Deities & Demigods vs Faiths & Pantheons

[Vecna]

I couldn´t care less about the stats of the gods or their avatars?

What I want is the description of the church, their dogmas, PrC for Clerics and others servants of the faith?

The interrelations of the gods and faiths etc

While churchs, dogmas... are things that surely should not be missing from the book, remember that an important event in the FR history was the Time of Troubles, when gods walked the earth.
Me too I'm not interested in stats for the deities which can be found in D&Dg, but in FR gods are very real!

However, should be 20 PrC in the book.
Will they be all divine (divine spellcasting as a prereq)?

 

[ruleslawyer]

My guess is that, as with pretty much every cap book and supplement, there'll be PrCs for everyone; it's just that all will have a divine flavor. So we probably will have variations on the Arcane Devotee, Divine Champion, Divine Disciple, and Divine Seeker. My guess is that assuming they keep F&P in line with 2e materials, the PrCs in the book will be for the "Affiliated Orders" described in F&A, P&P, and DD.

As for stats for deities: I agree with sword-dancer and enrious. I concede the point that it's better to detail the stats and allow DMs to use them or ignore them as they see fit, but I still say that for me, those stats are a waste of space that could be better spent on detailing holy places, artifacts, new spells, dogma, rituals, holy days, deity-linked adventure hooks, and divine feats, skill uses, and a PrC or two. I don't really care what neat abilities Odin, Pelor, or Mystra has; the abilities that their priests have, OTOH...

The point about the gods in FR actually having walked the earth doesn't really hold water, because the FR gods were in mortal form and therefore not "deities," as such. Moreover, it's unlikely that such an event ever will occur again, so having stats for the avatars is like having the details for 12th-level Netherese spells; kinda irrelevant.

 

[Erik Mona]

There are not prestige classes for every god. I sort of wish there were, honestly, but we didn't have the space for that sort of thing and the folks who planned what was going to be in the book wanted to keep some of the prestige classes more general (which is something I do agree with, as it means more utility for everyone).

There's not a lot of "recovered ground" in the F&P prestige classes. For instance, you _won't_ see versions of the divine seeker, divine champion, etc. as ruleslawyer suggests in his last post.

As someone upthread said, and as Rich Baker has confirmed elsewhere on the net, the book includes full write-ups (about the size of those in Deities & Demigods, but maybe a little longer because both Eric Boyd and I tend to write "long") of the 30 "core" FR gods that appear in the FRCS. It includes FRCS write ups of pretty much every other deity that appeared in the three second edition god books, as well as a few who never appeared in those books. There are also some temples with maps and tons of story hooks.

I haven't seen the final version, so I can't speak as to how much crossover there is with Deities & Demigods insofar as salient divine abilities goes, but my guess would be that the book contains as little of that information as possible while still making it possible to use F&P without owning Deities & Demigods.

Someone upthread asked what I'd done for the book. Minus the biolerplate rules stuff and lists of gods, which were done in-house by the FR design team, I did about a third of the book. I think I covered 11 of the core gods (this is from memory, so it may be more or less than that), including Azuth, Selune, Shar, Tyr, Torm, Bane, Chauntea, Tymora and a few others. I did five or six prestige classes, about a half dozen of the small write-ups of human gods (Garagos and Denier for sure) and all the halfling and dwarf gods. I also designed one of the temples, associated with one of the deities in the above list. It's probably the "darkest" of all the temples in the book and one of the nastiest things I've written yet, but I've only skimmed the three or four temples Eric Boyd did.

I'm eager for the book to come out. I think my stuff is pretty good, and Eric's material ought to make long-time Realms fans drool with delight. The art is absolutely top notch, a step above even our best looking books (in my opinion, at least). Designing a book with such intensive number crunching was tedious in the extreme, but the "ideas" part of the project was really fun and rewarding. I'm proud to have my name on that book, and eagerly await the online reaction to some of the little bombs we planted in our text.

Erik

 

[Florin]

...I think I covered 11 of the core gods (this is from memory, so it may be more or less than that), including Azuth, Selune, Shar, Tyr, Torm, Bane, Chauntea, Tymora and a few others... I also designed one of the temples, associated with one of the deities in the above list. It's probably the "darkest" of all the temples in the book and one of the nastiest things I've written yet...

So, ya think he did Shar's temple or what?

 

[Paladin]

Erik-

Can you tell us if there are any "Chosen of" templates?

 

[Erik Mona]

I _could_ tell you, sure. I'm not sure I'm supposed to. I suggest asking on the WotC FR boards, and maybe Rich Baker can give you an official answer. I certainly know a lot of people would like to see such information in the book.

--Erik

 

[Aaron L]

So that's a yes?

 

[seankreynolds]

Now I'm guessing here, but I'd imagine that the pages explaining how the entries work will be reprinted, possibly in a slightly condensed form, but that this would only be 2-5 pages or so. Think Monsters of Faerun in relation to the Monster Manual. Then the rest of the book would be write ups and stats of the FR gods, which won't appear in Dieties & Demigods, hence are not reprints.

That's a pretty accurate estimate of the situation.

 

[seankreynolds]

I'm eager for the book to come out.

As am I. Erik did excellent work on this book and I'm glad we were able to get him to work on it. I was the developer on the book, which meant that I synched up stuff with other books*, double-checked the new rules for balance and playability, and figured out what parts of the book needed extra playtesting. I think everyone who plays FR is going to want this book, and even people who aren't into FR might want to pick it up for the prestige classes and lootability of some of the other deities in the book.

*Note: I didn't handle the "god stats" part of the book." That was handled by Penny Williams, who also edited Deities & Demigods, and she worked hard to make that stuff work with the DDG rules (a necessary step, as the draft of the DDG that Erik and Eric used went through some changes before reaching its current version, so the F&P text relating to that had to be updated to account for the changes). Penny talked to me a lot about various FR-related issues so she could best address the "god stats" of the deities--questions like these:

"Deity X needs 20 more class levels. What classes would be best for that?"
"Deity X has blackguard levels. What sort of fiendish servant should he have?"
"Deity X has levels in wizard. What would be a good familiar for him?"
"Deity X has 15 ranger levels. What favored enemies should she have?"

And so on.

Anyway, it's a kickass book from a rules standpoint, from an FR standpoint, and from an art standpoint. I'm really proud that my name is in the book (even if it's not on the cover, ::sniff, sniff:.

 

[Nightfall]

Ah don't worry Sean, I'll buy you next release from Malhavoc for sure.