Champions of Valor --- Two things I'm really digging

[JPL]

Having just thumbed through it and read the info on the WotC site...

1. The new character regions that go beyond race / place of birth / culture and get into unique backgrounds and cool character hooks. That's an idea that bears further exploration.

2. Very cool use of substitution levels to represent different organizations with slightly variant abilities. I love all of those obscure orders of knights and monks running around the Realms, and this is a great way to model them without too many prestige classes entering the mix. And anyway, if I'm a Knight of the Mystic Fire, why should I have to wait until mid-levels and a prestige class to get some appropriate abilities?

Really, WotC needs to follow up on both of these concepts.

 

[JoeGKushner]

No, really WoTC needs to make some more of this material into the SRD like Psionics!

Heck, I'd love for some of the stuff from the DMG II to become open like magical locations or planar touchstones from the Planar Handbook.

 

[JPL]

No, really WoTC needs to make some more of this material into the SRD like Psionics!

Heck, I'd love for some of the stuff from the DMG II to become open like magical locations or planar touchstones from the Planar Handbook.

I'd welcome ANY additions to the SRD, really. I think it's a great resource.

Seems like in Champions of Valor, the character regions take on some of the traits of d20 Modern's occupations --- just another way to build some interesting backgrounds into first-level characters.

One of the reasons 2nd Edition's Faiths and Pantheons was such an awesome book was that every church had some kind of affiliated orders, which along with all the good info on dogma and church history, gave a sense of verisimilitude to the setting. I'd like to see more of these groups revisited [although CoV hits quite a few] Faiths and Pantheons 2.0 always gets a bad rap because of the broken specialty priests...but actually, substitution levels would be a great way to model some of those variant clerics [and other classes that were represented in the various orders].