Rating - 3: worth reading once (borrow it from a library)
You do not need a review of the last Harry Potter book. If you have read the first six, you are going to read the last one; if not, not. So you are here (1) to see if you should bother reading the series at all; (2) to see if the last book is too scary for your kids; (3) out of habit; or (4) for commentary after having read it.
Harry vs. Voldemort: the final battle. Yes, that is the summary.
If (1): yes. Harry Potter is the literary cultural phenomenon of the decade. Take part. If you have not read any, borrow the first book from a library and try at least 100 pages. If you would rather gouge your eyes out than continue, you get a pass. Otherwise, you can join the rest of us in enjoying a bit of Hogwarts. It is not the greatest writing in the English language, but it fares well for what it is.
If (2): no, it's fine. We have nothing more graphic than the previous books. People die. Someone swears.
If (3): hey, great to have you both back. I can make extra chicken if you are coming by for dinner.
So let's toss around a little discussion for (4). Warning tag: SPOILERS. I have changed the font color to the background color, so highlight the text to read it (cut-and-paste could be your friend here). Let me say a few general words in case you are reading this as pure text and need something to fill the space so that you do not automatically read something you did not want spoiled.
I have dinged quite a few books for not being tightly written. I don't expect it of Harry Potter. The writing sprawls, not always in the best way, but people really are here for the excessive detail, unnecessary characters and events, and yet another way Hagrid messes up. This is the Harry Potter world. The individual elements are inspired and the books' plots are sufficient to keep them bound together.
Yes, a firm editor could be helpful. Do you want to be the editor who cut 100 pages from the last Harry Potter book? Do you know which aspect is the goose that lays the golden eggs?
I was surprised by how many people are not taking part in the Harry Potter hoopla. If my workplace is a fair measure, 90% are sitting this one out, and many of them have kids. Readership will be stronger in a younger demographic, and that is still 30 million readers in the United States alone. Maybe an equal chunk of the population will get to it eventually and give us 60 million. That would be reassuring. I had the rare experience of feeling like I was part of something, then realized that only two of my co-workers had even started a book that most of My People have already finished. I may be completely wrong about the extent to which this is a phenomenon that has swept the English-speaking world. Or maybe I am just surrounded by muggles.
Okay, I now repeat the SPOILER warning and switch to white text. Really, the spoilers are mild here, except for that whole "explicitly stating the final confrontation and outcome" thing. ("Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?")
The book has a strong start, followed by about a quarter of the book in which Harry, Hermione, and Ron go camping with no sense of direction. That part feels really long. The rising action in the third quarter goes well. The climactic battle of good against evil feels long as well, and while it probably should be, "fight scene" and "drag on" do not go together. The epilogue was treacle.
That was more negative than I intended.
All the characters make a realization that many readers have had: all this secrecy and lack of communication is a problem. There is some justification for it in Deathly Hallows, but everyone seems to agree that things would have been much easier if Dumbledore and others just told people what was going on.
The book is successful in dredging up matter from all the previous books. While there is significant ret-conning, the resurrection of past story elements works well. Old things have not been forgotten. Okay, some have, like the "Unforgivable" part of the Unforgivable Curses Harry repeatedly uses in front of witnesses, but many things return from previous books in a way that makes it all feel more connected.
I am not sure how it works as a book. It is fine as a Harry Potter book and a conclusion to the series, but I do not think it would stand on its own. It is about as long as the first three books together, and the series would not have taken off with this as a beginning instead of those. This is not the best in the series, but it is not the worst (Book 5 for that?).
So we have more answers. We get some new questions, largely when new answers attempt to revise the old, but the book settles the series in a way that some do not. We have a great deal of exposition, which is probably why it is "fine" rather than "great."
I am still trying to figure out how Harry pieced it together with the sword and the locket. He had an epiphany that seemed more convenient than the literal magical deus ex machina that appears elsewhere.
Bother, this is getting negative again. It is not bad, but I had hoped for more, you know? I felt still at the end, rather than elated or saddened or anything else. The victory was not celebrated much more than a Quidditch championship, and mourning for the dead was out of the way of the conclusion. It felt like a safe and satisfactory end of the story.
"Safe," that is what is getting me. There were no unexpected deaths, only a few unexpected survivals. You pretty much knew how this had to end, within a narrow range. The only questions were how she was going to blast the Voldemort out of Harry and whether Harry died with Voldemort. There was no big WOW. (But there is a big spoiler about to happen, so really, last chance to stop reading.)
Despite all that, I did enjoy the read, and I look forward to having the chance to chat about it. The final exchange duel was exactly right, capping everything that the book built starting with the initial chase scene. Was that the fifth time Voldemort failed with a point blank Killing Curse on Harry (baby, Goblet of Fire, three times in Deathly Hallows)? And of course Harry wins it all with a disarming spell.
Shall we end on a random note? J. K. Rowling explains history! If Harry was born in the summer of 1980, that puts this book in 1997-1998. Voldemort seizes power at the end of summer 2007, and the Death Eaters are fond of bumping off muggles in ways that look like accidents. Yes, people thought it was just a car crash... Also, in 1940-what did British wizard Dumbledore go to Germany to stop the rising power of an evil potential world-conqueror?
Amazon link
boxed set of all 7
Friday, July 27, 2007
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
Rating - 2.5: parts of it are worth reading once (borrow it from a library)
I somehow made it this far in life without having read or seen Romeo and Juliet, apart from the scattered fragments one finds in other works. Were it not so famous and acclaimed, I would probably have set it aside during the second act. As it is, the play is required reading as a reference point for English literature if nothing else.
Do I need to write a plot summary for Romeo and Juliet? Really? Two young people fall in love, but their families are feuding. They plan to flee and marry, but a series of unfortunate events befouls their plans and leads to each committing suicide in grief for the loss of the other.
No, you do not get a spoiler warning. It is Romeo and Juliet. If you read as far as the first page, that opening sonnet gives it away anyway.
Knowing the play only by cultural osmosis, I was surprised to see how weak much of it is. I have my objections to the story itself, but even the writing is not great. Some of the most famous lines in the English language are surrounded by filler. Everyone can recite a few lines, but there are reasons why you do not know the lines before and after, or why we are all familiar with abridged versions. And I was looking forward to the full Queen Mab speech.
There is too much wordplay that has not aged well. I am sure that the audiences of the day loved the verbal gymnastics, all the puns, equivocations, and double entendres. Really, you miss a lot if you cannot catch the innuendos. The language has not retained all the necessary meanings, though, so the modern reader loses very little if you summarize an entire page of banter as "Mercutio says Romeo needs to get laid."
Yes, the language does bear more fruit once you understand it. If you have an Elizabethan dictionary or a good "Shakespeare in plain English" book, you can read the lines repeatedly until you get the original sense. That is more work than most one-liners are worth.
It is nice to be able to read Shakespearean writing without a reference text. Some of the lines are rather good, and far from all of them demand explanation. Some of them are worth research. I am being a bit excessively harsh here because Romeo and Juliet is a part of the canon and everyone is supposed to read it; we might be better served if everyone read a summary and excerpts.
One last shot at the writing: the rhyming is random. An entire scene or a brief exchange might be in rhyming couplets, which tend to sound too sing-songy for a modern audience. Then we have some scattered sonnets, but most of the play is in unrhymed iambic pentameter...except where it lapses into plain prose for a line or a scene. One hopes these oddities were added by the various mutations the modern text has seen since the original version.
Shall we take a shot at the story itself? She's thirteen. Thirteen. One-three. The great, archetypal love story of Western culture, and it would be a felony in at least forty-nine states.
Yes, it was a different era, and people married and had children earlier. But she is thirteen. If you told me that a thirteen-year-old girl and her sixteen-year-old boyfriend killed themselves because their parents did not want them to date, I would not describe it as the most tragic love story in human history.
Ah, but you can see the depth of their love. Romeo had said nothing of his devotion to Rosaline for at least thirty seconds before falling in love with Juliet. They had spoken to each other for nearly five minutes before getting married. Plus, they possessed the wisdom, restraint, and good judgement for which young adolescents are often known. How can anyone doubt that theirs was a true love, destined to last the ages?
Seriously, this kind of thing is why it used to be okay to beat your children.
Thirteen.
Now let us look at ... no, I am still not past it. Thirteen. Thirteen. They used to have boys play the female roles, and that worked well because thirteen-year-old boys do not look all that much different from thirteen-year-old girls. You have probably seen Shakespeare in Love; Gwyneth Paltrow was at least as old (26) as Lady Capulet was supposed to be.
We think it is creepy for rich old men to be lusting after the young girls. We think that girls are growing up and hitting puberty faster these days. When Juliet was conceived, her mother was twelve and her father in his forties (at the youngest). And everyone seems to have been okay with this (and Juliet's age) for the past several hundred years. So maybe I should buy the premise, but: Ew?
Okay, one more time and I will be fine to move on. Thirteen.
Let us assume that we accept "teenage love at first sight" as a compelling motive for life-and-death struggles. We hereby stipulate that the sighs of thirteen-year-old girls can move mountains. We are past it. How does the rest of the story fare? There is not a lot there. Introductions, meeting and marriage, dueling and death, desperation and fake death, despair and more death, all mixed with moodiness, wailing, and gnashing of teeth. You will recognize the primeval teen angst drama, complete with overblown language.
Given all this, which parts do I think you should read? The play contains some of the most famous scenes in the English language, so you should know those. Conveniently, those are also some of the best scenes and the ones most essential to the plot. Score! You will also note how those scenes differ from your mental image: most are longer and more spread out than you might recall, and your particular image may be dependent on stage directions that are not in the original. Various versions I have consulted differ on which times Romeo and Juliet kiss or are just talking about it. (Seriously, after having been named and identified as an enemy of the family, Romeo kisses Lord Capulet's virgin daughter, twice, in the middle of a party, surrounded by her family, and said family wants her to marry a relative of the prince, and said prince is at the party explicitly so that they can check each other out, and no one notices?) Key bits:
Thirteen.
Amazon link
Romeo and Juliet at Project Gutenberg
I somehow made it this far in life without having read or seen Romeo and Juliet, apart from the scattered fragments one finds in other works. Were it not so famous and acclaimed, I would probably have set it aside during the second act. As it is, the play is required reading as a reference point for English literature if nothing else.
Do I need to write a plot summary for Romeo and Juliet? Really? Two young people fall in love, but their families are feuding. They plan to flee and marry, but a series of unfortunate events befouls their plans and leads to each committing suicide in grief for the loss of the other.
No, you do not get a spoiler warning. It is Romeo and Juliet. If you read as far as the first page, that opening sonnet gives it away anyway.
Knowing the play only by cultural osmosis, I was surprised to see how weak much of it is. I have my objections to the story itself, but even the writing is not great. Some of the most famous lines in the English language are surrounded by filler. Everyone can recite a few lines, but there are reasons why you do not know the lines before and after, or why we are all familiar with abridged versions. And I was looking forward to the full Queen Mab speech.
There is too much wordplay that has not aged well. I am sure that the audiences of the day loved the verbal gymnastics, all the puns, equivocations, and double entendres. Really, you miss a lot if you cannot catch the innuendos. The language has not retained all the necessary meanings, though, so the modern reader loses very little if you summarize an entire page of banter as "Mercutio says Romeo needs to get laid."
Yes, the language does bear more fruit once you understand it. If you have an Elizabethan dictionary or a good "Shakespeare in plain English" book, you can read the lines repeatedly until you get the original sense. That is more work than most one-liners are worth.
It is nice to be able to read Shakespearean writing without a reference text. Some of the lines are rather good, and far from all of them demand explanation. Some of them are worth research. I am being a bit excessively harsh here because Romeo and Juliet is a part of the canon and everyone is supposed to read it; we might be better served if everyone read a summary and excerpts.
One last shot at the writing: the rhyming is random. An entire scene or a brief exchange might be in rhyming couplets, which tend to sound too sing-songy for a modern audience. Then we have some scattered sonnets, but most of the play is in unrhymed iambic pentameter...except where it lapses into plain prose for a line or a scene. One hopes these oddities were added by the various mutations the modern text has seen since the original version.
Shall we take a shot at the story itself? She's thirteen. Thirteen. One-three. The great, archetypal love story of Western culture, and it would be a felony in at least forty-nine states.
Yes, it was a different era, and people married and had children earlier. But she is thirteen. If you told me that a thirteen-year-old girl and her sixteen-year-old boyfriend killed themselves because their parents did not want them to date, I would not describe it as the most tragic love story in human history.
Ah, but you can see the depth of their love. Romeo had said nothing of his devotion to Rosaline for at least thirty seconds before falling in love with Juliet. They had spoken to each other for nearly five minutes before getting married. Plus, they possessed the wisdom, restraint, and good judgement for which young adolescents are often known. How can anyone doubt that theirs was a true love, destined to last the ages?
Seriously, this kind of thing is why it used to be okay to beat your children.
Thirteen.
Now let us look at ... no, I am still not past it. Thirteen. Thirteen. They used to have boys play the female roles, and that worked well because thirteen-year-old boys do not look all that much different from thirteen-year-old girls. You have probably seen Shakespeare in Love; Gwyneth Paltrow was at least as old (26) as Lady Capulet was supposed to be.
We think it is creepy for rich old men to be lusting after the young girls. We think that girls are growing up and hitting puberty faster these days. When Juliet was conceived, her mother was twelve and her father in his forties (at the youngest). And everyone seems to have been okay with this (and Juliet's age) for the past several hundred years. So maybe I should buy the premise, but: Ew?
Okay, one more time and I will be fine to move on. Thirteen.
Let us assume that we accept "teenage love at first sight" as a compelling motive for life-and-death struggles. We hereby stipulate that the sighs of thirteen-year-old girls can move mountains. We are past it. How does the rest of the story fare? There is not a lot there. Introductions, meeting and marriage, dueling and death, desperation and fake death, despair and more death, all mixed with moodiness, wailing, and gnashing of teeth. You will recognize the primeval teen angst drama, complete with overblown language.
Given all this, which parts do I think you should read? The play contains some of the most famous scenes in the English language, so you should know those. Conveniently, those are also some of the best scenes and the ones most essential to the plot. Score! You will also note how those scenes differ from your mental image: most are longer and more spread out than you might recall, and your particular image may be dependent on stage directions that are not in the original. Various versions I have consulted differ on which times Romeo and Juliet kiss or are just talking about it. (Seriously, after having been named and identified as an enemy of the family, Romeo kisses Lord Capulet's virgin daughter, twice, in the middle of a party, surrounded by her family, and said family wants her to marry a relative of the prince, and said prince is at the party explicitly so that they can check each other out, and no one notices?) Key bits:
- Act 1, Scene 5 is where Romeo and Juliet meet. Read the sonnet from lines 91 to 104, then finish out their meeting through 108.
- Act 2, Scene 2 is the balcony scene.
- Act 3, Scene 1 has the fight scenes that are plot-essential, and it has some good lines, scattered though they be. You probably have time in your life for 200 lines revolving around dear Mercutio.
Thirteen.
Amazon link
Romeo and Juliet at Project Gutenberg
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Complete Champion by Ed Stark, Chris Thomasson, Ari Marmell, Rhiannon Louve, and Gary Astleford
Rating - 2: of use for some campaigns (but not most)
D&D 3.5 edition. Another entry in the Complete series.
This book is mostly about religious affiliations. The Player's Handbook II developed rules for player advancement within organizations in the world, and more than half of this book is applying that idea to faiths. Advance in your church or a philosophy-based organization, with criteria and rewards for rank. If you do not use affiliations, this book will not be of much use to you. It may, however, convince you to start using them.
It is important to make that decision before trying to introduce elements from this book. If you are adding affiliations to your game, you are adding a new subsystem and one that can affect every player in a variety of directions. You may even want to make it a full faction system with enmity from opposing affiliations, though you will need your own system for such foes. You could just toss in The Eternal Library when a Cleric of Boccob requests it, but you open your campaign to imbalance and new venues for min-maxing if you accept affiliations without doing so comprehensively.
The other recurring theme of the book is one thing, many effects. One divine spell will have a different effect for each deity. One prestige class will provide six paths with different powers for each. One class level will let you pick from ten class feature options. The gradual movement away from a class-based system continues.
Chapter One: Religion is forty pages of affiliations, fully a quarter of the book. It has churches for all the good and neutral PHB deities, roughly at 1.5 pages per church. Half of that is the affiliation tables listing modifiers and benefits. The other half is roleplaying material on each religion and how the organized faith affects lives and gameplay. There are also affiliations for every PHB domain, which could be of use to domain-based clerics or for building affiliations for non-PHB deities.
The affiliation benefits are usually small and not especially game-breaking, but nice enough to be worth pursuing. Some are noticeably better than others, and I can imagine Rogues clamoring for swift invisibility [level] rounds/day.
Chapter Two: Divine Character Options has alternative class features, feats, more affiliations, and prestige classes. With seven pages of new alternative class features, we may be reaching the point where you can fully min-max those class levels. Lion totem Barbarians (trade fast movement for pounce) has swept the Character Optimization boards, and Wizards can trade a metamagic feat to be able to spontaneously cast all divination spells. As usual, the options range from absurdly good to mediocre, with some posing balanced trade-offs. 4th Edition might need to re-organize the classes as menus of abilities at each level.
Twelve pages of feats include divine, reserve, tactical, and wild feats, with a few general feats tossed in. You may recall tactical feats from the Complete Warrior and reserve feats from Complete Mage. There is one feat mislabeled as metamagic, and an entirely new category of "domain feats." Domain feats mostly give 1/day abilities related to each domain, so Plant Devotion provides natural armor and fortification while Destruction Devotion lets your attacks chip away your opponents' armor. You can use turning attempts to get more uses per day. Touch of Healing lets you gradually heal all your allies back to 50% hit points an unlimited number of times per day, and Sovereign Speakers will be interested in increased options from the Imbued Healing and Spontaneous Domains feats.
Next we have four affiliations over fifteen pages: hero-worshippers, friends of nature, knowledge-seekers, and Pelor's secret police. If you need an organization that fits one of those slots, go for it.
Finally, Chapter Two also has eleven prestige classes over thirty-three pages. Each prestige class is associated with an affiliation. Two of them are connected with religions and their affiliations are listed here, while the others refer back to the previous section. They are a monk-barbarian of nature, a sort-of ranger, a sort-of druid, a sort-of paladin, a knowledge-based caster, a caster-assisting warrior, Pelor's ninjas, Pelor's holy warriors, a hero support class, and two grab-bag PrCs that work several possible themes into each framework: become like one of these great heroes or become a sanctified warrior of your church. Notably, the Marshall from the Miniatures Handbook is for the hero PrC, bringing in other side-material that you may or may not be using; variations on the Marshall's aura ability have been popping up throughout D&D books, so it might be worth knowing. This book again includes example NPCs, about which I am weary given poor error-checking in previous books. Annoyingly, the stat blocks again repeat ability descriptions from the previous page.
Chapter Three: New Spells has 52 spells in 15 pages. All of the spells are divine, with a few noted for adepts, blackguards, dread necromancers, and shujenga. Most of the spells fall into one of two categories. Some have variable effects based on religion or alignment, so each of those spells comes with a table explaining that. Many provide minor bonuses and let you discharge the spell for a single larger effect, where both the bonus and the discharge effect are significantly lower than you would expect for the spell's level. This is a good way of balancing the spells, but the spell power is usually low. It could be useful to have many consumable spells in effect giving assorted bonuses, but the durations are too short to make this viable. I would not expect players to use many of these spells, although there is the usually cherry-picking. The 0-level Summon Holy Symbol is a nice toy for the captured cleric.
Chapter Four: Divine Items has the magic loot you would expect, 14 pages. We start with a page-and-a-half of power components, consumables to boost domain spells (mostly). They usually add 1 to a caster level or DC, for 100-600gp. There are also two pages of special holy symbols, which have similar effects on all spells of a domain or spell school, notably available to arcane casters as well as divine.
The actual magic items are not especially divine. They are themed around the clerical domains, often in sets of items like the cloak, robe, sandals, and staff of the vagabond. This continues the D&D habit of borrowing ideas back from Diablo. D&D now socketable items, set bonuses, and classes that select powers from menus along various paths. It is interesting to observe ideas shifting as they flow from pen-and-paper games to computers and back.
Okay, digression over. These are low- and mid-level sets, with some interesting items. Elven cleric-archers will want a bow and quiver of elvenkind. A little further down the line, divine casters can pick up domain staffs for 36,000gp. Each has the nine spells from a clerical domain, effectively allowing spontaneous casting from it (1/day per spell). This might be especially useful for clerics who rebuke rather than turning, since a domain staff of healing lets them convert any spell to healing, with heal on that list. The descriptions, however, could have saved a page by not repeating the same thing in every one, particularly with the new, longer item descriptions format. The only things that vary are the name, aura school, spell list (which is in the PHB), and the description: "This [adjective] staff of [wood] bears symbols at its head that represent the [Domain] domain." At least they kept it to four domains, rather than filling pages with all of them.
Chapter Five: Divine Quests & Sites covers just that in 14 pages. The quest sketches are fairly straightforward. There is a suggestion of ways to convert any adventure into a divine quest, but that is not explored at any length. It is more inspiring than guiding. The item here that most interested me was "The Elemental Wellsprings," an adventure that could be converted in many directions and would be a great model for structuring PvP or competitive PvE in a multiplayer game (back to the computer). Kord at the Olympics seemed is an interesting idea with no there there. Finally, we have six location "treasures," this time stemming from the Dungeon Master's Guide II. Read at Boccob's place, contemplate death with Wee Jas, or heal in the house of Pelor. If you want to use locations as loot/buffs, these seem fine to include.
In summary, this books extends ideas from previous non-core books and gives them a divine spin, along with adding a few new tools to your box. If you hew closely to the core, there is not much here for you. If you are already using items from the PHB2 and DMG2, this can flesh them out and bring an element of the gods into your game. Because hey, why just kill things and take their stuff when you can kill things and take their stuff for the Lord?
To note the art, the images accompanying the prestige classes are very good. I especially liked the few pieces from Steve Argyle. Sam Wood's iconic work with the D&D deities returns in Chapter One (which is good).
Amazon link
Congratulations to Rhiannon Louve for her first Wizards of the Coast publication credit.
D&D 3.5 edition. Another entry in the Complete series.
This book is mostly about religious affiliations. The Player's Handbook II developed rules for player advancement within organizations in the world, and more than half of this book is applying that idea to faiths. Advance in your church or a philosophy-based organization, with criteria and rewards for rank. If you do not use affiliations, this book will not be of much use to you. It may, however, convince you to start using them.
It is important to make that decision before trying to introduce elements from this book. If you are adding affiliations to your game, you are adding a new subsystem and one that can affect every player in a variety of directions. You may even want to make it a full faction system with enmity from opposing affiliations, though you will need your own system for such foes. You could just toss in The Eternal Library when a Cleric of Boccob requests it, but you open your campaign to imbalance and new venues for min-maxing if you accept affiliations without doing so comprehensively.
The other recurring theme of the book is one thing, many effects. One divine spell will have a different effect for each deity. One prestige class will provide six paths with different powers for each. One class level will let you pick from ten class feature options. The gradual movement away from a class-based system continues.
Chapter One: Religion is forty pages of affiliations, fully a quarter of the book. It has churches for all the good and neutral PHB deities, roughly at 1.5 pages per church. Half of that is the affiliation tables listing modifiers and benefits. The other half is roleplaying material on each religion and how the organized faith affects lives and gameplay. There are also affiliations for every PHB domain, which could be of use to domain-based clerics or for building affiliations for non-PHB deities.
The affiliation benefits are usually small and not especially game-breaking, but nice enough to be worth pursuing. Some are noticeably better than others, and I can imagine Rogues clamoring for swift invisibility [level] rounds/day.
Chapter Two: Divine Character Options has alternative class features, feats, more affiliations, and prestige classes. With seven pages of new alternative class features, we may be reaching the point where you can fully min-max those class levels. Lion totem Barbarians (trade fast movement for pounce) has swept the Character Optimization boards, and Wizards can trade a metamagic feat to be able to spontaneously cast all divination spells. As usual, the options range from absurdly good to mediocre, with some posing balanced trade-offs. 4th Edition might need to re-organize the classes as menus of abilities at each level.
Twelve pages of feats include divine, reserve, tactical, and wild feats, with a few general feats tossed in. You may recall tactical feats from the Complete Warrior and reserve feats from Complete Mage. There is one feat mislabeled as metamagic, and an entirely new category of "domain feats." Domain feats mostly give 1/day abilities related to each domain, so Plant Devotion provides natural armor and fortification while Destruction Devotion lets your attacks chip away your opponents' armor. You can use turning attempts to get more uses per day. Touch of Healing lets you gradually heal all your allies back to 50% hit points an unlimited number of times per day, and Sovereign Speakers will be interested in increased options from the Imbued Healing and Spontaneous Domains feats.
Next we have four affiliations over fifteen pages: hero-worshippers, friends of nature, knowledge-seekers, and Pelor's secret police. If you need an organization that fits one of those slots, go for it.
Finally, Chapter Two also has eleven prestige classes over thirty-three pages. Each prestige class is associated with an affiliation. Two of them are connected with religions and their affiliations are listed here, while the others refer back to the previous section. They are a monk-barbarian of nature, a sort-of ranger, a sort-of druid, a sort-of paladin, a knowledge-based caster, a caster-assisting warrior, Pelor's ninjas, Pelor's holy warriors, a hero support class, and two grab-bag PrCs that work several possible themes into each framework: become like one of these great heroes or become a sanctified warrior of your church. Notably, the Marshall from the Miniatures Handbook is for the hero PrC, bringing in other side-material that you may or may not be using; variations on the Marshall's aura ability have been popping up throughout D&D books, so it might be worth knowing. This book again includes example NPCs, about which I am weary given poor error-checking in previous books. Annoyingly, the stat blocks again repeat ability descriptions from the previous page.
Chapter Three: New Spells has 52 spells in 15 pages. All of the spells are divine, with a few noted for adepts, blackguards, dread necromancers, and shujenga. Most of the spells fall into one of two categories. Some have variable effects based on religion or alignment, so each of those spells comes with a table explaining that. Many provide minor bonuses and let you discharge the spell for a single larger effect, where both the bonus and the discharge effect are significantly lower than you would expect for the spell's level. This is a good way of balancing the spells, but the spell power is usually low. It could be useful to have many consumable spells in effect giving assorted bonuses, but the durations are too short to make this viable. I would not expect players to use many of these spells, although there is the usually cherry-picking. The 0-level Summon Holy Symbol is a nice toy for the captured cleric.
Chapter Four: Divine Items has the magic loot you would expect, 14 pages. We start with a page-and-a-half of power components, consumables to boost domain spells (mostly). They usually add 1 to a caster level or DC, for 100-600gp. There are also two pages of special holy symbols, which have similar effects on all spells of a domain or spell school, notably available to arcane casters as well as divine.
The actual magic items are not especially divine. They are themed around the clerical domains, often in sets of items like the cloak, robe, sandals, and staff of the vagabond. This continues the D&D habit of borrowing ideas back from Diablo. D&D now socketable items, set bonuses, and classes that select powers from menus along various paths. It is interesting to observe ideas shifting as they flow from pen-and-paper games to computers and back.
Okay, digression over. These are low- and mid-level sets, with some interesting items. Elven cleric-archers will want a bow and quiver of elvenkind. A little further down the line, divine casters can pick up domain staffs for 36,000gp. Each has the nine spells from a clerical domain, effectively allowing spontaneous casting from it (1/day per spell). This might be especially useful for clerics who rebuke rather than turning, since a domain staff of healing lets them convert any spell to healing, with heal on that list. The descriptions, however, could have saved a page by not repeating the same thing in every one, particularly with the new, longer item descriptions format. The only things that vary are the name, aura school, spell list (which is in the PHB), and the description: "This [adjective] staff of [wood] bears symbols at its head that represent the [Domain] domain." At least they kept it to four domains, rather than filling pages with all of them.
Chapter Five: Divine Quests & Sites covers just that in 14 pages. The quest sketches are fairly straightforward. There is a suggestion of ways to convert any adventure into a divine quest, but that is not explored at any length. It is more inspiring than guiding. The item here that most interested me was "The Elemental Wellsprings," an adventure that could be converted in many directions and would be a great model for structuring PvP or competitive PvE in a multiplayer game (back to the computer). Kord at the Olympics seemed is an interesting idea with no there there. Finally, we have six location "treasures," this time stemming from the Dungeon Master's Guide II. Read at Boccob's place, contemplate death with Wee Jas, or heal in the house of Pelor. If you want to use locations as loot/buffs, these seem fine to include.
In summary, this books extends ideas from previous non-core books and gives them a divine spin, along with adding a few new tools to your box. If you hew closely to the core, there is not much here for you. If you are already using items from the PHB2 and DMG2, this can flesh them out and bring an element of the gods into your game. Because hey, why just kill things and take their stuff when you can kill things and take their stuff for the Lord?
To note the art, the images accompanying the prestige classes are very good. I especially liked the few pieces from Steve Argyle. Sam Wood's iconic work with the D&D deities returns in Chapter One (which is good).
Amazon link
Congratulations to Rhiannon Louve for her first Wizards of the Coast publication credit.
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Trojan War by Aaron Rosenberg
Rating - 2: of use for some campaigns (but not most)
Gaming book: Mystic Vistas (d20 system). "Roleplaying in the are of Homeric adventure," so the Trojan War in terms of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign.
The book has many interesting features and seems to be a fine take on the subject, but it has balance issues and undercuts itself by displaying how little the standard D&D game resembles Greek myths. Dungeons and Dragons is an idiosyncratic pastiche of medieval, renaissance, and ancient elements from all across the world. Narrowing it to the Homeric world changes it so dramatically that it might be better to start anew or with a different base.
Running an existing epic story is problematic unless you throw most of it out the window. Homer provides great characters to play, but there is no point to adding dice to historical re-enactment if you go through the exact same story. You have fully made the leap to acting if the players cannot change the story. If you want to use the big guys, you are best off re-doing the Trojan War rather than acting it out. Besides, no one is going to fall for that horse a second time.
You could run side stories in the setting. This requires players who are interested in being the B-story. Not everyone wants to play skirmishers under the shadow of Achilles. Lord of the Rings Online: The Shadows of Angmar is doing surprisingly well giving players the chance to deliver pies and fight brigands while Frodo carries the One Ring; how did The Path of Neo do, giving you the smaller characters from The Matrix?
Or you could just ignore the war and use the Greek legends as a setting. That gives you a lot more room to play in, and you can make your own heroes while sprinkling in historical figures. You are, however, substantially on your own because this book focuses on the Homeric epics, not Greek mythology generally.
Much of the balance and tone in the game is set by intent and Rule Zero, rather than the mechanics. Many things are not done simply because the Greeks did not do them, despite their availability. The gods are a balancing factor or a balance problem, depending on how they are used. Piety is useful or a game-breaker depending on its implementation. Using the setting effectively under these rules requires good intent, clear expectations from players and DM, and either finesse or a willingness to ignore problems.
Fourteen chapters in 150 pages, let us go to the chapter-by-chapter:
Chapter One: The Epics is The Iliad and The Odyssey in two pages, with notes from the surrounding stories. Fair.
Chapter Two: Characters limits races to humans and the new Divine Offspring. The enumeration of the Achaean and Trojan nations is good, but there is little differentiation between them. Most characters should be male. Compared to the usual D&D campaign's Real World menagerie where the elves hang out with colorful midgets and half-redeemed villains, this is both more reasonable and less interesting.
Chapter Three: Character Classes replaces the Cleric, Paladin, and Wizard, while citing some other Green Ronin products you might want to buy to supplement the game. The new classes are the Charioteer, Dedicated Warrior (vaguely Paladin-like), Magician (wand-focused mage), and Priest. The Priest is probably the most interesting of these, replacing the Cleric with something more relevant to the setting. Take away the Cleric's arms, armor, and BAB, and trade in turning for a variety of divine effects. Spellcasting is the mechanically interesting part: think of a Psion with powers limit instead of a points limit. The Priest gets a relatively small number of spells per day, but they are spontaneously cast, and they can be of any levels the Priest can cast. They are limited by (1) the god's sphere of influence and (2) they must petition for each spell at the time. The petition is a caster level check against DC (20 + spell level), so a low-level Priest is almost useless and failure will be common at every level. The gods are unreliable.
Of course there are prestige classes: the Orator, Runner, and Seer. These PrCs are appropriate the setting. Mechanically, they are often are generally weak but one overpowered trick. The Runner, for example, is the master of charges: he can charge 120' (need not be in a straight line) while attacking everyone he threatens along that path, with a fear effect and bonuses to AC, Reflex saves, to-hit, and damage; he has few options other than charging.
Note before moving on that Druids are still in the game, with almost no notes about them. Druids, the meaner half of CoDzilla, are perfectly in the setting to turn into a bear and savage anyone who might displease Artemis, which is pretty much every male. Their main loss is the restricted spell list from Chapter Five. Of course, if you are playing a Homeric game, you are probably focused on meleers rather than casters, but the role of peripheral characters is not explored. That occasional Druid, Rogue, or Sorcerer will wreak havoc when everyone is built around the expectation of Fighters and Rangers.
Chapter Four: Skills and Feats is just what is says. We get a few new skills and new ways to use old ones. The feats revolve around chariot combat, mass battlefields, and Greek society or divinity.
Chapter Five: Magic has a restricted spell list and new spells. I have not compared the list to the Player's Handbook closely, but notable deletions include Fireball, all the Summon spells, and anything relating to undead. We have a much narrower setting here, recall.
The balance on new spells is questionable. Adjust makes your clothing fit perfectly; when you can learn a limited number of spells, when does this ever make the list? Restore Youth, Greater is rather nice, de-aging multiple targets with an instantaneous duration for 1000xp. The normal version is inadvertently one of the most amusing attacks in the game, since you can turn young warriors into small children with no save or SR; he may still be a 15th level barbarian, but he is an eight-year-old who cannot lift his greataxe. (There technically are not rules for that, are there? At least his armor should not fit.) I will address the Divine Anger spell in Chapter Fourteen.
Chapter Six: Equipment again narrows the field, this time on weapons and armor. There is also discussion of non-martial goods, notably the dyes of ancient Greece.
Chapter Seven: Homeric Battlefields develops mass-combat rules in ten pages. This is a weakness of D&D; I recall one of the 3.0 designers saying that they were told to leave out rules for battles between armies because they were just going to use the Chainmail and miniatures system for that. This has proved less popular, but running the Trojan War as a wargame makes a lot of sense, although players are unlikely to string it out for ten years. I am not interested enough in mass-combat rules to comment here. Another thing to attach to the D&D base.
Chapter Eight: Religion and Piety gives a serviceable account of the Greek pantheon. Players frequently bicker about which portrayal describes them best or just what alignment each is. You can use this or one of dozens of accounts, notably including several editions of Deities and Demigods. This has some Trojan War-specific commentary. This chapter also explains how you can "cash in" piety with your deity.
Chapter Nine: The Homeric World is a brief account of Greece and Troy. Sketched background material, enough if you are focused on the war but not a lot to work with.
Chapter Ten: Captains of Legend stats out the cast of The Iliad. You will disagree with some and want to re-write them, based on your own image of the characters. The "Playing the Legends" sidebar on page 109 is another take on my earlier comments on the difficulties of having the epic characters in play (or not).
Chapter Eleven: Homeric Bestiary lists the setting's limits from the Monster Manual. The limits are severe, although you could diversify your own Greek setting. There just were not really that many monsters in the Greek stories, and the ones you remember were probably singular rather than hordes. There is a new template here, with write-ups foe the Nemean Lion and Cerberus.
Chapter Twelve: Treasure gives some magic items and artifacts from the stories. The epic heroes are apparently bedecked in minor artifacts.
Chapter Thirteen: Nine Long Years is one of the two most useful chapters, as it addresses actually playing the War. This is how the events flowed, these were the pivotal figures, here are several ways you can insert new ideas or take the story in a different direction.
Chapter Fourteen: Running the Game is the best chapter. Homer told epic stories, and here is how playing that way has a different feel from the standard D&D game. These are how the Greeks' motives differed. The Greek gods were more active than you are used to, so there are useful comments on how the gods will involve themselves. People might think of D&D as using a vaguely Greek-Norse-Egyptian polytheistic pantheon, but the Greek gods in the old epics were something apart from the standard deities.
The most notable thing is that the favor of the gods is both necessary and a path to certain doom. If you try to please the gods, you may irritate them. If you do not try, that will irritate them. If you find favor, that god's enemies will hate you. If the gods ignore you, you will face people with divine support. This cannot turn out well for anyone, especially since the gods will get bored and spice things up at random.
I mentioned the Divine Anger spell earlier, and the rules on Piety make it potentially ridiculous. It takes away Piety from your target, which means the gods like them less. No save, nothing to be done except avoid upsetting priests. Negative piety can shut down abilities or permanently remove them; large negatives will literally kill you and possibly take your entire family or nation with you. All either side needs is a 20th level Priest and an enemy with 1-5 Piety. Cast Divine Anger three times; he has more than 20 attempts with an 85% chance to succeed. Three of those gives the target -55 to -59 Piety, which means the obliteration of that person and his entire nation. A 20th level Priest can eliminate six nations per day without running out of spells, although it might be dangerous to do so when the spell has short range. Keep those Will saves up, kids.
Summary: I find the rules side fairly weak, but there are good tips for converting your game to a Homeric epic. You might bet better off adopting the style and applying it to another setting. If nothing else, you can get some ideas of how to have the gods much about in your setting in a not-quite-utterly unfair way. Okay, the gods are unfair, Rule Zero with a thunderbolt, but you can at least give players a structured way to reduce their potential liability.
Amazon link
Gaming book: Mystic Vistas (d20 system). "Roleplaying in the are of Homeric adventure," so the Trojan War in terms of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign.
The book has many interesting features and seems to be a fine take on the subject, but it has balance issues and undercuts itself by displaying how little the standard D&D game resembles Greek myths. Dungeons and Dragons is an idiosyncratic pastiche of medieval, renaissance, and ancient elements from all across the world. Narrowing it to the Homeric world changes it so dramatically that it might be better to start anew or with a different base.
Running an existing epic story is problematic unless you throw most of it out the window. Homer provides great characters to play, but there is no point to adding dice to historical re-enactment if you go through the exact same story. You have fully made the leap to acting if the players cannot change the story. If you want to use the big guys, you are best off re-doing the Trojan War rather than acting it out. Besides, no one is going to fall for that horse a second time.
You could run side stories in the setting. This requires players who are interested in being the B-story. Not everyone wants to play skirmishers under the shadow of Achilles. Lord of the Rings Online: The Shadows of Angmar is doing surprisingly well giving players the chance to deliver pies and fight brigands while Frodo carries the One Ring; how did The Path of Neo do, giving you the smaller characters from The Matrix?
Or you could just ignore the war and use the Greek legends as a setting. That gives you a lot more room to play in, and you can make your own heroes while sprinkling in historical figures. You are, however, substantially on your own because this book focuses on the Homeric epics, not Greek mythology generally.
Much of the balance and tone in the game is set by intent and Rule Zero, rather than the mechanics. Many things are not done simply because the Greeks did not do them, despite their availability. The gods are a balancing factor or a balance problem, depending on how they are used. Piety is useful or a game-breaker depending on its implementation. Using the setting effectively under these rules requires good intent, clear expectations from players and DM, and either finesse or a willingness to ignore problems.
Fourteen chapters in 150 pages, let us go to the chapter-by-chapter:
Chapter One: The Epics is The Iliad and The Odyssey in two pages, with notes from the surrounding stories. Fair.
Chapter Two: Characters limits races to humans and the new Divine Offspring. The enumeration of the Achaean and Trojan nations is good, but there is little differentiation between them. Most characters should be male. Compared to the usual D&D campaign's Real World menagerie where the elves hang out with colorful midgets and half-redeemed villains, this is both more reasonable and less interesting.
Chapter Three: Character Classes replaces the Cleric, Paladin, and Wizard, while citing some other Green Ronin products you might want to buy to supplement the game. The new classes are the Charioteer, Dedicated Warrior (vaguely Paladin-like), Magician (wand-focused mage), and Priest. The Priest is probably the most interesting of these, replacing the Cleric with something more relevant to the setting. Take away the Cleric's arms, armor, and BAB, and trade in turning for a variety of divine effects. Spellcasting is the mechanically interesting part: think of a Psion with powers limit instead of a points limit. The Priest gets a relatively small number of spells per day, but they are spontaneously cast, and they can be of any levels the Priest can cast. They are limited by (1) the god's sphere of influence and (2) they must petition for each spell at the time. The petition is a caster level check against DC (20 + spell level), so a low-level Priest is almost useless and failure will be common at every level. The gods are unreliable.
Of course there are prestige classes: the Orator, Runner, and Seer. These PrCs are appropriate the setting. Mechanically, they are often are generally weak but one overpowered trick. The Runner, for example, is the master of charges: he can charge 120' (need not be in a straight line) while attacking everyone he threatens along that path, with a fear effect and bonuses to AC, Reflex saves, to-hit, and damage; he has few options other than charging.
Note before moving on that Druids are still in the game, with almost no notes about them. Druids, the meaner half of CoDzilla, are perfectly in the setting to turn into a bear and savage anyone who might displease Artemis, which is pretty much every male. Their main loss is the restricted spell list from Chapter Five. Of course, if you are playing a Homeric game, you are probably focused on meleers rather than casters, but the role of peripheral characters is not explored. That occasional Druid, Rogue, or Sorcerer will wreak havoc when everyone is built around the expectation of Fighters and Rangers.
Chapter Four: Skills and Feats is just what is says. We get a few new skills and new ways to use old ones. The feats revolve around chariot combat, mass battlefields, and Greek society or divinity.
Chapter Five: Magic has a restricted spell list and new spells. I have not compared the list to the Player's Handbook closely, but notable deletions include Fireball, all the Summon spells, and anything relating to undead. We have a much narrower setting here, recall.
The balance on new spells is questionable. Adjust makes your clothing fit perfectly; when you can learn a limited number of spells, when does this ever make the list? Restore Youth, Greater is rather nice, de-aging multiple targets with an instantaneous duration for 1000xp. The normal version is inadvertently one of the most amusing attacks in the game, since you can turn young warriors into small children with no save or SR; he may still be a 15th level barbarian, but he is an eight-year-old who cannot lift his greataxe. (There technically are not rules for that, are there? At least his armor should not fit.) I will address the Divine Anger spell in Chapter Fourteen.
Chapter Six: Equipment again narrows the field, this time on weapons and armor. There is also discussion of non-martial goods, notably the dyes of ancient Greece.
Chapter Seven: Homeric Battlefields develops mass-combat rules in ten pages. This is a weakness of D&D; I recall one of the 3.0 designers saying that they were told to leave out rules for battles between armies because they were just going to use the Chainmail and miniatures system for that. This has proved less popular, but running the Trojan War as a wargame makes a lot of sense, although players are unlikely to string it out for ten years. I am not interested enough in mass-combat rules to comment here. Another thing to attach to the D&D base.
Chapter Eight: Religion and Piety gives a serviceable account of the Greek pantheon. Players frequently bicker about which portrayal describes them best or just what alignment each is. You can use this or one of dozens of accounts, notably including several editions of Deities and Demigods. This has some Trojan War-specific commentary. This chapter also explains how you can "cash in" piety with your deity.
Chapter Nine: The Homeric World is a brief account of Greece and Troy. Sketched background material, enough if you are focused on the war but not a lot to work with.
Chapter Ten: Captains of Legend stats out the cast of The Iliad. You will disagree with some and want to re-write them, based on your own image of the characters. The "Playing the Legends" sidebar on page 109 is another take on my earlier comments on the difficulties of having the epic characters in play (or not).
Chapter Eleven: Homeric Bestiary lists the setting's limits from the Monster Manual. The limits are severe, although you could diversify your own Greek setting. There just were not really that many monsters in the Greek stories, and the ones you remember were probably singular rather than hordes. There is a new template here, with write-ups foe the Nemean Lion and Cerberus.
Chapter Twelve: Treasure gives some magic items and artifacts from the stories. The epic heroes are apparently bedecked in minor artifacts.
Chapter Thirteen: Nine Long Years is one of the two most useful chapters, as it addresses actually playing the War. This is how the events flowed, these were the pivotal figures, here are several ways you can insert new ideas or take the story in a different direction.
Chapter Fourteen: Running the Game is the best chapter. Homer told epic stories, and here is how playing that way has a different feel from the standard D&D game. These are how the Greeks' motives differed. The Greek gods were more active than you are used to, so there are useful comments on how the gods will involve themselves. People might think of D&D as using a vaguely Greek-Norse-Egyptian polytheistic pantheon, but the Greek gods in the old epics were something apart from the standard deities.
The most notable thing is that the favor of the gods is both necessary and a path to certain doom. If you try to please the gods, you may irritate them. If you do not try, that will irritate them. If you find favor, that god's enemies will hate you. If the gods ignore you, you will face people with divine support. This cannot turn out well for anyone, especially since the gods will get bored and spice things up at random.
I mentioned the Divine Anger spell earlier, and the rules on Piety make it potentially ridiculous. It takes away Piety from your target, which means the gods like them less. No save, nothing to be done except avoid upsetting priests. Negative piety can shut down abilities or permanently remove them; large negatives will literally kill you and possibly take your entire family or nation with you. All either side needs is a 20th level Priest and an enemy with 1-5 Piety. Cast Divine Anger three times; he has more than 20 attempts with an 85% chance to succeed. Three of those gives the target -55 to -59 Piety, which means the obliteration of that person and his entire nation. A 20th level Priest can eliminate six nations per day without running out of spells, although it might be dangerous to do so when the spell has short range. Keep those Will saves up, kids.
Summary: I find the rules side fairly weak, but there are good tips for converting your game to a Homeric epic. You might bet better off adopting the style and applying it to another setting. If nothing else, you can get some ideas of how to have the gods much about in your setting in a not-quite-utterly unfair way. Okay, the gods are unfair, Rule Zero with a thunderbolt, but you can at least give players a structured way to reduce their potential liability.
Amazon link
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