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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JoeGKushner" data-source="post: 2011881" data-attributes="member: 1129">A DM’s Directory of Demiplanes written by Philip Reed and Michael Hammes for sale by Ronin Arts.  There are two types of artwork inside, color art by Ted Wing, and black and white by Paul Daly. The PDF weighs in at 75 pages, one of which is an advertisement for various Mongoose products, with a front and rear cover as well as the standard credits page, table of contents, and OGL license. Most of the material is pure text.The color art varies. For example, the Ageless Chamber illustration is of a featureless box, or at least I imagine it as a box, in the Astral Plane. Most descriptions of the Astral feature it as a gray lifeless plane while the illustration here is a bright combination of black and red and is ugly. Other illustrions though, like a human standing in the Bone Field are done well, but have such heavy overtones to them, that details are hard to make out. The black and white artwork is easier on the eyes and reveals the details of the work more. I like the fact that it uses two types of illustrations, but because the book is art light, it could’ve removed one or the other and used those illustration space for other things.Each planar description is short, ranging from the Astral Ship at four pages, to the Burning River at eight pages.  Each plane starts with a brief snippet of fiction and then moves into the details of the location.  Details include traits, such as gravity, alignment, magical effects, and elemental and energy traits, as well as links to the demi-plane, both to and from, features, inhabitants, and some game information.Included are the following: The Ageless Chamber, The Astral Ship, The Blackguard’s Tomb, The Bone Field, The Burning River, The Chiming Clocks, The Clockwork-Driven Lighthouse, and the Great Corpse.Due to the length of each chapter, the material gets into the details and moves out quickly. Some of the planes, like the Burning River, include new denizens, in this case, the lava children. The monster stats are done up in 3.5 terms and include standards like touch and flat-footed AC, as well as attack and full attack information. The bad news is that the new monsters aren’t illustrated. One of them, the Time Flayer, isn’t even described. No italicized descriptions are listed but most of them include some details. The Time Flayer, has none. None of the monsters have tactics either so the GM will have to read over each carefully and determine how best to use their abilities. In terms of game stats, most of the material looks good, but a casual look reveals some common errors. For example, the Keepr, a tiny construct, has it’s Armor Class as 14, and then the bonuses, showing that it should be 16, which is reflected in it’s touch based AC. Some of the uses of the Keeper are also questionable. Giving it a hardness rating for example, instead of damage resistance, like a standard golem or most other constructs, seems odd design. The format is simple, but occasional slips are in like on page 48 where the second column, first paragraph, splits Material and Plane into two paragraphs or the “ly” orphaned on page 49 from effective from page 48. When looking at all the planes, some questions come to mind. For example, the Chiming Clocks were used by the time flayers in an attempt to destroy worlds but were beaten by the celestials. The celestials left one guardian but that radiant dragon was slain. Now many forces guard the Chiming Clocks. Flip over to The Clockwork Driven Lighthouse, a weapon built by the forces of Lawful Good. It’s a weapon and it’s very lightly guarded. Now I understand that celestial doesn’t equal lawful good, but since no details are given to either faction, it’s difficult to imagine that one would be lightly guarded and the other heavily unless numerous different factions were involved, but since there are no details, it reads very vague.The problem comes in the details. Too many times information is left blank for the GM to fill in. On one hand, this allows the GM to completely customize the area for his campaign. But for a counterpoint, let’s look at Seven Civilizations by Atlas.  Silvergate is a demiplane reached from mirrors.  It includes a typical Silvergate neighborhood map, some specific locations and details, some brief notes about the important characters, new magic items, feat, race, and spell, and adventure seeds. It doesn’t provide complete details on the individuals but let’s compare that with say the Blackguard’s Tomb. This is a five-pages, two of them, art. The heading takes up about a third of the page. The rest is a bit of traits and some notes about the plane itself. No maps, no suggested stats, no adventure seeds. For a GM whose looking to add something to his campaign that he can completely customize, it’s great. For someone who might want a quick detour for his planar campaign, it would require so much work, that it’s essentially starting from the ground floor as outside of the invisible field surrounding the corpse, the gravity, and time are normal, and it’s a finite size, The plane does have negative dominance, but that’s not difficult to add to a plane in the middle of the negative energy plane and the enhancement to negative energy spells follow that line of thinking.Let’s look at another one. The Ageless Chamber lies in the astral plane and prevents aging from taking someone. Now that agelessness also comes into effect with poisons and diseases, while they don’t go away, they do stop advancing. Because time has stopped, you also don’t get hungry or thirsty. Just don’t leave the room or it all catches up to you. There are links to it from any hospital that has an item that’s spent at least a year in the Ageless Chamber. I can quickly imagine some high fantasy hospitals that send adventurers to the Ageless chamber both to retrieve items and to leave items for next year. Inhabitants are noted to be 0 to 4 being there, but it’s left completely to the GM to determine and generate their statistics. Having a few pregenerated characters, even if I don’t use them right away, is the way to save the GM time and introduce plot hooks to other avenues. As far as I can tell, there are no direct tie ins to the other Ronin Arts book, Planar Factions here, which seems like a missed opportunity.The appendix, A Dozen Unusual Gates, fits into the mode of other Dozen projects from Ronin Arts. We have different gates with features that make them unique and the GM can easily add them to any standard campaign that features planar travel. One campaign seed could be the Doors To Everywhere. The gods of planar travel made numerous planar gates in the shape of doors and scattered them through the planes and each is connected to another by the number of that other door. A great campaign seed that allows the GM to quickly set up links between different planes and send the characters off in search of ever more doors to number and catalog.A nice touch is the link to Mongoose’s Book of the Planes. Unlike some tie-in products, the material here is often just a quick reference and doesn’t take up a lot of space and isn’t a required book to enjoy the material. The concepts are good but detail lacking. If there were some maps for the smaller planes, some adventure seeds, and some NPCs, the utility of this book would skyrocket.</blockquote>

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