It’s rerun week here at The Daily Bestiary. To give myself a little break
while I manage things on the home front, I’m posting a “Best of” list I submitted to Reddit’s r/rpg subreddit last
March. Enjoy Part 2!
17) Races of Stone David Noonan, Jesse Decker,
Michelle Lyons
The Races series
lacks a certain oomph. The books have their moments—Races of Destiny’s
illumians look undeniably cool, and the invention of the goddess Dallah Thaun
in Races of the Wild to explain the
edgier side of the 3.5 halfling character is inspired. But on the whole they
are skippable, with two exceptions. The first is Races of Stone.
If you like dwarves, Races
of Stone is obviously for you. But if you’re not a dwarf fan, RoS might make you one. Their lives are
described with richness. Their pantheon is interesting. There are prestige
classes and rune magic to explore.
RoS’s chapter on
gnomes may not work for the fey gnomes of Golarion. But you won’t care because
you’ll have already skipped ahead to the goliaths. At time of publication,
these competition-obsessed giant barbarians instantly felt fresh and likeable,
with a psychology that made sense and customs and legends that brought them to
life. It’s no wonder they made the transition to 4th Edition (in the Player’s Handbook 2, no less), and
they’ll easily make the transition to your Pathfinder game as well. They
instantly fit the bill for a big brute PC who doesn’t come with the baggage of
a half-orc…and the fact that they wield oversized weapons will have your
damage-obsessed players drooling.
Add to that some decidedly weird but compelling
subraces—chaos and whisper gnomes, dream dwarves, feral garguns, and
stonechildren—and some solid prestige classes and feats (Fling Ally!) and you
have a book that offers a lot for your Pathfinder game. [Edit: I probably should have said more here. While the default D&D
gnome doesn’t work as well for Pathfinder, chaos and whisper gnomes fit in
perfectly. And dream dwarves and stonechildren are just weird and unexpected in
a very good way.]
16) Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss Ed
Stark, James Jacobs, Erik Mona
Hordes of the Abyss
comes low on our list because it’s a bit of a repeat: Two later books on this
list (spoiler alert: Manual of the Planes
and the Book of Vile Darkness) cover
a lot of the same territory. But HotA
is able to give more real estate to each of the demon lords, and softens up
their stats a bit so that non-epic-level parties can still have some fun. It’s
also got good advice on how to use different demons for specific roles in your
campaign. But the real meat is 50(!) pages of Abyssal locations and adventure
hooks that can be dropped right into Pathfinder’s Abyss without even blinking.
After all, the number of layers in the Abyss is supposed to be infinite, right?
Change the eladrin to azatas and the obyriths to qlippoths and you’re good to
go. If you like demons, get this book.
Further reading: Hell books never seem to have the
freewheeling spirit of the Abyss (a case of art imitating alignment?). Fiendish Codex II: Tyrants of the Nine Hells
is a decent edition to your shelf, especially if you like Hellish politics, but
only after you own HotA. Also, James
Jacobs’s “The Demonimicon of Iggwilv” series fleshed out the demon lords even
more in the pages of the 300 era of Dragon.
[Edit: Reading this again, I definitely
stress HotA first, then TotNH only if you’re a big devil fan. And Green Ronin’s Legions of Hell book is great; I haven’t yet read Armies
of the Abyss.]
15) Player’s Guide to Eberron James Wyatt, Keith
Baker, Luke Johnson, Stan!
This one comes in early on our countdown for pretty obvious
reasons—it’s basically a digest of other Eberron sourcebooks, including ones
that will appear later on this list (hint, hint). But it definitely deserves to
be here, because it does something that (pre-Pathfinder) I’ve never seen
another Player’s Guide successfully
do—it actually gives players a sense of what their characters would know about
the world!
(This shouldn’t seem novel, but it is. Seriously, the Player’s Guide to Faerûn barely even
tries; it’s just another excuse to slather on feats, spells, and prestige
classes.)
As a GM, I might not just hand this book over to my players
wholesale. But I’d certainly Xerox from it with abandon: “Okay, so you want to
play a half-orc with a dragonmark? Cool. Let’s say you lived in the Shadow
Marches…before taking a gig in the Eldeen Reaches where the campaign starts…
Read these four sections and you’re good to go!”
So even if you’re not playing in Eberron, it’s a good model
for how to present world information to players. And if you are playing
Eberron, it’s a great refresher course even for GMs. Eberron is a big setting
with a lot of big new names and concepts to absorb…and the PGtE is way wieldier than the giant Campaign Setting.
And for both players and GMs, the PGtE offers lots of new tidbits and options. Along the way, it
references and synthesizes almost every published 3.0/3.5 core supplement that
came before it. This is in keeping with the setting’s promise: “If it exists in
D&D, it exists in Eberron”…and yet (unlike a lot of latter-day sourcebooks)
it does it without feeling like an advertisement, or like those books are
absolutely required. It’s more like, “Oh, you want to use incarnum? Here’s
where you’d find that. PCs with the scout class were stationed here during the
war. That rare subrace of dwarves you like? They’re here, and this is how they
fit into the setting.” It’s low-key and kept mainly to the sidebars, but it
rewards you for the books you have without punishing you for the books you
don’t. [Edit: This is a major bugaboo for
me. Especially late in an edition or
setting’s run, a lot of the books seem dependent on or serve as advertisements
for the books that have come before—Complete Mage, for instance, leans heavily on Complete Arcane, and Dragon Magic cross-references pretty much every 3.5 book under the sun. PGtE is much more elegant: Rather than saying
“See this book for the full story,” it instead says, “Do you have this book? If
so, here’s how to use that material.” That’s a subtle but important shift in
emphasis, and is especially successful because, like I said, it’s mostly kept to
the sidebars. (By the way, I exclude the Pathfinder Player Companion series from this criticism, because those
books act more as indexes and shortcuts to character creation than as
stand-alone references—you get them specifically to help you navigate and get the most out of the books you already
have.)]
If you don’t have any other Eberron books, I’d use this the
same way you use Underdark: Browse it
for inspiration and discard the rest. And if you do have other Eberron books,
this should definitely be on your reading list.
14) Frostburn Wolfgang Baur, James Jacobs, George
Strayton
WotC put out a few environment-themed books. They varied in
quality—frankly most were weak. But Frostburn
was solid, with everything you needed to run an arctic campaign. In a perfect
world, I would have lobbied for more human cultures (esp. based on Vikings,
Eskimos, Laplanders, etc., instead of FB’s
vague barbarian tribes), but the races, classes, and monsters already in FB keep me happy enough to pull it off
the shelf and browse.
And it’s close to a Core +1 book—I’d probably want a decent setting
or Viking sourcebook to go along with it, just in case, but if I wanted to kick
off a Pathfinder arctic campaign quickly this book would more than do the
trick. (It should also complement Reign of Winter or Jade Regent Adventure
Paths quite nicely.)
13) Lords of Madness: The Book of Aberrations Richard
Baker, James Jacobs, Steve Winter
Monster books are tricky. How many times can you read about
the intestinal structure of a dragon before you’re satisfied? And the longer
format can make it harder to sustain tone and excitement through the whole
book—compare the tightness of the articles in the dark elf-focused Dragon #298 (an absolute must-read) to
many of the more comprehensive but somehow less riveting drow books out there.
So while the Draconomicon,
Libris Mortis, and Drow of the Underdark all have plenty of
goodies for fans of those monsters, it’s Lords
of Madness that leaps off the shelf. The monsters are introduced, explored,
and then ushered away before they lose our attention. And Pathfinder GMs won’t
even mind that many of the monsters are D&D-specific (beholders, mind
flayers, etc.) because crunch GMs will still find plenty of monsters to steal
and stat blocks to convert, and lore GMs will be able to adapt a lot of the
origin stories to Pathfinder Darklands races.
Of particular note—and what brings me back time and time
again—is the introductory breakdown of the many elsewheres (and elsewhens) from
whence aberrations hail, the links to the Cthulhu Mythos in the aboleth
chapter, and the exploration of creepy aberration deities.
Further reading: If you like undead, get Libris Mortis next—several of the
prestige classes are great (every campaign needs a master of shrouds), there
are statted NPCs galore, and with over 50 pages of monsters, there’s bound to
be at least some you’ll use. Keep a special eye out for a tree of necrotic cyst
spells all based off of a mother cyst feat—it’s a neat concept so briefly
mentioned you’ll glide right over it if you’re not paying attention.
Otherwise, your next choice should be the Draconomicon, a hefty tome with statted
dragons for every core species at every age category, plus a stack of new
dragons to boot (including planar dragons and landwyrms).
Drow of the Underdark
looks gorgeous and glossy on the shelf, but the aforementioned books are so
strong and the same material has been done so well elsewhere that it brings up
the rear.
12) Secrets of Sarlona Keith Baker, Scott
Fitzgerald Gray, Glenn McDonald, Chris Sims
I typically have zero interest in books with psionics that
don’t say “Dark Sun” on the cover. At time of purchase I also had little
interest in Sarlona (especially when compared with Xendrik or Khorvaire) or the
Quori. But this book overcomes all those hurdles.
That’s especially telling, because the Eberron setting books
are notoriously uneven in tone and scope. Some of the early entries are
surprisingly dry given the supposedly swashbuckling pulp noir setting;
meanwhile, some of the latter books went too far in the other direction, being
little more than encounter sketch after encounter sketch. Secrets of Sarlona got the balance just right. It made a continent
I had no interest in come alive and suggested lots of opportunities for
adventure.
What does it offer the Pathfinder GM? Well, it’s a setting
with Asian overtones, for GMs hungry for something to put in the Dragon
Empires. It’s also a master class in using also-ran and leftover races to
construct a setting: humans and dwarves; psionic races like dromites, elans,
and xephs; half-giants, ogres and a new race called the eneko; and even
shifters, skulks, changelings, and yuan-ti. If there’s a blank spot on your
map, SoS will make you want to fill
it. A reliance on psionics is the only thing dragging it down.
Further reading: This book is probably going to make you
want to get the Expanded Psionics
Handbook, if only so you can see a picture of a maenad or xeph, and that’s
just fine by me.
11) Explorer’s Handbook David Noonan, Frank
Brunner, Rich Burlew
I just knocked the later encounter-sketch heavy Eberron
books. But despite being an example of just such a book, the Explorer’s Handbook really works.
The genius is in the chapter structure:
1) Travel: Reasons to you go.
2) Tools of the trade: The
means that get you there.
3) Points of Origin: A selection of starting
points.
4) Midpoints: Intriguing stops along the way.
5) Destinations: The
big finishes.
Stitch them together, (one from Column A, two from Column B,
etc.) and you have just made a fantasy Indian Jones movie in minutes. That’s
exactly what Eberron promised to be, and this is the book that most facilitated
that goal. In fact, if this were an Eberron book list, I’d have it at #2.
But this isn’t an Eberron list. So what does it offer the
Pathfinder GM? Well, that 1-2-3-4-5 model for pacing fast-paced, globetrotting
adventures is genius. Sure, good GMs know this stuff instinctively, and similar
advice is buried in big books like the Pathfinder
Core Rulebook or the GameMastery
Guide, but it’s nice to have it so neatly illustrated in a slim volume.
Second: Airships! Regular ships! Lightning rail trains!
Weird monasteries and mausoleums and caverns and lost cities! These are all
things you want in your game at some point, and here they are all in one place
for easy reference. There’s always that cross-country journey you were going to
hand-wave, but then you rolled a random monster encounter, and suddenly your
players are fighting storm wyverns from the riggings of an airship and the
player casting fireball wants to know if the masts will be in the area of
affect, and you go, “Uhhhh…” With this book you point to a map and say, “You
tell me.” Bam. Done.
So yes, it’s an encounter book…but it feels like much more.
And though it doesn’t quite have the re-read value of Secrets of Sarlona, it’s also more useful at the gaming table (and
doesn’t constantly nudge you to pick up the Expanded
Psionics Handbook). So it nudges out SoS
and nearly ranks in the Top 10. The only thing holding it back is that it’s so
Eberron-specific there are swaths of it that may just not work for you
(especially if you cringed at the words “lightning rail”) and because other
more Pathfinder/Golarion-friendly Eberron books are filling up the front of the
queue…
10) Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting Greenwood,
Reynolds, Williams, and Heinsoo
Look, the Forgotten Realms is the most popular setting in
role-playing (give or take a Golarion) for a reason. There is something for
everyone in the Realms. And even the most diehard Pathfinder fan can find
something useful in this book. Subraces? Check. Need a monastic order on the
fly? Here are eight. Want your alphabets or currency to be realistic? Here are
sample letters and notes on trade bars, plus gems both real and imagined. Not
to mention 234 pages of setting notes, hooks, and NPCs, an alternate cosmology
and around 120 (yes, you read that right, 120) deities.
It’s a tome. You won’t pull it off a shelf as often as many
of the other books on this list. That and our vast overfamiliarity with the
Realms in general knock it down several places. But that overfamiliarity was
well earned. Save it for a swing in a summer hammock or a long winter’s night
next to a wood stove.
Stay tuned for Part
3...
More to come
tomorrow. Again, here’s the original thread if you want to see redditors’ comments.
And I'd love to hear your
thoughts!
Also, my college
friend Maggie just had a story published over on Strange Horizons—check it out!
No comments:
Post a Comment