So did anyone buy Champions of Ruin?

[RichGreen]

I was rather disappointed with Champions of Ruin. The information is sparse compared to previous FR hardbacks. If you have a choice, pick up Lords of Darkness instead. I found that book ten times more useful from a DMs perspective. Champions of Ruin attempts to be a player-oriented book in terms of integrating evil characters and organizations into a PC party structure, but it really just ends up as the usual Feats + Spells +PrCs + Monsters.

Additionally, way too much space was taken up with Evil Nodes, something that I believe is of limited utility considering they have been discussed in previous books to some extent.

Again, Lords of Darkness is a much better guide for running evil PCs and NPCs.

Thanks for this. I already have Lords of Darkness and initially was worried that this was just a 3.5 update.

Cheers


Richard

 

[Cold0]

I'm also posting at work (sticking it to the man, as it were) so can't provide details on prereqs or anything like that. I'll try to post something tonight. I'm only about half way through the book, but so far all the DM advice on running evil characters has been very applicable to any setting. I'm just now knocking my way through the organizations chapter, some of these were presented in Lords of Darkness, but these write ups are more of the info players would want. How to join, benefits of joining, bases of operation, resources, role of adventurers in the organization, etc. Very handy stuff.
I can tell you from memory that the Justice of Weald and Woe must be an elf. It's a prestige class for members of the elven supremicist group, trained to hunt humans. It's a good ranger/rogue type archer class. The Vengeance Knight is a heavy armor wearing fighter type employed by the Knights of the Shield. He gets reduced penalties for wearing heavy armor and bonuses against declared enemies of the Knights of the Shield and bonuses against anyone who damages him in combat.

Thank you!