You Can't Spell "dLightful" Without "d20"
Well, my copy of d20 Future didn't show up, but undaunted I carry on with some linked looks at d20 pasts and presents. Speaking of presents, it's not too early to start sidling up to your gaming buddies' shelves during that one tedious lock-picking session and seeing what game book they don't own that you'd really like to read. You buy it for them in November, you read it for two weeks, and wrap it up by Tree Day. Both victory and niceness are assured. After all, their Aunt Edith isn't going to pop for a copy of GURPS Fantasy any time soon, and she sure as hell isn't going to let you read it before she wraps it.
History's Dodecahedral Mysteries
More than once, I've heard Jonathan Tweet muse that he thought a major category of d20 books would essentially replicate the GURPS line -- you'd have two or three d20 Aztecs, a bunch of d20 Vikings, and one d20 17th Century Jesuit Paraguay. Instead, we've mostly gotten two hundred or so d20 Dwarves that don't even do us the favor of stealing the one good open-source dwarf mechanic from whichever one of them came up with it. Slowly, however, one begins to see the "genre book" come into its own. Pioneered first by the Avalanche cheesecake series, and now aggressively colonized by the Mongoose OGL series, it's time to look back in time, and see if we can sneak dwarves into 17th-century Jesuit Paraguay while nobody's looking.
Or, as it happens, "Arthurian" "England." Desperate not to scare off gamers traumatized by 9th-grade history class taught by Coach O'Neal, developer Ethan Skemp hastens to assure us that Relics & Rituals: Excalibur (215 black-and-white pages, hardcover, $34.99), from White Wolf's Sword & Sorcery imprint, isn't actually a sourcebook for 6th-century Britain, or even for Sir Thomas Malory et al., but for evoking "the general feel of Arthurian myth," or more generically still, "chivalric fantasy." Hence, there's no maps of Logres, or even any castle plans, and no stats for Mordred or Galahad. (There are, however, stats for Excalibur itself, and other Arthurian artifacts.) With that said, it's a really good sourcebook for re-interpreting standard D&D; fantasy as "chivalric fantasy" -- the section on ways to redirect spellcasting away from un-Arthurian fireballs and toward Morgan le Fey-style glamours is particularly strong. (Around 100 new spells back it up.) Classes, races, and skills take on genre-specific forms (two kinds of barbarians appear, for instance, based on the Picts and Saxons), almost always done competently, and occasionally inspiringly. The honor system (a hybrid experience and alignment hack) is particularly good, and draws from White Wolf's long concern with the tension between a character's inner state and outward actions. There's also some tournament rules, some nice Arthurian monsters such as the Questing Beast, and Aileen Miles' clear, welcoming layout and typography. Not quite one brief shining moment, but 200 or so pretty good pages.
Also from Sword & Sorcery (this time from its Necromancer Games imprint), Ancient Kingdoms: Mesopotamia (174 black-and-white pages, softcover, $23.99) has a slightly different approach. Author Morton Braten gives us an opening chapter about Mesopotamian history and myth (roughly Sumero-Babylonia of the third and second millennia B.C.), which departs from history wherever it suits him, and fair enough. The bulk of the book devotes about 100 pages to a campaign through the Red Waste (the desert east of the Tigris River) for five or so PCs of 5th-10th level, climaxing in the "lost city of Ibnath" and its dungeony ziggurat of fun and doom. The first D&D; campaign I ever ran (when I was 15 or so) used a ziggurat as the dungeon, so perhaps I'm biased, but I don't think so. Fans of Necromancer's Necropolis setting will get roughly the same vibe of dusty coolness from this one, only pseudo-Sumerian instead of echt-Egyptian. One does wish that with all the real archaeological material available, this book would do more "real" dungeon-delving, but a gamer with this sourcebook and a good archaeological atlas will be able to make his own fun easily enough. Marduk knows I did when I was 15, and I didn't even have this book.
Relics & Rituals: Olympus (207 black-and-white pages, hardcover, $34.99) repeats the Excalibur approach, creating "Hellenic fantasy" instead of "chivalric fantasy," and does a roughly similar good job, again with no maps, but with slightly more historical background. (Slavery is mentioned, and the pre-Christian setting means the religion is more historically -- or at least literarily -- accurate.) I'll similarly praise the Hubris mechanic, where characters are punished by the gods for trying to be too heroic! This is a really bold step into real Greek flavor, and should be commended. (Use of the word "Grecian," to adjectivize anything except hair-color, however, should be scorned.) The monsters are really good, and plentiful to boot. Aaron Rosenberg (who contributed to Olympus) does a rather more focused job with Trojan War (158 black-and-white pages, softcover, $27.95), part of Green Ronin's "Mythic Vistas" series, which included Scott Bennie's spectacularly good Testament last year. Like that earlier book, Trojan War gives meaty details of culture, especially in the religion, divine favor, and magic systems. Rosenberg also adapts both the Piety and the Mass Combat rules from Testament to this book. The monster list is surprisingly light; only the Diomedean Mares, the Nemean Lion, and Cerberus get stats -- others get guides for adaptation from standard beasts (use Monster Manual hags for the Graiae, for example). We do, however, get stats for everyone from Achilles to Sarpedon, which is nice. If both Olympus and Trojan War share a flaw, it's the lack of rules support for playing epic-level campaigns -- a strange oversight given the topic.
The Pain In Planes Falls Mainly In The Brain
Bruce Cordell and Gwendolyn Kestrel's Planar Handbook (192 full-color pages, hardcover, $29.95) exists to provide plenty of sweet player-usable candy to bribe PCs to venture into the planes. I've already talked about the wide, wonderful vistas a planar game can open up for everyone; a book like this merely reinforces them with tasty carrots and tempting sticks. The best of both are the Planar Touchstone abilities, which allow you to attune to a given site of power and get limited-use spell-like abilities keyed to it. Once your charges are expended, though, it's back to the planes for more sweet sweet juice. The game just writes itself some days. Pieces of the old Planescape setting recur, which should gladden the cockles of everyone's heart as well. And, although strictly speaking a player's book shouldn't need a bunch of monsters tarting things up, I just gotta say -- astral kraken. Dude.
On the other side of the mind, Malhavoc Press presents Bruce Cordell's Hyperconscious: Explorations in Psionics (158 black-and-white pages, softcover, $23.99), based on, and updating, material in Cordell's previous Malhavoc work Mindscapes (and, come to that, material in Cordell's Expanded Psionics Handbook for WotC). 30 pages or so are "Plunge Into Dream," an adventure for four 7th-level PCs; the material needed to play that adventure (and, most likely, build those PCs to 7th level) appears in the rest of the book. By and large, it's excellent. Although the attraction of dream-travel and dream combat in a game like D&D; that's essentially fantasy wish fulfillment may not be that strong, the system is robust enough to fit into d20 Modern (perhaps in a game with the players restricted to 3rd or at most 5th level in the "waking world," to make the contrast even clearer). As always, Peter Whitley's page design and Sue Cook's layout are superb and clean. If more books looked like this, I wouldn't need to escape into dream so often.
The meaty core of Steve Kenson's Psychic's Handbook (79 black-and-white pages, softcover, $16.95) from Green Ronin is the replacement of standard d20 psionics with a much cleaner feats-and-skills system that cries out to be adapted to d20 Modern or even higher-powered Lumleyish d20 Call of Cthulhu games. Kenson is always sound, and compresses more good sense and good game design into 80 pages than many d20 writers cough up in 80 sourcebooks. Think about it.
Monster's Little Helper
Real quickly, I'll cover a couple of riffs on that other staple release, the "monster book." Generally, there's two ways to do this; "wide" in which you basically list everything you can think of from Aboleth to Zinnia, Dire, and toss it on the groaning shelves, and "deep," in which you go into obsessive detail about something that isn't dwarves but might as well be by the time you're done. Joseph Browning, Suzi Yee, and Kevin Baase exemplify the first in Monster Geographica: Underground (200 digest-sized black-and-white pages, softcover, $20), from their Expeditious Retreat Press. Cleverly, they attempt to gather 200 of the best "open content" monsters suitable for the underground environment from many different "wide" monster books, arranging them by CR, checking their 3.5 math, and renaming some of them to dodge product identity. They sprinkle their trademark blend of hard fantasy and real-world trivia in, in the guise of "Flora & Fauna" notes, which are oddly mostly about rocks. The whole shebang is mashed into a digest; handy, if cramped, it's worth getting if you do a lot of dungeon-delving.
Brian Stith's Masters & Minions Horde Book 2: Maze of the Minotaur (60 black-and-white pages, softcover, $12), published by Behemoth3, goes "deep," examining the minotaurs in agonizing detail. The killer part of this book (and, one assumes, others in the series) is the wide spread of utility -- there are several variant types of minotaur from the Bull Lord to the female Minotrice, with differing stats. Each then gets a full racial character class breakdown, complete with level progression. Then, we get sample minotaur characters (again with full stats plus backstory), minotaur roving bands, mapped-out minotaur lairs, and (yes) minotaur magic items. After 60 pages, you'll be lost in a labyrinth of immediate, concrete, gameable minotaur info -- and only about half of it is bull.
Soon, But Thankfully Not Too Soon
We have one more column in us for this month, it looks like, and then we're off into the Glorious Generic Holiday Month, which begins with GenCon SoCal in sunny Anaheim on December 2-5. Come see me flit about the place; I'm also on a panel or two, I believe. There are also non-Kenneth Hite related activities, if you must. That said, the next column when we get back will be our GenCon SoCal Con Report, with one or two reviews if something really scrumptious drops there. Then, I may try to revive the old traditional Out of the Box Holiday Fun Column, in which (as alluded to previously) we look at what to buy gamers for Christmas, or Hanukkah, or Presents From Buddha Day, or what-have-you. Or, I may get a copy of d20 Future -- from Out Of The Past!!! Sit rapt on the edge of your seat for another ten days or so, and find out -- If You Dare!!!
