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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gothmog" data-source="post: 1708273" data-attributes="member: 317">Hey Joshua,I got Darkness & Dread a month or two ago when it came out.  I was really excited about this book, both for the horror aspect, and because Mike Mearls wrote it.  Overall its a decent book, but it didn't live up to my expectations.  The classes are ok, but for a very low magic game, and something more investigative than combat-oriented.  Don't get me wrong, the classes were well done, but you couldn't really use them with standard D&D classes without the D&D ones overshadowing the Darkness & Dread classes.  The madness and black magic chapters are probably the highlights of the book, with cool ways to incorporate madness without it being all or none (like CoC), and black magic is scary and powerful.  The research chapter is pretty good as well, but won't appeal to people who want a more action-packed campaign.The last section of the book, dealing with running horror adventures, was the least useful to me.  I already had the old ICE book Nightmares of Mine (highly recommended), so the tips for running horror adventures were rather bland and self-evident.  Plus, if you've ever run a CoC campaign or horror game, you've already liekly read much more in-depth tips for how to run a good horror game.  The sample setting in the book was ok, but nothing too exciting either.It seems to me that in order to get maximum use out of Darkness & Dread, you'd have to design a campaign around it from the beginning.  Its not a universal toolkit, but more of a primer for starting a horror campaign from scratch.  The only things easily transposable out of the book are the madness and black magic rules- both of which are quite good.  So I guess I've give this book a qualified thumbs up- not too useful for experienced horror/dark fantasy DMs, but good for novices.</blockquote>

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