The Sigil
Mr. 3000 (Words per post)
Nobody heard the sky falling - because it didn't.
The silence you are hearing is not the sound after the sky crashes. It is instead the collective indifference towards a book that, once you scrape away all the hype and histrionics (from both sides) is, IMO, a colossal waste of paper.
It's not nearly as vile as it was made out to be - so the "religious right" isn't frothing at the mouth over it. What we have is a long stream of "bodily fluids, piercings, and boobies" - in other words, it's about your standard Ren & Stimpy episode - or Spongebob Squarepants (whom the religious right won't demean because stuff is flying off the shelves at Target and lining their pockets
). It seems to hit on the same themes and has the same emphasis, even if the writing is a little more "grown-up" in its treatment of the stuff.
The mechanics are middling to poor - execution rules aside (a topic for another thread), the drug rules are more of what we saw in Lords of Darkness. Poisons are, well, poisons - solid but nothing groundbreaking. The Archdevils & Demon Lords? Anticlimactic (the only real difference between how these guys work and how the write-ups on the Creature Catalogue site worked are slightly different choice of special abilities and the "Official WotC product" stamp). Vile damage is FAR from balanced and doesn't "play well" with existing rules (what about vile subdual damage - how do regenerating trolls cope with vile cold damage, frex?) and is, IMO, not all that mechanically exciting ("ooh, it's basically permanent damage"). The Feats were blasé and of dubious worth.
Having a section on how "flavor text"can make a spell evil was just silly. If it looks like a bolt of force, magic missile is a force spell but if it looks like a little demon that bites you and sucks your blood, that's an evil spell. What? Look, just simply slap the "evil" descriptor on the sucker and be done with it... but two spells with identical mechanical effects (1d4+1 points of force damage) are the same spell in my book. Blah.
Just as there's nothing really vile in the book for the "religious right" to attack, there's nothing profoundly "cool" or groundbreaking here for those who told us that "this book absolutely should have been written and in fact it was a must to write it." It boils down to an alignment splatbook -- and a piss-poor one at that.
Can someone please tell me what is so new and exciting in this work? Especially what is $33 of new and exciting? I failed to see it. Mongoose's Demonology and Necromancy and AEG's Evil covered much of the same ground over a year ago... and were more innovative in their mechanics. Green Ronin's Secret College of Necromancy and Legions of Hell and Armies of the Abyss covered some of the same general areas - and did a better job with innovative mechanics and capturing a consistent feel, IMO.
I stand by the conclusion I reached in my review of this product here at ENWorld. Once the hype wears off and people get a few months away from this one and look at what it *really* contains, they'll find it's pithy, shallow, and one of the poorest products WotC has released to date.
The biggest indictment on the utter blandness and unexcitingness of the BoVD? It has had nobody passionately singing its praises and nobody passionately decrying how bad it is. Its lukewarm reception ought to speak volumes about the utterly poor quality of the content.
--The Sigil
The silence you are hearing is not the sound after the sky crashes. It is instead the collective indifference towards a book that, once you scrape away all the hype and histrionics (from both sides) is, IMO, a colossal waste of paper.
It's not nearly as vile as it was made out to be - so the "religious right" isn't frothing at the mouth over it. What we have is a long stream of "bodily fluids, piercings, and boobies" - in other words, it's about your standard Ren & Stimpy episode - or Spongebob Squarepants (whom the religious right won't demean because stuff is flying off the shelves at Target and lining their pockets
). It seems to hit on the same themes and has the same emphasis, even if the writing is a little more "grown-up" in its treatment of the stuff.The mechanics are middling to poor - execution rules aside (a topic for another thread), the drug rules are more of what we saw in Lords of Darkness. Poisons are, well, poisons - solid but nothing groundbreaking. The Archdevils & Demon Lords? Anticlimactic (the only real difference between how these guys work and how the write-ups on the Creature Catalogue site worked are slightly different choice of special abilities and the "Official WotC product" stamp). Vile damage is FAR from balanced and doesn't "play well" with existing rules (what about vile subdual damage - how do regenerating trolls cope with vile cold damage, frex?) and is, IMO, not all that mechanically exciting ("ooh, it's basically permanent damage"). The Feats were blasé and of dubious worth.
Having a section on how "flavor text"can make a spell evil was just silly. If it looks like a bolt of force, magic missile is a force spell but if it looks like a little demon that bites you and sucks your blood, that's an evil spell. What? Look, just simply slap the "evil" descriptor on the sucker and be done with it... but two spells with identical mechanical effects (1d4+1 points of force damage) are the same spell in my book. Blah.
Just as there's nothing really vile in the book for the "religious right" to attack, there's nothing profoundly "cool" or groundbreaking here for those who told us that "this book absolutely should have been written and in fact it was a must to write it." It boils down to an alignment splatbook -- and a piss-poor one at that.
Can someone please tell me what is so new and exciting in this work? Especially what is $33 of new and exciting? I failed to see it. Mongoose's Demonology and Necromancy and AEG's Evil covered much of the same ground over a year ago... and were more innovative in their mechanics. Green Ronin's Secret College of Necromancy and Legions of Hell and Armies of the Abyss covered some of the same general areas - and did a better job with innovative mechanics and capturing a consistent feel, IMO.
I stand by the conclusion I reached in my review of this product here at ENWorld. Once the hype wears off and people get a few months away from this one and look at what it *really* contains, they'll find it's pithy, shallow, and one of the poorest products WotC has released to date.
The biggest indictment on the utter blandness and unexcitingness of the BoVD? It has had nobody passionately singing its praises and nobody passionately decrying how bad it is. Its lukewarm reception ought to speak volumes about the utterly poor quality of the content.
--The Sigil
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- my point is, "there's nothing 'bad' enough for the right-wingers to bash" but at the same time "there's nothing 'good' enough for the left-wingers to promote as a halcyon truth and undeniably justify why this book should have been written."
