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.

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Review: Martial Power

I’d been looking forward to Martial Power, the fourth-edition Dungeons & Dragons supplement for martial characters, for some time.  Happily, Amazon got it to me a day early, so I’m able to review it.  Does it meet expectations?  I obviously haven’t been able to play with the new content yet, so this is based on just a reading, but my initial reaction is:  Yes, mostly.

Wizards of the Coast, like TSR before them, has a history of putting out player-oriented supplements in large numbers.  Generally these are broken down by class “groupings” — so we have the Complete Priest’s Handbook, covering second-edition clerics, specialty priests and druids, or the Complete Arcane, covering third-edition arcane spellcasters, including wizards, sorcerers, and warlocks.  Martial Power follows in that tradition.  Its content is oriented, not surprisingly, toward the four classes that employ the martial power source:  fighters, rangers, rogues, and warlords.

These lines of supplements have one other thing in common:  their quality was always variable, and their content best taken by the GM with a grain of salt.  While I’d put Martial Power pretty high on the quality scale, at least on first glance, I did take note of a couple of things that might warrant some GM attention.

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Barbarians at the Gates

Wizards of the Coast released the barbarian playtest article in Dragon a couple of days ago.  This was originally scheduled for September, then pushed back a month.  As of this writing, it’s still free, but it’s scheduled to switch to Insider subscribers only at some undefined time this month, so hurry and grab it if you want it. (Edit:  Apparently it’s going to remain free.  Good news!  It really is a terrific article.)

The class is rather interesting.  It’s another striker, this time based on the primal power source — they draw on animal and nature spirits.  Purists might not care for that flavor, but I rather like it.

Barbarians are quite tough for strikers — they have as many hit points as fighters, and only one fewer healing surge.  However, they’re a little squishy.  They have proficiencies in only light armor, and neither Dexterity nor Intelligence is a primary stat for them, meaning their armor class will be relatively low.  Mitigating that, many of their abilities grant them temporary hit points, making them even more damage-absorbent.

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Dread: Worst Mechanic Ever?

This one needs a little background.  A little over a week ago, while reading d20 Blonde, I came across mention of a horror role-playing game called Dread, which featured a unique mechanic:  task resolution by playing Jenga.  (Not to be confused with the other horror role-playing game Dread, which uses 2d12, and which was published several years prior to this Dread.)  (Edit: Some further digging reveals that, while the other Dread was published first, this Dread seems to have been created and used for convention play first.  Not that this matters much, really — just for the sake of accuracy.)

My immediate reaction was not favorable:

A Jenga tower? Really? That’s got to be the worst mechanic I’ve ever heard of. Nothing like killing a character because the player is physically clumsy… or has a nerve-related ailment.

This was, however, apparently a unique reaction.  One of the responses put it this way:

The threat of the tower falling (even if you’ve got shaky hands!) is part of what builds the tension in the game… In fact, as the tower grows and become more precarious, you’ll see the players physically scoot back from the table because, even if you accidentally knock the tower reaching for a drink, you’re [sic.] PC bites it.

As the story progresses, the danger of dying increases with each pull… and the atmosphere grows more and more intense. It’s a beautiful thing.

Additionally, I received several admonishments not to judge the game without playing it.  Well, fair enough.  I decided to see whether my group would be interested in trying a game, using the quickstart rules available on the website.  They were.

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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.

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