John Cooper
Explorer
A PLAYER'S GUIDE TO CASTLEMOURN
By Ed Greenwood and Jennifer Brozek
Margaret Weis Productions product number MWP-1004
40-page softcover, $4.99
A Player's Guide to Castlemourn is an introductory product providing initial tantalizing details about the upcoming Castlemourn product line. Castlemourn is a new campaign world by Ed Greenwood (creator of the Forgotten Realms campaign), where nobody knows anything before the time When the Castles Fell; at that time (some 360 years ago), some kind of cataclysm occurred which caused new mountains to form and sunk some lands into the sea. It also "erased" the memories of the living - even long-lived races who have members that were alive When the Castles Fell do not recall what life was like back then. It's an intriguing concept, and it looks to be an equally intriguing campaign setting.
The cover artwork is a nicely-done piece by Gareth Verleyen showing a small grouping of castle spires nestled among forested mountain peaks. It's a very detailed work, with bricks of slightly different colors among the castle spires and a very nice granite texturing effect in the bare mountainsides. It's also the only color piece in the whole book, as the interior artwork (9 illustrations by Bruce Colero, Jason Engle, Beth Trott, and Gareth the cover artist) is all in black-and-white. Still, the interior artwork is also of high quality, with much of the architectural pieces looking almost like screen-shots from a high-quality videogame. Those (and Brain's painting of ships pulling into a harbor city on page 17) are the highlights of the artwork; the other pieces, mostly of various characters, are still pretty good but not up to the near-photo-realism of the architectural works.
A Player's Guide to Castlemourn begins with a piece of short fiction by Ed, called "Seventeen Shields" ("shield" being the common term for the gold piece). It offers an interesting introduction into the campaign world, making me (as it was no doubt intended to do) curious to find out the specifics of one of the new player character races in the campaign setting: the thaele, who seem to have many traits common to vampires (they drink blood, seem to have an aversion to both sunlight and silver, and drain life energy simply by touching another living being). The short story also reinforces a trait I've noticed in Ed's fiction: the predominance of the fat-but-extremely-competent protagonist. (Albaerth "Longtongue" Malark, the protagonist of "Seventeen Shields," bears a remarkable resemblance to Mirt the Moneylender from the Forgotten Realms, another overweight but otherwise able-bodied warrior.) I guess Ed's just filling in the gap left by a dearth of heavyset heroes.
A Player's Guide to Castlemourn provides the reader with a short overview of the geography of the Mournra (the lands that make up the Castlemourn setting), which are conveniently bounded by mountains on three sides and a stormwracked sea on the fourth - making the "known world" a specific size, beyond which the DM is presumably free to expand according to his own imagination (unless the forthcoming products in the line provide details beyond the geography presented in this book). The map is nicely done (in grayscale) by cartographer Sean MacDonald, and looking over it it's fairly easy to tell that the locations were created by Ed Greenwood, as most of the names would fit easily in the Forgotten Realms without looking at all out of place.
The book also provides the reader with details on the campaign's religion (there are 7 gods worshiped by all of the sentient races, although individual races often focus on a handful of the seven and ignore or pay minimal tribute to the others); races (all of the core races from the Player's Handbook are present except for the half-orc, and there are two new races: the thaele and the golaunt, a sort of savage humanoid); classes (besides the core classes, there will also be a new core class - the buccaneer - and six new prestige classes: the dusked, faithless one, rhymesword, servant of the Seven, Truesword Knight, and waymaster; the first three levels of the waymaster prestige class are provided in the book); calendar; astrology (14 constellations are provided); and magic systems (divine magic is as normal in a standard D&D campaign; arcane magic is rare and extremely valuable, although wizards and sorcerers are often mistrusted). There's also the concept of the estemel, which seem to be cosmic gates to other realities (the inner and outer planes, and perhaps even other campaign worlds), making the Castlemourn campaign lands a possible destination for planehopping PCs from other campaigns.
Ed sprinkles in a bunch of neat little twists in A Player's Guide to Castlemourn as well. Most of the standard races have been altered somewhat, either with different racial abilities, different ability score adjustments, different preferred classes, or a combination of the above. The fact that arcane spells are rare and wondrous puts a completely different "feel" into the Castlemourn campaign, as the players are warned that they won't be able to purchase arcane scrolls any higher than 4th level, and if they uncover a new spell, odds are that any wizard getting wind of the new find is sure to do what he can to get his hands on it, by hook or by crook.
One thing I didn't really enjoy was the decision to make up new words for the 8 compass points and then use them instead of "north," "northeast," "east," and so on. Reading through A Player's Guide to Castlemourn became a bit tedious when I had to keep flipping back to the glossary on page 15 to remind myself what "luthsurl" meant. (For the record, it means "west.") Those of you who have read Anthony Burgess' "A Clockwork Orange" will know exactly what I'm talking about. However, once you've made the decision to use these eight new words, it would be nice if you kept at it throughout, instead of sprinkling these new words in most places but still occasionally falling back on "southern" and "western" in a couple of places. Also, since Ed went to all the trouble to create the prefix "an-" as the equivalent of the suffix "-most," it seems silly not to use "an-aerho" instead of "aerho-most," like was done on page 16. (Not sure what I'm talking about? "Aerho" means "west.")
Likewise, there were a couple of other places where editor Brian Gute and proofreader Christy Everette missed mistakes; I noticed several places where the wrong word was used ("to" instead of "too," "it" instead of "its," "who's" instead of "whose"), a sentence with a word missing, another with one too many instances of "to" (the passage includes the phrase "hoping to one day to return"), and the irritating usage of an apostrophe to denote possessiveness with the subject "it" ("it's" instead of "its") or during simple pluralization ("Asmran's" and "Ghandalan's" - both names of people living in their respective cities of Asmrel and Ghandalar - and "servants'"). They also missed an instance where a mountain range ("Haeldar") was confused with one of the deities ("Haelarr"). Hopefully they'll bone up on their skills before the upcoming 224-page hardcover comes out (assuming they'll be the ones performing the equivalent duties on that book).
Overall, A Player's Guide to Castlemourn does a pretty good job of providing an overview of the new campaign setting, whetting the reader's appetite for more. Castlemourn looks to be an intriguing take on the d20 rules, weaving a campaign out of the D&D standards (well, most of them, anyway) and adding in just enough differences to make it stand out from the crowd. I give A Player's Guide to Castlemourn a solid "4 (Good)."
By Ed Greenwood and Jennifer Brozek
Margaret Weis Productions product number MWP-1004
40-page softcover, $4.99
A Player's Guide to Castlemourn is an introductory product providing initial tantalizing details about the upcoming Castlemourn product line. Castlemourn is a new campaign world by Ed Greenwood (creator of the Forgotten Realms campaign), where nobody knows anything before the time When the Castles Fell; at that time (some 360 years ago), some kind of cataclysm occurred which caused new mountains to form and sunk some lands into the sea. It also "erased" the memories of the living - even long-lived races who have members that were alive When the Castles Fell do not recall what life was like back then. It's an intriguing concept, and it looks to be an equally intriguing campaign setting.
The cover artwork is a nicely-done piece by Gareth Verleyen showing a small grouping of castle spires nestled among forested mountain peaks. It's a very detailed work, with bricks of slightly different colors among the castle spires and a very nice granite texturing effect in the bare mountainsides. It's also the only color piece in the whole book, as the interior artwork (9 illustrations by Bruce Colero, Jason Engle, Beth Trott, and Gareth the cover artist) is all in black-and-white. Still, the interior artwork is also of high quality, with much of the architectural pieces looking almost like screen-shots from a high-quality videogame. Those (and Brain's painting of ships pulling into a harbor city on page 17) are the highlights of the artwork; the other pieces, mostly of various characters, are still pretty good but not up to the near-photo-realism of the architectural works.
A Player's Guide to Castlemourn begins with a piece of short fiction by Ed, called "Seventeen Shields" ("shield" being the common term for the gold piece). It offers an interesting introduction into the campaign world, making me (as it was no doubt intended to do) curious to find out the specifics of one of the new player character races in the campaign setting: the thaele, who seem to have many traits common to vampires (they drink blood, seem to have an aversion to both sunlight and silver, and drain life energy simply by touching another living being). The short story also reinforces a trait I've noticed in Ed's fiction: the predominance of the fat-but-extremely-competent protagonist. (Albaerth "Longtongue" Malark, the protagonist of "Seventeen Shields," bears a remarkable resemblance to Mirt the Moneylender from the Forgotten Realms, another overweight but otherwise able-bodied warrior.) I guess Ed's just filling in the gap left by a dearth of heavyset heroes.
A Player's Guide to Castlemourn provides the reader with a short overview of the geography of the Mournra (the lands that make up the Castlemourn setting), which are conveniently bounded by mountains on three sides and a stormwracked sea on the fourth - making the "known world" a specific size, beyond which the DM is presumably free to expand according to his own imagination (unless the forthcoming products in the line provide details beyond the geography presented in this book). The map is nicely done (in grayscale) by cartographer Sean MacDonald, and looking over it it's fairly easy to tell that the locations were created by Ed Greenwood, as most of the names would fit easily in the Forgotten Realms without looking at all out of place.
The book also provides the reader with details on the campaign's religion (there are 7 gods worshiped by all of the sentient races, although individual races often focus on a handful of the seven and ignore or pay minimal tribute to the others); races (all of the core races from the Player's Handbook are present except for the half-orc, and there are two new races: the thaele and the golaunt, a sort of savage humanoid); classes (besides the core classes, there will also be a new core class - the buccaneer - and six new prestige classes: the dusked, faithless one, rhymesword, servant of the Seven, Truesword Knight, and waymaster; the first three levels of the waymaster prestige class are provided in the book); calendar; astrology (14 constellations are provided); and magic systems (divine magic is as normal in a standard D&D campaign; arcane magic is rare and extremely valuable, although wizards and sorcerers are often mistrusted). There's also the concept of the estemel, which seem to be cosmic gates to other realities (the inner and outer planes, and perhaps even other campaign worlds), making the Castlemourn campaign lands a possible destination for planehopping PCs from other campaigns.
Ed sprinkles in a bunch of neat little twists in A Player's Guide to Castlemourn as well. Most of the standard races have been altered somewhat, either with different racial abilities, different ability score adjustments, different preferred classes, or a combination of the above. The fact that arcane spells are rare and wondrous puts a completely different "feel" into the Castlemourn campaign, as the players are warned that they won't be able to purchase arcane scrolls any higher than 4th level, and if they uncover a new spell, odds are that any wizard getting wind of the new find is sure to do what he can to get his hands on it, by hook or by crook.
One thing I didn't really enjoy was the decision to make up new words for the 8 compass points and then use them instead of "north," "northeast," "east," and so on. Reading through A Player's Guide to Castlemourn became a bit tedious when I had to keep flipping back to the glossary on page 15 to remind myself what "luthsurl" meant. (For the record, it means "west.") Those of you who have read Anthony Burgess' "A Clockwork Orange" will know exactly what I'm talking about. However, once you've made the decision to use these eight new words, it would be nice if you kept at it throughout, instead of sprinkling these new words in most places but still occasionally falling back on "southern" and "western" in a couple of places. Also, since Ed went to all the trouble to create the prefix "an-" as the equivalent of the suffix "-most," it seems silly not to use "an-aerho" instead of "aerho-most," like was done on page 16. (Not sure what I'm talking about? "Aerho" means "west.")
Likewise, there were a couple of other places where editor Brian Gute and proofreader Christy Everette missed mistakes; I noticed several places where the wrong word was used ("to" instead of "too," "it" instead of "its," "who's" instead of "whose"), a sentence with a word missing, another with one too many instances of "to" (the passage includes the phrase "hoping to one day to return"), and the irritating usage of an apostrophe to denote possessiveness with the subject "it" ("it's" instead of "its") or during simple pluralization ("Asmran's" and "Ghandalan's" - both names of people living in their respective cities of Asmrel and Ghandalar - and "servants'"). They also missed an instance where a mountain range ("Haeldar") was confused with one of the deities ("Haelarr"). Hopefully they'll bone up on their skills before the upcoming 224-page hardcover comes out (assuming they'll be the ones performing the equivalent duties on that book).
Overall, A Player's Guide to Castlemourn does a pretty good job of providing an overview of the new campaign setting, whetting the reader's appetite for more. Castlemourn looks to be an intriguing take on the d20 rules, weaving a campaign out of the D&D standards (well, most of them, anyway) and adding in just enough differences to make it stand out from the crowd. I give A Player's Guide to Castlemourn a solid "4 (Good)."
