors in the formatting, such as the table of contents missing the kalashtar and several pages being misnumbered. I don’t mind getting a rougher early access product from a small 3rd party company, but WotC has the resources to give this a professional pass. Asking people to play for an unfinished product is rough, especially one that won’t be finished for several more months: until the artificer is written, tested, and revised.

$20 is also a high price point for a PDF, especially one where they’re not paying off an art budget. They know this product would be a high seller on the Guild, and could make up for a low price in volume.

Because the book is digital only and makes a good player book, it’s tempting to share it with the table (such as via Dropbox). Especially with the high price point as a deterrent for players. But the watermarking makes this problematic: you don’t want to share such books as that’s how they go public and your account gets locked.

The pantheons are listed but the gods are not detailed, and it refers to the PHB for domains and deity detail. A paragraph on each god and their beliefs would have been nice for players. This is the big absence from the book.

Most of the dragonmarks seem fine. But the bonuses from the mark of making are a little too strong. Just being able to make items magical might be good enough without the numerical plus.

The Awesome

The table of contents is hyperlinked. While this is pretty bog standard from a lot of other RPG companies (i.e. almost all of them), this is almost revolutionary from WotC.

I love the two-bladed scimitar, with associated feat. Double weapons have been absent from 5e so far, and this is a fairly simple yet workable implementation. It’s not only going straight into my game, but I kinda want to use it as the basis of my next character.

The book ends with a glossary. These are always appreciated. Glossaries are underrated, and especially useful with campaign settings that might be 90% unfamiliar nouns.

The regrets and debts table are awesome. (Sadly, there’s only 10. This is material ripe for expansion.) I want to make regrets standard, as they’d be a lovely addition to Flaws in each Background. While I’ve already seen more warforged and shifter accessories on the Guild, more of these are what I want (and might have to make).

Final Thoughts

An imperfect and unfinished product, the Wayfinder’s Guide to Eberron is a lovely start. There’s a lot of potential and it might mean more similar guides for other settings.

The big deciding factor will be if Wizards or the Coast can actually manage to follow through with their plans and add the artificer then revise this product. The company has a long history of starting things like this and then not finishing; editing a “released” book and getting it ready for Print on Demand will always be at the bottom of to-do lists. After all, it’s been eighteen months since we last saw an update for the artificer.

The book isn’t finished and the content could use a polish in a couple places, but the balance is “close enough”. The few places things are funky are easily tweaked, but even if left alone they’re unlikely to break the game.

If you like Eberron and are running a game in that world (or plan to in the immediate future) then this product is a must-buy. If you’re not, or don’t plan on heading to Eberron in the next year or so, it might be better to wait and see if this book is actually revised or if it’s available in print.

Shameless Plug(s)

First off, I play in a Star Trek Adventures game every Saturday at 3:15 EST, streamed on Twitch and archived on YouTube. I  also regularly post STA content on Continuing Mission.

If you liked this blog, you can support me and encourage future reviews.

I have T-shirts available for sale over on TeePublic!

I also have a number of PDF products on the Dungeon Master’s Guild website as part of the 5 Minute Workday Presents line. Such as Artificer Specialists, Rod of Seven Parts, Traps, Diseases, Legendary Monsters, and Variant Rules.

Additionally, my book, Jester David’s How-To Guide to Fantasy Worldbuilding, is available for purchase on DriveThurRPG or Print-on-Demand through Amazon. The book is a compilation of my worldbuilding blog series, but all the entries have been updated, edited, and expanded to almost two-hundred pages of advice on making your own fantasy world.

Review: Pathfinder 2 Playtest

In early March of 2018, Paizo Inc announced they’d be publishing a major revision of their Pathfinder game in 2019, the 10th anniversary of Pathfinder the RPG. Prior to this, they would be conducting a mass public playtest, evaluating the ruleset for a few months prior.

At the start of August, 2018, the Pathfinder 2 playtest went live. Included in the free package was a rulebook as well as an adventure that ostensibly covers levels 1-20, a bestiary of assorted monsters, and a few extra odds-and-ends. Prior to its release, the playtest was also available in hard copy, with softcover, hardcover, and faux leather collector’s editions being available.

Like its predecessor, Pathfinder 2 is born out of Dungeons & Dragons, and makes use of the Open Game Licence. And all the rules in the playtest are also covered by the OGL.

What It Is

The rulebook is a 434-page colour PDF featuring sketches of in-progress art for the final book along with art recycled from much of Paizo’s extensive back catalogue of art pieces (predominantly pieces done by Paizo favourite Wayne Reynolds). It features all 20 levels for twelve classes, updating the eleven core classes of Pathfinder and adding the alchemist. Included are six ancestries (aka races), three sample archetypes, and four multiclass archetypes.

The Bestiary product is 125 pages and lacks any art, and mostly focuses on monsters from the first couple Bestiary products, with a few additions from later products. There’s almost 250 monsters crammed into this product.

Why I Quit Pathfinder

Some background briefly, as this informs my evaluation of the product. (If you just want to get to my review, skip ahead to the TL;DR)

I was a big Pathfinder fan for some time, and ran four lengthy campaigns including two Adventure Paths. Prior to that, I greatly enjoyed 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons, but burned out on that system after playing Living Greyhawk for an extended period, which really brought the flaws of that edition to the forefront. While I was cautiously optimistic for 4e at first, I never really found that system to my liking and quickly moved to Pathfinder.

The weight of the ruleset finally drove me away again, as did some of its inherent flaws.

While I bought too many books, this was largely irrelevant as my players typically built their characters using online tools. By the end, I was smiling and nodding when my players said they could do something, because auditing their characters was impractical. I ceased being able to adjudicate as I had no idea what their powers did, so an honour system was in place: the players told me what they were doing in the game. Meanwhile, because the rules were so firm, it was easy to surprise me with seldom used but highly effective tactics. Such as using a combination of a feat, a spell, and a combat maneuver to steal a cleric’s holy symbol, denying them access to spells with a divine focus.

The number bloat was also problematic. In Pathfinder 1, numbers increased dramatically from level 1 to 20. Characters could have ability scores pushing 30, and checks could hit DC 35 or 40. This meant the world needed to regularly “scale” with the party, as low level threats were ineffective after four or five levels. Game elements encountered at multiple levels (like poisons, locks, and diseases) needed numerous variants that were functionally the same thing with bigger numbers. Characters were also complex to build. Pathfinder was a game of “lonely fun”, where players could spend hours building and rebuilding characters as a way to ‘play’ between game sessions. But this made the game hard for people who just wanted to show up and play (i.e. half my table), as even the “simple” characters like the fighter, rogue, and barbarian had degrees of complexity.

However, magic items were the biggest problem. I found Pathfinder, like 3rd Edition, made magic items less magical and more part of a character’s “build”, while also making it tricky to run a “low magic” campaign. You sold the vast majority of treasure you came across in order to buy gear that fit your character choices. And because all magic items could be crafted by anyone, the story and lore of magic items was excised from the game. Meanwhile, this made the economics of the game silly, as even a low level adventurer quickly earned enough money to live on for years, eliminating “financial gain” as a motive for adventuring. This also made it difficult to offer rewards (sailboats, castles, etc) as those items were expensive and could be sold to buy a sword with the next higher plus. Conversely, you couldn’t spend any of you treasure on interesting story things (paying off a debt, buying a keep, establishing a trade company) because the mechanics expected you to keep buying those magic items.

TL;DR

My biggest pet peeves of Pathfinder 1 were the overwhelming “number porn” of higher level play, the mandated complexity of characters, the predominant focus on combat, and how it treated magic items. As such, my opinion of Pathfinder 2 will be heavily influenced by how it deals with these issues.

The Good

In a curious bit of design the game makes heavy use of icons to convey action usage. I was worried about this in the previews, but there are only five icons and four are nicely related. It’s actually easier to parse than I was expecting, even in monsters. I found I could quickly tell at a glance the number of actions something required, and it makes different powers in monster statblocks pop.

Speaking of elements that sounded bad on paper, I like the Three Action system. It’s simpler than Pathfinder’s Standard/ Move/ Swift/ Interrupt/ Full-Round economy. There’s more opportunity to mix-and-match. In theory it should lead to just as much option paralysis as 4e or Pathfinder, where players pick through their spells and powers to avoid “wasting” a Minor Action or Move, but as all actions are equal it works more smoothly: you can default to a go-to Action. Such as just making another attack or casting a quick spell or shifting over five feet.

In place a pound or kilogram based encumbered system, the game uses a Bulk system like Starfinder, which overlaps weight and bulkiness, but keeps the numbers low. I’m likely going to outright steal this for my 5e game. It enables encumbrance to matter while also making the numbers manageable.

There’s a lot of decision points for classes, which a lot of players crave. This edition of the game is built on Lonely Fun. After each gained level you choosing from multiple options and can spent hours planning your character’s final build. Pathfinder 1 had numerous customization options for most classes: fighter feats, rogue tricks, rage powers, etc; this edition consolidates them all as class feats. Which will also make it easy for this game to receive content upgrades. It will be easy to add new chains of feats, which can easy be given to multiple classes.

The problem of quadratic wizards is partially solved by removing automatic scaling of spells. To cast a lower level spell and have it be more effective requires the use of a higher level spell slot. This should be very familiar to 5e D&D players. This means spellcasters will always be limited to a couple spells of their highest level, and low level spell slots are much more limited in number. However, Pathfinder 2 also retains at-will catrips for spellcasters, which now scale will level. This is presented as using the heightening mechanic other spells use, but it’s automatic rather than requiring the use of a higher level spell slot.

Also keep spellcasters in check is the “Concentration” system. Some spells (typically strong buffs and spells that inflict negative status effects) require you to spend an action to concentrate each round, which can be interrupted with a readied action.

I like that they renamed races as “ancestry”. Race is a loaded term that games are generally better off without. Similarly, I do like the idea of ancestry feats, gaining new species bonuses at set levels. I like that a characters species ends up mattering more than just at first level.

Similarly, Backgrounds have been added, replacing Traits as small bonuses gained from training prior to becoming an adventurer. These give a quick bump to skills. It’s a neat idea and I always liked having an idea of what your character did prior, be in farmhand or blacksmith.

I’m uncertain how I feel about the paladin, which retains its alignment restriction and has to be Lawful Good. I like the idea of the LG pally, and I prefer the baseline to be more restrictive so GMs can choose to lift prerequisites rather than imposing them and becoming the bad guy. But the “paladin” is a narrow trope, and I wonder if it might be better to rename the class the “warpriest” with different alignment-based titles: blackguard for Chaotic Evil, templar for Lawful Evil, and paladin for Lawful Good. Perhaps with a small variant power like the barbarian’s totem or wizard’s school adding some extra distinction.

The Bad

Icons really simpler than I feared, but are still awkward. When writing down your character’s powers on a scrap sheet of paper (and you will need them, as there’s not enough space on the character sheet) how do you denote actions? How does a GM type them into a document? Such as homebrew monsters. You almost need a custom font. (I also expect a dozen variants icons done by 3rd party companies, as each makes their own personal version.)

The presentation of cantrips is awkward. While they scale via level it’s written like other heightening spells, with the spell level rather than character level.  This is awkward and opens up potential misreading. It feels like this was written for an earlier draft when other types of multiclassing were in the game and a character’s level might not match their caster level.

Meanwhile, cantrip damage feels underpowered. These might deal up to 4 dice or damage with two actions at high level, while at the same level a ranger might have a bow that deals six dice of damage with a single action. So while a wizard can cast spells all the time, they’re do significantly better damage with that back-up crossbow.

Having critical success and failure dependant on the degree of success inherently slows down combat. It’s not enough to know if you succeeded or failed, you need to stop and do the full math to determine the margin of your success. Which would be tricky even if making an attack or save was simple and not “ability modifier + proficiency modifier + circumstance bonus + conditional bonus + item bonus + circumstance penalty + conditional penalty + item penalty + untyped penalties”. Plus, characters can make as many as three attacks with a bonus that could change each time  (and there’s not really space on the sheet to record these variant attack numbers).

Somehow, the actual bonuses characters gain at higher levels are less than 5th Edition. While your checks increase by your level, the difference between a low level rogue pickpocketing someone and untrained fighter attempting the same task might only be 2, while the master rogue and high level fighter might only vary by 5. The expert feels like less of an expert.

I’m uncertain how I feel about bards having the occult spell list. It does give them a very different feel than wizard/rogues, but they lose access to what my bards considered their go-to spells. Not all the spells feel particularly bardic, which is likely because they’re establishing the tone of the spell list for a theoretical occultist class. I’m still not sold on the bard becoming a full caster; I wasn’t happy with that design in 5e either as it meant fewer unique class features that only a bard could do.

There’s still a lot of vestigial elements in the rules. For example, the rules still mention “rolling for initiative”. But that’s a Perception check now. So… why not just say “roll your Perception”? Or “determine initiative”. The game also still has Ability Scores that go from 1-18 (and higher) with related modifiers. D&D can’t get away from elements like “18 Strength” or “8 Charisma” but Pathfinder could. Heck, previously it was for fear prerequisites, which were an odd numbered Ability Score, but even that doesn’t seem to exist. There’s zero reason to maintain the distinction between Ability Scores and Modifiers as they’re a sacred cow for a different game that is just there to confuse new players. Dump ’em. Similarly, they could just drop Constitution and tie Fort saves to Strength (as no one makes Constitution a dump stat, so it’s always 12-16, and there are no associated skills). They could also rename Charisma as “Presence”, making it more clear what it represents.

TAC aka Touch Armour Class also seems vestigial. And redundant. It existed in 3e because wizards half 1/2 Base Attack Bonus and a low Dexterity, so a separate accuracy mechanic was needed for them to hitting with rays. But wizards now have the same BAB as everyone else. While they still rely on Dex to hit, they could just as easily use their spellcasting stat. (Relying also creates an accuracy problem, as TAC goes up at the same rate as regular AC and saves, but wizards and clerics are unlikely to be able to boost their Dexterity at the same rate as their spellcasting Ability Score.) TAX is extra complexity largely to avoid having wizards hit with Intelligence or Charisma. But the whole things is extra moot: as touch AC is typically a couple points less than AC, it could be folded into flat-footed AC and have an identical effect.

Half-elves and half-orcs as human sub-ancestries feels off. You only get a single ancestry feat at first level, and choosing a core race shouldn’t be your one choice. As a concept it’s neat: I can imagine cool variant humans like primitive neandertals, changelings born from hags, or lycanthropic skinwalkers. But I’m not sure I like it for half-elves and half-orcs. Plus, when you need to have a sidebar in the book telling people where to find the option they want… maybe that option isn’t where it should be. You can’t tell people how to play the game, you have to make a version of the game that plays how people want.

Also… why isn’t there a “half-human” option for the elf?

I miss subrace options, like hill dwarf and mountain dwarf or high elf and grey elf. It works as feats but it’s odd taking these at higher levels. Which leads to some odd feats. Such as the elf being “forlorn” and getting a mechanical benefit for watching friends age, wither, and die; there’s also something weird about how you could just choose to get that feat at level 13, especially if none of the adventuring party died.

Not a fan of feat based multiclassing. But, given classes are just bundles of feats, I’m not sure there’s a better way. Having seen this in 4e, it doesn’t work well in in play as similar classes have too much overlap for the multiclassing feats to be of value as a feat, while dissimilar classes provide the most benefit: it encourages multiclassing “against type”.

For me, one of the more problematic aspects of the rulebook was the writing. As a ruleset, Pathinder 2 is written with “computer coder” language rather than natural language. It is full of lots of jargon (Strike, Step, Stride, Bolstered) that refers to snippets of information, and what something says on the surface isn’t what it necessarily means as that word might be redefined for the game. Powers are loaded with tags that refer elsewhere; there are over 150 traits in the game (which will only increase with even minor expansion). And even simple powers commonly refer to one of the 44 conditions in the game. It’s common to have single powers that makes use of a jargon keyword, requires knowledge of a couple tags/ traits, and imparts a condition. While this makes it easy for experienced players to parse while keeping the actual text of the power small, this requires a LOT of baseline system mastery to comprehend. Meanwhile, most powers end with a list of limitations and clarifications on how it interacts with other elements. To prevent abuse. It really bogs down reading of the book.

All this Pathfinder 2 into the kind of game that feels compelled to include a “dead” condition, because it needs to clearly and mechanically define what “dead” is. (I can’t wait for the inevitable combo that pairs the fighter’s Determination with a spell, magic item, or feat that allows someone to take an action when they normally wouldn’t, and permits the fighter to just remove the dead condition.)

Then there are the feats. Pathfinder 2 is basically feat porn. There are ancestry feats, skill feats, class feats, general feats, spells disguised as feats, and more. Class features have all but entirely been replaced with feats. Virtually all combat feats are now class feats, and generic feats are typically limited to skills.

This has led to a lot of generic feats just becoming class options options, often for fighters. Attacks of Opportunity for one, as well as Blind-Fight, Combat Reflexes, Power Attack, Spring Attack, and Point-Blank Shot. The fighter doesn’t have any more identity than in Pathfinder 1, many other classes just have those options taken away. Wanted to play a Spring Attacking rogue again? Sorry, that’s now a fighter feat. And while the fighter has some great feats that can allow some good diversity of builds—archer, swashbuckler, two weapon fighter, great weapon fighter, sword-and-board, etc—their few class features give bonuses to heavy armour, which aren’t great for several of those options. If you don’t play a fighter how the game expects you to play a fighter, you’re wasting class features.

As non-skill feats are localized to classes, this often means some feats are printed in multiple places. It is nice that they didn’t just rename some options and just gave both the rogue and ranger Quick Draw, the ranger and fighter Double Slice, and the fighter and paladin Opportunity Attack. But does mean less content overall as text is being written in the same place two or three times. However, as hinted earlier, because these optionals are baked into classes rather than being generic, it means there are options that could be in one class but aren’t, such as the ranger not getting Point-Blank Shot. And despite reprinting, there is some overlap: the ranger gets Favoured Aim at 2nd level but the fighter instead has Incredible Aim at 8th level, which is largely identical but phrased differently in terms of requirements. This means your character’s builds are far more dependant on how the designer thinks you should build a PC of that class and less on what you want to do. Such as the ranger, who is focused on crossbows over longbows now (because the iconic dwarf uses a crossbow).

As an extended example, let’s consider the paladin. As it has to be Lawful Good and requires a god that permits LG clerics, there are an impressive seven possible paladin patrons: the gods of cities/law, farming/hunting, honor/justice, history/knowledge, healing/redemption, and art/love, and the forge/protection. And at second level, paladins pick an oath that defines what kind of creatures they sworn to eliminate, with demons/fiends being one. Looking at elves, there’s a ancestry feat for elves based on fighting demons. That immediately sounds like it synergizes: an elf paladin sworn to kill demons. There is a couple good deity choices, with Iomedae (justice), Sarenrae (healing), and Torag (dwarves protection) being strong paladin choices. But if the player decides to play to the elven tropes of the bow and worship Erastil (god of family, farming, and hunting) it sounds reasonable. But there’s no ranged paladin options. They’d have to multiclass into fighter  to even get those feats, with the fighter multiclass archetype given zero benefits. It’s literally a wasted feat. A feat tax to get access to feats needed to play the character you want.

It’s also odd that all the feats are located in the classes, rather than being consolidated in the feats section and lists of feats being with the classes. Especially as the spells are consolidated in a single section with lengthy spell lists. Making this extra odd, there are a number of class feats that just grant powers, which are included with the spells. The paladin gets the lay on hands power and no other class, so why is it listed under spells instead of just included with the paladin?

The Ugly

The ancestries seem unbalanced.

Most get low-light vision, but halflings and humans get nothing extra for lacking low-light vision and darkvision. And adding insult to injury, halflings only have 6 hp. Meanwhile, dwarves get darkvision and the Unburdened ability and they get 10 hit points.

Also… why the heck do humans move at 25 feet?

I don’t see any mechanical difference for small creatures. So why not have all PC races the same size?

In general, relying on feats for the ancestry abilities makes the species seem ununified. Nothing connects elves or seems particularly elven. There is no signature elven ability.

Despite the difference between a skilled individual and incompetent individual being a couple points, Pathfinder 2 retains the number creep of Pathfinder 1. You add your level to almost every d20 roll. This needlessly inflates the DCs requiring challenges to continually shift and increase to provide an appropriate difficulty. Locks become harder, walls become slicker, and poisons become deadlier.

The DC of poisons and diseases are a pet peeve of mine. You need to continually have deadlier and deadlier poisons as old poisons cease to be effective; rather than a single poison that paralyzes, you need ten to twenty. Arsenic is a level 1 poison but only has a DC 15, so a level 1 wizard with 12 Con has a +2 and needs a 13 to not be affected. Reasonable. But that same wizard at level 10 has a +11 and needs a 4, without accounting for magic armor’s bonuses to saves. A fighter at the same level can just add arsenic to their morning coffee and suffer no ill effects.

(As a example of how easily this gets funky, werewolves are level 3 monster. So you could fight them at that level band. But curing lycanthropy before getting access to remove curse (a 4th level spell) requires surviving ingestion wolfsbane, a level 10 poison. When would you ever need to eat wolfsbane? If you’re able to handle wolfsbane, you can get someone to cast remove curse.)

The game doesn’t even need to have 5th Edition D&D’s bounded accuracy and flat math to get away from that. Page 337 has a table of DC by level. Poison (and disease for that matter) could always be a hard difficulty save of the character’s level. Heck, pair this with an expected damage-by-level table and even the damage of poison could scale…

Which leads to another complaint. I could not find an expected damage-by-level table. Which is essential for GMing. I need to know how much damage is appropriate for a level 10 PC.

Pathfinder 2 retains the magic item treadmill of Pathfinder 1. You’re expected to find no less than three permanent magical items before you read second level! Over the course of an expected campaign, you will find seventy-five permanent magical items. And twice that in consumables.

Magic items are very much required for the math of the game, and there is no “inherent bonus” system offered. And magic items are even more required for martial characters: by mid-levels of the game, the majority of their damage is expected to come from their magical weapons rather than their skill or ability.

Pathfinder 2 also replicates 4th Edition D&D’s treasure parcel system, where a set number of permanent items are awarded each level, which are expected to be chosen by the DM rather than rolled randomly. So in addition to planning each session, the DM has to keep track of their player’s gear and seed adventures with appropriate boosts. (Or rely on player’s wish lists for gear.) I hated the needless bookkeeping of tracking treasure parcels in 4e, and was very happy when random treasure tables returned with D&D Essentials.

The classes are exceedingly focused on combat. Even a typically exploratory option, like the druid’s wild shape, can only be used to turn into “battle forms” (which, of course, happens via spells). There’s no turning into a mouse to sneak past guards or a sparrow to quickly deliver a message. Meanwhile, it only lasts a minute so it is of zero use while tracking or travelling. Formerly, low level spells could work well for this. Your higher level spells were the combat spells that you saved to be effective in battle, while the increasing number of low level spells were most useful for utility or creative uses. But even this is diminished, as spellcasters get far fewer spells each level. The wizard caps at three 1st-level spells.

The combat “rabbit hole” makes sense with the feat-centric design: if you’re choosing feats, an option that works only out-of-combat is a trap option. It’s an option no one will take as it hinders their expected power level. Flavourful options (what Wizard of the Coast designers refer to as ribbons) work best as static class features that cannot be exchanged. The kind of class features Pathfinder 2 removed…

Meanwhile, for all the talk of “Downtime” being the third mode of play, there’s a single ancestry feat, a single class feat, and four generic feats that affect downtime. You could remove it from the game with minimal impact. It’s there not because it’s important, but because it feels like a mandated inclusion. Heck, even several of the out-of-combat spells were moved to a seperate “rituals” subsection for… reasons. (If they work anything like rituals in 4e, players will quickly forget they exist. Excluding resurrect.)

Roleplaying in Pathfinder 2, like 3e and PF1, remains the red headed stepchild of the game. It exists, but you’re not encouraged to roleplay. There are no rewards for playing in character. No inclusion of character traits or aspects— like in FATE—which can be used as roleplaying hooks or triggered by the gamemaster. No storypoints or narrative manipulation mechanics. Even things like puzzles seem downplayed. There’s a single puzzle in the playtest adventure, Doomday Dawn, which is solved by throwing DC 25 Intelligence checks at the “puzzle”. And while classes give you some possible character traits, neither ancestries nor backgrounds mention these. Backgrounds give pretty much the minimum amount of flavour possible.

Some small pet peeves. There’s no printer friendly version of the PDFs. Or even lite PDFs for easy loading on tablets. Even the PDF-only monster Bestiary isn’t particularly printer friendly with its ink devouriering sidebars, headers, and colour-coded level rarity. Even the character sheet that came with the package was not printer friendly! What the hell, Paizo?! There’s literally zero reason to make a character sheet with a fancy coloured background; if I want a character sheet with a funky parchement background, I’ll use parchment coloured paper.

There’s also no pregens included. Especially for Doomsday Dawn, which requires you to make multiple different characters. I’d have like to have a few pregenerated high level characters to compare against monsters and check my understanding of the math & character building rules.

Okay, ending this with a likely controversial complaint:” the “Gaming Is for All” section on page 5-6. This felt like the book was lecturing players who just wanted to read the rules. Now, the topic of that section is SUPER important and includes some must-read text. But… as it fills an entire half-page and occupies such a large percentage of the introduction, it’s long. Too long. Because it’s such a speed bump that delays getting to the rules, this section will likely often be skipped. A lack of brevity will mean fewer people read this valuable advice. This section desperately needs to be edited down  to a single paragraph. And then repeated and reiterated throughout the book.

“Gaming Is for All” is something that needs to be a theme throughout the entire book and not just slapped at the beginning like a disclaimer and then not mentioned again. As it stands, the section comes off as hollow virtue signalling.

The Awesome

Goblins were added as a ancestry. Nice! This has been hotly debated on the forums for goblin PCs potentially being disruptive. But Pathfinder’s goblins are so very iconic to that game it makes sense to move them closer to the forefront. Still, it would be nice for the game and core rules to acknowledge common and uncommon species, perhaps leaving certain options for GM permission. Goblins could be paired with other optional ancestries, like aasimar, tieflings, and kitsune.

I like how each class gives a blurb on potential character traits, as well as stereotypes others might have of you based on your class. I especially like how each class’ entry gives some discussion of how that character might spend their days off.

The other new addition is the alchemist. This is an odd choice and I imagine many Pathfinder players all had their own preferred base class that needed to be promoted. The the gunslinger or summoner maybe, or perhaps even the battlerager or investigator. I don’t mind the alchemist, and quite like the implementation. Specifically, I like how this alchemist makes and actually throws the same alchemical items other players can buy, rather than their alchemical items being entirely different to all other alchemical items in the game. There’s some nice design work there.

Archetypes are simple. They seem super easy to add and are nice and flexible. Being self-contained feat packages makes them easy to balance and allows that one archetype to supplement multiple classes at once. Similarly, it should be simple to add other variant classes, as classes are basically feat packages. Instead of requiring a separate skald class, you can add an appropriate totem and a dozen new class feats and that option is done. And making a brawler is as simple as picking the least mystical monk options.

Critical hits and failures with spells is fun. I’m uncertain it needed to apply to all spells, as it’s a lot of bookkeeping for area-of-effect spells. But a monster fumbling on a debuff is undeniably cool.

The game has four set spell lists all the classes use: arcane, primal, divine, and occult. It’s nice and simple. The names are a little odd, given they could just as easily be called the wizard, druid, cleric, and bard spell lists. But I imagine this leaves room for expansion with other classes.

A related comment: I love how the sorcerer isn’t tied to arcane. Instead, their bloodline determines the spells they have access to. That’s amazing and really makes that class more interesting that just being the wizard with an alternate spellcasting system (while also negating the need for a “spontaneous cleric” or “sorcererous druid”).

The resurrection ritual can fumble. GMs live for these kind of shenanigans and the potential of an evil spirit taking over the body or the dead PC animating as an undead.  

Final Thoughts

Before I started reading the Pathfinder 2 rulebook, I thought about what I wanted the game to do. I mentally laid out my “deal breakering” problems that I would want addressed, which I listed at the start of this review:

1) Reduce the “number porn” of higher level play

2) Reduce or limit the mandated complexity of characters

3) Place some focus on play other than combat,

4) Magic item Christmas Tree & Treadmill

Bonuses for characters were not reduced. Comparing the numbers for monsters with monsters in a Pathfinder 1 Bestiary show monster math is fairly close to the same, and Pathfinder 2 monsters are higher in a number of places.

While I don’t think the game needs to go with the flat math and bounded accuracy of 5th Edition D&D, Pathfinder 2 could easily have halved their bonuses by only adding 1/2 level to d20 checks rather than level. And not assuming magic items in their math would further reduce the number bloat.

Characters are just as complex as they were in Pathfinder 2. There are no simple characters for people who just want to sit down and play, as even the fighter and rogue require choosing one or more feats every level. And while the fighter is often considered simple as it doesn’t have spells, it requires selecting and managing more feats than normal.

For a final product, I think suggested builds would be lovely. One or two characters that are laid out with suggested feat chains from level 1 to 20. It’s not perfect, but it would help.

The combat focus in the game bugs me. Too often my Pathfinder campaigns descended into lurching from combat to combat in a dungeon, especially when running the published adventures. While you don’t *need* rules for roleplaying, encouraging that type of play helps. After all, nothing stops you from roleplaying in a game of Battletech or Warhammer 40,000 either, but that doesn’t mean those are RPGs. A good roleplaying game with continually suggest personality traits, and maybe even include a section for “personality” or “flaws” on the character sheet.

Lastly is magic items. Which isn’t any better in Pathfinder 2. The edition has even added the new Resonance mechanic which pretty much solely exists as a crutch to prevent why higher level parties don’t just buy dozens of low level magic items. It’s the definition of a rules patch: it doesn’t remotely fix the underlying problem and just smooths over a more irritating proud nail.

Pathfinder 2 is a very curious beast. Superficially, it incorporates a lot of 4th Edition design elements. Treasure packages, classes based around individual powers, heavy combat focus, emphasis on tactical play and in-combat movement, mandated magic items, comparable bonuses across classes, jargon and keyword heavy writing style, and even icon based powers. Which feels ironic as Pathfinder was created to appeal to D&D fans who didn’t like 4th Edition.

It’s really hard to judge this product because it’s so very dense. Even after a week of reading the book and watching several streamed playtest games there are still elements I’m not entirely sure I understand. Every single time I pick up the book and look up something, I stumble across some other sub-mechanic I have missed. Between the start of this section and and the end I decided to double-check how grappled was handled and came across references rolling against someone’s “Fortitude DC”. A quick search of the document pulls up a few other examples but no explanation of what a Fortitude DC is. An opposed check by rolling a Fortitude save? But then why not say that? And while doing an editing pass of the review I wondered how spells save DCs were determined, and spent five minutes trying to find out for certain as it’s not explained in either the Classes or Spells chapters. It’s a dense rulebook with spread out rules that require you to reference rules in two or three other places to figure out how something works. While learning the rules I was constantly flipping back-and-forth throughout the book.

With the lengthy above review all said and done… who is this product for?

I think it will appeal to alot of Pathfinder 1 fans as well as to D&D fans who are unhappy with 5th Editions “rulings not rules” attitude and want a game with less arbitration (and more crunchy character options). Ironically, I expect a lot of 4th Edition D&D fans who feel left out by 5th Edition and unsatisfied with that game’s simplicity will also enjoy Pathfinder 2. It’s become my go-to recommendation to jaded 4e fans.

Who is it not for? As this edition is not backwards compatible, using any class options for Pathfinder 1 is not an option. As such, I don’t this game as a good idea for die-hard Pathfinder fans who still enjoy the system: there’s so much material out there already that upgrading is likely unnecessary. You can play for years with what you have. Similarly, if you are like me and fell out of love with Pathfinder, this game is unlikely to win you back.

The Pathfinder 2 Playtest is also its own product, which largely stands alone. I’m uncertain how much this playtest book will reflect the final product: by design, this book was meant to provoke reactions from players and illicit feedback. The designers have admitted that whenever they had two different design directions they could go, they favoured the more extreme version to gather better feedback. And given several months have passed since this version of the playtest was sent to the printers, I bet the internal version Paizo is using already differs in a number of ways. So, very likely, a number of major complaints with the game could already be “fixes” and are simply awaiting reaction from the fans.

It will be interesting to see how much or little the final product diverges from this.

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Review: Vampire 5th Edition

Rising from death-like torpor, as if it were a vampire itself, game publisher White Wolf has returned and released a fifth edition of the Vampire roleplaying game. This time, White Wolf is aided in publishing and distribution by UK’s Modiphius, publisher of several games including Star Trek Adventures.

Previously, a version of White Wolf released two version Vampire the Masquerade (along with a revised version of its Second Edition, a 2.5e if you will) before relaunching and reimagining VtM as its sister game: Vampire the Requiem. Following the dissolution of White Wolf, the licence to VtM and VtR passed to Onyx Path, which release products in support of both lines, as well as Vampire 20th Anniversary, which was largely an expanded and updated reprint of VtM 2nd Edition Revised

Unlike Vampire the Requiem, which reimagined the lore and history of vampirism (as well as how the potency of vampires was determined) Vampire Fifth Edition is a continuation of Second Edition (and/or V20), picking up at a point over decade following the presumed “apocalypse” that ended its predecessor.

My personal history with Vampire is limited in terms of play (I ran and played a small amount of Revised 2nd Edition in the 2000s), but I read the major hardcover sourcebooks for that edition. Devoured really. But I hadn’t cracked these open in years. (And deliberately chose not to open them again, until I had finished this book and wanted to find elements of comparisons.)

I’ve been a little worried about this game. The playtest has some inelegant/ insensitive language and a few previews and early reviews echoed these concerns that the game might be pro-fascist or provocative in content. And the response to these concerns felt lacking, if not outright dismissive. Plus, the hook of advancing the setting beyond “Ghenna” sounded curious. This prompted me to review the book myself and form my own opinion.

What It Is

The core rulebook of Vampire the Masquerade 5th Edition is a 425-page full colour hardcover. The pages are plain white with black text (and red headers), with a majority of the pages having three columns. There is a decent amount of art in the book, which varies in style, with realistic paintings, punk-esque abstracted pieces, and photo-art of costumed models (occasionally enhanced and tweaked to be more abstract).

The Core Rulebook is apparently designed to be complimented by two accessories that detail the two main factions of this edition: the Camarilla and the Anarchs. Preorders for a slipcase collection of the rules are being sold, emphasising these books are the “core” set. A package deal. However, these two sourcebooks are currently still in production (with an estimated release of November), so the base rules are not entirely complete, so the core rulebook has to be judged on its own merits.

The book features numerous pages of fiction and in-world writing, the basic rules to play the game, introductions to Kindred (aka Vampire society) as well as the seven Camarilla clans along with two varieties of clanless vampires (Caitiff and thin bloods). Detailed are ten disciplines (groupings of vampire powers, plus rituals and alchemy.  It also provides introductions to running the game, making Chronicles, working with cities, and several appendices of advice.

Good

The book starts with a mature content warning. Not a bad idea given the fact the game assumes you’re playing blood sucking monsters. It also reminds you not to be a monster yourself. Good advice.

Similarly, when the book (finally) moves past its introduction, there is a sidebar on on individual limits and focusing on collaborative storytelling. This is echoed in the appendix, which provides several different ways of allowing players to set their limits and remain comfortable in the game. There’s even resource lists for further reading. I appreciate that the game puts this out there early in a quick sidebar and then reiterates at length. It doesn’t just have the aforementioned warning or token discussion and consider the matter closed.

I was a little worried when I saw the game used special dice. Special unique dice are en vogue with RP game systems these days—such as the FFG Star Wars game(s) or Modiphius’ own Star Trek Adventures—being a secondary source of revenue while also tweaking the odds of success. Thankfully, regular d10s work just fine; if you have a couple sets of old Vampire dice you’ll do just fine. (And even if you decide to get a set of the V5 dice, these are affordable, with the “per die” price being reasonable.)

Vampire has always been a particularly mechanics lite game system, but V5 keeps things even more simple than Revised 2nd Edition. There’s a few added wrinkles and subsystems, but the base rules are limited, and the hard mechanics of powers and merits feels purposely restrained. What needs to exist is present, but much of the time the rules strive to stay out of the way, and there’s even some advice on streamlining combat to single turn resolution or capping encounters at three turns. The base rules of the system will be familiar to anyone who has played Vampire before: you build a dice pool based on an Attribute + Skill, with opposed rolls for combat. Success is any die that rolls a 6+, with a number of successes equal to the difficulty being required to succeed. Not revolutionary, but it works and it has the nice effect of the rolls demonstrating how well you succeeded or how narrowly you failed, which aids in the narrative.

The twist in this version of Vampire is that your character’s Hunger is also represented by dice rather than just being a pool of boxes on your character sheet, with Hunger Dice replacing regular dice in your dice pools. Instead of separate Hunger checks, all checks are influenced by how well you are fed. This has the interesting effect of making Hunger a constant concern and the Beast a continual factor in the game without requiring additional checks and detailed subsystems. I like it a lot.

Likewise, the expenditure of blood for powers has been reduced. In part this is because maximum Hunger has been reduced to 5 (the maximum number of Hunger Dice). The mechanic for expanding blood has been made uniform: waking up each evening or dominating a mortal is the same Rouse check. Succeed and no blood is expended, fail and your hunger increases. It’s elegant and allows traits to easily modify the vampire’s powers, such as bonuses to certain Rouse checks. But a lovely side effect is that vampires performing light activity in social focused games might have to feed less.

I’m also surprisingly happy with the setting update. The new timeline feels dynamic rather than static. There’s far more room for player characters to gain power and influence, and elder vampires are less omnipresent and unassailable. Meanwhile, the cartoonishly evil Sabbat are all but gone, while the underappreciated Anarchs are given more chance to shine. 2nd Edition Revised was always somewhat dismissive of Anarchs, only reluctantly giving the sect a hardcover sourcebook at the end of the edition.

The two big changes are two-fold. First, the Sabbat is trying to kill the antediluvians somewhere in the Middle East, so vampires of that sect left the West en masse (a little hand wavy for a group of such rebellious vamps, but okay, it works). Meanwhile, elder Camarilla vampires are also being mentally called to that region to defend their sires. This leaves more room in cities for young vampires, while freeing other cities for Anarchs (or conflict for control), and also permits higher generation (aka weaker) vampires to rebel. These power vacuums create opportunities for all kinds of fun campaigns/ chronicles.
The second change of the setting is that mortals have (re)discovered the existence of vampires. Or, rather, government agencies have, but the public is still unaware. This is set-up as a variable threat: the “Second Inquisition” of government agents can be a omnipresent danger that drives a Chronicle/campaign… or not. I quite enjoyed the backstory to the reveal: following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Camarilla vampires were worried the assault was the result of manipulations by the Sabbat or other factions, and used proxy mortal agencies to seek proof, accidentally revealing themselves in the process. It’s an interesting twist on expectations, and works well with prior VtM lore: White Wolf actually released a book detailing the World of Darkness’ New York, which was written immediately prior to the 9/11 attacks but published very shortly after. Inside, White Wolf stated they would not be attributing that attack to secret vampire masterminds. It’s neat that two editions and over fifteen years later, 9/11 is still a symbol of human evil, and the writers remembered the paranoia of that time along with with concerns that it would be revealed that “a vampire did it” and instead spun it in a different direction.

Returning to the book, each clan receives several pages of description and lore, along with numerous characters concepts. Clans in general get a lot more attention, but the varying concepts do an excellent job highlighting the variations of each group. Even if you don’t directly use a concept, they can provide some excellent inspiration, showing the many different ways you can play a typical member of each clan.

That the book places so much focus on character and character concept almost slipped by unnoticed. The heavy focus on your character, their motivation, ties to the world, and concept are just such an established part of Vampire, that this remains a focus is almost expected. But it is worth noting that the book does a good job of encouraging you to make an interesting character while also focusing first and foremost on their personality and quirks over their mechanics and how much ass they can kick. The book not only reminds you that you can play a character of a different ethnicity, gender, or economic background, but encourages you to play a character of a different philosophy (while also reminding you in an Appendix to be respectful).

Similarly, the Chronicles section include a surprising number of sample campaigns, highlighting the many different ways you can play the game. Most of these are archetypal, but there are some neat twists and most build off the recent changes to the world.

The book includes the standard lexicon of jargon. It’s not as comprehensive as it could be, but it’s decent. This is the kind of thing that should have been expanded with some web support or a free PDF. But I’m sure it exists on a website or wiki somewhere. (Here’s one.)

Bad

The book takes a long time to get started.

It begins with a ten page short story that only loosely introduces the concepts of the world. It’s okay, but really exists for the “twist” of the narrator’s identity, which explains the previously vague elements. The story alone would be fine, but it is followed by eighteen other pages of realia text, only half of which feels necessary. This is all excessive and not only delays getting to the text players want, but is also largely incomprehensible without know knowledge of what all the lore and jargon means. This could easily have been spread out throughout the entire book.

Speaking or jargon, I don’t always like how the game insists on renaming role playing game terms. Storyteller instead of gamemaster is fine, and I’ll accept Chronicle instead of campaign. But “storyteller played character” (or SPC) instead of non-playing character/ NPC feels indulgent.

There are a surprising amount of contemporary references. It names a couple media personalities and alludes to current political events. While this arguably grounds the book in the real world and modern day, several of these references will likely be dated in just a couple years. This book won’t age well, which is awkward for a game about immortals that even mentions you can play in any era of history…

One example that has been referenced a few times is a Brujah character concept of a “neo-Nazi claiming to be “alt-right”,” an awkward modern concept using language that will likely be dated before this edition reaches the midpoint of its lifespan. Passages like that are one of many examples where the book is attempting to be needlessly edgy. It’s trying to be “mature” in a somewhat juvenile way, as if just being provocative makes it more adult. There are occasional usages of “fuck”, as if cursing were somehow grown up; in these instances the text has all the subtlety of a 13-year-old testing new vocabulary, trying to pass as older by attempting a bad caricature of what they think grown-ups are like. My favourite example is the transcript of two vampires watching a porn video involving a vampire, which references a performer’s “dick” and the “cumshot”. The video could have easily been a YouTube stunt or Twitch streamer, but its porn solely because it’s more “mature”. Or rather, less appropriate for children.

There’s also the curious page on “Fascism in Play” in Appendix II. While the following sections on Sexual Violence and consent are much better, this one feels like a clumsy response to criticism of the book. Focusing on fascism rather than all the other forms of human evil (white supremacy, holocaust denial, slavery), which could just as easily be found in a vampire game, makes this seem like virtue signalling and a defensive rebuttal of online concerns. Especially as s this concern is only raised here than any of the earlier mature content warnings, and the language is far more condemning. It’s clumsy and obvious… but I understand the sentiment and realise why they did this. And I suppose I appreciate the thought rather than just ignoring the controversy. 

Moving away from writing criticisms, one element of the original VtM I always stumbled with is mixed clan coteries. This is  never really explained satisfactorily; clans are often antagonistic and justifying a group of players socializing and interacting on a regular basis is always tricky. More could have been done to enable this, and justify intra-clan vampires of high generations cooperating.

The rules are awkwardly spread out throughout the text. They’re in the Rules chapter (obviously) but also in the Advanced Rules chapter, which also doubles as the combat chapter, and some vital rules are in Vampire section. I imagine the Vampire specific rules are separate in the event players are being mortals or to better allow that content to be reprinted in a Werewolf book, but that doesn’t make this product any easier to use.

I dislike the amount of examples in the book. It seems like ever rule is followed by a couple examples, often devoting twice as much space to examples as to the rules themselves. This feels inefficient, and wasteful given the amount of content that wasn’t included in this volume.

There’s a number of oddities with the layout: paragraphs that seems non-bold and don’t match the rest of the page, paragraphs with double indented, lots of negative space, sections that end in random places, and subsections that awkwardly cross pages. In a couple places I felt like a line had been missed or cut from the text box. And because the book decided to curiously have three columns, long words are often broken up and hyphenated. This is inherently awkward, but the book makes this even worse when the second half of a word is on an entirely different page! In one instance, a broken word is even separated from its ending by multiple pages of rules summary. This was very sloppy.

Ugly

Earlier, I mentioned the occasional needless provocative examples of characters and language. I held back the most egregious example because it really was beyond the pale. In the sample Brujah characters there’s an entry for the “Trolling Punk”. Okay, an Internet troll does work with the Brujah to some extent. (Albeit a simplistic take on the clan’s attitude, but you can imagine a passionate young vampire taking to the ‘net and pushing buttons.) But one of the examples given is the “fourth-wave token “feminist” who spent more of their mortal time attacking other feminists and their allies than coordinating responses to oppression.” Wow. Just… wow. Okay, people like that do exist. I’ve seen more than a few examples of the professionally outraged online, who are more interesting in picking fights than advancing their cause (I’ve even been attacked by one). But it’s super needless to get that specific in the book when it could have just gone with general slacktivism. This read like the author had an axe to grind. That it comes two pages after the new-Nazi characters reference doesn’t help.  

Complaints over the language aside, the biggest problem with the book is that it’s a terrible introduction to the World of Darkness. The book tries poorly to introduce concepts to newcomers while also filling in old fans with what has changed, but often defaults to the latter. This is really an update for people familiar with the setting. There’s a lot of jargon really quickly and a lot of terms and concepts are barely explained, if ever.

Heck, even mechanically the rulebook seems aimed at previous Vampire players: when explaining how the rules work, the book goes out of its way to repeat and clarify how the rules don’t work, to avoid confusing people who played two decades ago. (This feels akin to a 5th Edition D&D book pausing to clarify how higher AC is better.)

The book offers no explanation for Camarilla roles like the “Scourge” and the Harpies, the latter being namedroped a few times and given only the briefest of explanations. It repeatedly mentions how the SchreckNET fell and how this was a dramatic reversal for Nosferatu fortunes, but provides no explanation. Ditto the Society of St. Leopold, who are apparently Vatican vampire hunters but given no background. The (tiny) antagonist section features a statblock for a Noddist Bishop of the Church of Caine but doesn’t explain what the fuck that means. And, as mentioned, smaller clans are name-dropped a few times but no description is given, with curious details such as the reference to the Giovanni allying with “their Hecata brethren”, whatever the eff that entails: I can’t even find a reference to that on a wiki! New players are given nothing to work with regarding variant clans, and even existing players who do know the lore aren’t given any explications for how these major players function in modern nights. I don’t even think “bloodlines” are mentioned.

Worst is the Sabbat, which is almost nonexistent. I always had problems grokking the Sabbat and how they worked, so I’m not sad to see them de-emphasized, but they’re still teased as being around, serving as boogiemen. But zero effort is given to allow new storytellers to use these boogeymen, how to present them, or what their motivations are. And as their clans are also absent, you can’t play one as an Anarch (despite a Lasombra and Tzimisce characters being referenced as options), and are not provided with their specific Disciplines to even use them as NPCs. If you want to play a Lasombra or continue a long-running Chronicle of a Ravnos, I guess you need to buy another book. (I strongly dislike purposeful content gaps to sell more product…)

Meanwhile, the book seems apologetic for its default campaign style. When discussing styles of play, the book mentions the “Gothic-Punk” aesthetic that formed the spine of previous editions, and the hook of playing vampires struggling with their morality. And them immediately shoves that to the side to discuss how you can play an action centric game or “splatterpunk” Chronicle. It seems to be assuming that players are already familiar with all the core tropes of an archetypal Vampire the Masquerade Chronicle and the description “Gothic-Punk”, and that no ink needs to be spent describing either. It feels like if a Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide spent a short paragraph name-dropping “dungeon crawling” as a potential campaign before going on for a page on variant campaign styles…

The Awesome

There’s a number of cheat sheet and rules summary pages in the book, and most are black with white text. This makes them stand out and easier to find when flipping pages.

Relationship maps neat idea. These are visual mind maps of the relationships between player characters and NPCs. For a game as potentially social as Vampire—which can border on soap operas or TV dramas in their focus on relationships—having a visual representation is a good idea. (I’m a little sad there was only one hand-drawn example, rather than two or three. And no sample template: a form fillable PDF would be nice.)

A part of relationship maps is Touchstones, which are another great idea. Touchstones are characters who embody the beliefs, morals, of values of a vampire. The game encourages you to establish these connections, building your characters with ties to the outside world. This makes it easier for the storyteller/ GM to build stories and hook you into events.

A subsystem of feeding is resonance. Blood is associated with certain moods, which allows it to augment certain powers. This is somewhat complicated (one of the more complicated and finicky subsystems in the game) and potentially unnecessary, but adds a neat aspect to hunting: finding an appropriate person rather than a convenient one. Quality over quantity. And because it’s largely additive in the rules, it can be ignored for the first few sessions of a Chronicle and gradually added when the storyteller get more comfortable with the rest of the game.

Simplifying character creation are profession-based packs of skills. Rather than counting out all your skills, you can just use a template and quickly build a character. Augmenting this are a couple random tables that can flesh out a character’s backstory and habits. Making a simple character can be pretty quick. The game also provides different ages (read: starting levels) for characters, so you can play newly embraced childer to ancillae who have spent a human lifetime as a vampire.

In addition to clan and skills, characters are customized by their predator type. This is the vampire’s preferred method of hunting, which can add extra Disciplines and skills. This is very cool and allows you to slightly play against clan type while still having the powers you need and a baseline competence to play a character the way you want.

The game spends a little more time detailing the construction of coteries. Aka adventuring parties. This encourages the group to work together when planning their characters, supplementing characters’ bonuses with coteries merits.

Success is largely binary. You succeed, fail, or crit. But Hunger Dice add an interesting wrinkle. As you roll these dice in place of regular dice, they have added effects when they’re part of a crit or come up as “1” on a failure. Critting with a Hunger Dice is still a success, but becomes a “messy critical” that is far more flavourful.

Assamite have been renamed. It’s subtle, as non-Camarilla clans are barely mentioned. But they’re now just the “Banu Haqim”. Vampire always had some issues with ethnic representation and stereotypes. Which is to be expected when you’re mashing together mythologies and treating tropes as reality. The Aasimites along with the Setites, Ravnos, and Giovanni were always walking stereotypes. I’d rather these clans be made more well rounded and nuance than eliminated, and renaming one works in that direction. (It’s a start at least. Hopefully we’ll see more sooner rather than later.)

Final Thoughts

Vampire Fifth Edition is better than I thought. My expectations were low and I was regularly pleasantly surprised. The mechanics are good, the custom dice are a nice option, Hunger has a contest presence without interfering with the game, and the system retains Humanity as a sliding moral scale that separates feral vampires from those that manage to retain their compassion. Throughout my reading of the book I had to fight the urge to start planning a campaign and stifle a desire to run another game in my already stretched free time.  And if I do return to the World of Darkness, I might very well pull much of the rules and mechanics from this volume.

Additionally, while there were concerns that the game might be pro-fascist and made use of “Nazi dog whistles” and iconography/ symbolism of hatred, the game doesn’t seem to represent that as a whole. There’s some inelegant passages, but in general the game just seems to be clumsily trying to be edgy and topical rather than openly pro-fascism or pro-hate. Which, frankly, is probably pretty standard for the game: I doubt Second Edition Revised would hold up well upon rereading and will likely have similar instances of forced maturity and R-rated scenes for the sake of being “adult”.

Furthermore, Vampire the Masquerade has always had some uncomfortable sexual violence themes and aspects of assault, domination, and power fantasies. This game addresses these pretty plainly, while offering tools to make the game comfortable without glossing over those aspects, pretending they don’t exist, or just shifting the responsibility to the gamemaster.

But…

This is not a book for the uninitiated. This is not a book for someone who played a couple games of Vampire in college a decade ago, heard about a new edition, and wants to start again. This is a foundation to update the mechanics found in an existing library of Vampire the Masquerade books. If you’ve never played Vampire before, this book will likely confuse you and give you a fraction of the tools you need to actually run the game.

Despite being a hefty 400+ pages, this book feels woefully incomplete. Accessories and expansions are not only expected and a bonus, but required. Clans are absent, disciplines are missing, NPCs are limited, and lore is not present. Especially compared with earlier editions, this book seems lacking and detail-anemic. Somehow, this book is less comprehensive than 2nd Edition Revised, despite having over a hundred additional pages! This is annoying at the best of times, but is much more problematic when said past editions are easily available online.

Unless you’re just starting a new game building upon lore you already know, you’re much better off grabbing a Print on Demand copy of Vampire 20th Anniversary from Drive-Thru RPG. Or hunting down used copies of World of Darkness and Vampire the Requiem from eBay, Amazon, or NobleKnight.com. While mechanics might be less tight and the world less contemporary, the book will at least seem moderately complete and the lore more accessible. 

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Review: Waterdeep: Dragon Heist

For the fall of 2018, Wizards of the Coast decided to release another two-part storyline adventure, and their first storyline adventure running from level 1 all the way to level 20. The first of these adventures is Waterdeep: Dragon Heist. This part runs from 1st level to 5th and details the recover a hoard of 500,000 gold pieces, which are known as “golden dragons” in the city of Waterdeep. This is to be followed in November with Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage.

What It Is

Waterdeep: Dragon Heist is a 224-page hardcover adventure with full colour pages and illustrations but black-and-white line art maps. It’s accompanied by a full colour map of the city of Waterdeep, with one side being for players and the other for DMs.

This adventure covers four levels of play but features multiple different antagonists for the story, giving the DM a choice in what they want to happen in the adventure. Also detailed is the lairs of all four villains, in case the players approach them or have to break or sneak into the lair to recover a lost MacGuffin. I imagine a couple of these locations might also be useful for the second part of the adventure, especially the lair of the Xanathar.

The book also includes a 25-page gazetteer of the city of Waterdeep, ostensibly written by in-world scribe Volo Geddarm, which can be used to expand on the detailed locations featured in the adventure if the party completely zags instead of zigging.

Also being released to support the storyline are a set of miniatures by WizKids, and a dice set with health tracker (due in November).

The Good

The adventure has a lot of support for Dungeon Masters, especially new DMs. This is not limited to the usual table of common abbreviations, but there is a pronunciation table, suggestions for running the adventure and flowcharts not only for the adventure but also a linear flowchart of the adventure’s background. Even the various Adventurers’ League factions are not only present, but serve a purpose in the story and lead to quests that drive an entire chapter of the story. Added to this mix are several new factions tied to the city of Waterdeep or the adventure itself. There’s also some advice on forming an adventuring party and making the PCs fit the adventure and setting, with advice on accommodating guild membership and backgrounds. There’s also half-a-page of information on “life in the city” that provides a brief summary of Waterdhavian lifestyles.

Throughout the book are suggestions for handling the law and legal problems as well as portraying the city watch. Attracting the attention of the constabulary feels like a constant worry or concern, which reminds the DM that events are taking place in a populous city and not a lawless wilderness where the Player Characters can murder-hobo their way through events. Helping the players avoid legal entanglement is the handout at the end of the book listing Waterdeeps’ code of laws.

The plot of Dragon Heist is fairly simple but somewhat flexible, and it’s easy for the DM to tweak to fit their style and desires. It can (sort of) be played four different times, as the climactic investigation section of the adventure has a variable structure with several potential antagonists who have very different motivations and styles. The plot is also relatively flexible, and seems to expect things to go off the rails and not work as expected, attempting to give some support while also not making too many assumptions of what did or did not happen. Most of the antagonists in the adventure are also Name NPCs with a legacy in the setting who have appeared in multiple novels . These are noteworthy foes and not just random mooks or minor players. Locking horns with the Xanathar or Manshoon feels dramatic.

Each of the four different variants/ villains are tied to a different season, which changes the tone of the adventure while also providing a very different look at the city. This also allows the adventure to make use of different holidays and local events while grounding the adventure in the location.

Even if a Dungeon Master only opts to play the adventure once once, the extra content is still useful. A DM can pull out the lairs and unused locations in this book for homebrew adventures. If the DM decides to use the cult of Asmodeus as the Big Bads, they can follow it up with adventures related to the Xanathar’s Guild, and employ that section of the book. Or simply save that dungeon for the lair of a future Thieves’ Guild.

While the maps in the book are simple black-and-white line art and lack details, this makes them useful for the variable locations. The book describes locations like a tower or theatre and provides the map, but each of the four adventures flavours it differently. The simple maps complement this, allowing the locations to be more distinct and different between versions.

The art in this book is solid, with multiple two-page spreads showing great views of the city and the residents. In most of the two-page spreads are a trio of small children, who are recurring characters that pop up in all four variants of the story. These characters help ground the art and make it feel uniform, effectively serving as replacement protagonists in many of the scenes. This is fun, and different from just having the generic unremarkable filler PCs in the art. I also like the multiple scenes depicting the same street at different times of year. That’s lovely.

By having the treasure stolen from the city and in need of being recovered, the adventure also sidesteps the usual MacGuffin hunt problem where the PCs can derail the “plot” and foil the villains merely by getting ahold of the sought item and destroying it or hurling it into the sea. Doing so doesn’t end with the PCs being rewarded. While it’s unlikely the PCs will get to keep all of the treasure (although they can try) it’s also possible that the players can claim some of it as a reward for their efforts.

The Bad

Let’s start by getting pedantic: there’s no heist in Dragon Heist. You’re hunting for stolen treasure that was embezzled and needs to be recovered. You spend most of the adventure hunting for a MacGuffin that will tell you where the treasure is while trying to stop enemy factions from claiming it. That’s a treasure hunt, not a heist. This is unfortunate as heists are fun and interesting but hard to pull off as a Dungeon Master: they’re the sort of adventure you want written by professionals and playtested. But not only is that aspect lacking, there’s also limited advice for running that sort of adventure if you want to add it.

It’s not impossible to have a heist in Dragon Heist. If the chosen villain gets ahold of the Stone of MacGuffin, the player characters might need to break into their lair and steal it back. Which would be a fun penultimate scene and a good excuse to use the provided lairs. But that’s not set-up in the adventure, nor are there suggested ways of infiltrating the various dungeon-esque locations.

The adventure could also be more flexible at the start. The “Fireball” chapter is crucial to the story and sets-up the treasure hunt, but this is static and every scene in it is essential to advancing the story. There’s little redundancy or variation. This chapter also features some weaker design, having several potential roadblocks, such as if the PCs don’t think to talk to Ranear; it’s very likely that after rescuing Ranear, the party don’t bond with the noble and never sees him again, but part of the adventure only moves forward if they not only visit him but discuss their investigation with him. (Suggestion: make Ranear a reoccuring NPC, perhaps even an investor in their business.)

Most of the villains are iconic… except the Cassalanters. While an established noble family, the Cassalanters are the least remarkable of the villains, not having a long history in the setting or numerous novel appearances. Their fiendish cult ties help somewhat and give them a different flavour at least, while also emphasising Asmodeus: this connects nicely to Tome of Foes. And as the least iconic villains, they are the most expendable: if you want the players to have a more clean victories with their enemies dead or arrested, these might be the villains to select.

Ending with the most minor of quibbles, the adventure starts at a tavern but advises the DM to have the party members already known to each other. This was the perfect place to have an adventure begin with everyone meeting in a tavern. It’s a joke that all adventuring parties are formed in such a place, but I’ve never seen it actually happen.

The Ugly

With 32-pages fewer than (most) of WotC’s other adventure volumes, Dragon Heist feels short. Which makes sense given it’s only levels 1-5. But it’s the same price despite being 85% the size of previous books. It’s a lot of money for a book that might see less use at the table.

There’s no city map in the book: you have to refer to the accompanying poster map. If your players are using the map (or you choose to get it framed) you cannot check the locations of villain’s lairs or other key locales.  

Gold and treasure is very limited in the campaign. If the PCs don’t find a secret door early on, they’ll likely receive almost no treasure for almost the entire adventure. Not only will they be unable to repair their newly acquired tavern, but several of the “keys” to the vault are also very expensive. This can work to the advantage of the DM: if the adventure progresses quickly and takes place over a short duration, the reward earned for finding the stolen golden dragons can be used to rebuild the tavern. But if you want a slower campaign where the player characters leisurely investigate between spending time at their refurbished manor, then you will need to add lots of bonus gold.

I dislike the maps. They’re not bad, per se, but they’re not what I expect in a WotC product where I’m paying a premium price. These maps would be somewhat disappointing in a DMsGuild adventure…. Unlike past adventures, there’s no way to buy prints to display on a device or order as posters, and the DM needs to invent and extrapolate more details to populate the rooms. To say nothing of people playing on a Virtual Tabletop. While ostensibly the simple line art is easier for people to draw, I doubt most DMs’ attempts are going to remotely to look as good. If the map is going to be a pale imitation anyway: why not make it prettier? I expect to see a few map packs on the Dungeon Master’s Guild presenting more detailed examples of these locations. And I already know people who purchased this on Fantasy Grounds were provided alternate maps. But this feels needless for an official book.

Lastly… there are the usual Chris Perkins silly names. A few are good, such as “The Scarlet Marpenoth”, which requires more thought and knowledge while also fitting the world. Others are much, much less subtle and out-of-place. I’m not a fan of most of these, as they’re just a little too obvious. Such as J. B. Nevercott. Or Xardos Xorg. The latter isn’t even really an Easter Egg, as it’s pretty much the direct name of the referenced movie. It’s as subtle as calling a character Frankenfurter. I have enough trouble maintaining the tone of the game and not having the table descend into silly movie references at the drop of a hat without the book just lazily dropping pop culture references. Which just ends up making more work for me as a DM, as I need to invent a whole other alias, defeating the purpose of the published adventure of making the DM’s job easier. Lots of people have problem thinking of interesting names for NPCs but no DM has ever struggled at the table to make a movie reference or say a bad joke. The book doesn’t need to help with that.

The Awesome

I adore the idea of Trollskull Manor. This is an amazing idea. I love the concept of players getting property or becoming business owners. It gives them a stake in the city while also encouraging them not to wander away from town. I just wish there was more thought and pages put into the manor and related adventures. I also hope the map for it (and related handouts) end up on the website sooner rather than later.

There’s some lovely diversity featured in the book, especially with the party’s neighbours in Trollskull Alley. There’s a same sex married couple and nonbinary elf. Most of the neighbours are fun: I especially like the private detective with a tiger themed business. Even if I never end up running this adventure I might steal that character…

As a final thought, who doesn’t like the illustration of the Yawning Portal Tavern in this book. It’s much needed, as a map of the tavern was lacking. Plus, it’s a simply fun little picture crammed with Easter eggs and as many Realmsian characters as they can force into one picture.

Final Thoughts

Waterdeep: Dragon Heist is a tricky product to review. It’s almost as large as a regular storyline adventure, but there’s really not much there. It has four different story-ettes, but none stand alone. You can easily run it twice, but likely not for the same group as at least half the content is going to be identical. It’s nice to have an alternative introductory adventure to the one in the Starter Set, which covers a comparable level range, albeit for half the price.

The investigations are sadly very linear: you go to two locations and then follow a variable chain of encounters before engaging in a short dungeon crawl. There’s certainly room for the adventure to go completely off the rails and some writing is spent detailing key locations if it does, but there’s not much advice or suggestions for the plot in that instance. This could have been a much more interesting adventure, with more divergent plot lines and an investigation whose flow chart actually flows. And frustratingly, none of the assumed adventures truly involve a heist. This *should* be called “Waterdeep: Dragon Hunt“.

Judging the product based on what it actually does rather than what it could have done, the actual story is fine and should play well at the table, with a moderate mix of investigation and combat and small dashes of dungeon crawling. The early chapters are somewhat freeform and left to the DM to built atop the various faction’s missions. There’s some fun moments, interesting characters, and decent locations that should capture the imagination. The adventure doesn’t end in a cliffhanger and things wrap up neatly enough, but the party should be left in a decent position to continue their adventures in Waterdeep.  Which is a good thing, what with the second part not coming out for two more months. And there’s more than enough information here to get started on a Waterdeep campaign that eschews the depths of Undermountain and instead focuses on bringing down a devilish cult, Thieves’ Guild, or simply focuses on keeping the tavern afloat and the patrons happy.

For any DMs planning on running this right away, I’d advise you to just take your time and let the story breathe a little: it’s still many weeks before Dungeon the the Mad Mage drops and you could probably blow through this book in four sessions. Take it slow. Let them enjoy some tavern life and really build on those small sidequests in Chapter Two.

Shameless Plug

If you liked this review, you can support me and encourage future reviews.

First off, I play in a Star Trek Adventures game every other Saturday at 3:15 EST, streamed on Twitch and archived on YouTube. I  also regularly post STA content on Continuing Mission.

I have T-shirts available for sale over on TeePublic!

I have a number of PDF products on the DMs Guild website including the Ravenloft product Heroes of the Mists, Artificer Specialists, Rod of Seven Parts, Traps, Diseases, Legendary Monsters, a book of Variant Rules.

Additionally, my book, Jester David’s How-To Guide to Fantasy Worldbuilding, is available for purchase on DriveThurRPG or Print-on-Demand through Amazon. The book is a compilation of my worldbuilding blog series, but all the entries have been updated, edited, and expanded to almost two-hundred pages of advice on making your own fantasy world.

Review: Creature Codex

Roleplaying game publisher Kobold Press second big book of monsters is the Creature Codex. The book was funded on Kickstarter, with the project launching less than a year ago, in December 2017. The book defied the odds and reached the hands of its backers only a few weeks later than its estimate shipping date of August 2018. And impressive feat for a small publisher.

Prior to the Kickstarter, the book was first mentioned on the official Dungeon & Dragons podcast, DragonTalk where it was teased with the name Tome of Beasts 2: Electric Beastaloo. It didn’t make it as the final name… but it’s funny.

What It Is

A full-colour hardcover, Creature Codex is 429-pages long. It has non-glossy white pages with no overt background, but almost every page has an art piece (as there is a monster on almost every page).

Inside the book are roughly 410 new monsters. Among these new monsters are a couple fey lords, several new animal lords, 4 demon lords, a couple archdevils, and several other tough monsters. There are over 35 legendary monsters, with two-dozen monsters being CR 15 or higher.

The Good

Like their previous efforts, this book was playtested by backers who gave each monster a once-over and some extra attention. Backers could also submit a monster, and a good dozen were included in this book. There’s some really fun and evocative new monsters in the book.

Most of the monsters seem relatively balanced, and most of the traits and powers I read all seemed fairly easy to use at the table. Thankfully, there are few monsters that seemed to be familiar monsters but with a higher CR, effectively using the old statblock with an extra trait and some Hit Dice. (There are a few, though.)

While there are no boxes around monster statblocks, they make use of a sans serif font that makes the rules mechanics stand out from the flavor text. This fluff text is formatted akin to other 5e monsters with in-line headers describing important elements of the monster, such as its ecology.

There are many sidebars in the book. Most of these describe how the monster fits into Kobold Press’ world of Midgard; this also allows the general flavour of monsters to be setting agnostic. Other sidebars include poisons or associated diseases.

Apart from NPCs, the book features scant new humanoids, and the new ones all seem to exist in Midgard already. There’s not a dozen new humanoid species to fill each small valley and island in the campaign setting, which can get increasingly silly.

The back of the book has a few Appendix, with charts for monsters by type, CR, and terrain. Always useful for a quick monster or two.

A lot of monsters are pulled from myth and folklore. Some more familiar names include (in no particular order): Chupacabra, Crimson mist, Carbuncle, Wendigo, Wolpertinger, Pech, Nightgaunt, Mandrake, Werebat, Kitsune, Kappa, Jiangshi, Lamassu, Hungry ghosts Hound of Tindalos, and Grindylow. There are also variant liches based on clerics and warlocks. There’s a wealth of additional folkloric monsters; generally, whenever I googled the name of a somewhat lackluster creature it turned out to be a real world cryptid or mythical beast. In one case, while my wife was reading over my shoulder, she commented that the creature I was reading shared the name with a My Little Pony villain. While not the most interesting or evocative monster ever, I appreciate digging through mythology rather than just building a new monster based on a bad pun or weird visual. Of course… those monsters are in this book as well.

There’s also a few Lovecraftian monsters, some of which were added via a Stretch Goal. Lovecraft continues to have his fans, and he does envision some pretty weird and horrific creatures. In general there’s a lot of horrific monsters that might fit well into a fantasy or cosmic horror themed campaign.

The Bad

The Creature Codex is really just a big book of monsters. There’s no theme or set tone, no underlying concept that differentiates this book from the Tome of Beasts or a Tome of Horrors. It’s just… more. Even Tome of Beasts was almost “Midgard and Southland monsters”, giving it something to distinguish it from other monster books.

Like too many other monster expansions of the past, the book relies on ____ type monsters. Monsters with a lot of subtypes where you can add a new descriptor and create a “new” monster. Giants, hags, golems, dragons, and oozes. There are no shortage of these. Plus the inevitable list of new demons and devils. And the numerous new types of undead, as every conceivable manner of expiration spawns a new type of living dead. This book even adds “angels” to that list, introducing eight new heavenly critters. Eight! A new angel or two might be nice, as they’re usually an underused creature type, but eight?!

There’s also a curious number of book and text related monsters. I counted the Bookkeeper, Paper golem, Inkling, Weirding scroll, Sigilian, and the Ink guardian ooze. So when the party walks into a library and gets their ass kicked by a tome, they can ask “yeah… but what KIND of codex creature was it?”

Like Tome of Beasts, each entry has lore before the monster, but the volume continues the Pathfinder design of starting each entry with a physical description. Given there’s pictures on the page, a line or two of description is more than enough, but some are four or even five lines long, eating into useful text and background material. And sometimes, the monsters could really use that extra line or two.

While most of the monsters fill up the space nicely, there’s a few whose illustration seems a little large, as if padding the entry to avoid requiring extra writing. Like the Ahuizot, whose picture could have been 10-20% smaller without losing any detail and allow an extra paragraph explaining why you should use that monster in your adventure rather than one of the other forty-odd monsters.

The Ugly

There’s a bunch of Lovecraftian monsters here and in the Tome of Foes, but there’s STILL no 5e elder thing! One of the classic beasties, seen in Mountains of Madness, a famous dungeon crawl through a ruined city.

There’s a few monsters I’m not thrilled by, but I’m going to be a dick and single out one. I’m not a fan of the Gulon. It’s based on myth but implementation is so-so. The Gulon’s traits are curious: giving it Amorphous seems like an error that would negate the hook of the creature and how it squeezes between trees.

Also…there’s the fey drake—how is this different from a fairy dragon? What stories and adventurers only work with a fey drake and not a faerie dragon?

The Awesome

The Kickstarter version of the book came with a sticker reading “Tome of Beasts 2 Electric Beastaloo”. So if you didn’t like the Creature Codex name, you could rechristen your book.

I quite like seeing more fey lords. As there are fewer established archfey in the game and no official ones detailed as yet, this is still a nice content gap. These monsters don’t just become creatures to beat up but potentially influence the story of the world. The various fey lords and ladies of my setting will strongly resemble Kobold Press’. (This is a little subjective and hypocritical given I complained about all the new demon lords and such—but a nonsubjective review is just a description of a book’s contents.)

Giving a quick shout-out to some monsters that caught my eye, I was amused by the idea of lesser golems. Golems tend to be powerful and hardy constructs, but there’s a niche for cheap and inexpensive helper constructs made of less durable substances. These fill that role.

The book has a few “punny” monsters such as the Exploding toad and the Swolbold (a big, muscular kobold). I groan, but the explode toad is useful as well as ridiculous, as a living trap. And while discussing monsters with catchy names, there’s the Albino death weasel. It’s simple and might make a fun pet.

And while I’m pointing out fun monstres, I laughed at the Keg golem. It’s ridiculous, but somewhat useful, being an effective guard of a dwarven tavern or brewery, or being an accidently animated being.

In a curious but fun bit of design, a Bar brawl is statted up as a monster. Odd, but it works, effectively being a massive swarm of people. It’s not a case of “if” you will use that monster so much as “when”.

While visually unremarkable, the mechanics of the Fractal golem are interesting and would make a surprising fight. It’s a neat idea that would have been somewhat difficult to get right.

Lastly, the book has Baba Yaga. Yes, that Baba Yaga.

Final Thought

While Creature Codex is very similar to Tome of Beasts and even superior in a few ways, the market of 5th Edition is very different now than when Tome of Beasts had released. Since mid-2016 we have seen two monster expansions from Wizards of the Coast: there’s simply a lot more monsters in the game. There isn’t as much of a burning need for this product. While Tome of Beasts quickly became a must-have book that was used every session or two of my home game, I have still used only a small fraction of the content from that book. I doubt Creature Codex will see as much use. The competition for table time is just higher.

Counting through the monsters of the book, there are 115 or so that I’d use without hesitation, and a few that might be dropped into my game sooner rather than later. And slightly more than that are what I’d consider “okay”: monsters I might use if they fit the story I have in my mind or a fall upon them randomly, but nothing I want to purposely design a story around. That leaves a comparable 110 monsters that are simply “meh”. The monsters I’m unlikely to ever seriously consider. The hit : miss ratio for the book isn’t bad, but it’s worse than Tome of Beasts.

If you’re one of those DMs who thinks you can never have enough monster books, then you should buy  Creature Codex right now with zero hesitation. There’s a few surprises, some nice monsters, and the presentation is solid. Also, if you need monsters right away and Tome of Beasts is sold out from your FLGS while a copy of Creature Codex is sitting on the shelf then you will get your money’s worth. It is a good purchase.

But… if you already have Tome of Beasts you’re probably better off getting one of the other official monster books, such as Volo’s Guide to Monsters. If you already own those books, then Creature Codex might be a little superfluous. It’s good, but chances are you haven’t used all the monsters you already own. It’s the monster equivalent of stacking a few new movies onto a Netflix watch list or videogames to your Steam library.

The Creature Codex is a lovely “extra cash” purchase when you have a few extra bucks from a gift or minor windfall. Especially with fewer official D&D books, it’s a nice option and treat for the ol’ Dungeon Master. It’s nice to have and you won’t regret the purchase, but it’s not so necessary that you have to budget for it right away. 

Shameless Plug

If you liked this review, you can support me and encourage future reviews.

First off, I play in a Star Trek Adventures game every other Saturday at 3:15 EST, streamed on Twitch and archived on YouTube. I  also regularly post STA content on Continuing Mission.

I have T-shirts available for sale over on TeePublic!

I have a number of PDF products on the DMs Guild website including the Ravenloft product Heroes of the Mists, Artificer Specialists, Rod of Seven Parts, Traps, Diseases, Legendary Monsters, a book of Variant Rules.

Additionally, my book, Jester David’s How-To Guide to Fantasy Worldbuilding, is available for purchase on DriveThurRPG or Print-on-Demand through Amazon. The book is a compilation of my worldbuilding blog series, but all the entries have been updated, edited, and expanded to almost two-hundred pages of advice on making your own fantasy world.

Review: D&D Endless Quest

Way back in 1979, the Choose Your Own adventure book series began, being published for almost twenty years. Just three years later, TSR launched their own modular path adventure book series, the Endless Quest books. There were a couple runs of Endless Quest branded books, with the second series ending in the late ’90s.

In 2018, Wizards of the Coast has partnered with Candlewick Press to relaunch the Endless Quest imprint. Currently, there are four books in the line, all written by noted author Matt Forbeck, previously known in D&D circles as the author of the excellent Dungeonology book for children.

Disclaimer: I was provided complimentary review copies from Candlewick Press.

What They Are

There are currently four Dungeons & Dragons Endless Quests books, each based on a previous storyline adventure and “starring” a character based on an archetypal character class. There is Escape the Underdark staring the fighter, (inspired by Rage of Demons), Into the Jungle with the cleric (inspired Tomb of Annihilation), To Catch a Thief with the rogue (based on Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, and potentially a dash of Dungeon of the Mad Mage) and

Big Trouble with the wizard (inspired by Storm King’s Thunder).

The Endless Quest books are for kids, being marketed to children aged 8-12. The books are somewhat larger than a mass market paperback, and 122 pages. They’re full colour with art pulled from the various D&D products, including concept art and I believe a few unused pieces. The pages have a “rendered cloud” background colour coded to the cover of the book. Despite the large page number, the text is a large font and there aren’t many words to a page.

Choose Your Own Quest??

For anyone reading this who may be unfamiliar with the Endless Quest or Choose Your Own adventure books, a brief explanation.

The books are not read from start to finish like a novel. Instead, you start at the beginning and after a couple pages are presented with a choice, associated with a page number. You reach fork in the road and can either go left or right. You make your choice and flip to the relevant page then continue reading with the narrative responding. Sometimes there’s a “right choice” and sometimes not. Heck, a few times there was only wrong choices, and I had to flip back three or four decision points to get back to a path that *might* lead to a positive ending.

There might even be more than one ending, with the plot unfolding to a successful end very differently if you head north versus south or follow your mother rather than your father.

The books are also written in the unusual second-person point of view. This means the book is told from the point of view of the reader, using “you” and “your” to describe the character’s thoughts, rather than the “I” of first-person or the “he/ she/ they” of third-person.

The Good

Because there are different narrative paths and the story can unfold two or three entirely different ways, you can reread the book several times. In fact, to get the full “story” of the event, you need to reread to “see it all”. For this reason, early on in most of the books there is a clear “branching narrative” choice designed to send you in very different directions. (Often literally, with the character going north or south.)

A reader can work through a single narrative path potentially fairly quickly, allowing an entire arc to be read in a single sitting. This can be useful if reading these books aloud at bedtime, as you stop at an “ending”. It also makes these books easier for kids to pick-up and read for daily reading. This almost means young reads can read them to completion—seeing all the various endings—or read them in short bursts serving as breaks between other books.

For better or worse, the books don’t sugar coat failure. If you make a poor choice (or at just unlucky) you can die. The book doesn’t just fade to black or cut away right before bad stuff happens. The books themselves quickly “teach” you this: in each of the books, one of the first choices is a non-choice that quickly brings things to an unceremonious end. From the start you’re told to think carefully (or cautiously) as the book won’t necessarily save you from a poor decision, and that just because your the hero you don’t have plot armour.. Which does feel like D&D, as poor choices in the game can lead to PC death.

In general these books are very much Dungeons & Dragons books. They feature D&D monsters, locations, and even characters. All four are set in the D&D world of the Forgotten Realms—like the adventures that inspired the narratives. You can meet and interact with characters important to the adventures, from Laeral Silverhand to the Demogorgon. The branching narratives and consequences for your actions reinforce this: you are a character in the world whose decisions have an impact.

The second-person narration works nicely complements this: reading the book (either aloud to someone or to yourself) feels akin to the narration of a Dungeon Master. The entire book becomes read aloud/ grey boxed text.

From a technical standpoint there’s decent binding. Very often kids’ books are poorly bound and barely glued to the spine. These books seem to hold up decently, which is important given the amount of random flipping and back-and-forth that will likely happen with these books.

The writing of the book moves quickly, with few lengthy descriptions. There’s not a lot of lengthy stretches of exposition and description that will tire young readers. But neither does it stick to simple words and phrases. Readers should encounter some new words, which is desirable. They’re unlikely to hold the interest of adults for long, but they’re not supposed to.

The Bad

Several of the books have extremely limited descriptions of fantasy peoples. Often there’s just the name (drow, deep gnome) and no physical characteristics. The associated pictures can fill in the gaps for readers (and words are at a premium in books this short) but knowing what the various characters remotely look like is important, especially for young readers who may be less familiar with fantasy tropes or mythological creatures. (The drow were especially problematic, being described as “black-skinned elves”, which *really* needed an extra adjective or two for racial sensitivity reasons. I.e. “pitch black”, “coal-black”, or even “black-purple”.) This lack of descriptions is echoed for several of the fantasy locations and places, which are very sparsely described. It’s tricky to find a balance between keeping the plot moving and painting a mental picture, but too often I found myself relying on established metal pictures rather than the words in the book.

The book replies on canonical Realmsian names. Which is nice… most of the time. In Escape the Underdark you’re confronted with a wealth of subterranean critter names, many of which will difficulty for smaller children to pronounce. Or grown adults reading to their kids. Those Kuo-Toa names darn near killed me.

There’s quite a few non-choice choices: options where you choose between certain death and the chance for survival. It’s neat to sometimes take the obvious death choice and die. And I suppose the option to refuse out of principal is fine. (And it can be fun to sneak a peek at a “wrong choice” and feel satisfied seeing the bolded “The End” and know you chose wisely.) But sometimes, it might have been nice to be “saved”. And this isn’t to say there weren’t always surprises.

As noted, many options do end in death. Which is a feature/ bug. It’s neat, but given the books are written in a second-person perspective, this has the potential to be disturbing. The character doesn’t get squished by a giant, YOU get squished by a giant. My son had no issue, but it is important to know the sensitivity of the reader.

The Ugly

It should be noted that the books do contain violence. This is generally not particularly graphic (in once instance you “impale” an enemy but there are no descriptions of the weapon entering flesh, the wound, or blood) and the recipients of the violence are almost universally inhuman monsters. However, it feels worse given the second-person perspective. I read a couple books without much issue, but one extended scene in Big Trouble where a giant slid into a fire was a little more graphic than necessary. It shouldn’t phase most 10 or 11 year-olds but it might be a bit much for sensitive children on the younger end of the spectrum.

As the early choices of the book can lead to an abrupt and unpleasant end, some young reads might become upset or frustrated. It’s almost as if the books are telling you your choice is wrong. Children not used to losing might have issues with these books. I don’t think losing in these books is a bad thing per se—and a lot of kids might enjoy the failure and novel experience of the death of a protagonist and the challenge of having to try again—but it’s something to be aware of when reading these books.

For younger children, a strategy I’d recommend is demonstrating how the book and choices work by choosing a bad one and laughing at your death, then challenging them to do better.

The Awesome

This is a fun and excellent introduction to D&D and its worlds and concepts, but aimed at kids who may be a hair too young to play. It can get them excited and familiar with D&D—and the inherent dangers and potential for death—before they’re old enough to join a group at the table. These might also be fun books to find in a library (or donate to said library), hooking children on the idea of Dungeons & Dragons and inspiring them to look further into the hobby.

For young readers, the Endless Quest books might serve as a nice and fairly accessible entry to the fantasy genre. They can be read in shorter stints but serve as a gateway to other D&D and genre fiction, which can otherwise be exceptionally long. There’s often a big gulf between short fantasy chapter books aimed at grade 2s and 3s and the much larger young adult fantasy aimed at grade 5s and up. Being aimed at children aged 8+ makes these excellent books for reluctant readers who can handle chapter books but can’t quite handle content like Percy Jackson or Fablehaven. These books might also prompt kids to eventually try the Drizzt novels, as they’re set in the same world (and Mr. Do’Urden is name-dropped in To Catch a Thief).

The protagonists of each book are not described beyond their class and “race”, which matches the character on the cover (e.g. elf wizard, halfling rogue), if they’re even given that much description. I don’t recall the fighter being described as that, let alone as a human. Gender and ethnicity is not described, and the pronoun used is “you”, so the protagonist can be anyone. This is lovely and allows the books to engage with people regardless of identity. It’s rare to find fantasy books with female protagonists, let alone ones for youths and children.

Final Thoughts

The Endless Quests books are not high literature by any means, but about what you’d expect from licensed books aimed at elementary aged children. And while the descriptions are light and the prose is simple, it’s still significantly more complex than, say, Diary of a Wimpy Kid without being overwhelming. And while slightly more dense, the format of the books makes them relatively quick and easy to read. And they’re fun, which means they might be enjoyed even by a kid who is at the older end of the reading spectrum.

I’d say the books would appeal most to medium to strong readers in grade 3 as well as most readers in grade 4. They might be a little too simple for many grade 5 children, but weaker readers might find them engaging: this is important as so often finding high interest books for struggling older readers is challenging, as the material is too juvenile to hold their interest. And while potentially too simple for many grade 5s to 7s, the novelty of the choices and action might make these books appealing for reluctant readers who otherwise might not be interested in reading.

Of the four, I personally found To Catch a Thief to be the best. The city environment was more accessible to start with, and there was more explanation of the creatures involved. It had classic mythological creatures (a griffon) but also had the iconic D&D beholder.

Into the Jungle was also decent, and touched on a lot of the Chultan exploration that might be skipped by parties playing Tomb of Annihilation in favour of rushing towards the eponymous tomb.

Big Trouble was comparable, but the couple descriptions of the smell of burning giant flesh toed the line for me as a parent. Not a deal breaker, but enough to knock it down a few spots in the ranking.

At the bottom is Escape the Underdark, almost entirely for the naming. This shouldn’t be as troublesome for an older child who can read the book for themselves and skip trying to pronounced the more ridiculous names. (And even then, an argument could be made that the gibberish names encourage the reader to practice sounding out the word.)

Review: Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica

In a surprise move this summer, Wizards of the Coast announced a fourth book for their 2018 schedule—the Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica—breaking the pattern of previous years where there were only three major releases. Even more surprising, this product was a campaign setting and and a product set in the world of Ravnica, previously only seen in the Magic the Gathering collectable card game.

D&D and Magic have only loosely crossed over before. Since WotC purchased D&D in 1997 along with the other properties of TSR, there has long been speculation that there would be a crossover of some kind, or that elements of the CCG industry would bleed into D&D. Shortly before the release of 5th Edition, a former D&D team member now working on MtG began releasing small little campaign guides for the Magic worlds, known as Plane Shifts. As of this writing, there’s currently six free Plane Shift PDFs available along with an adventure. Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica is largely a supersized Plane Shift book released to stores rather than free online.

What It Is

Basically a large hardcover Plane Shift, this is a very brief guide to the world/ plane of Ravnica along with a description of the ten associated guilds and many new monsters. Like other official D&D releases, this is a full colour hardcover book. Clocking in at 256 pages, Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica has five brand new Player Character races (centaur, minotaur, simic hybrid, vedalken, and loxodon; plus the goblin, reprinted from Guide to Monsters), two new subclasses—cleric of order and spore druid—and 16 magic items, along with 10 new backgrounds: one for each guild. In the middle of the book there is even a short adventure. There’s also a whopping 79 new monsters ranging in challenge  CR 1/4 to 26, which make use of art recycled from Magic cards.

The focus of the book is very much the Guilds, which are the centerpiece of several sections and even receive their own unique monstres: the heads of each of the Guilds are given stat blocks.

Like some of the other recent releases, there’s also a set of dice, which comes in a decorated tin and includes a “guild die” that can be used to randomly choose one of the 10 Guilds. (But, sadly, only one d20.) There is also a map pack, reprinting the maps in the book. These locations are somewhat generic, making the map pack relatively useful for other games. (However, as it is black-and-white line art, the encounter maps in the book are not particularly difficult to print out at home, or even copy by hand.) There’s even a set of miniatures, so the new monsters in this book will be represented, and there’s two companion sets. 

Disclaimer

I know absolutely nothing about Magic the Gathering. Well… beyond the obvious that it is a collectable card game. I played two games in in my life (both games being twenty years ago) with a starter deck, purchased before starter decks could stand alone and back when they were just larger randomised packs. And after those humiliating defeats, I lost all interest in the game. (Even then, I never really read the cards in those games.) Similarly, my knowledge of Ravnica is limited to a few message board discussions that mostly focused on the importance of the Guilds.

For the interested in Ravnica, there are several articles on the Magic wiki, several episodes of the Dragon Talk podcast, as well as a forthcoming art book that contains additional lore . However, I purposely avoided doing any of this pre-research and tried to go into the book relatively blind. It seemed the best way to evaluate how well it explained the concepts and lore of the setting.

The Good

I’ll start with the obvious: this book is a bonus. It is not for everyone, being a non-D&D world that is a crossover with another game. Not every D&D fan will like this product, let alone want this product. Personally, when it was announced I was aghast that they picked this world to be the first non-Realms setting for 5th Edition rather than any of the classic settings I was familiar with. However, as this book was an unexpected fourth book, it’s not coming at the expense of an existing D&D book. I (and other MtG agnostics) lose nothing by ignoring it. While Magic the Gathering is not my jam, there are more than a few fans of that game in the world, and this product might be the one that pushes them to try D&D.

Despite being an… extraneous release, the mechanics of this book are as solid as any official D&D product. The two new subclasses were reviewed blind by the D&D community, publically playtested via the Unearthed Arcana articles. A third subclass was offered but didn’t make the cut based on fan feedback. Similarly, the minotaur and centaur were also revealed and tested, and after the book was announced the simic hybrid, vedalken, and loxodon were tested and reviewed. The fifth race in this book is one we’ve seen before: the goblin. But as that people is common and important to the world, I like that they reprinted it rather than directing the audience to Volo’s Guide to Monsters.

Emphasising this is a Magic player’s starter book for D&D, in the middle of the Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica, is an adventure for first level characters. (Unfortunately, there’s no associated pregens.) Similarly, it’s a shame this book makes use of a druid subclass, rather than focusing classes from the Basic Rules, making this work almost as a stand-alone starter product. (The spore druid does feel rather essential to one of the ten Guilds that are the centerpiece of the setting and this book, so I guess that was unavoidable. Still… the druid is in the SRD, so you can make do.)

When I first heard of the Guilds and how important they were to the city, I was expecting them to be familiar urban guilds: the merchant’s guild, the artisan’s guild, the mercenary guild, etc. I was rather surprised to instead find them to be very unique and flavourful, more being large and varied monolithic organizations. Almost akin to cyberpunk mega-corps focused around a single broad theme or hook. Instead of the generic “Guild of Tradesfolk” there’s a Guild entirely focused on ruling the city, enacting laws, and keeping the peace. And a Guild that is equal parts state church and moneylenders.

As someone who goes by the name “Jester” online, the Cult of Rakdos is fun, being the traditional satirist court jesters but also wild entertainers, with the added twist of being led by a demon. That’s rather nifty and gives the carnival folk and entertainers a very dark edge. And it establishes an instant difference between a non-Guild bard and a Guilded bard beyond their credentials.

These ten Guilds are very, very much the focus of the book. Each Guild is given a couple page write-up along with a background to tie PCs to the Guild (each Guild probably receives more total pages than the default setting of the 10th District). There are occasionally unique spells and other new mechanics, along with text spent on their locations, the type of adventures the Guilds are involved in, how the Guilds work as adversaries, and the role of both character classes and adventurers in each of the Guilds. This book should almost have been called “A Guide to the Ravnican Guilds“.

I’m not entirely sure what makes the guilds special beyond the fact each was founded 10,000 years ago and their survival is tied into some unbreakable law that is at the core of the plane/world’s society. Aka the Guildpact (which is also a dude). Why these ten groups? Given there’s ten Guilds and Magic the Gathering is known for its five schools of magic, I’m guessing each Guild is tied to either a dark or light reflection of a school. (Or, more likely, law vs chaos.) As such, they special because they’re tied to the backstory of the game of Magic, and the lore of that universe. There might be an element of “balance” at play. But I’m just guessing at this point.

Regardless, this leads to some interesting concepts and makes the Guilds varied in attitude, and even varied in tone, from very formal organizations that look and feel like traditional Guilds, and very anarchist collectives that are more akin to gangs.

The Bad

Not knowing anything of the setting beyond that the city was a megaopolis that covered the entire planet and that the Guilds were super important (so much so that it’s presumed all stories set in Ravnica will involve them), I went into this book seeking answers to several questions:

Why are the Guilds so important, and what role do non-Guild people play?

Is the entire surface of the planet a uniform city? Or are their expansive suburbs the size of provinces? Parks the size small states? Are there still rivers and oceans? Are entire districts floating? Were mountains pancaked flat, or did the city weave around them? How about canyons? Where does the food come from? What’s the source of raw materials to build new things? Is everything made from recycled goods now or is there still mines?

And the book told me… very little.

Apparently, the city covers the oceans and rivers, which can be reached by passing deep into the reaches below the city. So the entire city is a good distance above sea level. It mentions rain water being collected, cleaned, and piped into wealthy neighbourhoods, but I’m not sure where common people get their water. Wells might work for a fraction of the surface, but how does that work when you’re on a city-shaped crust above miles and miles of ocean?

There are “greenbelts” that provide the food, but the one in the book is barely the size of central park. Realistic cities require rural farmland covering twice the landscape as the urban core to sustain themselves, so two-thirds of the planet should be “green”. This is very much not so.

(I’m aware of the paradox of bringing up “realistic cities” in a fantasy book. But the excuse “because magic” is passable for a nitpicky complaint, but very much not for something as large as asking how everyone doesn’t starve.” It’s literally “a wizard did it”, which is super dismissive. “Because magic” works best when invoked on purpose and not as a justification for shoddy worldbuilding.)

The scale of things in general seems very poorly thought out. As demonstrated by the map. It’s a lovely map of a district, but the map scale denotes it as covering an area roughly the size of the island of Manhattan. But it shows individual buildings, so it should really have a scale half as large. Unless each of those buildings is HUGE.

I’m also not certain of the role of Guildless in the city. A sidebar early on in the book pegs the percentage of Guildless at 50%—roughly 5% of the population would be in each Guild. More or less. But it also implies there is a higher percentage of Guildless outside of the more urban cores, so it might be higher than 50% Guilded in the 10th District. (What the city even looks like outside the more urban centers is also not detailed.) I’m also uncertain how the Guildless are seen in the world, given it is a 50/50 split. As they’re more common outside the urban core, is it a Red State/ Blue State distinction? An upper class/ lower class division? Are the Guildless seen as blue collar working folk that keep the system running, or a forgotten underclass dismissed by the Guilded elites? Or perhaps they’re viewed as the essential servers and officer workers who keep the system working rather than manufacturing? Are Guilds seen as the groups that “get things done” for everyone else?

The book does a passable job explaining how most of the classes fit into the setting, which can be awkward as some are so very much tied to D&D and presumably not the tropes of Magic. For example, sorcerers are explained as gaining magic from experiments and it implies warlocks have a pact with several guildmasters. But there’s no list of other potential patrons, such as Great Old Ones. Meanwhile, it says the worship of gods is rare, and that clerics typically devote themselves to a cause, but spends virtually no time on religion at all. Is Ravnica atheistic? One of the Guilds is kinda sorta a church (Orzhov Syndicate) but they feel like a bank that founded a religion worshipping wealth and the presence of the divine in their beliefs isn’t stated.

The description of monsters is folded partially into the monster chapter, which makes it easy to miss that vampires are immortal but significantly less powerful, or that medusas are called “gorgons”. In general, it’s unstated if the the nature and flavour of D&D monsters is the same or different in Ravnica, or the role and culture these monster societies possess. Are giants all one species/ people or are the different types as different as frost and fire giants? I have no idea. And looking at images of the miniature set showed that Ravnica ogres apparently look very different from D&D ogres. I have no idea if it’s just cosmetic or if they should be presented differently. Are there even orcs in Ravnica? Hobgoblins? I have no idea.

And then there’s monsters like the Skyswimmer that receive a single paragraph monster writeup that would be sad and anemic in 3e.

The Ugly

The 10,000 years of Ravnica’s history is ridiculously long. That’s twice as long as recorded human history! And it gets even more screwy when you consider that ONE faction has managed all the laws and policing over that time: the Azorius Senate. Who basically has control in a one party political system. Meanwhile, on Earth, if a single political party is in power for more than ten years they become crazy corrupt and start abusing their power.

It gets even more silly when you consider the goals of a couple guilds, like the Golgari Swarm and the Gruul Clans. The primary philosophy of the Swarm is that they want to tear down the existing social order and replace it, and that the other Guilds of Ravnica are “shortsighted and inevitably doomed to collapse”. And yet… these quote-unquote short sighted Guilds are twice as old as the story of Gilgamesh!! And the Gruul Clans are basically random violent gangs who are somehow considered a necessary Guild (probably because of needless symmetry, and needing an evil/chaotic variant of another Guild. Azorius maybe?) Their primary goal is furthering the cause of anarchy and destroying civilization… and yet the entire planet is a city and the same social order has been maintained for 10,000 years. Congratulation Gruul, you’re a joke. A Guild of losers. And because the primary goal of the Guild would destroy a core aspect of the setting (that the world is entirely covered in a single city) the Gruul can never, ever achieve their primary goal. The setting has indestructible plot armour. So the Gruul aren’t just abject failures, but paper tigers doomed to a Sisyphean task.

I’m not even certain what the purpose of these Guilds is. It’s implied in a few places that the Guilds were chose for some in-world reason (with the Cult of Rakdos being formed to find a positive societal place for devils) but I’m uncertain why the Gruul or Swarm were established. The Golgari have a refuse management and slime/ algae/ fungi  farming position in the present, but that hardly would have been useful ten millennia prior.

Centaurs in an urban setting seem weird. They’re an awkward fit for the world. Likely literally. Climbing stairs would be a pain and no one would like them on a train or in a carriage. Do they even have a role in polite society?

Most of the mechanics are good. But from a game design perspective, many of the Guild renown perks are problematic. I like the concept of focusing on renown and making this the sourcebook for factions and reputation perks. However, gaining the assistance of half-dozen NPCs is a massive pain in the ass. Not only for DMs trying to balance encounters, but just in terms of table management. Do they each get seperate turns? Act on the same initiative as their boss? If everyone has that level the “party” might be over twenty-members strong!

The Awesome

Early in the book there is a flowchart questionnaire that can be used to assign a guild based on the answers to a couple choice questions.

The start gives you some sample party compositions, with complimentary class, Guild, and role configurations. Useful for new players as well as thinking of what type of campaign the table wants. And you can just roll and pick randomly, setting disputes over the type of game that way.

Speaking of new players, there are tips and reminders regarding common rules mistakes. This really emphasises that this book is aimed at first time D&Ders.

While I bitched about the scale, the district/ city map is awesome. Some lovely, lovely art. And likely easy to steal and appropriate for another city, even in a homebrew setting.

I’m a fan of the Horrors monster, which are nicely customizable. They remind me as less tentacly feyr (or fihyr), which are a classic-esque D&D critter.

Rubblebelts are fun. These are basically neighbourhoods where the city has decayed and fallen into ruin (or potentially been overgrown/ reclaimed by nature; but these might overlap with greenbelts). Rubblebelts are basically the “wilds” of the setting where monsters live. It makes sense that there’d be areas that just get ignored: former mining or industrial cities where the jobs have moved on or areas where a natural disaster wrecked the buildings and no one wants to pay for the reconstruction. This sets up interesting dungeon crawls through abandoned warehouses and factories or wandering through neighborhoods that have more in common with a city in Fallout.

Final Thoughts

As a non-Magic fan, Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica was always going to have to work to selling me on the setting. I wasn’t coming into the product with established affection. However, I am a junkie for neat campaign settings, and every time I read one I end up thinking of two or three campaigns I want to run in that world. WotC has proven me wrong a few times, surprising me with products I was sure I’d be indifferent towards; while I was initially hesitant (and vocally so) I was prepared to be proven wrong and fall in love with the setting.

In general, I’d much rather have a cool product I can praise than to be right. I desperately wanted this product to be good.

But as I read Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica I found myself left with more questions over the world than I had answers. While I could play or run in the setting with what I was given, I never felt like I was given enough information to manage the setting or accurately portray it, let alone present it as a living place. I never felt like I was given enough information to understand the world and I would either have to invent large swaths of the setting (defeating the purpose of paying $50 for a campaign setting product) or do further research. Lots of research. Likely necessitating the purchase of additional books.

As a small example, the Izzet League is a Guild of magic/steampunk inventors—as seen by the cover illustration—but I have no idea how widespread their technology is. Is it found everywhere with arc lamp streetlights, flying ships, and trains? Or is that localized to their holdings, and the technology seen as proprietary “Guild secrets”? To me that’s essential information as it informs how I describe the setting, the potential weaponry of enemies, and even the setpieces of encounters.

Meanwhile, also I prefer to make my own choices over what I find most interesting in a setting. I like to have a choice, to find some small side area to make my own, or small reference that enflames my imagination. This book doesn’t give me that. It provides the absolute minimum details for a single small area (that may or may not be representative of the entire world) and assumes I’m playing a Guild-focused game. When given a single non-choice like that I makes me want to rebel and do a game where the Guilds are in the background.  

Now, in fairness, the city proper is given twelve pages of text detailing the neighbourhoods, which is probably comparable to the world lore given to Greyhawk in the World of Greyhawk folio that launched a hundred campaigns. So you can very easily run a game just with this book. It just requires some invention and willingness to take liberties with the setting. But if your players are not familiar with the setting, they won’t know or care that you’re making it all up.

That said, this book feels like it was written for existing fans of Ravnica and not casual fans looking to learn more about the setting. It was designed for those fans who already know how the world works and just need some specifics. It’s a book designed to introduce those fans to D&D. It’s almost a conversion guide providing the rules for the current edition.

By this metric, how does the book measure up?

The Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica certainly gives you the mechanics needed to play in the setting. It doesn’t attempt to translate the five schools of magic to D&D (even in a flavourful method) but it gives you everything else. If you are a Magic fan curious about D&D, then this will be a solid purchase, and pair fairly nicely with the Basic Rules, getting you started and playing, with the monsters in that free PDF and this hardcover being all you need to adventure for months.

But if you’re not a Magic fan and you just want a new world to play in… this is probably not a good choice. Try the Eberron book on the Dungeon Master’s Guild, which is somehow more comprehensive despite being far smaller. Or check out the Midgard Campaign Setting from Kobold Press.

But to me, this book felt incredibly anaemic and probably inferiour in terms of both quantity of lore and mechanics to even the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide.

Shameless Plug

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Review: Ghosts of Saltmarsh

The spring 2019 release for Dungeons & Dragons is a compilation of older adventures. Like 2017’s Tales From the Yawning Portal. Like that product, Ghosts of Saltmarsh is a “low energy update” of adventures from previous editions: it replaces monsters with ones from the current rules and updates the math in the adventurers themselves, but otherwise makes few revisions or changes. This isn’t like Curse of Strahd where the adventure is revised, updated, and expanded.

(Very likely because working on a big storyline adventure takes more than 6 months, so adventure designer Chris Perkins doesn’t have the time to manage two full original adventures each year).

Unlike Tales From the Yawning Portal, this product features slightly less well-known modules as well as some deep cuts pulled from Dragon Magazine. While this book may not contain new content, it might easily contain adventures that are new to even experienced gamers.

Personally, I wasn’t familiar with any of the adventures in this book, as the U-series escaped my notice as a young gamer. This was my first reading of those modules: I’m coming into them fresh and without nostalgia.

What It Is?

A 256-page full-colour hardcover, Ghosts of Saltmarsh contains seven adventures running from levels 1 to 11. At 157-pages, these adventures fill the majority of the book. But only just.

Prior to the adventure is a 29-page introduction to the small town of Saltmarsh, which is the starting point of three adventures, and can serve as the opening location of a number of other adventures in this book. Following the seven adventures is a 40-page appendix called Of Ships and the Sea (recycling an old title from 2nd Edition). This contains 14-ish pages on running and managing sailing ships, with the rest detailing hazards, ocean environs, 5-pages of random encounters, some mysterious islands, before ending on a couple underwater encounter areas.

The book ends with 27-pages of monsters, containing roughly 56 stat blocks. Some of these are new, but a few are being reprinted from past monster books, so owning those books isn’t required to run this adventure. Notable new monsters include the locathah, variant sahuagin and lizardfolk, skum, and even koalinth (aquatic hobgoblins).

Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh

Originally 32 pages for levels 1-3. Now 23  pages for level 1.

Published as U1, a stand-alone module. This adventure reads… okay. The hook is the adventuring party investigating a haunted house, which turns out to be less haunted than expected. (This feels obvious from a metagame perspective: what adventure would put 1st level characters against ghosts?) At its core, this adventure is basically a dungeon crawl through a rotting house and its cellar with a secondary follow-up dungeon crawl. At the time it was probably revolutionary, but thirty-five years later and the twist is less… twisty.

Nitpicky complaints aside, this adventure holds up fairly well. I imagine this module plays much, much better than it reads. The players’ paranoia can make them overreact, and a skillful DM can play off their expectations. You can have a lot of fun with this adventure. I’ve run a few fake-out adventures in my years, starting a Ravenloft campaign with something similar: beginning a horror campaign with an un-haunted haunted house is fun. (It would be easy to port this one into Ravenloft, moving Saltmarsh to Mordent or Souragne.)

If I ever need an introductory adventure on short notice, this has jumped to the top of my list.

Danger at Dunwater

Originally 32 pages for levels 1-4. Now 25 pages for level 3.

Published as U2, a stand-alone module and a direct sequel to Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh; while its predecessor holds-up well, this one has not nicely weathered the passage of time. The basic plot of this adventure is the party investigating a lizardfolk lair and, after some encounters, discovering the lizard folk are not unreasonable & potentially striking a truce. Or just murder hobo-ing through the entire lizardfolk community.

When written, this was a role-playing focused module. You talked to the lizardfolk, heard their concerns, convinced them you were on their side and then “won” the scenario. Now, with skill checks, you walk into the room, the party diplomancer declares they’re being friendly, rolls a dice (with a 75-50% chance of success) and then moves onto the next room. Repeat until you beat the module.

Role-playing is still possible, but it doesn’t feel like there’s enough here. A modern adventure might have listed the concerns of the various lizardfolk, as well as what the PCs could say or promise to win them over. It might also have been possible to have a series of tasks and side quests that could be undertaken to win favour with various lizardfolk (finding lost objects, helping end an argument, fixing a damaged wall, locating lost youths, etc). Instead, this adventure is dominated by the large map and dungeon crawl through the lizardfolk lair; it gives you the tools for if the adventurers fail to negotiate rather than supplying the tools for if they attempt the otherwise assumed peaceful solution. While the resulting adventure is clearly runnable (as people have been running it for decades), it doesn’t do much to reduce the DM’s workload.

Salvage Operation

Originally 8 pages for level 2. Now 9 pages for level 4.

Published in Dungeon Magazine #123, from June 2005. This adventure is fairly unremarkable. It’s a straight dungeon crawl, only the “dungeon” is a boat. The climax is interesting though, with the added complication of a rampaging giant squid. But the overall story felt nonexistent.

This feels less like a full adventure and more like an extended random encounter. A filler location-of-interest encountered while travelling at sea. Unfortunately, it’s a little too long to just drop into the middle of a session. Trimming it down would certainly turn it into a nice diversion on the high seas. It would also work if your players jump the rails and sail off on a ship and you need *something* for them to encounter, especially if this module starts in the middle of a session and finishes it at the beginning of the next session.

Isle of the Abbey

Originally 10 pages for levels 1-3. Now 13 pages for level 5.

Published in Dungeon Magazine #34, from March/April 1992. This adventure is simple, almost bare bones. I’ve seen similar adventures in organized play campaign (Living Greyhawk and Pathfinder Society), where the hook is little more than a justification to head to the location, where you engage in 3-5 combat encounter, explore for treasure, and then call it a success. It’s hard to be critical of such an adventure, because it does exactly it sets out to do. Heck, this is basically a Johnn Four’s Five Room Dungeon.

As written, this adventure feels anaemic. There’s just not much there. But, like many 1st Edition adventures, it’s a good framework to add your own content. A story MacGuffin in the treasure room that needs to be recovered, or the PCs have been tasked with turning the island into a naval base.

This would be a good one-shot, especially as you can modulate the challenge by having diplomacy work in a few places or removing a few fights. Adding a time limit might also be a good idea, preventing a five-minute workday. It might work especially well for a first time Dungeon Master who is an experienced gamers but is testing out the other side of the screen. There’s not too much to manage or remember, it’s a one-and-done tale, and there’s potentially a mix of combat and minor role-playing.

The Final Enemy

Originally 48 pages for levels 3-5. Now 29 pages for level 7.

Published as U3, a stand-alone module. U3 is another dungeon crawl. Because it’s not a 1e adventure if there’s not a major dungeon complex to explore room-by-room. This one is curiously a stealth adventure, where the players “win” by investigating a sahuagin fortress. Combat is optional. Like U1, this is another adventure that likely plays better than it reads, with the fun being the players’ various attempts at sneaking, distracting guards, and avoiding patrols. And the amusing chaos that results from poor rolls or bad luck.

Like U2, this module suffers from advancements in RPG storytelling and general game design over the intervening thirty-five years. Stealth games have become a trope, especially in video games. This adventure not only feels significantly less original, but also has the problem of not including elements expected in stealth games. Plus, stealth missions are inherently complicated once you include an entire party of adventurers. The rogue shines, but the fighter and barbarian get antsy. A skilled DM should look for opportunities to let combat-focused PCs scratch that itch: lone sentries in isolated rooms, wandering patrols, guards that need to be quietly knocked out to continue, etc.

Originally, this adventure lacked a firm end. The PCs reported back that the sahuagin were preparing for war along with details of their numbers, resources, and the like. Then the PCs were off onto another adventure… This reprint adds a new ending where Saltmarsh and its assembled allies can confront the sahuagin, and the PCs are allowed to participate. It’s a nice addition.

Tammeraut’s Fate

Originally 29 pages for levels 6-10. Now 21 pages for level 9.

Published in Dungeon Magazine #106 from January 2004. This adventure has a lot of overlap with Isle of the Abbey, as both are undead-focused adventures where you explore ruins on a deserted island. But contrasting the two really highlights the evolution in adventure design in the intervening decade. The residents of the ruins are survivors who can be saved and not just evil cultists to be killed. The undead aren’t just incidental encounters lurking in the sand but besiege to the building and have an evil scheme. The adventure doesn’t end after you’ve killed everything in your first pass through the dungeon and have looted everything of value. There’s more to do and a secondary goal.

Like Salvage Operation, this feels overly long for the story. Like many 3e adventures, there are quite a few superfluous fights to get the necessary tactical combats in for the adventuring day.

The most interesting part of this adventure is what could happen next. As the adventure suggests, the PCs could be given the deed for the island as a reward, providing a cool base of operations for naval adventures. And there’s a nice house that can be repaired and customized.

The Styles

Originally 23 pages for levels 6-12. Now 23 pages for level 11.

Published in Dungeon Magazine #121 from April 2005. This adventure is modern enough that this book actually recycles the original art. (Not that you could tell.) It’s the odd duck in this aquatic tome, as it’s more of an urban investigation that just happens to take place by the sea rather than a firmly nautical adventure.

I rather liked this one. It has a neat Lovecraftian vibe and makes good use of an aboleth, which is a creature that should be the mastermind of more adventures but are seldom used as more than a mid-tier filler encounter in the “flooded level” of dungeons. And the adventure makes creepy use of skum, bringing that monster into 5e. I also have a soft spot for investigative missions.

The location of this adventure is odd. The setting invents a neighbourhood that’s designed as part of a large city, but the actual region is quite large. Much larger than it needs to be for the adventure. It works better as an independent city. The “big city” people in Saltmarsh sell their wares to. Or a DM could just drop the included city descriptions and port it wholesale to a seaside city of your choice.

The Good

This book makes efforts to weave the seven adventures together, doing more than just updating that stat blocks but making them part of a consistent narrative. This is great, as direct updates aren’t particularly hard to write: 5e is so similar to 1e it’s possible to update adventures on the fly. While minor, the connective tissue and expanded details provide a reason to buy the book.

For fans of the originals, very little was changed in these adventures. This is certainly a feature/bug as it doesn’t try to revise or update the adventures to modern design standards, but it also doesn’t remove favoured elements.

I quite enjoy that this adventure keeps original setting of Greyhawk. Saltmarsh is firmly located on Oerth and locations in that setting are name dropped, and factions common to that world are included in Saltmarsh. There are actual references to the Scarlet Brotherhood! The adventure doesn’t try to wriggle the adventure into the Realms or force the Adventurers’ League factions into the product.

(It should be noted that Saltmarsh was only kinda sorta in Greyhawk. The setting was referenced as a potential site for the city, but this was just an option for those who wished. Still, assuming Greyhawk should make fans of that setting happy.)

For those uninterested in Greyhawk/ the world Gary made, this product provides small sidebars for relocating adventures to Eberron, the Forgotten Realms, or Mystara. The last setting is a bit of a deep cut, not having been published since 1996 and the days of Basic Edition. I’m surprised they chose Mystara rather than Ravenloft or Dragonlance.

The ship combat rules seem… okay. They’re pretty simple really, just giving a few extra action options to the captain and first mate as well as details of attacking parts of a ship. This allows you to functionally disable a ship without having to have ship weapons do ridiculous amounts of damage and risk them breaking the game by being deployed against creatures. But it also skirts around having large vehicles have tiny amounts of hit points so mundane weapons are useful against them. Sinking a ship is HARD but stopping one is relatively easy.

The Bad

Most of the adventures don’t update NPCs with additions such as Personality Traits, Flaws,or Bonds. This would have been especially useful in Chapter 3: Danger at Dunwater.

I’m inherently not a fan of this style of update, preferring the full expansion and revision of Curse of Strahd. Adventures that don’t just tweak the rules and swap out suggested monsters but that improve the adventure based on innovations and new ideas introduced over the last twenty or thirty years. I’m sure that when Dave J. Browne and Don Turnbull wrote The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh in 1981 they had several years of experience writing adventures. Perhaps as much as 7 years! But there are DMs out there with two or three decades of experience as Dungeon Masters. These adventures have quirks and oddities that could be improved, even if these additions are just included in sidebars or as optional sections.

I’m still not a fan of the simple line maps used throughout this book. They’re not BAD by any means. I just don’t like the aesthetic. The simple blue line maps made sense in the various Waterdeep products, which had too many maps for fancy well-illustrated maps. But this product has far fewer maps. I prefer maps I can display or that include details I can quickly use to strengthen by descriptions. To say nothing of people running on Virtual Tabletops. Simple line maps are fine for smaller publishers, but this is a book by the biggest name in the industry. I expect gorgeous maps. This is especially jarring with the newer maps. With the older maps, at least you’re getting a map of comparable quality to the original. But the maps in Dungeon #106 or #121 are arguably better.

Having played a couple games that make heavy use of adventuring parties in vehicles (I’m playing in Starfinder and Star Trek Adventures campaigns), the ship rules seem weak in a few places. There’s not really any rules for turning or moving the ship in combat (so a big sailing ship can do a U-turn ridiculously fast). Furthermore, the absence of roles for half the party is problematic. I’d have liked actions for the helmsman, carpenter/ engineer, and master gunner.

The Ugly

Let’s get to the big element of weirdness. There’s zero reason for this product to contain the ship combat rules. At no time in any of the adventures will the party engage in ship-to-ship combat. While these adventures are aquatic, boats are simply a way to get to the dungeon. People who want the big book of underwater adventures (and water-adjacent dungeon crawls) end up with a book that is 1/6th unnecessary rules, while people planning a pirate campaign end up with superfluous adventures that have little to do with swashbuckling adventures on the high seas.

(This is especially unfortunate for people who may have purchased the $250 Falling Star Sailing Ship expecting that to be useful in this adventure.)

Similarly, the cover is misleading. At no time will you fight a massive kraken while also battling sahaguin at the surface of the sea.

My final complaint shouldn’t be a surprise: another “collectable” alternate cover. I got tired of these when they stopped being special, around Tome of Foes. And having one for an adventure seems like a poor choice. A sourcebook you use, but not every session and only for a short time. The length where the limited edition cover is on the table and in danger of cola damage, Cheetos stains, and clumsy rips is limited. But an adventure? They might be in play for the entirety of every session for several weeks if not months. That’s asking to damage the rare collectable book. Which is anathema to this librarian. I tried running an Adventure Path using a deluxe collector’s book one (Rise of the Runelords for Pathfinder) and never freakin’ again.

The Awesome

In the original product, little attention is given to the village of Saltmarsh. There’s no map or details given, and you’re expected to just use a town of your own creation. “Saltmarsh” is really just a placeholder name. It’s effectively the seaside town of S______. This product gives the town sixteen pages of detail, including NPCs, locations, places of interest, and downtime activities. The introduction to this product also details the role of various backgrounds in the region, giving a paragraph on how each fits. I love this, and it’s a great way of tying PCs into the adventure and region. There’s also four new backgrounds added for this book, which are always a neat addition. You could have an entire party of four PCs with different nautical backgrounds (five if you count the sailor/pirate in the PHB).

The ship rules contain several new options for customizing ships. These are fun and fantastic, and the kind of thing you’d expect to see in a world of wizards and dragons. Magical ships that are made or living wood and enchanted prows that breathe fire.

The monster section has a lot of fun beasties. I liked seeing the skum return, and they look extra horrifying and inhuman. Like were-aboleths. The juvenile kraken will be useful, being of a much more appropriate level range for most tables. And there’s a skeleton swarm! And a large skeleton made of smaller skeletons that sheds small skeletons over time. Those are just cool.

Final Thoughts

This book is what Tales From the Yawning Portal should have been. It’s not just random adventures slapped together but a series that is connected, both thematically and potentially as a campaign. And the inclusion of lesser known adventures great.

Ostensibly, the selling feature of this book is it’s a way to introduce the new generation of gamers to “classic” adventures. Which is a noble goal. But… the adventures still need to be good. Fun to play. If they feel dated then you’ve just ruined these adventures for this generation. It’d be silly to have a book of adventures that make use of old rule design (like THAC0 or quadratic wizards). So why is it okay to employ old adventure design? That feels weird.

Sadly, because the book only makes use of old adventures, none of them take advantage of the ship combat rules. Even the brand new underwater locations featured in that section don’t really make use of ships! The book could have easily dropped the 8 pages for Salvage Operation or ten pages for Isle of the Abbey and maybe added a ship combat scene to one of the other adventures. Such as further expanding the climax to The Final Enemy, perhaps having a player controlled sailing ship facing a sahuagin-trained giant octopus.

The adventures are hit-and-miss, with most of the more recent ones being arguably better. However, the introductory adventure is one of those surprising classic that deserves it’s reputation and is still highly playable. And a couple of the middle adventures can easily be adapted or incorporated into an existing campaign, especially if you need an island dungeon quickly or high sea encounter.

Shameless Plugs

If you liked this review, you can support me and encourage future reviews.

I have a number of PDF products on the DMs Guild website, including a bundle of my Ravenloft books. Others include my first level 1 to 20 class, the Tactician, Rod of Seven Parts, Traps, Diseases, Legendary Monsters, a book of Variant Rules.

I play in a Star Trek Adventures game every other Saturday at 3:15 EST, streamed on Twitch and archived on YouTube. I  also regularly post STA content on Continuing Mission.

Additionally, my book, Jester David’s How-To Guide to Fantasy Worldbuilding, is available for purchase on DriveThurRPG. The book is a compilation of my worldbuilding blog series, but all the entries have been updated, edited, and expanded to almost two-hundred pages of advice on making your own fantasy world.

Plus, I have T-shirts available for sale over on TeePublic!

Review: Tales of the Old Margreve

Way back in 2010, Kobold Press released Tales of the Old Margreve for the Pathfinder roleplaying game. A book of 8 forest adventures with 12 new monsters set in the publisher’s setting of Midgard. This review is NOT about that product.

In late 2018 Kobold Press launched a Kickstarter to update this product to 5th Edition, adding additional monsters and creating a second accompanying book of player options.

Tales of the Old Margreve has now been out for a while, and it’s time for a review.

What It is

Tales of the Old Margreve is a 200-page book, available in PDF or hardcover formats. The book is named after the Margreve Forest, a dark Germanic wood that is the location of all the adventures in this product. Inside are 8 adventures and 3 encounter sites, designed for characters of levels 1 to 10. This product is not an adventure path, and won’t take characters from first level to 10th level. Nor is there a singular story connecting these adventures.

The opening chapter is named the “Gazetteer” but is a description of how the Margrave functions—along with new optional rules—as well as any mechanics that are altered within the woods, such as certain spells. This chapter also describes how the forest reacts to characters, with reaction adjustments based on race and actions taken within the woods. At the end of this chapter are seven pages of random encounters. After this are thirty-odd pages detailing adventure sites and locations within the woods, including a fairly detailed description of a coaching inn.

The bulk of the volume is the 135-pages devoted to the 11 small adventures and encounter areas. These range from simple investigations to monster hunts to recovering items stolen from Baba Yaga. Many have a map for a key area, which is occasionally (but not always) a dungeon.

The book ends with an Appendix containing a dozen new forest monsters. There are also monsters in pretty much every adventure or encounter site, so this product contains roughly 40-odd monsters in total,

The Good

This product is basically a “big book of one-shots”. The included adventures are excellent for when you need a short adventure in the woods quickly, where a dungeon level from Dungeon of the Mad Mage will not easily fit. They’d be excellent for filling out a travel adventure where you want some events of interest to occur between points A and B. It might also be a good book of adventures for a public play program, such as at a school, library, or game store, where you don’t want much continuity between adventures.

There’s a consistent theme and setting to these adventures, as they all take place in a magical wood. The adventures in this book have a very Eastern European feel, which is consistent with the tone of the Midgard campaign setting: Kobold Press’ work tends to have a Russian/ Germanic folkloric vibe rather than the “English” feel of traditional fantasy. It can be a nice change of pace. As such, a couple of the adventures almost have a Grimm’s Fairy Tale vibe, which I adore. A few adventures have other linked elements, like the spider crones, each of which is creepy but unique. And the final adventure suggests how to reference prior adventures, making the events of those tales impact the final adventure.

There’s a nice mix of adventures, with some investigation and some combat focused, and a few where roleplaying is vital. It’s not just a book of dungeon crawls, but there are a few “dungeons” in the woods, albeit atypical ones.

The book has a moderate amount of art, which new pieces for many of the new monsters, especially the ones that need it. Kobold Press continues to have decent art. Most of the art is the standard affordable character shots with no backgrounds, but there are a few illustrations of the landscape or a memorable scene.

The Bad

While the adventures are good, the encounter locations are so-so. They’re not bad (and most are arguably quite good) but they’re very specialized. They’d be hard to work into an existing adventure and would be poor as random encounters, having too much story in the background. They feel like the climax of adventures where the preceding adventure was accidentally omitted. They’re neat, but figuring out a way to use them will be a lot of work. I would have preferred slightly more generic lairs, or seeing these fleshed out into full adventures.

Almost every chapter ends with the new monsters and magic items found in that adventure. This makes it tricky to find a specific monster for later use. It would be nice if all the monsters and magic items were grouped at the end. Similarly, there’s not even an index or chart of the new monsters, and individual monsters aren’t listed in the Table of Contents. So if you decide to add a briar man or giant aberrant moth to a homebrew adventure be prepared to flip.

The book does reprint some art of monsters, using images from Tome of Beasts. But, Kobold Press is a small publisher and having art for those monsters is nice, so this is an exceedingly minor complaint.

The status subsystem is okay, but feels very similar to the Renown system from the Dungeon Master’s Guide.While they probably couldn’t actually call things “renown” or copy those mechanics, they could have drawn a little more inspiration for how Renown was handled in the DMG and similar products. (In fairness, this book was probably written well before Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica was released, so it couldn’t have been inspired by that product. )

The Ugly

I found the introduction awkward. Information on the wood is spread out between the Gazetteer chapter (which isn’t really a gazetteer) and the second chapter of locations (which arguably is a gazetteer). It felt like they had one chapter written and then added a second chapter without trying to make them complement each other. It’s a little awkward, and quickly finding information you might need to run an adventure can be tricky.

There is no map! This book is all about the Margreve Forest and it doesn’t include a map of the titular forest! Not even a zoomed in image from an old campaign setting so you have a vague idea where the forest is in Midgard.

In fairness, there is a free map PDF available online. And there is the excellent map on this site http://midgardmap.koboldpress.com/ which has a lot of other features. But these aren’t referenced or reprinted in the book.

edit: Apparently there IS a map included in the print version. A fold-out physical map is included with the book, but this just didn’t make it into the PDF. If you’re buying the hardcover, you can disregard that complaint.

The Awesome

Kobold Press initially opted not to have a PDF option for this product. It was a physical release only. Because of player feedback during the Kickstarter campaign, they changed their mind and added a digital option. I opted to support the Kickstarter pretty much entirely because of this reversal, so this review exists because Kobold Press listened to its fans. I appreciate publishers who listen.

This product is limited solely to the adventure, but there is a “Player’s Guide” as well. I like that there’s a secondary product that helps players make characters that fit the setting. This is pretty hefty for a “player’s guide” and is focused around new mechanical options (13 new subclasses!) and a little less on lore. (I like my players guides to fill the players in on what the characters should know.)

I like the extra details given to the Bluebell Coaching Inn, which comes complete with interiour map and exterior shot. This is useful for a rapid forest (or forestside) inn. But this book also has quite a few new ranger beasts companions, so that’s neat.

I adore the image of the village of Levoča in the first adventure, Hollow, by Richard Pett. That’s a gorgeous map.

I’m fond of that whole adventure really, and it would make an excellent start of a homebrew campaign (especially a Midgard or even Ravenloft campaign) or just a low level one-short. The inclusion of the “A Hollow Tale” rhyme is nice and creepy and the image of the villain is fantastic.

The book has several references do Baba Yaga, who is a major villain/ antagonist in Midgard. This product casts her as a quest giver in one adventure, and I like her being this menacing yet present figure. That adventure even included a “map” of her hut (although navigating it is a little tricky).

And lastly, on a pure ego stroking note, a monster I designed for Tome of Beasts made it into the random encounter tables. This does literally nothing to affect the quality of the book for anyone else. But for me it’s a huge selling feature.

Final Thoughts

A collection of small self-contained adventures, Tales of the Old Margreve is a product many people have been asking for. While not entirely new, the adventures are modern and not quick-and-dirty updates of adventures from thirty years ago. Unless you were a follower of Kobold Press’ Pathfinder material, you might not even realize these adventures are updates of past modules.

Tales of the Old Margreve isn’t going to revolutionize your game. But it’s solid product full of decent adventures that should be easy to run and quick to add to your Midgard campaign or almost effortless port into any setting with a large, dark forest full of ancient magic. And the tone of the adventures is nicely distinct, being different from most other generic western fantasy adventures.

It’s well worth a look and more than worth your time and money.

The biggest “problem” with the book is that it’s not a full Adventure Path. You can’t just sit down and run this and get your party to level 10. You’ll need to add new adventures and fill out the campaign with homebrew. But given this product never claims to be a complete storyline adventure: I can’t fault this product for not being something it doesn’t strive to be. And this is potentially a strength, as the gaps in the campaign leave room for smaller, personal stories tied to the characters and their quests & goals.

Shameless Plugs

If you liked this review, you can support me and encourage future reviews.

I have a number of PDF products on the DMs Guild website, including a bundle of my Ravenloft books. Others include my first level 1 to 20 class, the Tactician, Rod of Seven Parts, Traps, Diseases, Legendary Monsters, a book of Variant Rules.

I play in a Star Trek Adventures game every other Saturday at 3:15 EST, streamed on Twitch and archived on YouTube. I  also regularly post STA content on Continuing Mission.

Additionally, the revision of my book, Jester David’s How-To Guide to Fantasy Worldbuilding is on DriveThurRPG, available for purchase as a PDF or Print on Demand! (Now in colour!) The book is a compilation of my worldbuilding blog series, but all the entries have been updated, edited, and expanded to almost two-hundred pages of advice on making your own fantasy world.

Plus, I have T-shirts available for sale over on TeePublic!

Review: Acquisitions Incorporated

When someone writes the history of tabletop gaming for the first decades of the 21st Century, 2019 will go down as an unusual year, being filled with D&D partnership products that tie-in to other media. There’s the Stranger Things boxed set, the Rick & Morty comic books and adventure, the big storyline adventure tied into the video game Baldur’s Gate III, and lastly—the subject of this review—a book related to an online live-streamed comedy campaign.

Penny Arcade, the webcomic, gaming convention operator, charity organizer, and streaming channel has decided to add “RPG publisher” to its portfolio and create a Dungeons & Dragons compatible book. Reportedly, they initially planned to Kickstart the book, but after talking with WotC/ the D&D team, it was decided to co-publish the book: Acquisitions Incorporated. 

Staff at both companies worked on the book. Which makes this product kinda sorta official. (Like the early 5e adventures that were done as a partnership with other publishers.) The book is mostly written by Penny Arcade staff with A-list freelancers who have a long history writing for D&D. As it’s published in partnership with Wizards of the Coast, it doesn’t use the Open Game Licence and can use D&D-owned monsters (like the Mind Flayer who adorns the cover) and also makes use of the official trade dress (aka the logos and look of the book, such as the red streak on the cover). 

But it’s mostly a Penny Arcade book focused on Acquisition Incorporated. 

Which means there’s a heck of a lot of backstory here…

What is Acquisition Incorporated: the Brand?

A brief-ish introduction for those unaware, such as D&D fans unfamiliar with Acquisition Incorporated and/or Penny Arcade. 

Acquisition Incorporated is interwoven with the webcomic Penny Arcade’s live streamed D&D games. These started in 2009 as official podcasts to hype the release of 4th Edition and sell that edition to a new generation of kids & video gamers. After three recordings (over a year or two), the game moved onstage and were performed live during PAX conventions, where the players could directly feed off the audience’s energy and play to the crowd. It was during these games that the characters moved to the Forgotten Realms, shifted to the D&D Next Playtest, and then changing to 5th Edition proper. Since then, the group has been involved with most of the major storyline adventures to one degree or another.

“Acquisition Incorporated” is the name of the player characters’ adventuring company. The name was brainstormed on-air by Jerry Holkins, the writer of Penny Arcade and player of the cleric Omin Dran. Because of the official sounding name, Dran declared himself the CEO of Acquisition Incorporated rather than the “party leader”, and the adventuring company was presented akin to a modern corporation more than a guild or adventuring band. This rapidly evolved into a form of corporate satire, with a focus on branding, contracts, and hiring employees (read: interns).

Two years ago, Penny Arcade also started a weekly side-game: the C-Team. This campaign is streamed on Twitch and run by Holkins. The C-Team was established as a “franchise” of AI, operating out of a different location. A couple players from this campaign have guest starred onstage during the live shows with the main cast. 

What is Acquisition Incorporated: the Book?

Acquisition Incorporated is a 224-page full cover hardcover book. It features a five-page introduction to Acquisition Incorporated that is largely in-world, twenty-five pages on running your own AI franchise, and thirty-two pages on designing characters that fit AI. This chapter also includes five new backgrounds. The bulk of the book is a 117-page adventure that takes a party of PCs from 1st level to 7th level, while awarding the characters management of their own franchise. 

At the end of the book are a number of appendices, which include stat blocks for four members of the core AI team (Omin, Jim Darkmagic, Viari, and Môrgæn), the C-Team, and the B-Team, plus five new monsters and a couple vehicles.

This book is ostensibly set in the Forgotten Realms, but apart from referenced gods it could largely work in any setting. The adventure might take a bit of work to move into a homebrew setting or another published campaign world, but the concept and AI material will be effortless to lift. (Heck, given there might be AI franchises in the Nentir Vale and Ravnica now, you don’t even need to “move” things per se.)

The Good

The book is an interesting concept, a type of gaming product I don’t think I’ve seen before. It’s not a fantasy world or a full adventure, but a sourcebook on a type of campaign. Somewhat akin to a book entirely about playing pirates or merchants, but much more specific. It has the kind of laser-focus typically seen in later products for a campaign setting, such as a supplement on a specific faction—like the Harpers or the Veiled Alliance—if 

those also had a very different tone and a dash of satire.

The two centerpieces of the book are the adventure and the “company positions”, which are roles in the organization. Such as a cartographer or loremonger. Each character chooses or is assigned a single role, which gives them a handful of new features (typically including a minor magic item). New features are unlocked as the franchise’s rank increases (done as the player characters increases in level). This is a bit of a power buff as a character who works for a franchise will have more options than one who doesn’t belong to a faction, but since all the PCs should be members, it balances at the table. The benefits are also small and flavourful, being unrelated to combat and unlikely to break your campaign. They’re smaller than the faction bonuses in Ravnica.

The book is full of helpful tools for setting up a franchise, including quirks for the NPC manager, upkeep costs, and lots of random tables for establishing a headquarters. Franchises are ranked from 1 to 4, which is a neat way of managing how well known your business is and the number of employees. These guidelines are useful, so the DM doesn’t have to handwave how many workers are present. 

The prose feels very different from most official D&D books, and even most 3rd Party books. It’s even different from a more conversational book, like Strongholds & Followers. It retains the goofy tone of the live games, possessing silliness and absurdity paired with the corporate satire. Normally I’m not a fan of jokey gaming products, as comedy is often unnecessary in adventures: you don’t need a full joke, just a set-up allowing the gaming group to produce the punchline. But I don’t think presenting Acquisitions Incorporated entirely straight and seriously does justice to either the concept or the brand. Humour is not only implied, but intrinsic. Expected even. 

Additionally, this is a bit of a niche product: I don’t know how many people will ever play a full AI corporate franchise game. As such, this product needs to be entertaining on its own and should be a fun read (which it is). The entertainment value needs to come from the reading as much as the playing. Adding to the entertainment value are the little notes. Like most 5e D&D books, negative space on the pages is filled with small in-character annotations. These are attributed to name members of Acquisitions Incorporated, either the main characters or members of the C-Team. 

The art in this book is very different than the art in other D&D books. Mostly. There are a few choice pieces that could comfortably be used in any D&D product. Traditional tabletop RPG art. But most of the art is cartoony pieces unlike those in other D&D books. These help establish this book as something untraditional and atypical. I’m using “cartoony” to demote the style and not the quality: these pieces are still quite good. Cartoony does not equate with amateurish.

The book includes a number of new Downtime activities, which are very much appreciated. I rather like Downtime, but it is seldom used in the game. (There is even a sidebar listing all the existing Downtime activities and their source.) These new Downtime options are tied into running a franchise, but could be used for any business.

The class option chapter is filled with fun quirks and roleplaying suggestions for all the classes in the game and many of the subclasses. Thought is put into how each character class fit into a franchise and how they might work as part of a corporate satire campaign, including an amusingly little in-character blurb from sample members of each class.

The adventure is solid. It’s a lengthy part of the book and is really six smaller linked adventures, which are each chapters in an unfolding story. Unlike the other published D&D storyline adventures, this isn’t just a giant sandbox and a couple dungeons being called a single “adventure” because of a linked backstory or initiating event. This is one big adventure with the PCs establishing their own franchise, slowly collecting a powerful artifact, and facing off against established antagonists before saving the C-team… and the world (and, more importantly, the brand). Each chapter adds more to the story. Really, the adventure is a showcase of the various factions of AI canon, while still feeling original and not just a retread or akin to a “clip show”.

Near the end of the book are several new traits that can be added to existing monsters, which are tied to the various faction and corporate roles. These can be effortlessly used to make NPCs members of any of the included factions, including Acquisitions Incorporated. This is a nice and easy way of adding additional NPCs without duplicating stat blocks and having five different types of guard. 

The Bad

The title of the volume is problematic. “Acquisitions Incorporated” is both the name of this book, the organization, the live streamed games, and the brand in general. It’s like a book just named “Star Wars”. It tells you what’s inside but googling the name is going to produce a lot of false hits. It could have been called the Acquisitions Incorporated Franchise Guide or Acquisitions Incorporated Field Manual. Anything really to help distinguish between “AI” the brand, “AI” the shows, and “AI” the book. 

The book contains no stat blocks or even firm references to former members Binwin or Aeofel. This was likely for legal reasons, as those characters are owned by their players and might not have given permission. It’s still a little sad that an arrangement couldn’t have been worked out for a cameo or nod. I’d love a one or two page Binwin web enhancement or PDF from Scott Kurtz. 

The new race doesn’t wow me. It might be a huge part of the C-Team show for all I know, but having only watched the shows with the live cast I have no idea. They’re not very iconic or unique, lacking both a strong societal role and a unique look. They’re just sorta there.

The Ugly

There’s only 5 new monsters that aren’t NPCs. Which feels like a small number, and a missed opportunity for more comedic monsters. I wasn’t expecting dick wolves or the fruit f***ker to make an appearance, but the Penny Arcade comics are filled with inventive foes that could have been added. And of the new monsters, we get the chaos quadrapod, which lacks art and *really* needs a visual. The clockwork dragon is also a let down, being only Medium and CR 1. (Three or variants might have been nice.)

There’s an entire chapter devoted to classes (literally called “Player Options”) but no actual new options for classes or related options like feats. While it is useful having advice for how each class fit into the organization, at 20-pages (almost a tenth of the book) the space used far exceeds that topic. The class options chapter could easily be half the length. It also feels unnecessary to include details on almost every subclass in the game. The advice here isn’t bad by any means and is often amusing and entertaining but it’s size and inclusion makes the book feels slightly anemic in terms of new player mechanics: there’s precious little content to add into this game apart from advice. You’re effectively paying for suggestions, which feels like contents more worthy of a blog than a hardcover tome. 

The above is arguably the key issue with this book. It is so narrowly focused, it does feel like topic better suited to a blog or PDF on the Dungeon Master’s Guild than a hardcover book purchased in bookstores. I’m uncertain what the unwitting  new player who has only been playing for six months and buys this as their second or third book will make of this product.

The Awesome

I adore the portmanteau names for many of the company positions. Like documancer and occultant. They amuse me greatly. I also like how each of these corporate roles was given an iconic member, an NPC with a name and backstory who appears throughout the book. I like having “iconic” npcs that appear in multiple places, where you can see different artist’s takes on a character. 

(There are no stat blocks for these characters in the book, but a web document with these characters was released on the AcqInc website: http://www.acq-inc.com/downloads. I love free online expansions and bonus content. Love.)

The book makes good use of monsters. With such a small number new beast in the book (and not assuming ownership of any of the other monster volumes) the adventure makes heavy use of the Monster Manual, but frequently modifies or alters foes in creative ways. I particularly like the big giant tentacle in the sewer that is mechanically a constrictor snake without a bite attack. Elegantly done.

While I’m calling out monsters, I adore the fact that Deep Crows were included. For those unaware, the deep crow is a creature that appeared in Penny Arcade comic strips and is included here as both a CR 9 and a CR 15 monster. That’s the content I wanted!

The book also has a great map of the Sword Coast by Jared Blando. He’s done a few before, but this one looks perfect for handouts and is definitely something to look for online from the artist’s website.

The adventure returns the town of Phandalin, last seen in the original 5e boxed Starter Set. The town here feels much more like a living town. It was a little sad in the Starter Set, when all the NPC’s in the town were tied to the Adventurers League factions, but this time there’s actual people in town who exist for purposes beyond introducing player characters to organizations. The players can even get involved in such local shenanigans as the town mayoral election.

The book includes two vehicles making use of the new vehicle stat block format introduced in Ghosts of Saltmarsh. Given that book was so recently released shows some very nice coordination between Wizards of the Coast and Penny Arcade to get the proper formatting into this book. And, of course, who doesn’t want a balloon-powered airship; that’s almost worth the price of admission alone. (The mechanical beholder is just icing on the cupcake.)

Final Thoughts

This is an exceeding tricky book to evaluate. 

The audience for this book is the narrow group that plays D&D but also enjoys the Penny Arcade live games. I’m uncertain how it will be received by D&D fans who aren’t Acquisitions Incorporated fans: even as someone who has watched the live games but not the C-Team games there was a lot of references I didn’t get. Like the new race. And because the book is so heavily focused on making your own franchise, it’s not really going to appeal to Penny Arcade/ Acquisitions Incorporated fans who don’t play D&D; the amount of lore & background on AI is very limited and viewers who have watched all the shows are unlikely to learn anything new. This is NOT a book of lore on the organization.

But, as a counterpoint, the book is just plain fun. It’s oozing with flavor and a distinct style. There’s also the great adventure that’s an excellent choice if you need four to eight sessions of adventuring. Even if you don’t plan on running an AI franchise for longer than this adventure, after it ends you might find yourself wanting to tell a few homebrew tales or figuring out what happens with the business next. If you’re not planning on running the adventure it’d be easy to adapt the franchise rules for use with generic adventuring companies or a different business, making this book useful if you plan on having a game focused around a mercantile guild or mercenary company (perhaps even a tavern). And while the book is dripping with humor, the actual mechanical elements of the rules are not inherently jokey and those aspects can be stripped away. (Such as the amusing names for the corporate roles.)

If this were one of the three official releases by Wizards of the Coast I could see a lot of people being upset by this product. But as it is a bonus fourth book and only semi-official it feels like a nice bonus. Even if you never plan on running an Acquisitions Incorporated game, the book is still an entertaining read and has a lot of fun ideas that might inspire your campaign, be at a traditional dungeon crawl or a much more fantastic guild-based Ravnica game.

Shameless Plugs

If you liked this review, you can support me and encourage future reviews.

I have a number of PDF products on the DMs Guild website, including a bundle of my Ravenloft books including the newly released Cards of Fate. Others include my first level 1 to 20 class, the Tactician, Rod of Seven Parts, Traps, Diseases, Legendary Monsters, a book of Variant Rules.

I play in a Star Trek Adventures game every other Saturday at 3:15 EST, streamed on Twitch and archived on YouTube. I  also regularly post STA content on Continuing Mission.

Additionally, the revision of my book, Jester David’s How-To Guide to Fantasy Worldbuilding is on DriveThurRPG, available for purchase as a PDF or Print on Demand! (Now in colour!) The book is a compilation of my worldbuilding blog series, but all the entries have been updated, edited, and expanded to almost two-hundred pages of advice on making your own fantasy world.

Plus, I have T-shirts available for sale over on TeePublic!

Review: Pathfinder 2nd Edition

Following the four month playtest in 2018, Paizo Inc has released a second edition of their Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.

Unlike the playtest for 5th Edition D&D, which was more of a series of concept tests, the Pathfinder 2 playtest was very much about testing the game, and was intended to balance of the new edition. The final product of Pathfinder 2 is very much like the playtest product; while there are numerous changes, the overall foundation of the game and its classes are largely the same. If you didn’t like the playest, you probably won’t like the final product. And if you loved the playtest product, this is largely the same thing with tighter balance, refined rules, and better presentation.

For the unaware, Pathfinder was initially a very slightly tweaked version of 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons, released following the divisive 4th Edition. At the time, Paizo valued backwards compatibility with the wealth of 3e material already on gamer’s shelves, and resisted making many changes to Pathfinder. Despite half a decade of evolving game design, Pathfinder was still 3e.

And now, ten years after Pathfinder 1 and almost twenty years after 3e we have Pathfinder 2.

What It Is

The Pathfinder Core Rulebook is 640-pages, making it almost exactly the same size as the 5th Edition D&D Player’s Handbook and DMG combined. 

The book is full colour, with a textured background and big decorative coloured sidebar on the right that tells you what chapter you’re reading. 

The book is divided into a 34-page section on Ancestry, 166-pages on classes, 22-pages on skills, 16-pages of generic feats, 26-pages of equipment, 120-pages of spells, 26-pages on “The Age of Lost Omens”—an introduction to the world and setting—which curiously comes right before the section on actually playing the game. Those rules take 40-pages, followed by 48-pages on Game Mastering, and lastly 87-pages of magic items . 

Also out for the ruleset is the first Bestiary, and an update of their campaign sourcebook in the Lost Omens World Guide as well as a GM screen and Condition Cards. Coming soon is a Lost Omens Character Guide, which is the first (of likely many) splatbooks, offering three new ancestries, and 10 archetypes (each likely with at *least* half-a-dozen feats) and the Gamemaster’s Guide, with the *rest* of the rules needed to really run the game. Shortly will be a second Bestiary, and the 2e Advanced Player’s Guide will drop at GenCon 2020 with four new classes and 10 new ancestries!

Playtest Note

For this review, I’m going to try and focus on the product itself, and not really bring up the public playtest. While initially outlining this review I would observe things that had changed since the playtest and mark those as “good” or “awesome” based on how much they had improved, not considering if the mechanic itself was good or bad, which isn’t very useful for a review of the product.

Generally speaking, this product is a LOT like the playtest. Small things were changed and tweaked (language in powers, the removal of resonance) but the overall design of classes and the game is largely identical.

The Bar

In my review of the playtest I ranted at length at what I would like to see in a 2nd edition of Pathfinder. Changes from that initial edition that would bring me back to the Pathfinder fold after abandoning it for 5th Edition and other games. 

My review and opinion of Pathfinder 2 will largely be shaped by if it includes or does not include:

• Lighter rules
• Optional Complexity
• Optional Magic Items
• Focus on Gameplay Outside of Combat

First, an overall reduction of the weight of the ruleset. Too often I felt less like a storyteller and more a puppet of the rules, being forced to conform my ideas to the game system: I wasn’t the game master, I was the rules’ servant. Because there was a rule for everything, system mastery was a powerful tool, allowing my players to “win” via the rules, leading to far more rules lawyering and arguing. 

Secondly, the complexity of characters was problematic. While I appreciate some players enjoy building and planning characters, that doesn’t translate to fun at the table. That’s literally something you do between games. And because options equal power creep, and optimized characters destabilized the balance at the table, too much character complexity is detrimental to play. Also, the mandated complexity made creating characters and levelling up a chore to half my players.

Magic items are third, and were a big problem for my 3rd Edition and Pathfinder campaigns. The prevalence of magic items in those editions doesn’t really match any established fantasy fiction, and often reduced what should be wondrous and special items to just another element of the character’s “build”. And common magic items did funky things to the economy of the world, making it difficult to award extra treasure or rewards, and led to absurd elements like ogres with magical greatclubs worth tens of thousands of gold pieces.

Lastly, I’d like some focus on roleplaying and the personality or values of characters. Modern RPGs tend to have some form of bonus related to that: convictions in Vampire, values in Star Trek, personality traits in D&D, aspects in Fate, icons in 13th Age, duty/ obligation in Star Wars, Tales from the Loop’s Problem, Drive, Pride, Relationships, and Anchor (phew), and so many other examples. Or even plot points, like in so many other narrative games. 

The Good

The linchpin of the Pathfinder 2 system is the three action system. This was actually introduced in Pathfinder Unchained back in 2015, and is a relatively small tweak of the existing action economy of Pathfinder. While arguably as complex as PF1’s standard/move/swift system—being just a slight simplification—it potentially makes things faster by theoretically removing option paralysis and confusion. Rather than having to hunt through your character sheet for a minor or swift action, you can just use another action, such as moving a second time or making an additional attack. 

At first I was worried that the icons that drive the game’s powers would be hard to read or parse, but they do pop and are easy to distinguish, even in monsters. It’s easy to tell at a glance if a power is a passive ability or an active one that requires an action. 

The critical success/ failure system works with natural 20s and 1s. If you succeed by 10+ it’s a critical success, while if you fail by 10+ it’s a critical failure. But a nat-20 bumps the result up to the next degree of success while a natural 1 bumps it down. So even if you would miss on a 20, it’s still a success, or if rolling a 20 still only succeeds by 9 it’s a critical hit. And while you miss on a 1, if you’re skilled enough to just succeeded on a 1 then you don’t critically fail but just fail. (And, theoretically, if you’re so badass that even a 1 would be a critical success, you still only get a success.) It effectively maintains the “1” is a auto-fail while the 20 is an auto-success” but elegantly ties it into the new definition. 

The game has lots of decision points for people who crave that sort of game system and enjoy building characters. At first level alone you have six or seven decision points, all with two to four options. And you pick at least one new feat every single level afterward. For players who don’t enjoy building characters, each class has two or three suggested paths that you can follow for levels 1 to 12 (however you still need to pick your heritage, skill, and general feats). These pre-planned builds—basically PF1 style archetypes baked into the class—are each fairly diverse, and there’s some decent variety of characters that can be created, such as baseline angry barbarian, the animal barbarian that grows claws or fangs, or the giant barbarian that wields and oversized weapon. 

Races are now called ancestries, dropping the mid-19th Century racist connotations. There’s an acceptable amount of lore on each ancestry, along with some roleplaying bullet points and common perceptions of those people. Each ancestry also has several  subraces, which are called Heritages. These provide a mechanical variance, letting you customize what type of dwarf or elf you want to be. Ancestry feats are a decent idea, allowing you to expand natural talents and inclinations, and continuing to make your choice of ancestry matter after first level. Most of the later feats are reasonably well designed, improving your existing ancestry abilities or refining your skills rather than having you spontaneously develop some new ability. 

Both the ancestries and classes have their key text for new characters located in a side column, which makes finding those mechanics easy. 

Each class section also begins with a nice page telling you want the class does in each of the three varieties of encounter, letting you know what type of characters you can play with that class and how they can contribute. 

The disparity between the power level of linear fighters vs quadratic wizards is largely solved by removing automatic scaling of lower level spells, and fewer spells of each level. Also reining in the power level of spellcasters is the action requirement to sustain spells, which might also limit your ability to cast spells in future rounds. However, spellcasters have also been gifted slightly more effective cantrips that scale with their level, so they can continue to contribute despite fewer full-power spells. 

Additionally, the spellcasting classes also have “Focus Spells”, which are spells that use Focus Points rather than spell slots. These recharge after 10 minutes of rest, offering an additional power boost, making up for the fewer spells per day. Completely not coincidentally, there are a number of non-spellcaster feats that also have a once per 10 minute stipulation. These are basically 4th Edition D&D Encounter powers presented without overtly calling out that they’re once per Encounter, maintaining the in-world narrative. Really, they’re Encounter powers done right. 

Multiclassing is handled through archetypes. You take a feat that gives you some base features and can then take other feats from that class, letting you pick their powers. Given the classes are basically packages of feats, this isn’t much different than gaining a level in that class. The initial archetype feats also give you a decent array of abilities, so you’re not losing that feat slot as a “feat tax” to build a character you want. 

The book has a quick summary of the campaign setting, which includes changes in the setting as the result of the last decade of adventure paths. I like that Paizo is incorporating the effects of their Adventure Paths and letting their world evolve. Also, the world of Golarion is something unique to that publisher, and is what differentiates their game from any other generic fantasy RPG ruleset. It makes sense that they should tie Golarion into the game. 

There’s lots of decent art. The ancestors section seems to have a male and female individual of the relevant species in each section. And many of the pieces are full half-page scenes with a background and environment. There are fantastic locations and scenes of adventuring in progress, and significantly fewer images of a generic character standing mid-pose like they were caught in front of a greenscreen.

The Bad

Ancestries have no base powers or features, apart from ability boosts, proficiencies, and vision. Everything else is a choice. There’s no unifying element common to all dwarves. Forge dwarves and rock dwarves might as well be related in name-only. Like walnuts and peanuts. And the Heritages are just a mechanical choice: there’s no flavour or world lore for a Cavern elf or Razortooth goblin. That choice doesn’t tie you to anyplace in the setting or bring with any additional  or character hooksstory hooks or background details. Adding to this absence, later in the book we’re given descriptions of different people found across Golarion, including variant goblins, who don’t match the heritages in this book. Why are the PC goblins and the setting’s goblins unrelated? 

Half-elves and half-orcs as human Heritages feels off. As races don’t get base abilities, half-elves and half-orcs don’t really share anything with humans. They could just as easily have their own section, which would allow for half-elven HHeritages based on elven subtype or who raised them. (Or just not have different HHeritages: there doesn’t need to be an option and choice…)

Because the rules rely on icons, it’s easy for errors to creep in. For example, both the fighter and the monk have the feat Stance Savant, but it’s a free action for the fighter but a reaction for the monk. 

The classes are basically collections of unrelated feats, with most (but not all) having a signature power at level 1. I’ve heard them described as “feat soup”. There’s a handful of small features gained at higher levels, but most of these just increase proficiencies. This design has led to a lot of generic feats just becoming class options options, often for fighters. Attacks of Opportunity is now their signature ability, but they also know Blind-Fight, Combat Reflexes, Lunge, Point-Blank Shot, Power Attack, and even Spring Attack. The fighter doesn’t have any more identity than in Pathfinder 1; instead, other classes just have options taken away. Wanted to update a beloved Spring Attack-ing rogue? Sorry, roll a Dex fighter. 

As shown by 4th Edition D&D, this style of clas design is also a space hog. Every new “build” of a class needs 1-2 powers at every other level, for 11-22 new feats. And there’s always a demand for filled gaps. For example, there’s only four two-handed melee feats for the fighter, so that’s a pretty basic gap that needs to be filled necessitating at *least* 7 new feats, which is a LOT of mandated design that would easily fill an entire page. With each build filling two pages, a lot of space and design work is needed just to provide minimum support to a new option; even the multiclass archetypes need a full page and their feats are often only a couple lines long.

As non-skill feats are localised to classes, this often means some feats are printed in multiple places. I appreciate they didn’t just rename some options—like Blind-Fight or Quick Draw—giving us two almost identical options. But this is not universal, and there are options that are super similar, like Double Slice, Twin Feint, and Twin Takedown. (And since perfect balance is impossible, that means one of those will be the better choice and the other two nonoptimal.)

Given classes can share feats, it’s odd that all the class feats are located in the classes, rather than being consolidated in a larger feats section with a list of feats for each class, that way they wouldn’t need to reprint or come-up with doubles. Especially as that’s exactly how spells are printed. Making this even more contradictory, there are a number of options and class feats that grant spells, which are included in the spells chapter. Why the paladin-only feats are located in the paladin class section while the paladin-only spells—like lay on hands—are on the far side of the book makes little sense. It’s not like the Focus Spells are included alphabetically in the regular spells. 

Speaking of the paladin (now known as “the champion”), this class has become very reactive. It’s a tank class, defending allies and using its former “smite” abilities to hit enemies that strike at its allies. I dislike baked-in roles, and prefer players to have a choice in their party role. If someone wants to play a damage dealing striker paladin then the game shouldn’t tell them they’re wrong. Previously, the class was generally proactive prior, smiting and dealing damage when it wanted, so this is a pretty sharp change to expectations. Plus, with three different subtypes of champion (the paladin, reddmer, and liberator) it would have been easy to have one be proactive, one reactive, and one defensive. Let the player choose their role. 

Cantrips are confusing. They’re presented like other heightened spells, so a casual reader might think you need to spend a higher level spell slot to gain the increased benefit. The damage of most cantrips is also still pretty low. Wizards might still better off relying on a crossbow that deals 1d10 damage than using a cantrip that deals 1d4 damage, and only takes one action rather than two. 

I praised the inclusion of 10 minute rests earlier as “encounter powers done right”. Which I stand by, as phrasing them as requiring refocusing your mind or a break to muscles is better than calling them out overtly as being tied to Encounters. However, rathering that using “Focus Points” they could have probably just said “you know the spell XXX and can cast it once without using a spell slot, and regain the ability to do so after you spend 10 minutes refocusing your mind.” And there are other more awkward examples, like the rogue’s Defensive Roll feat that doesn’t require you to catch your breath for 10 minutes, but just requires 10 minutes to pass. The 10 minute “short rest” just feels like a hidden mechanic, a minor example of expected system mastery in the book, and knowing that most characters will want to stop after every fight for 10 minutes. It feels like Paizo wanted desperately to avoid having overt “short rests” despite that concept being a part of the gamer zeitgeist for a full year before Pathfinder was published, 

Backgrounds are exceedingly minor, containing the minimum amount of flavour and additional options possible. They evolved from the traits of Pathfinder 1, but somehow contain even less design. They feel like a reluctantly included element, done out of obligation rather than to add something to the character. 

The core rulebook only contains class archetypes for multiclassing. The playtest offered others, but those were omitted. Possibly for space (it’s a big book). But it’s a shame there’s not even a single example of an alternate archetype to use as the baseline for homebrewing or updating existing characters. There’s still a lot of vestigial elements in the rule set. For example, Encounter Mode section still tells players to “Roll Initiative”. But you don’t “roll initiative” as that’s a Perception check now. Every single player’s first combat is going to involve them scouring the character sheet for an absent “initiative” box. Why not just say “Roll Your Perception” or even “Determine Initiative”? Similarly, the game also still has Ability Scores that go from 1-18 (and higher) with related modifiers. Dungeons & Dragons can’t iconic elements like “18 Strength” or “8 Charisma” but Pathfinder can. Its not like “rolling your Ability Scores” is even an optional rule. There’s zero reason to maintain the distinction between Ability Scores and Modifiers which just exist to confuse new players. Dump ’em. For a more dramatic change, the designers could have renamed Charisma as “Presence”, making it more clear what it represents. Or dropped Constitution and tied Fortitude saves to Strength, as no one makes Constitution a dump stat and there are no associated skills. (Of the iconic characters, everyone but the cleric has a Con of 12 or 14.)

The Ugly

The book makes regular use of specialized icons, with Paizo having a specialized font for those. Which is available for approved compatible publishers. But NOT the fans. So you can’t use it for homebrew monsters, NPCs, custom feats, or cheat sheets of powers. This is seriously unacceptable. Roleplaying games live and die based on the ease of homebrewing, and almost every GM eventually want to do some custom design. That’s how new game designers are made! I’m opposed to anything that makes it more frustrating for gamers to not only prep but to homebrew, especially since it would be effortless for Paizo to put it into their Community Use package and thus limit commercial use. 

Then there’s the size of the book. It’s 640-pages! At the peak of Pathfinder, when it was the best selling RPGG, the 1st Edition Core Rulebook was often called out for being so large it intimidated new players. And then they go and make the next one even larger! While it has been argued this is the same size as the 5th Edition D&D Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide combined this isn’t a fair comparison: Pathfinder 2 doesn’t move beyond player content until page 415 with some setting details. And arguably the “magic item” section is also player content, since Players will be crafting most of their gear. The DMG section of the book is less than 50 pages. And the Pathfinder 2 Gamemastery Guide with the rest of the GMing rules coming in January 2020. Plus… if someone is a player, why do they need those 50 pages of GMing lore at all? 

Pathfinder 2 needs to attract new players to be a success, and a giant, expensive, and intimidating tome isn’t a selling feature. 

While talking about new players, I want to rant about the fighter for a second. The fighter is often called out as the “newbie class”. The class just for people who want to hit things. But this wasn’t really true in 1st Edition Pathfinder, as the class had a LOT of choices in practice. In PF2 the fighter seems simple, not having the obvious build choice of the other classes. All fighters just get Attack of Opportunity. This is problematic for three reasons. First, what if you don’t want to be a tank? Second, one of the three fighter “builds” is the Archer, which can’t take advantage of its signature ability as it can’t make melee Strikes. Archery is a trap option. Lastly, the real choice of what type of fighter you are is the weapons you focus on. Your fighting style: sword & board, two weapons, finesse weapons, archery, a greatsword, etc. But realizing that takes system mastery as well as reading through ALL the feats to see which you should take. The game should have made the fighter’s choice of weapon their decision point, and had Attack of opportunity limited to specific melee fighters. 

Proficiency in Pathfinder 2 is curiously like that in 5th Edition D&D: being trained gives you a +2 while being legendary gives you a +8, so the difference between a master and novice is 2 points higher than in 5e. Which is fine, really. But the game also adds your level to all trained checks, which feels needless. It’s bonuses for the sake of bonuses. Bigger numbers that don’t really do anything since the DCs in the world and in the monsters you face all increase at the same rate. (You don’t even get experience for fighting monsters more than 4 levels lower than you.) The numbers increase, but you don’t really get any better. 

This just leads to one of my biggest pet peeves from 3rd Edition D&D and Pathfinder 1: the dwindling effectiveness of poisons and diseases. You need to continually have deadlier and deadlier poisons as old poisons cease to be effective. Rather than a single poison that paralyzes, you need a dozen of various levels. Arsenic is a level 1 poison but only has a DC 18, so the first level pre-gen wizard with his 14 Con has a +5 Fortitude bonus, necessitating a roll of 13 to be unaffected. Reasonable. But that same wizard at fifth level has a +10 bonus and needs to roll an 8 to avoid feeling the effects of a deadly toxin. And at level 10 that could be +15. Meanwhile, the fifth level pre-gen fighter is rocking a +12, and by 10th level they can just sprinkle arsenic on their morning eggs for extra kick. It’s silly. 

The game doesn’t even need to have 5th Edition D&D’s flat math to move away from the above wackiness. Page 503-4 has a table of DCs by level, used for things like rituals. Poisons and diseases could always be a Hard difficulty save of the character’s level. Heck, pair this with an expected damage-by-level table and even the damage of poison could scale to always be a threat. 

Which leads to another complaint. I could not find an expected damage-by-level table. Which is essential for GMing. I need to know how much damage is appropriate to have a trap or hazard deal to a tenth level PC. The closest is the environmental damage table on page 512, but that’s not set by level. 

Pathfinder 2 retains the magic item treadmill of Pathfinder 1. The adventuring party is expected to find no less than four permanent magical items before they reach second level! Over the course of a level 1 to 20 campaign, each character will find thirty-six permanent magical items. That’s a ridiculous amount of magic.

Magic items are also required for the math of the game, and there is no “inherent bonus” system offered. Magic items are very essential for martial characters to maintain their effectiveness; by mid-levels of the game, the majority of their damage will likely come from the extra damage dice of striking runes rather than their skill or ability. It’s not the PC that’s the hero, it’s the weapon. They’re just the tool the weapon uses to move.

Each class’ powers make regular use of “traits.” These are tags that reference bite-sized rule element or restriction. Common ones are in a sidebar at the start of each class, but not every trait is covered like that. Plus, it’s easy to overlook a key tag and not realize how an ability works. 

Having critical success and failure dependant on the degree of success inherently slows down gameplay. It’s not enough to know if you succeeded or failed, you need to stop and do the full math to determine the margin of your success to determine if it was a critical success or just a regular success. 

The book has a staggering 42 conditions! Pathfinder 1 only had 34, which already felt like a ridiculous number. Some of these conditions are just descriptions of real-world terms like “Helpful” and “Indifferent” without a firm mechanical effect. Or Encumbered, which is really more of a state of being than a condition: encumbered should cause a condition, not be one. I can’t imagine a spell or power causing someone to be “encumbered” rather than just be “slowed”.

The classes are exceedingly focused on combat, with precious few (if any) options relating to out-of-combat activities. And nothing related to exploration or social encounters in classes. This is largely the result if the feat soup design of classes: flavourful options (what Wizard of the Coast designers refer to as “ribbons”) work best as static class features that cannot be exchanged or swapped out. Which are exactly the kind of options Pathfinder 2 removed from classes, because if you’re choosing feats, an option that works only outside of battle is a trap option. It’s an option no one will take as it hinders their expected power level. This means elements like a ranger being able to survive in the wild or calm animals, the monk ceasing to age, or rogues knowing a thieves’ cant have vanished. 

There’s also almost no focus on roleplaying, with no system where the player can be rewarded for having some form of personality quirks or flaws that the GM can also employ to prompt roleplaying. The game could easily have tied Hero Points into some kind of Virtue or Aspect system. These kinds of systems have been commonplace in other mainstream RPGs since the 3rd Edition of Fate back in 2007, and predate Pathfinder. It wouldn’t even have been that hard to add a “roleplaying” mechanic. Pathfinder 2 makes use of the “Hero Point” system found in Pathfinder 1, which is tied to abstract “heroic deeds.” (However, the bar for “heroic deeds” is low as the GM is expected to hand out one each hour!) But it could just have easily been roleplaying elements. For example, champions have Tenents while druids and barbarians have Anathemas. Every character could have those, choosing their own, and when the character chooses to conform or act according to their Tenents or Anathemas, that could grant a Hero Point.

The Awesome

The index is also a glossary, which includes several basic actions including their icons as well as a description of traits and conditions. I really like that.

The bulk system for managing equipment is good. Much simpler than counting pounds, making tracking gear less onerous, but also not so simple that you might as well skip encumbrance altogether.  

As I mentioned earlier, the paladin class has been renamed the “champion” and now features a variable alignment restriction, with the Lawful Good variant of the champion being the paladin. I love this so much. It retains the concept of the paladin being the champion of virtue, but doesn’t lock people who enjoy that class’ concept into a set alignment and offers some variety. It also means we don’t need three or four variants of the paladin class down the line, as something like the blackguard could just be a champion subclass. 

Calling out two other classes, I’m rather impressed by the barbarian and the bard. The barbarian’s rage is a mechanic that D&D-esque games have struggled to get right for several editions. I think they really nail it here: Pathfinder 2 oddly keeps in simple, just allowing you to rage almost at-will, only requiring a 1 minute break following a rage to calm down. Not even the psuedo-short rest of 10 minutes. Meanwhile, the bard is an oddity, being a full caster (as there are no spellcasters in Pathfinder 2 that don’t get 9th level spells… or higher), but they have their own spell list (occult, which is an… adequate fit for the bard if I’m being generous). However, where Pathfinder 2 makes the bard shine is in their Focus Spells. Former class features have been added to this, including Focus Cantrips, like inspire courage or inspire competence. The bard can just do that at-will as a single action. The Pathfinder 2 bard can be a support machine. 

While discussing the unconscious condition, the game includes hard rules for when you hear something while sleeping. I’m not a fan of having “a rule for everything” and don’t see the need to codify every situation… but this is something that comes up often enough that having a rule makes sense. I can’t think of a single campaign where there wasn’t a nighttime ambush or encounter. 

Basic enchantments for magic items make use of runes, which can be moved from one item to another via a runestone. This is an evocative and neat idea that matches the fiction of magic items in a way that has been missing in D&D since… ever. It also allows you to keep a useful enchantment but upgrade to a different weapon… or potentially upgrade a well-loved weapon like the archetypal “familial longsword”.

You don’t roll initiative in Pathfinder 2. You roll your Perception, which determines when you act. How well you spot the danger determines how quickly you act. However, this can be other skill checks if the GM wishes (in an uncharacteristic display of GM fiat in Pathfinder), such as a Stealth check if you’re hiding or a Diplomacy check during a social encounter. A few class feats imply Survival could also work. It’s a fun idea and a neat twist on Initiative. 

Goblins were added as an ancestry. Nice! This addition was hotly debated on the forums, as goblin PCs have the potential for being disruptive. They’re the Pathfinder equivalent of kender or Malkavians, and disruptive players are drawn to them. But Pathfinder’s goblins are so very iconic to that game it makes sense to move them closer to the forefront. (And really, disruptive players are going to disrupt anyway.)

The other new addition to the game is the alchemist. This is an odd choice and I imagine many Pathfinder players all had their own preferred base class that needed to be “promoted”. The gunslinger or summoner maybe… perhaps even the battlerager or investigator. I don’t mind the alchemist, and quite like the implementation. Specifically, I like how this alchemist actually makes and throws the same alchemical items other players can buy, rather than their alchemical items being entirely different to all other alchemical items in the game. There’s some nice design work there.

The game has four set spell lists all the classes use: arcane, primal, divine, and occult. It’s nice and simple. The names are odd, given they could just as easily be called the wizard, druid, cleric, and bard spell lists. But I imagine this leaves room for the inevitable additional of new classes. (*sigh*) 

In a related comment, I love how the sorcerer isn’t tied to arcane spells. Instead, their bloodline determines the spells they have access to. That’s amazing and really makes the sorcerer far more interesting that just being the wizard with an alternate spellcasting system, while also negating the need for a “spontaneous cleric” or “sorcererous druid”. 

The resurrection ritual can fumble. Oh. My. God. Gamemasters live for the kind of shenanigans that can arise from an evil spirit taking over the dead body of a PC.  

Final Thoughts

Pathfinder 2nd Edition is almost retro. If there was a term for 3e OSR style play, Pathfinder 2 would be that style of game. It’s Labyrinth Lord for d20. (d20SR?) It streamlines and cleans up the rules while improving balance but doesn’t really innovate much.

Pathfinder 2 reduces the number of skills while removing skill ranks; it adds Encounter powers; classes are designed around lengthy chains of feats/ powers; powers with keywords and tags; monsters that don’t follow PC rules; bonuses that increase based on your level; treasure is awarded by handing out magic items of set levels. To say nothing of the heavy combat focus and tactical play that requires a battlemap. It’s all very 4th Edition… but 4e arguably done in a way that retains a lot of classic elements and curiously kills fewer sacred cows than 4e despite being far more able to make hamburger.

The game is a direct evolution of 3rd Edition and Pathfinder. But it evolves the d20 game system in a lot of the same directions as 4th Edition and Star Wars Saga Edition. Games that ironically predate Pathfinder 2e. It’s an evolution of the game, but an evolution that could have taken place almost a decade ago. It feels designed in a vacuum, ignoring innovations of its competitors and rivals. Which would be problematic at the best of times, but is even more curious at a time when 5th Edition D&D has become the best selling RPG ever.

It’s also a dense system that requires a lot of system mastery. You need to know what keywords do, and memorize conditions, and keep track of specific jargon like “Step” and “Stride”, which are different things despite starting with “S” and relating to movement. This is not an easy game to learn. While arguably simpler (or at least more streamlined) than Pathfinder 1, it’s still one of the more complicated RPG rulesets currently being published. If not the most complicated in-print RPG. We’re currently in a time when most other roleplaying games have been moving towards narrative play (or even the emotional play of Nordic RPGs), when theater-of-the-mind gameplay is a major focus as it enables & supports the live stream games that have become so essential for new player acquisition. 

All of the above is a pretty big feature/ bug. If you like complexity, everything I just said is probably a selling point. If you don’t, then Pathfinder 2 is probably not your jam. And that’s okay. Because so many other games are drifting towards the narrative end of the spectrum, it’s probably a good thing to have a big name game providing an alternative.  

Pathfinder 2 evolves Pathfinder in a direction I have very little interest in playing. It doesn’t fix or resolve any of the issues that caused me to burn out hard and drove me away from the game. It’s still complex with a lot of work to build character and ridiculous amounts of magical items without even an optional inherent bonuses system. And it encourages roleplaying and acting in character largely as much as Battletech or Warhammer 40k. In a world where 5e didn’t exist, I could probably hammer Pathfinder 2 into something playable with a barrage of house rules… but 5e does exist, so I don’t need to do all that work. 

But that’s just me. I’m sure there are lots of people who want a heavier game than 5th Edition and are unsatisfied with its character building. It should also appeal to D&D fans who are unhappy with 5e’s “rulings not rules” attitude and want a game with less arbitration and firmer rules. It should also appeal to many fans of 4th Edition who might be in the market for a new game. To say nothing of Pathfinder 1 fans who just want a little more balance, or desire a version of the rules that has a clean slate and far less bloat (at least for a year or so). Pathfinder 2 might easily appeal to all the above. And it’s certainly the go-to game I will recommend to people who want that kind of experience.

Shameless Plugs

If you liked this review, you can support me and encourage future reviews.

I have a number of PDF products on the DMs Guild website, including a bundle of my Ravenloft books including the newly released Cards of Fate. Others include my first level 1 to 20 class, the Tactician, Rod of Seven Parts, Traps, Diseases, Legendary Monsters, a book of Variant Rules.

Additionally, the revision of my book, Jester David’s How-To Guide to Fantasy Worldbuilding is on DriveThurRPG, available for purchase as a PDF or Print on Demand! (Now in colour!) The book is a compilation of my worldbuilding blog series, but all the entries have been updated, edited, and expanded to almost two-hundred pages of advice on making your own fantasy world.

Plus, I have T-shirts available for sale over on TeePublic!