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It's good to be good
Post originally by Joe Grendel at 2004-01-23 18:29:09
Converted from Phorums BB System
I went into this book with low expectations. And while there were a few clunkers, I found this to be a highly well done book overall.
The bad:
The art at the beginning of each chapter was horrible. I normally don't really care about art, but this was BAD. Worst than 1st edition or Basic D&D bad. Stop-me-reading-to-wonder-whose-relative-drew-this bad. I have no idea what possessed them to hire this artist for this commission or to run the finished result once they'd seen what he or she had turned in, but let's hope they don't do it again. There are tens of thousands of artists out there who would have done the work for a pittance and done an excellent job.
Ravages. Your good characters can't use poisons, because they're a dangerous weapon that can hurt unintended victims. (Sort of like landmines in the real world.) "Ah ha, but what about poisons that only hurt EVIL people?" Now, while I respect that evil is an existant, real force in the default D&D cosmology, the official books (including THIS book) don't endorse slaughtering the forces of evil just on the basis of their alignment. So ravages aren't significantly better than actual poisons, just because they can only accidentally kill a person with evil thoughts who was otherwise minding their own business. Diseases-that-only-affect-evils were almost as bad. Stupid and a waste of space that could have been used in dozens of better ways. One massively overpowered feat even lets characters with high wisdom inflict an evil-only-disease by touch. By EVERY touch, without limitations.
No listing for Bahamut in the gods section. If you're going to have a prestige class that specifically requires worshipping Bahamut, and that figure isn't statted out for worship in one of the core three books, put him in with the fairly generic new dieties, please. One shouldn't have to buy the 3.5 Draconomicon to get this information. (And only one of the new dieties, the unicorn diety Valarian, was particularly useful, and even he is a retread of a Forgotten Realms figure.)
On the other hand ...
The vast majority of the feats are nice, balanced and flavorful. The Exalted feats actually work with the same sort of restrictions as a paladin's abilities do, which serves as a pretty hefty limitation on them, as opposed to the Vile classification, which was something of a giveaway for dangerous new powers (including redundant new forms of damage). Want your wizard to have a saintly glow about him like Gandalf the White? It's doable. Moreover, you can even buy more feats to customize what sort of aura you're projecting. Neat. The feats were at their weakest when trying to be counterpoints to BoVD, though; the Words of Creation feat is nowhere near as interesting or useful as its evil counterpart, for instance.
While the "what IS good" stuff was sort of weak, the prestige classes nicely make up for it, creating truly impressive ass-kickers for the force of good, with character and style -- a wizardly order of scholars who can shapechange into bears and serve as sentinels against evil are going into my next campaign, either DMed or played -- with a wide variety of flavor. They draw heavily on the celestial paragons (counterparts to the archfiends) and as a result, form a quite compelling part of the cosmology. I felt these were much stronger than the comparable prestige classes in BoVD, which included the Corpse F'er of Orcus, for instance, which was just silly and stupid. Whereas most of those prestige classes ranged from the silly to the pathetic, the vast majority of these are genuinely cool and impressive, without ever becoming overpowered. (The Celestial Mystic borders on it, but their behavior is far more restricted than even a paladin's ever would be, and if properly played, the character will quietly duck out after saving the world to merge with the 7th Mounting Heaven at some point anyway.)
Finally, the celestial paragons were so cool that they almost take away the need to have a strong pantheon in a campaign world, as these folks will nicely serve many of the DM's and players' needs. In addition, the clear differentiation between the various celestials of the upper planes has never been so clear to me before (although I suspect one or more Planescape boxed sets may have done it justice previously), giving a very different feel to the various forms of good. Even the normally somewhat lame guardinals come off well here.
While the spells aren't as interesting as in BoVD -- it's hard to compete with spells that turn you into green slime, for instance -- they were credible enough, although a lot of them have no reason for the Good descriptor. Likewise, having yet another set of sacrifice-ability-scores-to-use spells really reduces what was an interesting mechanic in BoVD into meaninglessness and blurs the line between good and evil, IMO.
I honestly expected to get minimal use out of this book when I got it, but I suspect it will end up vastly more useful to me than BoVD, which I liked quite a bit.
Good show, WotC.
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