D&D 2E [COMPLETE] Looking back at the limited series: Player's Option, Monstrous Arcana, Odyssey, and more!

[Alzrius]

See, now this is how you end something on a high note!

The Illithiad is hands-down the best book in the Monstrous Arcana line, and not just because of the excellent dad joke that's its title. No, mind flayers have long been one of the most iconic monsters in D&D, having premiered way back in Strategic review #1, then going mainstream in Supplement III: Eldritch Wizardry, and appearing in adventures as early as D1 Descent into the Depths of the Earth (which for some reason isn't available on DriveThruRPG, so I'm linking to the D1-2 compilation instead).

To my mind, illithids are perhaps the single monster most worthy of an ecology book like this, as I'm of the opinion that they're possibly the most iconic monster in all of D&D (even if dragons are, quite literally, the name of the game). There's a reason why Stranger Things never named any of their monsters "the beholder" after all. But what is it about mind flayers that makes them so impressive?

My guess is that it's a combination of factors, the big one being that they straddle the line between "unknowable alien monstrosities" and "villains of genius intellect." The former makes it clear that they're creatures with which no coexistence is possible; they can't be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. But the latter makes it clear that they understand you just fine, and can go out of their way to bedevil you. In fact, their psionic powers means that they'll get in your head psychically before they get in your head physically and eat your brain, which makes for a profoundly disturbing method of execution. Beholders might disintegrate you, but these guys will tentacle-probe you in a way that makes the way little green men do it seem positively benign.

...and The Illithiad took that to new heights. Seriously, this book isn't just a repository of mind flayer lore, but it also expanded on it in a way that D&D is still making use of today. You know "ceremorphosis," the disturbing way that illithids reproduce, and which was featured in the trailer for Baldur's Gate 3? Yeah, that comes from here.


That's not the only disturbing new tidbit to be found in this book. It also reveals several new psionic powers that mind flayers have invented, among them a taste link power that they use to make other creatures – typically other mind flayers in "performance eating" ceremonies, but also captured humanoids – experience the taste of brains as they eat them. Heck, sometimes they use it on the creature whose brain they're eating! Some seriously disturbing stuff there; I love it.

One thing that this book introduced which didn't take, I should note, is the illithids' origin story. In what was the third attempt to say where these creatures come from – previously they'd had their "home planet" explored in Dragon #150 ("The Sunset World"), before The Astromundi Cluster would retcon that entirely, claiming that the Clusterspace crystal sphere was where illithids originated (the culmination, perhaps, of how Spelljammer had taken the Underdark-dwelling mind flayers and put them in space, much as it did with drow and beholders) – The Illithiad not only explicitly de-canonizes The Astromundi Cluster (ignoring "The Sunset World" completely), but instead says that mind flayers were human time travelers who tried to go to the beginning of time and ended up "Outside" (which was later made clear to be the Far Realm).

Ironically, this would itself be de-canonized later, though the time travel part would remain: D&D 3.5's Lords of Madness: The Book of Aberrations would say that illithids are actually from the far future, and when their empire fell they traveled back in time to the recent past, where they've been working to change the future so that their reign will never end (though I'm not quite sure what that says about the githyanki and githzerai; did they follow the illithids back through time before splitting into two camps or something?).

And that's just two of this book's points. There's also how much it leans into the illithids' use of psionics, which you might remember that I'm a big fan of. Naturally, these use the new psionics rules from Player's Option – Skills & Powers, which (as noted previously) are also in the Dark Sun Campaign Setting (Revised and Expanded Edition), though that world has no illithid presence at all, unless you count the Spellfire card game placing the Annulus (3rd/411) there, which seems odd since that magic item is originally from Temple, Tower & Tomb, which is a generic adventure, although Athas was invaded by githyanki in DSE2 Black Spine, which seems like a precursor to D&D Third Edition's "The Incursion" event in Dragon, Dungeon, and Polyhedron...

...wait, what was I talking about again?

Right! Mind flayers! So, another cool tidbit from The Illithiad that didn't survive this book was how they see in infravision all the time, which contributes to their hatred and fear of the undead. See, with no natural body heat, most undead are near-totally invisible to mind flayers; throw in being immune to psychic powers and having no (edible) brains, the undead are mind flayers' natural enemies. So naturally, the presence of creatures like alhoons (also known by the much cooler name "illithiliches") and vampire mind flayers scares illithids something fierce.

And if you're a Ravenloft aficionado, your ears likely perked up quite a bit there, because you know that vampire illithids are originally from RQ2 Thoughts of Darkness. But while it's almost impossible to escape Ravenloft, The Illithiad explicitly tells us that at least one vampire mind flayer did so, which means that those creatures (which, unlike illithiliches, are little more than ravenous beasts) can now be found anywhere. More trouble for your PCs!

I should also point out that The Illithiad was something of an indirect redemption of the Ravenloft domain of Bluetspur, which is where illithids in the Demiplane of Dread come from. While everyone knows that the darklords of the various domains all have curses that torment them, it was always kind of hard to define that in the context of Bluetspur's lord, the Illithid God-Brain; likewise for showing what a "horror version" of illithid society was like, compared to their "normal" culture.

That's where The Illithiad comes in. It was here that we were told that illithids eschewed arcane magic in favor of psionics (and, for a small few, divine worship of their gods Ilsensine and Maanzecorian, the latter of which died in Planescape's Dead Gods), with arcane practitioners being killed unless they fled and became outcasts. But in Bluetspur, the illithids not only practice magic, but practice biomancy and necromancy, engaging in activities that most mind flayers would find to be a perverse mockery of their cultural values.

And the God-Brain? Well, it makes no attempt to hide that it has its own wants and desires, the greatest of which is to be an ambulatory being, which is obviously impossible for it, so instead it absorbs the brains of various creatures – of all types – in order to assimilate their memories of their mobile existences. This is in stark contradiction to what The Illithiad tells us about elder brains, which is that while they do have distinct personalities, they go out of their way to hide this from the illithids they rule over. That's because illithids believe that each elder brain is a single gestalt consciousness, and that when their brains are added to it after death (and only theirs; the idea of adding a non-illithid brain to the elder brain would never occur to a "sane" mind flayer), they think they become part of that. In fact, the elder brain simply absorbs their knowledge and squelches their personality completely. So yeah, Bluetspur's God-Brain is clearly a deviant from illithid standards (and for all we know, that's what got it its own domain in the first place).

Really, all of that feels like it's just scratching the surface of what's here. Information about the illithids' written language, their stories about "The Adversary" (who kept their human personality even after undergoing ceremorphosis), new illithid tools and gear, a bestiary that compiles creatures like ulitharids and brain golems with new monsters like urophions and neothelids; there's just so much here! Don't even get me started on how illithid society as a whole has the goal of extinguishing suns; now that's the sort of lofty ambition your society of brain-eating monsters should have! It's no coincidence that this was the book that made me start to wonder if I should be picking up the Monstrous Arcana adventures; alas, I'm still looking for print copies of A Darkness Gathering, Masters of Eternal Night, and Dawn of the Overmind.

Though personally, I think there should have been an illithid lich who was trying to make friends with some cannibal zombies, since for all their differences, they're united in their love of brains.


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[glass]

And the God-Brain? Well, it makes no attempt to hide that it has its own wants and desires, the greatest of which is to be an ambulatory being, which is obviously impossible for it, so instead it absorbs the brains of various creatures – of all types – in order to assimilate their memories of their mobile existences. This is in stark contradiction to what The Illithiad tells us about elder brains, which is that while they do have distinct personalities, they go out of their way to hide this from the illithids they rule over. That's because illithids believe that each elder brain is a single gestalt consciousness, and that when their brains are added to it after death (and only theirs; the idea of adding a non-illithid brain to the elder brain would never occur to a "sane" mind flayer), they think they become part of that

I rather like the idea (which I saw somewhere on the Internet) that the reason that the Bluetspur elder brain became a darklord was that it was the one that came up with the idea of lying to the illithid populace about what happens after death and sold it to the other elder brains. When you think about it, it is evil in a fairly un-illithid-like way!

_
glass.

 

[Alzrius]

Being a bunch of consummate nerds, it's no surprise that the tabletop RPG community has come up with multiple categorizations for the types of products we consume. I don't mean genre labels, such as sci-fi, westerns, urban fantasy, etc., nor purely physical descriptions such as boxed sets, hardbacks, softcovers, and other such terms. Those were all either self-evident or imported from other media (e.g. films).

Rather, what I'm referring to here are things like "campaign settings" or "supplements." The sort of thing which tells us in one or two words what type of content we can expect to find, whether it's a bestiary or an adventure or a book full of various tools for GMs. Even that last one can be broken down further, as supplements can be described as "character galleries" or (to bring in my own parlance), "generators," which are books of tables, often with terms and descriptions for the various roll-able entries, to help create content on the fly.

Of course, that's usually where these terms begin to break down, since it's quite possible to have books that blend the various content types, defying easy description.

Which is where Den of Thieves, the first of what I'm calling the "Strongholds" limited series of sourcebooks, comes in.

Before going any further, I feel the urge to point out how this series feels incomplete. I mean, we have a thief book, a wizard book, and a cleric book...and none for fighters? I can see other classes being eschewed, since this was the edition where they were all grouped into four meta-class groupings (well, five if you count psionicists), but somehow there was never any "Fortress of Fighters"-style grouping. While I've never heard anything to suggest that there was supposed to be a fourth supplement that fell through the cracks during the TSR buyout, it wouldn't surprise me, since this seems like too big of an oversight to be missed otherwise.

Turning our attention back to this particular product, I have to once again ring the "I didn't remember this at all" bell, which isn't something I do idly. I honestly thought that this was written by Bruce Cordell, and that it connected to his "Neverness" world the way the next two books did. Nope! This supplement, which is written by Wes Nicholson (with whom I'm otherwise unfamiliar), has no connections to any other TSR product that I'm aware of, easter egg or otherwise.

Instead, what we have is a book that seems almost like an adjunct to AD&D 2E's classic supplement of larcenous characters, PHBR2 The Complete Thief's Handbook...sort of. While the page count isn't quite divided evenly between them, this book is divided between three major sections: overviewing a thieves' guild, showcasing a sample guild, and presenting several sample adventures. It's that first one that makes me think that this is an extension of the leatherette book on thieves, since this is more focused on guilds than individuals.

By the by, I want to mention that if anyone goes looking for this on the secondary market (as opposed to buying the print-on-demand copy from DriveThruRPG), be aware that the cover is removable (i.e. isn't stapled to the pages) and it's supposed to come with a poster map of the sample guild.

So with all of that preamble out of the way, what's there to be said about this book? Well, I can tell you that at the time I purchased it, I pretty well glanced over it quickly and then moved on. Looking back on it now, however, I find myself reacting much more favorably toward what's here.

For one thing, the overview of how a thieves' guild operates is not only expansive and insightful, but is presented in a way that's easy to follow and interesting while still being snappy in how succinct it is. That might sound effusive, but the single- or double-page overviews of the various criminal activities that a guild will regularly engage in (burglary, counterfeiting/forgery, extortion, pickpocketing, etc.) are all examples of how to present information in an engaging manner. Each one briefly summarizes the type of crime, talks about the guild's stance toward that particular area of activity, and has a helpful table for things like how much time is needed or how much money can be earned via a job. (Amusingly enough, "dancing girls" was an entry here; for the life of me, I can't remember if my younger self knew that was a euphemism for "prostitution").

That's not all that it has to say with regard to general information about a guild, however. There's also numerous interesting pieces of information here, such as the general rule that a guild will need to be in a city of at least twenty thousand people in order to have a sustainable series of business operations, or that a guild will go out of its way to avoid antagonizing the political rulers since they (the guild) will virtually always be destroyed if the local rulers decide to wipe them out (and so it's no surprise that the sample guild includes multiple hidden basements and an escape venue).

The second section of the book is where it interested me most, however, since while guild hierarchy is presented in the first section, it's in the second where we start to meet our cast of ne'er-do-wells in the sample guild. From the guildmaster down to the various heads of certain criminal activities to guild associates (e.g. a local wizard), and the staff members of the higher-ranking members, these characters (each of whom has an abbreviated stat block) struck me as much more interesting than I remember them being, particularly with how down-to-earth they are.

What I mean by that is that no one here is possessed by a demon or secretly an undead creature; rather, the intrigue here is entirely political, with the guildmaster secretly grooming his daughter to take over even as another young up-and-comer gathers allies to stake his claim when the guildmaster retires. A mid-level operator is upset that she's been passed over for promotion due to repeatedly engaging in unnecessary violence, and isn't willing to stand for it much longer. A popular young thief is actually a plant from the city watch who's playing a very dangerous game. It's all so low-fantasy.

And really, if there's any sort of complaint to be made about the book, it's exactly how low-fantasy it is. Maybe I've been playing too much D&D 3.X/Pathfinder 1E, but the assumptions that went into a lot of what was here make it clear that this isn't a wild-and-woolly world of magic and monsters, but rather is very grounded in the classic quasi-medieval take on fantasy role-playing. For instance, the book flat-out says that demihumans are rarely members of a thieves' guild, because demihumans naturally stand out in cities (i.e. cities are assumed to be humanocentric). Likewise, you won't find spellcasters in most thieves guilds, as wizards are too interested in their research and experiments to care much for larceny (which they aren't very good at anyway), and even if you have a cleric of the god of thieves, they'll want to set up a house of worship, which will invariably be the first place the local authorities suspect when a big heist is pulled.

Heck, the book even assumes that dual-classed human thieves won't make it very far in guilds due to being pulled in two directions by their different classes. A wizard/thief who somehow becomes guildmaster, the book tells us, would see a lot of guild funds going toward various magical projects, upsetting the junior members with how their guild dues weren't being used in the collective interest. Magical characters, instead, are likely to be contacts who do work for the guild on a freelance basis.

That's equally true for the adventures, which assume that the PCs are guildmembers who need to troubleshoot various circumstances that come up for the guild. Personally, I find it a bit awkward to assume that the PCs are mostly one particular class, and while that doesn't necessarily have to be the case, the book is clearly leaning in that direction. While I don't have HHQ3 Thief's Challenge or HHQ7 Thief's Challenge II: Beacon Point, and I'm leery of one-on-one adventures in general (at least in the context of AD&D 2E, what with how unforgiving the system can be for singular adventurers), I find myself wonder if that's the better way to go about making an adventure that's all about thieves.

But on greater consideration, I think that might be missing the point somewhat. Back during my overview of DMGR2 The Castle Guide, I complained about how that book didn't make it clear how to transition a campaign to domain-level play, nor make a case for why such a campaign was worthwhile. In the case of Den of Thieves, I think it wanted to do exactly that.

Or at least, I wish it had. But the fact of the matter is that this book is, quite simply, far more focused with providing tools for DMs than it is for name-level thief PCs. While it's entirely possible to use this as a template for how a guild works, and the adventures that can be crafted around one, it doesn't speak to broader issues of how to make this work with a diverse party, it doesn't specify XP awards (if any) for crimes carried out by the PC's guild but not the PC themselves, and it doesn't talk about what high-level thieves can do (even the sample guildmaster is only 12th level). Heck, it doesn't even seem to remember that thieves of 10th level and above can use scrolls!

Overall, this is a very good sourcebook for if you want a focus on thieves in an urban locale. That's already fairly niche (though even if you have your PCs regularly adventuring in dungeons and the wilderness, this is still worthwhile if they have a home base city that they regularly return to), so I suppose I can't hold it against this book that it wasn't a domain-level guide for thief PCs, though I still wish it had been.

Even so, it's well-done for what it is, and so I look at it more fondly now than I did in my youth.

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[cbwjm]

I really liked the wizard version of these books and want to get the others to go along with it, since they all seemed to link together somewhat. I was also a little surprised to find that there wasn't a fighter book, you'd think that with the thieves' guild, wizard's guild, and temple, that a fighters keep and holdings would have completed the series. Maybe there was something started but never completed.

 

[Orius]

Given the publication dates of to these three books, it's not too surprising there wasn't a fighter book, as it likely would have come right before the release of 3e. Then again, The Castle Guide might have been considered sufficient, but the Stronghold books did have a bunch of NPCs filling things out.

Den of Thieves is okay, but it feels a little redundant with the related material from the Thieves' Handbook. If a DM wants a fleshed out thieves' guild for his campaign, it's an adequate enough resource, and IIRC, there are a few rival guilds and gangs in here do deal with as well. I'm just not a big fan of thieves though so it doesn't make me very enthusiastic about this one.

Unfortunately, domain play and other name level stuff started to fade away in 2e, and these days it seems one has to look into the OSR and adjacent third party material to find anything about it. And it doesn't help that the classic material didn't deal with it too heavily; the best one can find is the Companion rules and CM1, Test of the Warlords.

 

[Voadam]

This was one I wasn't particularly interested in. Thieves' guilds are fairly focused on a couple specific scenarios, PCs who are part of a guild, raiding a guild, and dealing with a guild for something like fencing items. The guild part of the Complete Thief's Handbook was the part I thought I would have the least use for in my games which were generally modules in a sandbox world with typical diverse class parties not focused on city thief guild interactions. I developed a criminal organization/D&D gang (magic-user leader, assassin lieutenant, humanoid minions, dungeon headquarters) in the rough town of Nulb outside of the Temple of Elemental Evil in 1e and I had the thieves guild in Greyhawk as a big setting background thing as written that could have come up, but for the most part guild type stuff did not come up in my games.

Thieves guilds are shown as big things in The City of Greyhawk, in the AD&D sourcebooks for Lankhmar, and in The Pirate's Guide to Freeport, but the modules I ran in Greyhawk were focused on the temple of St. Cuthbert versus cults and the Freeport ones I ran were dealing with pirate stuff, city politics, and cults.

 

[Alzrius]

The more books in the "Strongholds" series (as I've termed it) I go through, the more I see where these hit the limit of what sort of gaming D&D lends itself toward. I mean, "magic school" is a popular fantasy trope, but it's one that the world's oldest fantasy game – which can be bluntly characterized as "killing things and taking their stuff" – can only awkwardly embrace, at least when it comes to actually gaming that premise.

That said, Bruce Cordell's College of Wizardry is probably as good as it gets.

It's certainly not the only time D&D has touched upon the idea of magical institutions where knowledge is sought. Mystara's GAZ3 The Principalities of Glantri showcased that country's Great School of Magic, for instance. The Birthright campaign's Royal College of Sorcery was likewise overviewed in The Book of Magecraft. And of course, while not quite a school per se, Dragonlance's Towers of High Sorcery had a long pedigree even before the eponymous Towers of High Sorcery sourcebook for D&D 3.5.

Of course, mentioning all of those throws into stark relief that there's been a more recent take on this particular idea (i.e. Strixhaven), but I'm not going to talk about it simply because I don't own and haven't read that book. For all I know, it's the apex of bringing "adventures in magic school" to D&D, but I simply couldn't get past how so much of the marketing for that book seemed to emphasize everything except adventuring. Maybe younger gamers are lured in by the idea of playing characters who study for tests, work at the local coffee shop, and navigate the dating scene, but I like my characters to delve into forgotten tombs, confront the restless dead, and keep an evil god from returning to plague the world!

Which brings us nicely back around to what's in this book.

The titular college of wizardry is actually called the Arcane Order of Enchantment & Exposition, or just The Arcane Order, for short. It's also called Mathghamhna in the ancient tongue of the people who built the place in a previous age, and who are all gone now. You see, long ago the evil demigod Dargeshaad was close to conquering the world, with only Mathghamhna holding out. When it was finally about to fall, the master of the place used a doomsday spell to summon/create something called the Dragon of Shades, which destroyed Dargeshaad before turning its wrath on the rest of the world, causing a cataclysm before it finally left/dissipated. The world hasn't been the same place since.

All of which is a rather epic way of saying that this book doesn't really fit in with any of TSR's established campaign worlds, and probably not with your homebrew, either. Though, of course, there's a big sidebar on pages 8-9 about how to fit this into the published D&D campaign worlds (many of which require almost all of that backstory to be discarded), which makes me wonder if all of the proper names and specific references should have had brackets around them so that you'd known where to fill in the appropriate replacements.

Cynical jokes aside, I can appreciate what Bruce Cordell was doing here. Fleshing out what the Arcane Order is and does required giving it a backstory, and keeping it world-neutral meant that he couldn't default to an existing campaign setting. The end result is probably the best that could be reasonably accomplished, since grounding the place with a definite past gives him more to work with and therefore lets him present us with a more complete product.

That's one of the differences – quite possibly the single largest difference – between this product and Den of Thieves. That book wanted to be as generic as it could; not only did it have a considerable overview of thieves' guilds in general, but even when it presented its gallery of a sample guild, it kept it focused squarely on the people involved, divorcing them from everything outside of guild activities, let alone providing any sort of history of the campaign world. By contrast, College of Wizardry grounds itself firmly in the specifics and particulars of what it presents. This isn't a book to generate random wizards schools; it's all about Mathghamhna.

The result is that this is a location book more than anything else. A poster map and two additional maps inside the covers present the entire school, and considerable pages are given over to charting each and every room of the place. Fun fact: there are only two privies in the entire building, one for the headmaster and one for everyone else (although the latter is actually a communal latrine where apprentices go to dump out everyone's chamber pots; and you thought your primary education was bad!).

Likewise, the book overviews fewer NPCs than Den of Thieves, but gives them more depth, with less important characters receiving less information. It's almost amusing how this works: the headmaster and regents who chart the course of the Arcane Order all get full stat blocks, paragraphs of presentation, and sidebars outlining their various secrets and plots. The guild wizards (who are fully-fledged members of the Order) just get names and abbreviated stat blocks. The initiates (i.e. wizards who haven't graduated yet) only get their name, race, sex, class, and level listed. The apprentices (who are all 0-level characters) don't even get that; we're just told how many there are (although two individuals are spotlighted in one of the adventures at the back of the book).

The funny thing is how small this makes Mathghamhna seem, since altogether this comprises just over sixty individuals, almost half of which are those nameless and faceless apprentices. Hogwarts and its houses this is clearly not.

More notable is how this book keeps nodding its head in the direction of having PCs be students of the Arcane Order, but can't seem to figure out how to make a campaign out of that. For instance, there's a schedule outlining a typical day for apprentice characters, along with a table to see if you're able to successfully shirk your chores and duties, and another table for what happens if you're caught, but none provide experience or anything like that. There is another table which says how, after X number of years, you have an N-percent chance to becoming a level Z wizard, but the header makes it clear that's for NPCs only. I suppose PCs could use it also, but it's hard to see how as anything other than a background generator for, say, your character's age.

And yet, the adventures at the end of the book (four of them, for characters of levels 0, 3-6, 4-8, and 8-11) seem to presume that the characters are students of the school. Which, given that it's a school for, you know, wizards only, seems like an invitation for a TPK, not to mention ruling out a lot of races. I'll say it again that I liked racial level limits and class restrictions, but it's notable how many character options are excluded here. Humans, elves, and half-elves can be wizards, but gnomes have to be illusionists, and dwarves and halflings are completely out of the picture. So are most other humanoids, if you're inclined to go a little further than the typical PHB races. Really, this works better if you have mid-level wizard PCs who want to join the Order without having gone to school there (which the book outlines how to do).

If not, then I suspect that's why the adventures here are all so short. I thought they were outlines, but they might well just be written that way because they know an all-wizard group won't have much in the way of diverse abilities or staying power.

Of course, they're likely to at least have an impressive array of magic. Part of what makes Mathghamhna unique is that it has two very special features: the Spellcrux and access to the Language Primeval.

Both are, of course, given extensive coverage. The Spellcrux is sort of a magical relay system, which has a bunch of spells cast into it that attuned wizards can then withdraw and cast on the fly, rather than having to prep their spells ahead of time. So basically it makes them into proto-sorcerers, though it should be noted that there are quite a few limits on how much they can make use of this. By contrast, the Language Primeval (aka Aleph) is an expensive nonweapon proficiency (four slots!) that, on a successful check, allows a spellcaster to modify a spell they're casting in some way, such as by extending the duration, making the saving throw tougher, reducing the casting time, etc. Whereas the Spellcrux is a new creation by the Arcane Order, the Language Primeval is a mere fragment of the power from the previous age, with the headmaster searching relentlessly for more of the lost language.

That's not all the magic you'll find here, of course. There's quite a few new spells and magic items, making this a valuable resource for cherry-picking if nothing else. While none of these were popular enough that they went mainstream in later editions, there are still several that have some impressive presentations, such as the cowl of darkness, which permanently shades the user's face beneath impenetrable blackness, making him almost blind in bright light but giving him great vision in darkness, or spells like one question (which compels a person to answer a query on a failed save), ESP barricade (a spell to protect against thought-reading magic), and iterative mnemonic negation (a powerful enchantment that wipes spell after spell from a caster's mind).

I should mention that Cordell's ability to tie various products together is on full display here. Remember how I said that Den of Thieves, which was written by someone else, isn't connected to any of these books? Well, Cordell fixed that; one of the assassins from that book is explicitly mentioned here (even saying that he's from Den of Thieves), having been hired to kill one of the school's regents. A couple of Dargeshaad's old minions are mentioned in passing, but you might notice that they appear again in Return to the Tomb of Horrors as sentient magic items, as does another NPC from that boxed set: Acemadecian Drake. And of course, Mathghamhna will be mentioned in the next book in this series.

Overall, this is a book that oozes flavor, and has a lot of resources to offer (especially if you do some tweaking and tailoring), but it stumbles on the practical implementation. Simply put, there isn't enough here to run a "wizard school campaign" on, even if you have the PCs leave after they graduate to become fully-fledged guild wizards (which happens at 7th level). There are ways around this problem, of course; DMs can always introduce new situations and scenarios for student PCs, and you can even bring in other classes if you exercise some creative thinking (e.g. Mathghamhna has mundane guards on loan from the nearby town that supplies the college; that's an opportunity for a fighter PC), but the book doesn't do enough of the heavy lifting in that regard, instead defaulting to the more typical location book format.

But maybe that's for the best. Ultimately, D&D isn't built to be a game about kids in a formal academic setting, and trying to twist it in that direction has always struck me as trying to put a square peg into a round hole. You can do it, but it won't be easy, nor will it be pretty. But that's fine by me: if I have to choose between running errands for upperclassmen, and an orc-infested dungeon, then all I've got to say is...

School's out. Forever.


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[glass]

Arcane Order of Enchantment & Exposition

Funnily enough I was flicking through Complete Arcane just yesterday, and I wondered if it had any backstory before that (well, before Tome & Blood in 3.0). Question answered!

Out of curiosity, does the sidebar on adapting to existing settings say anything about geographical locations?

Of course, mentioning all of those throws into stark relief that there's been a more recent take on this particular idea (i.e. Strixhaven), but I'm not going to talk about it simply because I don't own and haven't read that book

I have heard good things about Strength of Thousands for PF2, and The Magaambya featured therein, but I have not read that either.

_
glass.

 

[Alzrius]

Funnily enough I was flicking through Complete Arcane just yesterday, and I wondered if it had any backstory before that (well, before Tome & Blood in 3.0). Question answered!

Ah, I neglected to mention that the Arcane Order was mentioned in some of the D&D 3.X supplements on magic. Good catch, there!

Out of curiosity, does the sidebar on adapting to existing settings say anything about geographical locations?

A little bit, mostly with regards to where Mathghamhna itself should be placed. For instance, in Mystara it recommends placing the Arcane Order in the city of Mirros/Specularum in Karameikos, while in the Forgotten Realms it says it's in an extinct volcano in the Nether Mountains, close to Sundabar.

 

[Alzrius]

Oh my eyes have seen the coming of the glory of the Cord...ell, I mean, as Bruce brings us what is easily the best (and final) entry in the "Strongholds" mini-series: Bastion of Faith.

The only entry to be perfect-bound instead of stapled, and lacking a poster map for some reason, this book takes full advantage of the fact that its focus is one that lends itself – more than either of its two predecessor supplements – to being useful to characters beyond its main focus. Religious faith might be the raison d'etre of clerics (and druids, though it should surprise no one that they get zero coverage here), but there's room for it in the life of every PC, and Bastion of Faith makes sure to lean into this, without letting it detract from its overall focus.

But I'm getting ahead of myself; let's back up and talk about the eponymous bastion. In a sharp break from the previous supplements, this one grounds itself firmly in a particular campaign world: that of Greyhawk. It's not so firm that it places itself in a specific city (though it nods more in the direction of the Free City than elsewhere, going so far as to offer an explanation for how it can be there when previous supplements never mentioned it; that being that it's the previous temple, under new management who's given it a new mandate), and it has some advice for placing it in other campaign settings, but the default is very much Greyhawk specific.

How specific, you ask? Well, rather than being some sort of ecumenical force, or being dedicated to a never-before-mentioned deity, the Bastion of Faith (yes, that's the in-character name of the place) is dedicated to Heironeous. And I don't mean that his name is used as some sort of placeholder, the way a lot of Greyhawk deities were in the D&D Third Edition Player's Handbook. No, this guy gets a full deity write-up in the Faiths & Avatars format, including new spells, magic items, and information on his specialty priests, called gloryaxes. That last one always reminds me of the old "Who the Hell is Erik Mona" story (scroll down to find it), which is rather appropriate, since he's one of the people credited with "Design and Editorial Assistance" here.

But make no mistake, this is Bruce Cordell all the way; in fact, this is Cordell at his Cordelliest. For instance, this is where he flat-out names his personal campaign setting in which his cross-linked products reside as being "Neverness." It's literally one of the campaign settings listed in those aforementioned alternatives of where you can put the Bastion, and it makes sure to say that there's also a noted den of thieves and college of wizardry in the bastion's town of Stormport. It also mentions a martial academy, but alas, that one never materialized.

What does materialize here are the numerous links we've come to expect, and not just to the Den and the College. Both of those books have established NPCs of theirs make guest appearances here, but it doesn't stop there. The White Kingdom (from Wolfgang Baur's "Kingdom of the Ghouls" in Dungeon #70, which came out that same year) got a name-drop here. There's a single tooth of dahlver-nar under examination as well (remember that from the Book of Artifacts?). It even references several prominent Greyhawk NPCs from WGR4 The Marklands (which, for some reason, has been removed from DriveThruRPG) and even one from The Rogues Gallery! (And if my knowing that sounds impressive, a lot of Greyhawkiana is actually spelled out in a list of references in the book itself.)

Honestly, I'm a little amazed that the crusaders who bedevil the undead PCs on the lowest level of the Reverse Dungeon don't come from here. That seems like a natural point for a crossover.

But it's not just a question of lots of little links for D&D aficionados. Much like College of Wizardry, this book presumes that PCs will be part of the Bastion's hierarchy, outlining not only the grounds and major NPCs (complete with a who's-who list and maps), but also detailing the process of joining the temple and the various ranks and positions that can be obtained. The difference is, as mentioned before, that this time the book goes out of its way to talk about "affiliates," i.e. thieves, fighters, and mages, can join. Their process of becoming part of the Bastion's community is given almost as much of an overview as that of priestly characters, and moreover the book is smart enough to talk about Bastion priests can be "confirmed" (i.e. live-in) or "affirmed" (i.e. adventuring) characters, while affiliates are either "attached" or "detached," which are the same status with different titles.

And there's still more! The Bastion, you see, isn't just any old temple of Heironeous, instead hiding a secret: it's where Ferrante, the saint and prophet who founded the faith (and is, insofar as I know, original to this book) is buried! Only a select few members of the Bastion know this, and treat it as a secret society. Of course, not even they know the real truth: that, after fighting against a champion of Hextor (the evil god of war and tyranny who's Heironeous's brother), Ferrante succumbed to temptation and turned to evil, before being smote by Heironeous himself. Should the sealed casket he's contained in ever be opened, the damage that the truth would do to Heironeous' faith would be devastating, to say nothing of what would happen when Ferrante rises from it...

All of that, and I'm still glossing over details. For example, Hextor gets his own Faiths & Avatars-style write-up, just in case you want to turn the place into a Bastion of Evil. There's a section on how the Bastion is handing out "favors" (e.g. coupons worth a certain amount of gp that can be redeemed for spellcasting services), which have started to become a parallel economy to gold coins. There's an entire chart of glyphs that can be used to modify the lesser/greater glyph of warding spells. Plus, did I mention that one of the new spells presented here is miracle? Everyone thinks that the clerical equivalent of wish is a product of Third Edition, but nope! It originated here! (Though honestly, I find the personal savior spell to be slightly more evocative for what it can do.)

This is, in other words, probably as good a location sourcebook as your going to get. It takes what's possibly the most accessible premise for making a location important to your gaming group (since they need to get healing and resurrection spells from somewhere), fleshes it out masterfully, offers ways it can be used as a source of adventures (both by handing out quests, which are "obediences" from the abbot who runs the place, and because it has its own dark secret waiting to be unleashed), and has methods of incorporating the entire party beyond simply clerics.

Really, the only complaint I could conceivably make here is that this eschews the idea of domain play, in that the characters are never assumed to take control of the place nor expand on what's here. But even then, I can't hold that against the book; that's what I wish it did, to be sure, but it was quite clearly never its intended focus. Instead, it's a well-rounded and thoroughly grounded home base/source of adventures for your entire party, integrating well with a classic setting while still being easily used in almost any other campaign you might be running. After several imperfect entries among the "Strongholds" books, this one is a tip-top way of closing out the series.

Every character should have some of this old-time religion.


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