Yesterday I received Open Grave, the 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons supplement concerning undead. I haven’t spent much time with it yet but my first impression of it is very favorable, and it will be a huge aid to me in preparing my first 4E campaign.
It also reminded me that I’ve been meaning to post reviews of the 4th Edition sourcebooks. I’ll get to OG after I’ve examined it more fully. For now, I’ll do the book that my thoughts are the best-organized about and that I have the most to say about, good and bad:
Manual of the Planes
This is the sourcebook of the new edition that I was the least interested in, as the nitty-gritty details of the planes in D&D are usually inextricably bound up in with the default mythology/theology and I prefer to come up with my own of those. However, I knew this book would contain new monsters, rituals, etc., that I might want to incorporate into my games, so when I had a good coupon for Borders I went and bought it.
It’s hard to say if it was worth it or not. Although I had no intention of using the default D&D cosmology, I find some of the concepts presented interesting enough to adopt, but…
Gah.
I was a little peeved to find that Draconomicon was being released as a series of books and that the first one was going to cover the chromatic dragons when they were the only dragons presented in the first line of core rulebooks, but I ended up appreciating the finished product.
Having read Manual of the Planes, I can see even more strongly why this divided approach was good.
For those who are familiar with previous editions and haven’t read up on the 4th Edition, this book might be confusing. The cosmology worked up for previous editions has been set aside, with the number of planes simplified… somewhat. What exactly constitutes a “plane” is a little bit fuzzy.
There is the World (what was formerly referred to as the “prime material plane”), and then there are four other worlds/planes jutting out from it: the Astral Sea, the Elemental Chaos, the Feywild, and the Shadowfell.
The Astral Sea, which is the old astral plane and the outer planes smushed together, conceptualized as outer space with the various celestial realms hanging in it like islands or planetoids. Different, but not an uninteresting idea. The assorted elemental planes are now the Elemental Chaos, a realm of primordial creation and destruction. Instead of being instantly fucked because you entered into a realm made entirely out of fire or water without the right protective magic, it’s now a place you can traverse in the normal fashion… as long as a mountain doesn’t explode on you or something. I think it’s much more interesting, and the idea that the elements all coexist among each other makes for some more interesting possibilities, which the 4th edition has embraced in its treatment of elemental monsters (more on this later).
The Nine Hells of the devils are found within a planet in the Astral Sea, and the Abyss of the demons is a corrupted area of the Elemental Chaos. They’re referred to as “planes” (as are the individual hells and the layers of the abyss), existing within the larger planes.
The two remaining greater worlds/planes are the Feywild and the Shadowfell, which are conceived of as being mirrors of the physical world, one bursting over with life and magic and the other tainted with darkness and death. The geography of these realms are a funhouse mirror of the “real” world, and there are places where natural crossings occur. They allow for fairy tale or horror flavored digressions in a campaign, and provide a setting if you want to run an entire campaign that way.
Really, each of the four major realms to me represents a major step forward in making planar adventures really interesting in a way that goes beyond portal chases. You can sail the Astral Sea, negotiate the Elemental Chaos, step in and out of the Feywild, and try to escape the Shadowfell…
So, yeah. Grade A job on designing the world cosmology. It’s been changed from a concern of high level wizards and clerics to something that any group of adventurers can contend with.
But simply put, there is not enough information about any of the four major realms or the subrealms belonging to the devils and demons to be truly satisfying and make it worth the price of admission.
Each of these realms was covered at a glance in the core books. Each of these areas receives expanded coverage in the Manual, building on the information that could be gleaned from previous mentions and generally demonstrating the fertile and rich potential of them, but that’s pretty much it.
They show the potential.
If you’re going to be setting a campaign in the Feywild or the Astral Sea, you’re going to be making a lot of it up yourself. And I stress that I don’t see this as a burden, but I also don’t see it as something worth paying money for the privilege of. If the descriptions I’ve written above… or the ones present in the core rulebooks… tickle your fancy, you could just take them and run with them almost as easily without this book.
Sure, in defining and designing the specifics you’d end up doing 99% of the work yourself… but with this book, you’d still be doing like 90%.
The problem is that a book this size (a relatively slender 160 pages) can’t hope to give enough coverage of four completely different worlds and their major subrealms. Instead, it gives you their “fluff” (broadly-painted flavor text) and a few examples of gameable material for each.
If the Monster Manual contained a few example monsters and a light discourse on the principles of monster design and some flavor text describing the various sorts of monsters there might be stats for, who would buy it?
As a concrete example of its shortcomings: the section on the Elemental Chaos describes at a glance the perils of traversing an area made up of elements and chaos, and then has a couple of random elemental hazards thrown in as examples of the sorts of things parties could experience (a blast of elemental steam and a chaos storm).
Okay, well, examples are nice… and the chaos storm at least serves as a fairly iconic example of what the Elemental Chaos is all about… but why not something like the catalogue of traps and hazards that came with the Dungeon Master’s Guide?
Sure, I can make up a couple dozen of own… or put an elemental flavor on the ones from the Guide… but if I’m going to do that, coming up with 22 such hazards isn’t much different than coming up with 24 of them. So why buy a book that has exactly 2 hazards fully statted out in it in it?
One area I was very hopeful about was the bestiary. Being that the Feywild and the Elemental Chaos comprised somewhere between 33% and 50% of the book’s focus (depending on how you count the demon/devil subrealms), I was looking forward to getting more fey and more elemental creatures to add to my repertoire.
Big disappointment there.
The Monster Manual has stats for two types of elemental warriors called archons: fire and ice. It mentions that many, many other types exist in the Elemental Chaos. How many of these many, many types are defined in this book? One. The air archon. No earth archon. No water archon. No steam, dirt, mud, pungent, or boom archon.
The Monster Manual also demonstrated the potential of your basic “elemental” monster when you allow that they may contain combined but unmixed elements (fire + air equals a monster using both fire and air)… it did so at the expense of including the four “basic” elementals or any of the traditional D&D para-elementals.
So, the door was wide open for Planes here. Continue with more varieties of combination elementals? Go back to basics? Throw up some para-elementals? Or how about D, all of the above?
I’m sorry, the answer was E. There are no new elementals in this book.
There’s only one new fey and one new denizen of the Shadowfell… though that one, the Keeper, is kind of cool. Their flavor text ties them to a specific setting within the default cosmology, but they’d be easy to fit in any setting that requires ooky creepy otherworldly caretakers.
I think a book covering the Feywild and describing the society and culture of Eladrin and Gnomes in their native environment might have included stats for new varieties of these, as well as some other examples of wee folk and fair folk and less than fair folk. How about some pucks or bogeys or something? But, no joy.
The bulk of the bestiary is given over to new devils, demons, and such, which would make sense if this were some iteration of The Book of Vile Darkness or something.
And this brings me to my ultimate point: they should have done this as multiple books. Maybe one for each realm, or maybe combine some and do three: one for the Feywild and Shadowfell, and either one for the Astral Sea including the Nine Hells and one for the Elemental Chaos including the Abyss, or one for the Astral Sea and Elemental Chaos and one for the Abyss and the Hells.
Oh, I’ve got no doubt they’ll release more books that will expand on this stuff, but that just makes this book all the more superfluous. It’s kind of like those teaser booklets they put out prior to 4th Edition’s release.
None of this is to say that the book isn’t interesting, especially to me as a veteran of 2nd edition AD&D.
There’s a three paragraph section in the Shadowfell chapter mentioning “Domains Of Dread”, “places hidden behind thick walls of mist, places ruled by dark and deeply troubled beings bound to the plane by dreadful curses.” Hear that? If you want to port some old Ravenloft material over to 4th Edition, they’ve just told you where to stick it, so to speak. I’m guessing we’re eventually going to find out that the “Demiplane of Dread” is contained within the Shadowfell, in the same way that the Abyss is part of the Elemental Chaos and the Nine Hells is part of the Astral Sea.
On the subject of the Sea, there’s also a single stat block for a “spelljammer” vehicle as a means of accessing and traversing the it. Don’t tease me like that, Wizards… is this a shoehorned-in continuity nod for us 2E veterans, or is it a sign that one of the more interesting campaign settings from that era is going to be revived and folded into the new cosmology in a real fashion?
The player content is also decent: a handful of cool new paragon paths, a smattering of new magical items, and new rituals that focus on planes which are useful if you want to do a campaign where PCs are self-directed planar travelers and aren’t simply straying into strange new realms.
So, really, the designers of 4th Edition have succeeded in impressing me and made me interested in future products involving Des Plaines, but there is not one person I would recommend this book to as being essential. Not one. Buy it out of a sense of completism or brand loyalty, not because it’s the essential ingredient needed for your game.
I’ll get over it, though. As I said long ago, it’s weird to think about one’s family reading one’s work, whether it’s “kitten snuff porn or the trilingual instruction booklet for a six speed blender”.