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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Messageboard Golem" data-source="post: 2009159" data-attributes="member: 18387">This is the kind of deities book all campaign settings need.  This is darn near everything you need to play a faithful priest of a deity, or make a devout follower.  For those who play in truly high-powered campaigns, there's even some deity stats to play with.  This book has four chapters, an introduction, and an appendix.Introduction:This gives you the definitions of the deities (native and interlopers), explains pantheons, dead gods, and faiths.  Then it gives you a run-down of ranks of divine power and diety entries.  Essentially it's a mini Deities and Demigods.  Useful for statting out the deities that didn't get an expanded write-up.Chapter 1:  Major Deities of FaerunThis is simply an expanded write-up of all the deities that were given a write-up in the campaign sourcebook.  Each deity gets a stat-out, and most get avatar write-ups as well.  What I particularly liked was how they detailed when the clerics pray for their spells, how they do it, what garments they wear, and other little details.  Things like this are important for fleshing out a cleric, and give non-clerical worshiper a place to start.  Also included are general temple appearances (if any) and holy days and festivals.  This is so comprehensive that one could write out a whole Faerunian calendar and keep track of each holy day if you were so inclined.Also it gives a section in each write-up about the history and relationships between the dieties.  It's a good yardstick for determining which churches are likely to be allied or opposed.In several places appropriate unique magical items, or oft-used weapon special abilities (not included in the DMG) are included in sidebars.The majority of the art is quite good.  A few (including Lockwood's Sune) are amazing.  Another few (inlcuding Chauntea and Silvanus) range from the bad to the mildly disturbing.Chapter 2:  Other Deities of FaerunThese are all the deities that didn't get a write-up in the campaign sourcebook.  Now after wondering who the heck is the Red Knight, or wanting to give your non-human deities a little more flair and distinctiveness, you can learn everything you wanted to know.  There's over two dozen lesser-known Faerunian deities, along with the pantheons for the drow, dwarves, elves, gnomes, halflings, orcs, and the Mulhorandi pantheon.  Again, I found these informative and interesting.  No stat-outs for these deities, but with a little work with the information supplied in the introduction, you could have one in short order.However, the art in this chapter is mostly a step down.  Very few of the deities have individual pictures.  Those that do have individual ones have fairly good pictures (Beshaba's in particular is striking).  However, the majority of the pictures are these "group shots".  The art ranges from bad to worse.  Several pictures are vague and indistinct, looking as if someone smeared the picture or rubbed it with dirt before putting it into the book.  Others make the gods look laughable (elven pantheon in particular).  The dwarven pantheon is the least offensive of the lot, but that's not saying much.However, I tend to weigh the book for for the value of it's written content rather than the art.  The bad drawings are distracting, but the writing is quite good.Chapter 3:  Places of WorshipThis chapter provides three fully fleshed out holy places to drop into any campaign; The Abbey of the Sword (Tempus), the Darkhouse of Saerloon (Shar), and The Wyvernstones of Hullack (Malar).  Each write-up includes the history and background of the temple, ceremonies, services, heirarchy (with stat-blocked NPCS), initiation, allies and enemies, a map and descriptions of the rooms, breaking in (either literally or figuratively), adapting the temple, and several plot hooks to get the players involved.  A web enhancement on the Wizards website provides for a fourth, The Leaves of Learning (Oghma).These places are well planned, with a great deal of adventure potential packed into each one.  The Abbey, for example, guards several magical portals in the Underdark.  The Wyvernstones used to be sacred to Eldath, but are now corrupted by the People of the Black Blood.  Chapter 4:  Champions of FaithHere are 20 prestige classes, each one (aside from the Wearers of Purple) devoted to a particular deity.  They are, in a way, specific divine desciples.  Putting a cleric with levels of one of the appropriate prestige classes as the main villain of a plot could be quite an eye-opener for the PCs!  Particular favorites included the techsmith (Gond) that gives the PC a special contruct under their control, a strange combination of familiar and shield guardian, and the waveservent (Umberlee) that gives the PC the physical characteristics of aquatic creatures.Also included in this chapter is the template for a Chosen of Bane.  Much has been made of the fact that there was no general template for a Chosen.  However, each Chosen is so different that making a universal template would be difficult, if not impossible.  If you feel the need to have Chosen of a dozen different dieties running around your Realms campaign, go ahead and make them, using the current Chosen templates as a yardstick.  Appendix:The appendix includes the definition of the divine feats and divine salient abilities.  Also included is the Repose domain (for good-aligned death deities), and two new spells (both in the Repose domain).  The last couple pages is the table that gives a quick run-down of a deity's name, porfolio, granted domains, etc.  Finally, a similar table covers monster deities as well. (As another useful aside, there's a second web enhancement on the Wizards website that gives some deity dos and donts, along with a table about typical deity manifestations.  Very useful, I'd recommend giving it a look.) Overall this is a well-done book chock-full of information for all your divine needs.  A few art gaffs can be forgiven for such fine material.</blockquote>

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