Time for Everquest to embrace the power.
Heroes of Norrath
Everquest Role-Playing Game
Written by Carl Gilchrist
Published by Sword & Sorcery (White Wolf)
126 black and white pages
$22.99
So the thirty levels in the core Everquest game aren’t enough to satiate your thirst for power? Then open up Heroes of Norrath and expand your options up to level 35 with new abilities for all the core classes, a ton of new spells and new monsters to ally yourself with.
The book uses standard two-column layout with a gilded border around it. Tabs at the outer edge on the top of the page are used to indicate chapter and section of the book. Interior artists are all top notch including David Griffith, Brian LeBlanc (familiar to Necromancer games fans no doubt) and Tyler Walpole. Each adds some great illustrations to this book and make it a visually striking book.
The bad news is that there are seven pages of advertisements in this book. Some of them for the novel tie ins to the series, some for the recently released Everquest II rpg and even for the online game. Too much advertising cutting deeply into the page utility of the book, not counting of course the OGL license or reprinted cover in black and white in the interior.
The book starts with how to augment the classes, starting ironically enough with ‘non-heroic’ class abilities, things that can be selected from a list of options in the EQ: Player’s Handbook. These include a wide variety of new abilities like divine powers for clerics or new death masteries for necromancers. It’s a brief section that allows characters not up to the levels here to still gain some use from the book.
To handle the expanded increase in level, there are new tables for experience point awards and advancement for characters from 1st to 35th level.
Heroic characters, those that are past 30th level, have new tables that show available spell level by spellcaster’s level, not only for dedicated spellcasters, but also hybrid casters.
One interesting thing is that when looking at the classes, it provides some role playing ideas, as well as specific roles that the core classes assume, such as chronicler, journeyer, maestro, minstrel and thespian for the bard, as well as history, famous personages, and then the game rules. Up to the game rules, these ideas would work well for any player new to roleplaying looking for more background opportunities or for players who don’t know what role they’d like their character to assume. Do you want that cleric to be a healer? Is the cleric a templar?
The game information includes all the details from 31st to 35th level and the expanded table includes the standard level, base attack bonus, saving throws, and special abilities, which are detailed under the text after hit dice, and skill points per level.
The abilities vary but tend to follow the earlier progressions. For example the warrior gains “warrior ability” at every level after 30th and can select from several options. They can either take a feat , use furiour rampage, using the feat Whirlwind Attack as a regular attack rather than a full-attack, Living Shield, where the warrior can take a blow meant for another ally near him, or other abilities like Mettle, Shield, Stalwart, Tactical Mastery, Two-Weapon Mastery and War Cry. Having multiple options allows the player to customize his character, helping to prevent copy character syndrome where all characters of that level look alike.
The second chapter, Songs and Spells, takes up a good portion of the book. It’s arrange by class, then level. Because of the expansion of the levels, the casters have access to new levels of spells. For example, how about an 18th level druid spell like Winter[‘s Frost that does (8d6+5) x 10 cold damage or restore some of that damage with a 13th level paladin spell, Touch of Nife (which might be Life, but who can tell with these typos eh?) which heals (5d10) x 10 hit points of damage.
Most of the spells are designed around attack or defense with a few designed for healing or influencing other magics like Annual Magic, a 13th level ranger spell that cancels the effects of three spells or items. In many instances, this makes the spell features, such as level, spell line, mana, etc, longer than the actual spell description. You get a block for the stats and than a line and a half for the spells details.
Chapter three, pets and warders, provides details includes details on new monsters, some that the caster turns into or summons, using the spells previously described. These monsters follow the 3.5 edition of stats including a regular attack listing, and a full-attack listing with details for each attack, so instead of writing 2 claws +9, they write 2 claws +9/+9, in the hope of easing some of the potential confusion in the game.
Most of the monsters are in the mid to high teens in terms of challenge ratings and can act as near epic enemies for standard Everquest games or in some cases, when other Everquest information is minimized, in a standard d20 fantasy game.
Between the spells and monsters and augmentations for characters, we get a lot of details on the iconic characters as we discover what they’re doing at this, the end of their careers, the end of the world of Norrath as it once was, leading up to Everquest II with snippets of fiction and the original art included from the Everquest PHB for ease of identification. It’s fair stuff and of more interest to someone closely following the ways of the world as opposed to a casual reader like myself.
In terms of coverage, the book does a good job, but needs a little more. For example, where are the ‘heroic’ items that characters of this level should face? While the Monsters of Everquest core book has enough creatures of appropriate challenge rating to face even characters of this level, it would’ve been nice to see a few more higher end creatures, making this book more like Warcraft’s epic level expansion.
The material to augment standard Everquest characters is well handled. By including more than just game mechanics, the authors have given game masters and players of any game system something to read over or think about. For those looking to expand the scope of their Everquest game, Heroes of Norrath is the first place to look.
