Review: Manual of the Planes

Back in my first-edition days, I really loved the Manual of the Planes.  I’m not entirely sure why, because I rarely staged any interplanar adventures at the time.  The odd trip to the Abyss, sure, but nothing I really needed that book for.  And it was a book stuffed full of small print detailing such regions as the Quasi- and Para-Elemental Planes of Dust or Vacuum.  I’m not sure I’ve ever spoken to anyone who used the Plane of Vacuum in a game.  But something about that book fascinated me.

Now the fourth-edition Manual of the Planes is out.  I’d planned to take a wait-and-see approach, but somehow I found myself ordering this one, too.  I’m still not sure how much of it I’ll use — I already had my own take on the 4e cosmology worked out for my game.  Yet I enjoyed reading it.

It’s pretty perverse, I guess.  Anyway, the review.

Manual of the Planes is a 160-page book, like Martial Power.  It feels too short — it could probably have used twice as many pages and hardly touched on everything, though.  With a subject this vast, with this many possibilities, it’s almost bound to feel too short, so I’ll try not to hold that against it too much.  Production values seem pretty good as far as I can tell, and its layout, font, and so forth are still hewing close to that of the core books.  I would like to commend whoever chose its cover, which is clearly a nod to the cover of that first-edition Manual I knew and loved.

In fact, the entire book is full of little shouts out to previous editions.  That monster on the cover is an Astral Dreadnought, and its stats are in the book.  Spelljamming ships are in there, too.  So is Sigil.  The City of Brass, the Demonweb, the Domains of Dread, veils of color, the Blood War, the githzerai monastery of Zerthladun.  Some people feel that fourth edition is dismissive or even disrespectful of the game’s past, but it’d be pretty hard to feel that way about this book.  Plenty of much-loved (or in the spelljammer’s case, much-derided) bits of past game-lore are brushed off, cleaned up, and presented, often with new twists.  Of course, there’s also new material — it’s not a book entirely full of rehashes.

I feel pretty positive about this one, needless to say.

The book is divided into seven chapters.  The first is Exploring the Planes, which contains information about the basic nature of the game’s cosmos.  It talks briefly about the various planes and their traits, leaving the detail for later.  It touches on ways of traveling between and navigating the planes, ranging from portals to veils of color to spelljammers to reality rifts.  It discusses the cosmology in general, and briefly discusses how you might change the basic assumptions for your own game.  The example of a possible alternate cosmology is the Great Wheel, which will be familiar to veterans of previous editions as the base cosmology of those editions.

The first chapter also includes a section on Sigil, City of Doors, a planar city set inside a demiplane which can be accessed only by portals.  The five-page segment obviously doesn’t go into the detail that Planescape did, but it gives a decent taste of the flavor of Sigil, and it establishes the City of Doors as an important location for planar adventuring.

It wraps up with brief blurbs about the Far Realms and the Plane of Dreams.  The lack of information about the Far Realms is my biggest objection to the content of the Manual; I was hoping to see more about them, because I find them intriguing and information is scarce.

The next four chapters follow similar layouts to each other, dealing with different planes of existence:  The Feywild, the Shadowfell, the Elemental Chaos, and the Astral Sea and its dominions.  Each chapter contains four sections:  Visiting the plane, exploring the plane, sample inhabitants of the plane, and sample locations of interest within the plane.

All of this is very heavy on fluff, and that’s not a bad thing.  I don’t know whether I’ll ever use the Archfey Siobhan, Lady of the Oceans, but the passage about her is sure to have ideas I can mine.  Likewise, a couple of paragraphs about the Isle of Dread (a section of the Feywild that often “falls through” to the mortal world — as OD&D players who’ve played module X1 might know) gives enough information to spur the imagination and lead a DM to developing the region.

Some might feel that the locale and inhabitant writeups are too brief, containing too little information.  It’s true that you couldn’t just pick up this book and drop those locations full-blown into the middle of an adventure.  Even if the GM chooses to use everything in the book, much of the work of creating and establishing these locations is still left to him.  The book provides guidance and ideas, but not a fleshed-out location suitable for immediate use.  This is in keeping with the 4e philosophy of “opening up” worlds, but it also happens to be the style I prefer — a tenuous web of ideas to take, use, develop, twist, mangle, or dismiss as I wish.  Some people would doubtless prefer the more exhaustive development of, for example, Sigil in Planescape, with its large casts of NPCs, its factions, its locations of note, and so on.  If you’re one of them, you might find the Manual less useful or interesting than I do.

To this point, the Manual is largely fluff, but chapters 6 and 7 deal with mechanics.  Chapter 6, Monsters of the Planes, introduces some new interplanar creatures for the gamemaster to make use of.  There are four devils, four demons, one archdevil (Dispater), two demon lords (Graz’zt and Baphomet), the Astral Dreadnought I mentioned earlier, and half a dozen others.  One, the Bladeling, also includes a Player’s Handbook-style stat block suitable for use as a player character race.  I’m not particularly fond of them, but it’s another option for GMs so inclined to offer their players.

Chapter 7, Planar Characters, contains eight paragon paths related in some way to the planes, such as the Gatecrasher, a sort of interplanar tomb robber, and the Shadow Captain, a warlord whose followers include mysterious shadowy creatures and lost souls.  (The Shadow Captain is the standout in my mind, and aside from its flavor, it’s also notable for having a character image which is the first picture I’ve seen in 4e that doesn’t make tieflings look ridiculous.)  There’s also a couple of planar rituals, inclusing a version of Rope Trick that appears to not be utterly broken, and a selection of planar-related magic items — including the self-referential manual of the planes, which helps adventurers open portals to the right places.  The githyanki silver weapon also makes an appearance, though it’s not nearly as fearsome as the silver swords of first-edition.  Which is probably a good thing.

Weaknesses: The lack of content related to the Far Realms is the biggest content weakness.  (The lack of attention paid to the Plane of Mirrors, which is briefly mentioned in an offhanded way as the land behind every mirror… and then not really heard of again… is also a bit disappointing.)  The biggest usability-related weakness is, as usual in fourth edition, the lack of an index.  The Manual does have a pretty fair table of contents, though, and finding information about a location or character is easier than it might otherwise have been.  This doesn’t excuse the missing index, but it does mitigate the impact.

Aside from that, I’ll repeat what I said above:  this is a book of inspiration for creating extraplanar locations and characters, not a book of pre-generated ones.  I don’t consider this a weakness, but some might.

Price: $29.95 list; Amazon is offering it for $19.77.  I think it’s worthwhile at that price, but I find it somewhat difficult to give a firm recommendation, because the usefulness of the book will vary depending on the GM using it.  Paragon paths and magic items aside, though, it is a book for GMs; players who have no interest in running a game of their own will probably not find it terribly useful.

The Verdict: I’m going to call this a 7/10 on first glance.  On one hand, I find it tremendously entertaining, for reasons I’m not entirely clear on myself.  I think that it’s the sort of book that will provide me with a great deal of inspiration, even if I use relatively little of its content as-printed in my game.  On the other hand, I wish that there was more:  more about the Far Realms, more about some of those locations, more about the anomalous realms like the Plane of Mirrors and the Plane of Dreams.  It’s probably unfair to expect a 160-page book to cover all of those planes in depth, especially when I’d probably end up cheerfully ignoring most of that depth anyway and using my own creations, personally.  Still… I wish there were more.  It just feels too brief at times.

I like it, though.  I like it a lot.  This is a product that makes good use of the history of the game and its lore, without becoming a slave to it.  It puts new twists on old friends like the Isle of Dread and the City of Doors, and it fits things like spelljammers into 4e without also bringing along the annoying parts like helm-related bookkeeping, phlogiston, and gravity wells.  I’ve been satisfied with supplements that have done much less.

So… a little conflicted, but mostly positive.  The ideas, old and new alike, are just that strong, I guess.  The mechanical parts are actually weaker, to my mind, though nothing leaped out at me as broken.  If you’re going to buy this book, buy it for the fluff.  It’s pretty cool fluff.

Even if you’re not going to use it.

Related posts:

1. Monster Manual
2. Review: Player’s Handbook 2
3. Review: Divine Power
4. Review: Arcane Power
5. Review: Martial Power