Quick Looks: Adventurer’s Vault, Forgotten Realms Player’s Guide

I had the opportunity the other day to look over two new Dungeons & Dragons supplements:  The Adventurer’s Vault and the Forgotten Realms Player’s Guide.  This won’t be an in-depth review, like I did for Dreaming Cities, because I don’t yet own either book, but I did have a few comments to make about them.

The Vault is the easier of the two to discuss:  it’s a book filled with almost nothing but tables.  Tables of weapons, tables of armor, tables of mounts, and, of course, many, many, many tables of magical items.  Some of the items are new, while others are translated from earlier editions.

Alchemy is reintroduced, using a system similar to the ritual system.  I rather like it.  It allows access to anyone who studies it, makes getting recipes a valued reward, and offers an easy way to break down the power of a given concoction.  I was sort of ambivalent about 3e alchemy, but this version feels better to me.

The list of mounts includes such things as a giant ant.  Could be useful, although mounted combat isn’t typically a huge factor in my games.  I’m still a little skeptical about allowing flying mounts so early (sometimes in heroic tier, if I recall correctly) — but that could always be modified, of course.  And the new crash rules mitigate the potential abuses somewhat, if only by making combat potentially very deadly for those riding a flying mount.

As for magic items… there are hundreds.  Many new weapons and armors, of course, but some of the miscellaneous items looked very appealing.

On the down side, there’s not much to the book apart from those tables.  Descriptions of the various items are limited in most cases.  It’s all very crunchy.  Not a bad thing, necessarily, but this is a lot like the 4e Monster Manual — it’s not really that much fun to just read through.  It’s a reference work.  Worth picking up?  At the cover price of $30, I’m not sure.  Amazon’s $18 makes it more attractive to me.  I’ll need to consider it; items books are rarely that important to me — I come up with the majority of my games’ items myself — but I like having them around for reference, and the weapons, alchemy, and mount-related goodies should make it useful enough to justify the purchase.  One thing I’ll want to check out first is the quality of the index, which I sadly neglected to skim; if it’s as poor as the Player’s Handbook index, it could make looking up items quite difficult.

The Forgotten Realms Player’s Guide is a different kind fo book.  It’s sort of like a PHB appendix specifically for the Realms setting.  It contains many of the same chapters as the PHB does — races, classes, feats, and so forth — though the content is different, detailing things I suppose are meant to be particular to the Realms, although much of it would work in other campaigns as well.  It also contains an Almanac chapter that discusses, briefly, the gods, lands, languages, coins, and other “world facts” of the Realms.

The races include the drow, which appear to be more or less unchanged from their Monster Manual writeup, and the half-elemental genasi, which make excellent swordmagi or warlords, gaining bonuses to Strength and Intelligence.  The classes chapter covers said Swordmagi, as well as adding an entirely new Warlock pact (the Dark Pact) with a drow-ish flavor.  Finally, there’s “Spellscarred,” a multiclass-only “class” that represents odd abilities granted by the Spellplague that’s struck the Realms.  Which appears to have something to do with Spellfire.

I hated Spellfire.  But the Spellscarred looks at least somewhat intriguing.  I’d need to evaluate them more.

Swordmagi are arcane defenders, and seem to be mostly built around Intelligence.  They also seem as if they have some very powerful attacks, with control abilities mixed in among their defender-ness.  I’d guess a multiclassed wizard/swordmage could do some scary things with the right power choices — what the swordmage uses to close and mark, the wizard would use against something nearing (or in) melee range, and then escape.  I didn’t notice anything obviously broken during my skim.  Could be an interesting class to play, but I’d have to rename it.  “Swordmage” just sounds so… banal.  Why not “bladesinger?”  That was the Realms’ fighter-wizard type, right?  Well, whatever…

The Dark Pact looks very cool.  I would definitely play it.

It’s official:  paragon paths are the new prestige classes, just without the multiclassing ability-stacking brokenness potential.  The FRPG contains at least 20 of them.  There are a couple swordmage-specific ones, of course, and a Dark Pact warlock one, but I also noticed a few old friends, like the Purple Dragon Knight and the War Wizard of Cormyr.  Since multiclassing issues are no longer a factor, I don’t mind the proliferation of paragon paths as much as I did the proliferation of prestige classes, but still, there seem to be a lot of them here.  I wonder whether some of the space might have been better used for more world details.

There’s one new epic destiny, which involves being chosen by a god.  It’s slightly different for each god, and would need to be adapted for non-Realms gods, but another epic destiny is nice to have.  They were among the weakest points of the PHB.

The feats are almost entirely for the new races and classes.  There’s also at least one additional racial feat for each of the PHB races.  (Humans’ is a +2 bonus to saves when the character has no action points.  I’m not sure offhand whether it stacks with Human Perseverance, but if so, that makes humans quite resilient.)  The racial variants of previous editions are handled by mutually-exclusive racial feats:  if you take the Wild Elf feat, you can’t take the Wood Elf feat, and vice versa.  Not a bad way of distinguishing subraces without having to write them up as a separate race, really.  It’s not exactly ideal, but it’s low-maintenance.

There are about two dozen new rituals presented, none of which jumped out at me during a quick skim.

Finally, there’s that almanac.  I haven’t seen the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting yet, but it looks to me like this might be an abbreviated version of that book — giving the players an idea about the various nations, deities, and so forth, but without the detail that is (I would hope) present in the FRCS book.

Worth it?  For a Realms player or GM, probably.  For me… well, there’s certainly stuff in there that I’d use, but I’m not sure I’d pay the $30 cover price. Amazon’s $20 will probably save it for me, though.  Of the two books, I suspect the FRPG would prove the more worthwhile purchase for me, even if I don’t play or run a game in the Realms.

Related posts:

1. Forgotten Realms preview
2. Review: Player’s Handbook 2
3. Review: Arcane Power
4. Dungeon Master’s Guide
5. Incoming Barbarians