The Book of Vile Darkness - it is mine, review within

[Sinistar]

I will have to order this as no one in or around Dallas is carrying it...

But I think the CR of the Demons/Devils sounds about right. I would hold off final judgement until I see their actual abilites, but that puts them out of the range of your standard party to directly assault them, but the party would have the ability to challenge their minions and to thwart their plans.

Everyone likes different levels to play at, (my personal favorite is 10-15th level) but even with high level non-epic this is going to be a challenge rating that is beyond a party (the 20's may be an exception). But if you are in epic levels, you should be slaying demon princes, I mean what else is there to do?

 

[Florin]

Are they pushovers if you only use the core books, or are they only pushovers if you use supplemental material? I'm sure WotC wanted to keep the book core rules only compatible, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if they were pushovers for groups that use more books. Of course, the DM should feel free to add in stuff from those books to the demon and devil lords also...

 

[IceBear]

Yeah, I think it was mentioned that the book provides the stats as powerful monsters, but there were rules/options to make them divine beings using the rules from Deities and Demigods. Remember, the only requirements of published supplements is that you have the core rules, not other supplements. Since they can't assume everyone has Deities and Demigods the demon and devil princes are going to be less than "divine"

IceBear

 

[Zelda Themelin]

Everyone likes different levels to play at, (my personal favorite is 10-15th level) but even with high level non-epic this is going to be a challenge rating that is beyond a party (the 20's may be an exception). But if you are in epic levels, you should be slaying demon princes, I mean what else is there to do?

This is IMO, very true. Everyone has their opinion as to what is right power level to present unique monsters (or any monster for that matter) or deities.

What comes to slaying demon/devil-lords, these rules make it possible, and IMO, a bit too easy. WotC reason to make such stats, is because they want to keep their game player-centered, where every statted monster can be hacked to pieces without much thought (depending on how dm plays it, of course, if stats were good enough alone, there wouldn't be so mant people 'bothered about disposable dragons', now would there? )

Heh, but IMO there are much else to do on higher levels than slay bigger baddies, but sure one can do that too.

What bothers me, is that it's made too easy, and these supposingly unique critters lack feeling of being unique, if their powerlevel fails to deserve their name.

These creatures have been around for eons. Now, why hasn't some upstart group of powerful critters of pc party hasn't walked over them yet?

Personal power certainly is not all that matters, but comes moments where it actully only thing, that truly counts.

For me it's simple a fact, that when I know if my players look at stats on book and wouldn't feel any fearful respect, (while comparing odds to some min-maxed 20th level character group), I know critter is too lame to uphold position in nasty place like Hell/Abyss.

Then a bit comments on epic rules in general,

What comes to epic rules, I strongly dislike rules WotC made. They just basicly repeat over everything already within PHB/DMG/MM/classbooks, sometimes multiplaying values by ten.
(gold pieces, skill ranks needed, mainly).

To add to that, book describes character classes up to 30th level, but epic effect around skills and possibility to actually cast epic lv. spells come around when character is between 50 to 120 lv.
And supposingly new epic Prc abilities are pretty lame (read, similar to non-epic).

And many potential rule-problems stand there unattanted.

And artifacts are boring.

To me, there is no epic levels. There is levels over 20th, but they follow exact same rules as in PHB and I just use corrected CR calculations.

 

[Aloïsius]

Demogorgon was done by... hmm... I don't recognize the signature. What artist uses a circle and cross over the year? Is that Fischer? Graz'zt was done by Jeremy Jarvis.

The same circle and cross as the MM Dragonne, Hippogriff or Sphinx ? That's Daren Bader, one of my fave, sadly underused by WotC. If only Bader, Lockwood and Wood had made all the illos made by Baxa, Easley and Kaluta...



Oh, and hello Craig ! So you're disappointed Thrin's great-uncle is merely CR 24 now ? I guess that's indeed a bit humiliating. But where's the problem ? I don't think your Odin, for example, is the one in D&Dg either... The loss of power of archfiend seems in line, IMHO, with the loss of power of deities, so that is, at least, consistent with itself. Of course, that requires extra work for those who want cosmic beings with more grandeur; but in your case that work is already made, isn't it ?

 

[Psion]

These guys seem like a push over for the status they hold.

I really have to ask what level games you run. 24-32 CRs aren't a challenge for you? If you hand out levels so readily that this CR is a pushover, I don't think the fault les with the book.

Doesn't 20th level mean anything to anyone anymore? Sheesh...

 

[BryonD]

Tavern Wench: "You boys got back here a lot sooner than we thought."

Fighter: "Yeah, we thought we had to fight a great wyrm red dragon, but lucky for us, it was just Graz'zt."

 

[Numion]

If the demon / devil princes' CRs had been pushed to the 40+ range they wouldn't be very usable with the core books. As it is now, they can be possibly used as major enemies to battle for non-epic groups. This is right IMO, because BoVD doesn't require the ownership of ELHB to use.

 

[greymarch]

Nice review...

So what is Orcus's spell resistance? I have been trying to get someone to answer this question for 3 days now!

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

I really have to ask what level games you run. 24-32 CRs aren't a challenge for you? If you hand out levels so readily that this CR is a pushover, I don't think the fault lies with the book.

Given that PC's reach 20th level pretty fast, hell it can be only a couple of years in game time, I would think these "cosmic entities" would be a little more imposing. It seems to me that a party would have cleaned their clocks long ago. They could barely get work as gate guards in the city of Union out of the ELH!