Heroes of Light

[Messageboard Golem]

Beacons of hope in a world ruled by Dark Powers, a few stalwarts stand against the forces of horror. Armed with courage, virtue and the will to strive against overwhelming evil, these heroes risk heart, mind and soul in deadly battle - sometimes against their own dark desires. Whether paladin or priest, rogue or ranger, they dedicate their efforts to bringing light into the Realm of Dread.

Heroes of Light provides a guide for creating and playing characters who stand in opposition to the pervasive evil that inhabits the world of Ravenloft. Included in this book are rules for creating and developing characters, prestige classes, information on the religions of Good in the Realm of Dread, and ideas for running campaigns focusing on the good fight.

 

[Drinnik Shoehorn]

Heroes of Light is an accessory for the Ravenloft Campaign Setting. It's 126 pages long and deals with the facets of heroism in the Demiplane of Dread. It is the companion book to Champions of Darkness. Fortunately it does not have as many failings as that book.

The introduction talks about the different stages of virtue. It is very brief and not very informative. It starts introducing rules that are mentioned no where else in Ravenloft literature. This starts on page nine when in passing it mentions "Penitent characters have a -1 penalty on their Fear and Horror Checks." To me, this is a major rule and should be made more clear and should have been mentioned in the core rules.

Chapter I details new Prestige classes, feats and the poorly written Morality rules. It has 12 new PrCs and 20 new feats. The PrCs vary in quality. Some are well written, like the True Innocent and the White Arcanist, whilst some aren't, such as the Blessed Paladin and the Blessed Defender. For some reason the authors decided to use the "Heavy Metal" quality for any Anchorite PrC. It basically means that the Anchorite must wear heavy metal armour or none at all. Most of the PrCs are unbalanced. They either demand too much from the PC taking the PrCs or give too much for too little. The clunky and unwieldy Morality rules make the PrCs difficult to use realistically. The nature of Ravenloft makes the Morality rules impossible to comply with. The powers checks detailed in the RLCS mean the character will fall from grace quickly and mean that the PC will not be able to continue the PrC.

The feats as well are unbalanced. One, called Test of Virtue which does not give the PC any benefit until they have gained a level, then it becomes the Blessed feat. The Blessed feat is a prerequisite of 8 of the feats in this book. Half of the feats in this book rely on the PC taking the Test of Virtue feat.

Chapter II deals with new Secret Societies in Ravenloft. Revealed here are four secret societies: The Blessed Army of Ezra, The Noble Brotherhood of Assassins, the Van Richten Society and the Vilushka. Of these the Van Richten Society is probably the one that will appeal to most DMs. It's a network of intellectuals and monster hunters across the Core domains. There's no formal leader and the name is merely a recognition that Van Richten brought these people together.

The Brotherhood of Noble Assassins needs to be addressed simply because it shows that the author fails to grasp the fundementals of Ravenloft. Whilst false history of lands is a given in the setting, saying that the society was founded over 200 years ago and is the nemisis of a man who is only 55 years old shows a lack of knowledge of the campaign setting.

Chapter III is rather cutely titled "Who's Blessed?" a joke on the usual "Who's Doomed?" titles of other Ravenloft NPC chapters. There are 11 NPCs, three of which are grouped together in a group called "The Wanderers." The most annoying thing about this chapter is the fact that none of the NPCs use ANY of the PrCs or feats introduced in Chapter I! The NPCs are the strongest factor of this book. Ravenloft has always been a world where the characters are important and none of the characters here lack like the ones in Champions of Darkness.

Of the NPCs the strongest character-wise is Shih Suren, a Caliban Paladin (Calibans are Ravenloft's equivelent of Half-Orcs. Orcs do not exist in Ravenloft). He looks like a man with a tiger's head due to a curse on his father. He wants to be accepted by people and fears necromancy. He hails from the land of Rokushima Taiyoo, a land based on feudal Japan. The Wanderers are the reminants of a gypsy caravan decimated in the novel Spectre of the Black Rose. They are three Vistani men and one Stone Giant.

Chapter IV deals with establishing a Heroic campaign. It deals with themes such as romance, tragedy, heroism and triumph.


GOOD POINTS: Heroes of Light's strongest asset is it's NPCs they are all interesting. They can be easily inserted into any campaign and are even useful outside of the Land of Dread. The secret societies are also strong. The Brotherhood needs slight tweaking, but they are all useful.

BAD POINTS: The PrC and the feats are unbalanced. They also are unwieldy due to the Morality system. This hurts the book in a major way.

THE RESULT: Heroes of Light is a good book. It is not a great book. It lacks in places and the PrCs bring the book down. The over reliance on the Blessed feat also hurts the book.

 

[frandelgearslip]

This product is $21.95 for 126 pages. The text density is average and there are some gaping white spaces at the end of each chapter.

The book begins with some rules for morality that are overly clunky and add little to the setting. Essentially they add extra rules and states for being good in the ravenloft setting. There is no reason for these rules, as there is already a little thing called alignment. Unfortunately the majority of the book is based around the morality rules meaning that to use the feats and prestige classes one has to use the severely overcomplicated rules.

ch1 prestige classes and feats: First off there are two anchorite classes in this chapter, which is not neccesary since an anchorite prestige class has already been detailed in a previous books. Furthermore the prestige classes have a strange requirement requiring them to only wear heavy armor or no armor at all. This is really strange as the anchorites are described in detail in other products and there is no mention of this requirement elsewhere. Really the author should talk with others before doing things unilaterally. Both of these prestige classes also violate the fundamental rules of ravenloft in several of there abiltities, including restrictions on crossing closed domain borders and the use of divination. The blessed defender and blessed paladin are classes that are very similar and really shouldn't be two seperate prestige classes. Also both prestige classes don't fit the setting since both treat darklords as nothing more then extra powerful villians there for the killing. The absolute worse prestige class is the metaphysician which includes the feat trustworthy in its requirements, which is detailed in one of the wotc class books, why it requires a feat from a random wotc class book is unknown to me. Furthermore the classes most powerful ability is astral projection, the problem with that being that astral projection is banned in ravenloft.

The feats are not much better. The feats resolute, sancitity, and sanity are simply renamed feats from the campaign setting book (courage, jaded and open mind). Other feats such as unicorns fellowship violate the fundamental rules of the setting. The worst feat though is conscience which works with regards to power checks in the same way that consience works with regards to humanity in vampire the masquerade game. Not even counting the fact that consience has nothing to do with power checks, its pretty ridiculous to port over a rule from vampire the masquerade. I guess the company lied when it claimed it would keep ravenloft different from the worlds of darkness settings.

ch2 organizations: This chapter deals with 4 organizations in the setting. There is the blessed army of ezra a group of worshippers who have had visions that one of the other sects of ezra has been coopted by a demon. I actually plan to use this in my campaign though I plan on making the visions false. There is the noble brotherhood of assasions, which is a group of nobles who assisinate the reputations of evil nobles. In general it is an interesting idea and fits the tone of the domain it is based in. There is the van richtens society which is given a little info, but not really all that much useful information, since it all boils down to a group of scholars who trade information. The vilushka is a group of half vistani adventurers and probably the least interesting of the groups.

ch3 npcs: The npcs are described well and there are no glaring mistakes in there stats. The best of the npcs are the wanderers a small group of vistani's intimately connected to the history of sithicus one of the domains of ravenloft. ch4 is info on running campaigns and is the fairly lackluster type of information common to these types of sections.

In the end the information is okay and the book would have gotten a 3, except that the whole first chapter is extremely broken. The other chapters are useful and interesting.

 

[Darrius Adler]

If you think the inclusion of Trustworthy is annoying, they have Sharp-Eyed listed as a bonus feat for the Detective PrC. I have only been able to locate the Sharp-Eyed feat in the d20 Call of Cthulhu. Apparently they were not happy with just using D&D books for feats.

 

[frandelgearslip]

I believe the feat is also in the star wars rpg book. I had forgotten about the sharp-eyed feat.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

I can't really disagree with your assesments. All i can say is i found plenty of useful material that i would have rated it a average. But I really can't say you are wrong to give it a poor either.

 

[Joël of the FoS]

A companion book to Champions of Darkness, I was quite afraid when I purchased Heroes of Light a month after the first book. Thankfully, it is much better. The book introduces new ways to characterize gradations in virtue. Well made, IMHO, but difficult to maintain. The new PrCs are much more useful and relevant then those in CoD.

The good: Anchorite Inquisitor (with the cool candle communion ability), Blessed Defender, True Innocent (for NPCs with the highest virtue; get some divine powers from their inner strenght), White Arcanist (cool return)

The average: Anchorite Wanderer, Black-powder Avenger, Blessed Paladin (with the weird Last Stand ability - no wonder they loose one point of wisdom ! ), Detective, Dilettante ( a good NPC class, but not for PC IMHO), Knight Errand

The weird: metaphycisian, scholar

The new feats are less silly then in CoD, and most are geared toward roleplay, which is good - check Test of Virtue for example.

Chapter two presents good secret societies. Many adventure hooks in these pages.

Chapter three is a bunch of good NPCs. Most are quite cool and colorful (Patrick Connor, Kattinker Tatters) while Eia Pax is a little too powerful to my taste (next Saturday night: Eia Pax against Mrs Shadowborn herself !) (but her drawing is cool). However, none of them uses the PRCs and the feats introduced in the book.

The chapters ends with the great Wanderers from Spectre of the Black Rose. Great stuff !

Chapter four has guidelines for DMing Heroic Campaign. Good advices.

OK book. 3 out of 5.