Another adventure series or monster manual?
Glades of Death
Written by Patrick Lawinger, Jeff Harkness and Gary Schotter
Published by Necromancer Games
www.necromancergames.com
ISBN: 1-58846-791-0
200 b & w pages
$29.99
Glades of Death is a bit of a change of pace from most Necromancer products. Not a full adventure nor a full setting, Glades takes a look at how the typical woodlands can fit into your campaign and adds different game mechanics with four new adventures for GMs.
One thing I’m glad of the cover, is that it’s not another rip off of the original Player’s Handbook. Back in 2000 when it first came out, that was new and imitation was flattering. Now it’s cheap looking. Glades uses the standard two-column layout, but the skulls from most Necromancer adventurers that border the outer edge are gone, replaced by some type of faded background. Text use is good, save for when a chapter ends, as most have space that ranges from a third of the page to over half the page as just blank white space. Art varies, with most of what I’d consider bad art, coming in at the appendix. Brian Leblanc does a lot of the work on the early chapters and does some fantastic detailing, especially on the individual links of chain mail on the dwarf on page 24 and the forest maiden on page 26. Ed Bourelle from Skeletonkey Games, handles the cartography and does his usual bang up job.
The introduction, “Into the Glades”, is a brief overview of the book and of forest in general. Chapter two moves into how to create a fantasy forest, but doesn’t really get deep into it, more or less general ideas about how different types of forest, deciduous, evergreen, rainforest, and tropical rainforests and jungles would work, in addition to the use of magic and ecology, as well as setting up encounters and lairs of monsters. It’s a brief section and of use to GMs who may not have been bombed with similar information in numerous other products. For me, some of the more useful bits were the tables and steps in creating a forest “on the fly” including tables on the general population, rulers, typical encounters, hunting parties, traps and other goods found in a forest.
In terms of game mechanics, many of the notes work on the assumption that the skills are going to be used in a forest environment. For example, the modifiers to spot at a distance are much heavier in a dense forest than just the standard –1 per 10 feet. Moving silently through a forest can either be helped or hindered depending on the conditions. Is the ground wet and moist or mossy with dry debris? A lot of the feats are aimed at the natives of the forest as opposed to being interesting to players who may wander all over the campaign setting and through the planes.
For example, Animal Mastery gives you a bonus to Handle Animal skill checks, but it’s big benefit is the use of Wild Empathy to improve the attitude of an animal. Plant Critical allows you to study a plant creature and determine its vulnerability, allowing you to critical it.
Spells are broken up in alphabetical order and are aimed at the forest. These range from Blades of Jade, a 6th level Druid spell that makes the plants razor sharp, dealing damage to those who walk through the area that also reduces their movement. Damage depends on how thick the underbrush is.
Those more interested in equipping their characters will enjoy the new items ranging from birding arrows, used to knock out small birds and maintain their feathers, to artifacts like White Fury, a powerful holy composite longbow.
GMs will enjoy the new monsters and hazards. We have a few new treants like the lightning treant and the quenching treant. The former has some spellcasting ability and that includes a few lighting based spells, but the quenching treant has a foam blast that can absorb magical fire damage.
The adventures include two short ones, Howl of the Wolf and Niavark’s Revenge, and two more lengthy scenarios, Timber Rivalry and Canyons of Arcuri. The shorter adventures are a bit of a disappointment for those looking for anything more detailed than what is essential a grouping of random encounters. It’s good to have the game stats fully fleshed out and the maps and art add some professional elements, but Howl of the Wolf and Niavark’s Revenger are short on overall ‘feel’. Of the two, Niavark’s Revenge, if it can be worked into the campaign early, can add some great campaign elements as Niavark is a druid who hunts down those who seek out magic and magic items. This includes most wizards and sorcerers and of course adventurers. To make matters more favorable for himself, he has his own demi-plane with many minions and allies of great power. Perfect for ending a high-level campaign as it’s a 17th-19th level adventure.
Timber Rivalry, designed for 2nd-4th level characters, isn’t about crawling around in dungeons. Rather it’s about finding out what’s happening in Carson’s Mill as many loggers haven’t been sending in their usual amount of logs. This adventure is solid on many levels. First, it doesn’t have a single bad guy. There are numerous factions that the players will have to engage. Some of them not-even human. This allows the GM to weave in themes of prejudice as well as weave some of the old “druids are always for the natural order” bit around his players.
Canyons of Arcuri is another adventure that doesn’t rely on a long-dungeon crawl to get the players going. Instead, the players, using one of the adventure hooks provided, start off in Storm Haven, a small village, and move into the canyons. Ideally, they’ll discover some information about the nearly extinct religion of Arden and help to bring this goodly aligned deity back into the spotlight, but along the way, they’ll have opportunities to help some worshippers of Arden who’ve degenerated into tree living primitives, explore the canyons and fight their menaces, including giant rocs and bugbears and discover the final fate of the original Arden worshippers who sought safety in these canyons. Of course this doesn’t count second party interference from individuals like the Dogs of Orcus, a group out for their own goals and treasures or the Knights of the Wasp, hobgoblins who’ve tamed giant wasps as mounts.
Canyons offers the players opportunities to engage their role playing skills among both the good and evil factions, as evil doesn’t even get along with itself at all times, as well as crank out the damage against many unique foes like Crab Bawm, an ettin fighter with his own bet dragon known only as “Bad Lizard”.
Game stats are not provided for casual encounters and the GM will have to refer to the Monster Manual and the Tome of Horrors or the appendix for run of the mill creatures. For unique monsters, those with character classes for example, full stats are provided.
My biggest problem with this book is the amount of reprinted monsters from the Tome of Horrors. All through the text, we’re referenced to the Tome of Horrors or the Appendix. Since the monsters are all here, why not just a reference to the Appendix? But more annoying than the flipping, is the fact that so many pages are used on updating these old monsters.
For me, I’m one of those people waiting for an updated Tome of Horrors to 3.5 rules. Fans have been told that due to the size of the book and the changes in printing cost, that it would be too expensive and unprofitable. Okay, I can accept that. However, it hasn’t stopped Necromancer from reprinting Tome of Horrors monsters in several books, eating up numerous pages. In this book, it goes from being a few pages to almost a third of the book. And yet, it’s too expensive to reprint the Tome of Horrors? Can those monsters only be reprinted then when another project can lessen the cost?
While I enjoy seeing some new art on some of the illustrations, let’s be honest in that many of these monsters didn’t need to be updated and certainly not in this book. The swamp troll is not so unique and different that another brute monster couldn’t replace it. The Al-mi’raj, a horned rabbit, is not crucial to any plot lines in this book. The skunk while amusing certainly doesn’t need a full page, nor do the moose, fox, and deer. While the gorilla bear is interesting, there is nothing wrong with the original cross breed monster, the owl bear.
Add the number of monsters here from over forty pages to the new monsters introduced in the book and you’re left with a sourcebook that’s more monster manual than adventure.
For me, I hope that Necromancer either goes the way of the sourcebook and gets rid of the adventures, or goes the way of the adventures and leaves the source material where it belongs, in the sourcebooks.
Glades is a great buy for those who don’t own Tome of Horrors and want adventures with lots of new monsters. It’s good for those who don’t plan on buying the “soon” to be released Tome of Horrors PDF and want some updated monsters in a hardcopy format. It is not for those seeking pure adventures to run their characters through.
