Reviewer's Note: This review originally appeared on RPG.net but recently we reviewers have been cleared to review En World Products.
The Complete Guide to Drow is the printed and expanded edition of Goodman Games and EN World's Complete Guide to Drow. For some, it's printed form may be too little at too late a time. Many books have already either been devoted to the drow, like the Quintessential Drow (3.5) from Mongoose, Green Ronin's Plot and Poison book, or Goodman's own Underdark Adventure Guide.
The main strength of this book in comparison to those books is that it's smaller, easier to read, and easier to incorporate right away. At 48 black and white pages for $13.00, it's right on the industry standard. The bulk of the book consists of new crunch with little in the ways of building structure, social structure, holy days, and other non-crunch or flavor material.
This is good as in les than 50 pages, we get new races, monsters, magic items, spells, equipment and of course, prestige classes. This isn't to say that there is no information not flavor related. Several sample drow deities with a spider theme are introduced. A page full of names for male, female and house names is provided. Charts for typical armies, and rules for constructing houses also help flush out the society aspect. The majority of the work however, is player based crunch that the GM should feel free to use.
I'm not a master of game mechanics by any means. My motto is try it out and see how it works in the game. Having said that, some of the material might be mechanically unsound and not for all games. For example, in the new spells, there's a second level spell, Shadow Bolt, that inflicts 1d4 per level (up to 10d4), requires no hit roll, and gives the target a penalty to their spell resistance. Other factors like Combat Intuition, a feat that gives you a +2 bonus to initiative checks and a +1 dodge bonus, are too good. Why every take the dodge feat if you can take this? Or how about Dual Casting, a Metamgic feat that allows you to cast two spells in the same round? Why have this feat when Quicken handles this?
Most of the material falls somewhere in the middle. For example, in the prestige classes, the adamantine soldier, a warrior who uses a adamantine limb. He gains more skill points than a fighter, bonuses to his saving throws, and other special abilities in relation to his limb, the limb itself has a huge weakness. Daylight or even the spell, dalyight, can destroy it quickly. Another idea that's different is the Blood Druid, a core class variant with abilities spelled out from 1st to 20th level with many changes to the natural abilities, making them more dark and suited for the drow.
When looking at different races, there are some things that I liked and some I didn't. First, with the new 3.5 Monster Manual, the drow are no longer a mystery race where the GM has to reverse engineer the racial statistics. Second, Goodman Games Underdark Adventure book already provided stats for drow, and other underdark races. Third, while there is an ECL indicator, there is no CR indicator. What modification to it's CR does a Shur, a demon-drow have? Sure, it's +3 Level adjustment (Not ECL as used in Underdark Adventure Guide), but what does that mean for CR? If there was a monster listing like the Monster Manual, it wouldn't be an issue as you could look over the sample monster (NPC) as an example and decide for yourself.
On the other side, there are a lot of new drow variants in this book. Driders, Drothir (surface elf-drow), Half-Drow, Shaturug (orc-drow), Shur and Urbam (goblin-drow) all make an apperance. Now a half-drow template could've solved some of this but it's good to see how different authors use the game mechanics.
Internal art is done by Brad McDevitt, giving the book a universal feel. Interior front cover is used to showcase some drow features like the extra joint in the fingers and slightly slanted eyes of the drow, while the rear cover is a partial catalog of Goodman games books. Editing is fair, but the book feels wordy. Some parts are in two column format, others one column, stretching the text the entire length of the page. Upper and lower boarders are drow based with good spacing, outer and inner borders are tight.
There's a lot of material crammed into this book and many users will find something different for their underdark campaign or character but other drow books have already made their stake on this territory.
