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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Garnfellow" data-source="post: 4007093" data-attributes="member: 1223">This book had an interesting history. Back at the height of the d20 craze, when books were coming out so fast that no one person could keep up with it all, the EN World review section played a vital role in helping me get a handle on all of the releases. The section ranked by review ratings, and for many months (years?) the Book of the Righteous stood on the top of the heap, with just an unbelievable string of perfect scores. In fact, I seem to remember there was even something of a minor scandal when some brave reviewer decided to give the book a middle of the road rating -- and his rationale was, reasonably enough, that while the book was an interesting read it was not useful for his game. I think part of the argument was that the pantheon was too hard to integrate into an established world or one that deviated too far from D&D conventions.And this is actually a big and fundamental problem with D&D and religion: unlike feats or prestige classes, pantheons are not just modular plug and play elements that can be easily dropped into a game. They come with all sorts of implied cosmology, history, social organizations, cultures, game mechanics, and so forth. If a game product presents a new pantheon it has to also provide a certain amount of detail to make the pantheon worth the trouble; but the more details make the pantheon harder to implement. It seems really hard to find the sweet spot.Anyway, back in the day I was running a D&D homebrew that was low-magic and I had really no use for a pantheon book, even though I was impressed by the reviews. Like Wulf, I only just picked up a copy over Christmas. I haven't read it cover to cover, but I do pick it up now and again and I've been very impressed by the amount of adventure hooks built in. Almost every prestige class makes me want to make a character, which is usually a very good sign. But that said, it does look like it would be very hard to use BotR in an average homebrew game, unless you designed your whole world with that specific pantheon in mind. It's sort of a shame that no other publisher seems to have used this pantheon for their house world.</blockquote>

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