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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Amphytrion" data-source="post: 9793460" data-attributes="member: 7046181">I finally had a chance to give Heroes of Faerûn a good look yesterday. I haven’t read it cover to cover, but I spent a good time with it. The following is from a DM perspective:Part of me likes the idea of a player-focused book. If this were truly 100% player focused, I would just skip it and move on, because I play 2014 5e, don’t think I’ll ever move to 2024, and most of these things were either available before (subclasses) or I’m unlikely to ever allow in a campaign (circle casting). But there’s quite a lot of DM material in this book, including a sort of gazetteer for the world.The gazetteer really should have been in a DM-facing product, especially since it spoils several past adventures completely and also some key surprise hooks with art (why would they choose to do that?). Otherwise it’s very brief but nice. Good art throughout, somewhat confusing organization. They really knocked gazetteers out of the park with Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount, and I wish they had followed that format mostly.The player-facing info on species is just palpably inferior to the player-facing section on races from the SCAG. The SCAG had tons of issues and a horrible gazetteer, but the Races of the Realms section was mostly great, including also brief descriptions of deities typically worshipped and some more cultural stuff. This is like a pared-down version of that, sometimes just clearly edited.The deities section itself is a vast improvement over the SCAG and I generally like it. It is disappointing not to see some key other deities that are comparably much more popular. Corellon and Moradin get named references, and Bahamut gets an easter egg, but it’d be on average more helpful to have Corellon than, say, Leira. It is not clear to me why Lolth and Eilistraee were selected but not others. Some info under some deities and their factions should also clearly be on a DM-facing side.They excelled at deities in Mythic Odysseys of Theros and I wish they had used something more similar to that, even if for a more limited number of deities. Maybe the top 10 or 20.The factions bit at the end is nice, and I love the use of concept art for all the factions. It’s not as good or as useful as the ideal treatment of factions WotC previously did in Guidmaster’s Guide to Ravnica, and I’d really have liked something more similar to that, which I repurpose constantly for multiple settings. There’s some confusion on the factions as well: why is the tourney part of the Order of the Gauntlet’s iconography, our knights templar, rather than the Purple Dragon Knights, our Camelot stand-ins?Overall, I think it’s mostly ok, but that is because I (a) have a very lengthy 5e collection and my players don’t really need these player options, and (b) have seen WotC do phenomenal work in exactly the topics covered and wish this was a bit closer to those past publications in format. I look forward to reading Adventures in Faerûn next when I have some time; I know I’ll probably like that more.</blockquote>

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