Book of the Righteous, The

[CRGreathouse]

The Book of the Righteous is Green Ronin's book of their gods. It includes about two dozen extensive writeups for gods and their churches, a large mythology, prestige classes, an alternate core class (the holy warrior, a generalized paladin), and even a few monsters and magic items. Overall, the illustrations are decent; the cover art is the best I've ever seen gracing the cover of a d20 product, but the interior art is uneven in quality.

Holy Warrior The BotR presents a new core class, the holy warrior. Holy warrior is an extension of the paladin class; while they are customized for each of the major gods presented (using templated abilities), they must be good -- even if the god the holy warrior worships isn't.

The holy warrior addresses a need that has been expressed by many gamers: more customization, and more setting-specific information. The class succeeds at both handily: each god has their own 'flavor' of holy warrior, and their abilities are reasonably fluid -- for example, you can choose two of three domains (similar to cleric domains, but without spells) from your god's list.

Unfortunately, I have serious balance issues with the holy warrior. Take a basic example: the Eagles of Urian. On first level they gain: detect evil, lay on hands, the Auran language, Improved Initiative, Dodge (even without Dex 13), and the ability to rebuke air creatures as a cleric of her level. That’s a lot of powers to give a full base attack core (that is, nonprestige) class! Additionally, they have a decent skill list -- including Spot. I needn't even get into the issue of their celestial giant eagle mount...

Creation Story: One of the more extensive undertakings of the Book of the Righteous is its creation myth, which is tightly integrated with its prestige classes and holy warriors.

There's something to be said for putting together a story this extensive. The main story is about 30 pages between Chapter II and Appendix I. It is well-written and reasonably interesting, but difficult to customize on its own. (Chapter X addresses this to some degree, giving suggestions for changing it to fit your own world.)

Unfortunately, I found the story unsatisfying; it broke little new ground. It is to be lauded, I feel, for its hard stance against racial deities, but most other aspects are familiar and even clichéd: the gods unite to throw out the great evil; the chief angel rebels and is cast into Hell; gods are forbidden by mutual agreement from changing Earth directly; there are separate planes for the devils (Hell), demons (the Abyss), and daemons (Gehenna).

Gods and Churches: Most of the book (200 pages) is devoted to each of 22 gods. Each one gets 6-8 pages, on average, with full-page artwork and overviews covering the balance. It's nice to see so much space devoted to the gods for a change, but unfortunately the material isn't very inspiring; the gods aren't that different from the standard gods that appear everywhere.

As in most of the sections, the author's unusual take on alignments has an impact on the quality and usability of the material. There are no mainstream evil deities, and this is a real shame and lack. There is a section for evil gods, but they're not very similar. The prevalence of good gods and their worshippers makes the world of the Book of the Righteous a uniquely unplayable one: the PCs can't save the world from an overarching conspiracy, because there's no real opportunity for one when good churches are everywhere. Sure, there are small evil cults, but beyond level 6 PCs need something bigger, somehow.

The section on evil cults of god gods provides some degree of workability, but they're limited in what they can do and how they can organize.

Conclusion: I got no use *whatsoever* out of the Book of the Righteous, and I run a campaign with a strong emphasis on the gods. In fact, out of all the D&D books I've ever bought, this is the purchase I regret most. I didn't like the mechanics of the new classes, sapping all flavor out of already tired archetypes; I didn't like the new spells or domains; I thought the creation story was same-old, same-old; I enjoyed reading the evil section, but didn't get any use out of it. I despised their take on alignment, I hated their strongly good-slanted pantheon, I found their gods to be as flat as Greyhawk gods or FR gods -- and for me, that's a horrible comment. I didn't like the stats for the new creatures, which I've never used as a result. The new PrCs weren't good by my standards; they were about at the same level as what I see on our House Rules forum.

The cover art is excellent, the best part of the book; I liked about an eighth of the interior art, but I disliked the rest strongly. The space wasted on 1Eesque forms of address by level doesn't use too much space, but as I don't find them useful, so it's just another strike against the book for me (though admittedly not enough to drop a point from the score).

More random things I didn't like: backward prophecy mechanics (p. 104-105); magic items -- especially since they don't have prices, making treasure valuation hard (even if they're not sold); holy warriors, especially since they're required to be good even if serving a nongood deity; the enforced segregation of evil and nonevil members of the same faith.

In short, aside from the cover and a bit of the art, I found the book utterly useless. There's nothing particularly creative in the book, which is perhaps my biggest complaint; if all I had to do was tear out the mechanics by the roots and rewrite them, I'd have something useful after 10 hours of prep. Now I have nothing regardless of preparation, unless I cut out the pictures I like and use them for props.

 

[MarauderX]

Summary
This is the thickest book I have on my shelf. It is black and white, which leaves a tad to be desired for the internal attractiveness. I hope I can cover what I felt was not in some of the other reviews.
The consistancy of writing and depth of subject matter is worth the amount to bring into a campaign. The length of each backstory to the gods is a great bonus to have. Going beyond the motivations and history of each god, it explains the god with a more in-depth perspective that works for the more mature or sophisticated reader.
However, much is constrained by these in-depth backgrounds. Though the crunch leaves a little to desire, the mechanics of the elegant fluff makes it more than worthwhile to flesh out a new world.

Versitility
I found the plug-and-play aspect of the gods hard to accomplish. I would have liked a more open pantheon to rip and drop gods into a campaign as needed, but most of them couldn't stand on their own. The pantheon as read in the opening chapters is more of a replacement than an addition, as it includes creationist theory and is all inclusive of the beginnings of each god in the book. This makes it harder to 'tack-on' to any existing campaign setting with gods and their entwined relations already in place. There is one chapter at the end that has great advice for transplanting one or more gods across cosmologies, but doesn't mention how well rooted many of the gods in the book are to one another. Though much of the writing is done in a linear paragraph-by-paragraph fashion, there is often too much to ignore and still keep the detailed background.

Gods
This is where the ideas are. While the versitility of combining them with others may not be the smoothest, the quality and quantity of information behind each god is enough to inspire. As intertwined as they are, the gods are rich with motivation and desire toward future goals. The names of the gods are everywhere in the titles, as are the aspects they represent, making it easy for a non-linear reader to pick up where they left off.
An example is Anwyn, a God of the Womb from Chapter 6; her description at the beginning is The Goddess of Home, Hearth and Servants, The Hearths of Anwyn, the Homely, the Blessed, Goodlady, the Fire Keeper, the Plentiful, etc. The descriptors are up front, and following this is the myth behind the god, the secret history, associations, alignment, representations, purpose and servants. This is done in the same fashion for each god, and after the god's descriptors are the Church's description and Holy Orders, each in detail.
With the banishment of racial gods, the book tends to only highlight the various races in their aspect of adding to the human consensus. Again, it creates a slight void where racial favoritism has been ushered out.
As mentioned, having Asmodeus as a main evil deity is as though the writers wanted to keep that central core around the deity as was published in Book of Vile Darkness and other sources. Though this is nicely done within the Book of the Righteous itself, it makes Asmodeus more difficult to define if plucked from the book and mixed with another source.

Holy Warrior & Prestige Classes
The Holy Warrior is a new core class that is basically an alignment-expanded paladin. There are many options to the class that allow for customization, including domain-based abilities. Though this class could be used to replace the paladin class, the prestige class version, also provided in the book, works just as well for mechanics.

Though the Prestige Classes are unique, I don't see much player use for the niches they look to fill. Nonetheless, they are interesting for the motivations they bring into the bigger campaign picture as opposed to how effective they are in a fight. In general they are more one-trick ponies with special abilities that are not focused combat damage output.

11 new Feats and the new Skill:Famous
Some such as Famous (instant fame via a feat) would be nearly useless and other such as Ear of God (1% of getting essentially an unlimited wish spell) are a bit much. Devout, Attached Soul, Religious Scholar and Weapon Master are nice additions to round out details a player might want for a character.

Several others worth more mention:
Free Thinker allows a cleric to pray for spells at any time of day, but still adhering to the guidelines of how often.
Domain Specialization allows spontaneous casting of domain spells, essentially purging any need to choose between two domains in the first place. Combined with the number of new domains allows for a whole new set of combinations for a cleric.
The Heretic feat is worth more than a mention, as it allows access to worship gods with little concern for alignment restrictions. This aspect is an important factor in the book, as it allows corruption and those with misguided intentions within a religious heirarchy. The theme of corruption among good churches and misguided worship is a constant theme.
Profound Faith is useful for the Charisma-focused character to have access to higher level divine spells when advancing as a cleric.

The Famous skill is the only new skill or use of skill presented in the book. It seems to want to replace diplomacy but has no guidelines as to when boundries of NPC reactions may be crossed. A modified retry is allowed to sway NPCs, and the table of Famous DCs is nice and simple.

9 new Domains
This is pretty important for a book filled with a new pantheon with many new aspects. They stay true to their name, and pull only a limited number of spells from the druid and wizard's spell lists. Many of the domain spells are new spells found within the book, adding more spice to the domain's flavor.

Items
The items presented are derivitives of the gods contained within the book. Again, this is great consistency, and the abilities of the items are perfect for the gods they are associated with. If nothing else is easy to pluck and use out of the book, the items are.