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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Psion" data-source="post: 2010081" data-attributes="member: 172">Allies and AdversariesAllies and Adversaries is a "legendary character collection" for d20 System fantasy games published by Bastion Press. Though the book is a slick-paged full color book, it departs from the standard Bastion format, being quite a bit thinner. Also, Jason Engle (frequent contributor to the art in Dungeon magazine) is the art director and main illustrator is this book. The writing is by Paul Schmookler and J. Darby Douglas.A First LookAllies and Adversaries is a 32-page saddle-stitched softcover book priced at $14.95. The book is full color with glossy pages. There are no comparable full-color d20 System products of this size, but you get half as many pages with this book as a typical black-and-white d20 System book of the same price.Allies & Adversaries is lavishly illustrated in full color, primarily by Jason Engle. Every character has a handsome full-page illustration. The pages are colored with a velum-style background.The character descriptions are in a rather large font. Considering the book is expensive for the amount of pages that you get in the first place, this means you are paying a lot if you are looking at the content of the book.A Deeper LookAllies & Adversaries contains NPCs for use in d20 System fantasy games. Each character is laid out on two facing pages. The left hand page has an attractive illustration that takes up most of the page, save for a paragraph of role-playing notes. The right-hand page has the game statistics and background of the character.Each of the characters has between 10 and 20 total levels, making them most suitable for high level games. The backgrounds are generally written in generic terms, allowing them to be used in general D&D games, though some are specific enough they might defy adaptation. However, I found the level of insight into the character personalities to not be that impressive; the role-playing notes present pretty cliche character archetypes like power mad wizards and cold calculating tacticians, and there is very little insight into the motivations of the characters.Mechanically, the characters look solid at first glance, but a deeper look reveals some significant errors that I don't think anyone with a deep understanding of the d20 System should overlook. For example, Nebezzar is a 13th level wizard lich. Under the d20 System rules, his HP should be altered to 13d12. Instead, the statistics shown here merely add 1d12 to his HD, for a total of 13d4+1d12. Another character, Emerald is a drow cleric. His background indicates that he was an assassin trained by mind flayers, and he has some skills to this effect (like a high hide rank.) However, he only has cleric levels and has many non-clerical skills at way higher rank than is possible under the cleric class or his skill point allotment; it seems as if many skill points have been lumped on by fiat. Given that his history was to reflect the life on an assassin, he should have been a multi-class character. There are other examples.ConclusionI was a little dismayed at the price tag on this book, and am not so sure I would be willing to pay a dollar per character unless I knew I would use them all, especially considering that I did not find many of these characters anything I couldn't conceive or create myself with far fewer mechanical errors.It seems to me that this book is primarily an art book. It succeeds on that score, with several nice illustrations. But as a gaming supplement, there are other NPC books out there that deliver more, more interesting, more mechanically sound characters.Overall Grade: D+-Alan D. Kohler</blockquote>

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