Death: Guardian of the Gate

[Tuerny]

Hello, at the suggestion of the publisher I thought that it would be appropriate to start a thread discussing Death: Guardian at the Gate.

My review of it and the comments made upon it by myself and said publisher can be found here.
http://www.enworld.org/d20reviews.asp?sub=yes&where=active&reviewer=Tuerny&product=LPDOD6

Do any of the other esteemed members of this board have any comments, views, and such on this newest product produced by Natural 20 Press under the Dark Quest Games imprint?

 

[Dragongirl]

Personally I think doing a book(let)/PDF what have you on a single domain to be interesting. That being said, i should say that I would rather see a product show different view points of that domain. I know a lot of work went into Lady Pale, and from what I hear it is very good background info (not heard the same about the mechanics), but I was disappointed that it only showed that one perspective. That more than anything would probably prevent me from spending money on it. I know that discussing more than one viewpoint would make each entry have much less detail, but I think it would be of more use to the general population. All just my opinion.

 

[Krug]

How does it compare with the Gur U'dok book? Since they do cover similar domains, Necromancy.

 

[Tuerny]

Actually its subject matter is only vaguely related to Gar U'dok's.

Death: Guardian of the Gate is an in-depth discussion of the faith of the goodess known as the Pale Lady. It has lots of material on rituals, the clergy's view, myths, and similar things. Basically it takes one deity and goes into great depth of detail about who and what her and her clergy are about.

Gar U'dok's is more about covering a broad amount of necromantic lore with the more flavorful bits serving to tie them together.

Death's flavor bits are good. I see lots of stuff that is worth stealing for other non-evil death faiths. Unfortunately its rule implementation is somewhat lacking and needs to be fixed if you want to use it in a more balanced campaign.

Gar U'dok's is a superior product though by virtue of its mechanical execution. If it weren't for that it would be hard to say. They could very easily compliment each other with Gar U'dok's covering the more evil end of the spectrum of death, and Guradian of the Gate covering the good end of the spectrum.

 

[MonkeyBoy]

...

I was generally impressed with this PDF when I got it, though a little dissapointed that it was so closely focussed on one deity when the general "advertising" had pushed it as a book on the death domain (which it isn't, really).

For me, its also a bit of a let down that its so heavily filled with prestige classes, and that some of the sections are quite so closely tied to a particular world. (you'd need quite a lot of tweaking to get rid of all the rogue references if you wanted to transplant the faith into another setting) This also means that the document has a fair number of "dangling references" to other parts of a setting that you don't have.

I've not looked through the rules implementation, since I tend to get truned off by PRCs in general, so I find the only approach is to look at them one at a time, when a player asks about them.

In general though, its a well written PDF, with an interesting take on a death deity. What its NOT is a comprehensive look at death deities in general, or a look at the death domain. It also wasn't detailing quite what I think of when I look for a death deity, but thats really neither here nor there...