Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Psion" data-source="post: 2009411" data-attributes="member: 172">The Book of the RighteousThe Book of the Righteous is a book in Green Ronin's Arcana series whose goal is to expand on the role of magic in d20 System fantasy campaigns. The Book of the Righteous introduces a complete and self-consistent pantheon for use in d20 System fantasy games, with mythology and game mechanics to support it.A First LookThe Book of the Righteous is a 320 page hardcover book priced at $39.95. The book is written by Aaron Loeb.The cover art, by Brian Despain, depicts a huge deity sitting on a throne holding a sword while a human stands before him in petition.The interior is black-and-white. The interior art is of generally good quality and includes work by Toren "Macbin" Atkinson, Steve Lawton, Andrew Baker, Stephanie Pui-Min Law, Britt Martin, Mike Vilardi, Chris Keefe, Jennifer Meyer, James Ryman, Mike May, Ken Capelli, and Todd Gamble.The interior art includes some cosmology pictures by Todd Gamble that are very similar in style to the illustrations in Wizards of the Coast's Manual of the Planes.The interior layout is clear and attractive. The chapter, section, and page headers use an attractive back-shaded white font. The interior text density is high, using a dense font, but the paragraphs are double spaced. The table layout is attractive and I didn't notice any major layout or editorial gaffes.A Deeper LookWarning: This section contains spoilers regarding some secrets in the book.The Book of the Righteous is organized into 11 chapter plus three appendices.The first chapter is an introduction. It lays out the purpose and approach of the book, and outlines the contents. One important statement is that the book does not use real world myths, but it does mimic many real world myths to give it a more authentic feel.The second chapter is entitled The Mythology. It provides and easy to digested nutshell version of the myths behind the creation of the universe, the divinities, and mortal races. As told by the mythology, there was a nameless creator responsible for the creation of the universe. He created the world and the four elemental deities, and departed from the universe. From these four deities, all other deities were born in one form or another. Some deities were turned from law and good by a force of pure corruption. This corruption caused Kador, the god of fire, to become evil, and he eventually becomes the king of hell.The cosmology outlines in this chapter appears to be a subset of the cosmology defined in the Manual of the Planes. As such, it should be easy to expand out the existing mythology here if you prefer the setup in the manual of the planes.The third through eighth chapters describe the various deities and churches. There are 20 deities in all, but a total of 22 faiths. Each of the deities has their own faith. There is also "the Great Church", which is the church of the common man which reveres all the deities instead of just one; the Great Church is a good analog for the catholic church if you desire one in your campaign. There is also a faith called "the conspiracy" which is, in truth, a faith devoted to Asmodeus/Kador which has subsumed the faith of another deity.Each faith is outlined in great detail. Each section includes information of the name of the deity/church, important myths, alignments, representations, purposes of the deity, the structure of the church, doctrine, common prayers, holy days, saints, how the deity views the church, and game information such as preferred weapons and clerical domains.To make it easy to fit the faiths to your game, each has sections with small symbols that gives you seeds and connection points to tie it into the campaign. For example, the seat of power of a church, holy days, religious sites, and other details are vaguely defined but left to the GM to integrate.Most of the churches have three holy orders. These orders correspond to classes. One holy order consists of clerics, another of holy warriors (see the additional rules section below). The third order is a prestige class with abilities specific to the deity's portfolio. In addition to the pertinent information about the prestige classes and clerical and holy warrior domains, many deities have minor changes to their classes, such as different class skills for clerics.The deities and faiths outlined in the chapters are, in brief:- The Great Church- Urian (NG) - God of the air and sky. Similar to mythological sky figures such as Zues and Ukko.- Rontra (LG) - Goddess of the Earth. Mother/grandmotherly figure similar to Gaea and Dannan.- Shalimyr (CN) - God of Water. Similar to figures like Poseidon.- Eliwyn (N) - The Tree of Life. Essentially non-sentient, the source of power for druids and wellspring of life. The tree bore the fruit that lead to most mortal races.- Nameless One (N) - The nameless one is the original creator of the universe, whose name created the universe and could destroy it again. The nameless one has no clergy, but monks seek spiritual enlightenment through contemplating his mysteries.- Morwyn (LG) - Goddess of Healing and Wisdom- Terak (LG or LN) - God of War and Valor- Zheenkeef (CN) - Goddess of Wine, Madness, and Inspiration- Tinel (CG or N) - God of Magic, Knowledge, and Truth- Mormekar (N) - God of Death and Rebirth- Maal (LN) - God of Law and Justice- Darmon (CG) - God of Travel, Wealth, and Joy- Aymara (CG) - Goddess of Love and the Arts- Korak (NG) - God of the Forge and Artisans- Anwyn (LG) - Goddess of Home, Hearth, and Servants- Naryne (LN) - Goddess of Nobility, one of the "three sisters."- Canelle (CG) - Goddess of Victory and strength, one of the "three sisters."- Thellyne (NG) - Goddess of Woodcraft, Nature, and the Hunt, one of the "three sisters."- Asmodeus/Kodor (LE) - God of Lies, Power, and Fire- Canarak (CE) - God of Destruction, Violence, and Rage- Thellos (NE) - God of Greed, Gluttony, and Desire- Naran (LE) - God of Tyranny, Pride, and CunningFinally, in the chapter on evil faiths, there are a number of heretical evil splinter cults of the good faiths. These splinter sects are made possible by the heretic feat, which allows a priest to have an alignment more than one spot away from the deity's and still be able to use clerical powers.The ninth chapter provides ideas and advice for utilizing the material herein - and religions in general - in a campaign. This includes adventure ideas, placing geographical sites of religious significance, political positions of churches, evil races, heresies, and the form that the various chucrches take in the campaign.Chapter ten is entitled Do It Yourself. It provides GMs with advice on utilizing and adapting the deity descriptions herein to their campaigns. To this end, it identifies many of the fundamental assumptions of the mythology and cosmology of the pantheon so that GMs can work out any conflicts between the Book of the Righteous pantheon and that of their own campaign world.Other points addressed are differences between the included cosmology and D&D's "great wheel" and reconciling or combining the pantheon herein with your own or one of another publisher.The eleventh chapter presents a number of additional rules for use with the religions presented in the book. One of the most interesting innovations is the holy warrior. The holy warrior is a core class that serves a specific church or deity. All holy warriors are good, even if the character's patron deity is neutral with respect to good and evil. No holy warriors serve evil deities.Holy warriors are a flexible class. Each holy warrior chooses two domains. Like clerical domains, which domains may be chosen depends on the deity. However, unlike clerical domains, holy warrior domains do not determine spell access. Instead, they determine which abilities the holy warrior gains at first and second level.Paladins are basically a specific implementation of holy warriors. A holy warrior with the champion and guardian domains has the same class abilities as a paladin.If you are not comfortable with the concept of a holy warrior as a core class, guidelines are provided to introduce them as a prestige class.There are new feats to support the religion and religious characters. As examples, Domain Specialization allows a cleric to cast domain spells spontaneously much as healing spells, Heretic allows clerics to transcend alignment limitations for a deity, and Profound Faith allows a character to use charisma in place of wisdom when determining spells available to the cleric. However, a few feats turn me off. Martial instructor adds a questionable training mechanism to the rules, and Famous grants the character access to a fame skill, which is a clumsy way to handle fame in the campaign.Nine new domains are introduced: beauty, the dead (similar to Ravenloft's repose domain in that it is concerned with natural death), the forge, home, inspiration, justice, night, oracle, and truth. New spells are also introduced with these domains. Unfortunately, none of these is represented in Green Ronin's recent Pocket Grimoire Divine.Finally, new magic items and creatures are presented that stem from the mythology and church description chapters. For example, the five staves are unique magic items used by the leading characters in one of the  holy orders dedicated to Tinel, and the creatures section contains servants of the god like various animal spirits and the Handmaids of Zheenkeef.The first appendix is A Treatise on the Divine. This is a player safe, exhaustive version of the myths spelled out in pieces earlier.The second appendix is entitled Gods and Races. Essentially, it is a glossary that outlines how various figures and races fit into the mythology of the book. This is a very convenient reference for those (like reviewers <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> ) who want to get the gist of the book without a lot of reading.The third appendix is entitled Religion Reference Guide. It summarized the most important salient information (including game details such as clerical and holy order domains) for each of the faiths listed herein.ConclusionThe Book of the Righteous is a monumental resource, and perhaps the best "idea mine" for the d20 system since the Manual of the Planes. The pantheon and mythology detailed herein has a great deal of depth to it and provides a flurry of details useful in playing clerics and other religious characters as well as introducing religious themes into a campaign. The book will obviously be of the greatest use for those who do not have well developed pantheons of their own, but the "Do It Yourself" chapter provides sufficient advice to make its applicability much broader.Further, the style and organization of the book, with primers and a glossary, makes it very easy to digest the content.A few of the mechanics bother me, but those are small points and for the most part can be omitted with little harm. As a fan of an old article in the Dragon magazine called A Plethora of Paladins, I was rather enamored by the concept of the holy warriors for more alignments than lawful good.There are a few possible sticking points in the book. For one, many people (myself included) disdained the idea of having Asmodeus as the ultimate evil deity (originally suggested by Green Ronin's Chris Pramas in the AD&D 2e product A Guide to Hell); The Book of the  Righteous cements that viewpoint. That said, the main reason that I disdained it (that I already had central evil figures in my game that I felt ill at ease overshadowing) shouldn't be a problem if you are adopting the book's pantheon, as it makes sense here, unlike the old Guide to Hell. A second sticking point is that the book openly disdains the concept of racial deities, and this is a major assumption of many GMs and settings, and the "Do It Yourself" chapter seems rather less accommodating on this point than it is on many others.-Alan D. Kohler</blockquote>

Verification