JoeGKushner said:
Sorry to pick your brain again Psion, but we have some similiar taste in campaign styles. For the Classic Play Book of the Planes, how useful are you finding it? I stopped buying everything Mongoose after reading some of John Cooper's reviews as I found it too expensive to pay for their future editors. Still get some of the Conan stuff just to read and some of the Quint. lines just to expand my options, but I've steered a bit away from the Classic Play series.
Well, I am finding "get Gareth's and Patricks' books, avoid all others" to be words to live by. For me, the author drives the quality more than the editor. I mean, I found Cleric II just fine, but Elf II exemplifying poor class design.
Do you have Book of Dragons, perchance? Gareth displays the same imaginative streak here that he did there. If you liked book of Dragons, you should like this.
Some of the Planes covered are conceptually the same as MotP -- mostly the transitive planes like astral and ethereal, and elemental planes. But he provides some different details and sites and goes in different directions.
I also like the chargen stuff. I liked their approach to planar organizations better than planar hanbook (feats and short prestige classes allow more room for variety in organization). The planecrafting rules are more in-depth for players that might be interested in such things, and there are more explicit rules on things like planar barriers and keys.
He provides brand new outer planes, some of which can be used as sites in existing planes if you use some other cosmology. I especially dug Mal, which sounds like a creepy and challenging plane ripe for eerie adventure. It's a sand covered plane with tombs of green resin. The sands are really eggs of alien beetles that consume intruders to restore the souls of the race the once stood poised to spill out over the multiverse and threatens to do so again.
One new mechanical aspect is that he rates planes in several aspects on a 0 to 20 (or -10 to +10) scale.
Editing errors -- there were some, but I could tell what the intent was (for example, one scale was obviously meant to be from -10 to +10 where a random roll provided a 0 to 20 range.)
I don't think it's as imaginative or vaires as BCD, but I definitely will be getting some use out of it. I plane to use some of his sites and organizations in my River of Worlds game.
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