In my reviews I rarely give 1's, just as I rarely give 5's. While production qualities matter, the content is what determines a final rating. Good pictures or unique ideas won't save a product from a poor review, but it might push a good one slightly higher. Functionality first, then the flash if you please. Price is also generally taken into consideration. A quick summary of my personal ratings:
1 - Lazy, incomplete, shoddy effort. So disgusted I'm likely only to open it again to review it.
2 - Below average. Not completely unhappy I bought it since it probably has some good ideas.
3 - Average/Good. I got approximately what I expected in terms of content and quality. No major flaws and useful.
4 - Very Good. I got more than I expected. Inspired me enough to think about using it down the road.
5 - Excellent. The cream of the industry. I immediately want to use it somewhere. Excellent production values.
This book is a Campaign Setting for a world that has a very Tolkein-ish feel to it (the fact of where the inspiration came from has been confirmed by the authors more than once) with one minor difference. Saur.. errr, Izrador won the final battle. Seriously, I won't make any more such comparisons or 'slips of the tongue' because once you read the book, while the insipration is obvious, there's a large amount of ingenuity, uniqueness and love that went into this campaign world. The overall feeling might be familiar but it comes across as a world of its own. One other thing that strikes immediately after reading it is that they've listened to comments on other campaign settings. This book is one of the most complete sourcebooks available for any setting. It does require the Player's Handbook (and for parts, also the Psionicist's Handbook, the DMG and the MM) On to the review:
Production Quality: Ok, I lied, I'm going to make one more comparison to one of the inspirations for the game. The boundary of the book has a somewhat similar look to Decipher's LotR RPG book, though the background is darker in Midnight, and the base color is textured to look like that of old, worn stone. The picture shows one of the Night Kings (one of the four servants of the dark god, Izrador) standing atop the tower of Theros Obsidia in the former center of learning in the human lands, Highwall. It's probably night, though it might be the smoke from a burning part of the otherwise dark city that darkens the sky, and there's an orange tint. A Goblin servitor bows behind the Night King and dragons can be seen in the sky overhead. The back shows the same general look, and the picture there is of a Legate with his Astirax charges (incorporeal creatures that can sense and drain magical energy). The first introductory part of the book follows the format FFG started with Dragonstar, being on glossy pages and in color. The map is a thing of beauty, and while I didn't care for the somewhat larger symbols for cities, fortresses and towns at first, they don't distract anymore. It looks almost like it was taken by a satellite. The only issue I have with the map is that it's not a pull-out, nor is it on the inside covers where it would be on sturdier paper. I hope the map is offered as a PDF file down the road, or at least a pull-out is available in the next supplement. I don't really like the glossy, colored section of the book.. and for an unusual reason, it makes me wish the rest of the book were in this format! The rest of the book is in the standard FFG black and white and slightly newspaperish feeling paper. By that I mean it feels just a bit coarse, and I've noticed black ink stains on my fingers if I hold a section too long (fortunately very light, and it hasn't smeared the book yet). All of the art is uniformly good to excellent in my opinion, except for one piece that had what felt like a completely different style than the others (page 216 for those interested - it's good artwork, but just didn't seem to fit). The headings are quite obvious, the heading sections are consistently done and there's good use of white space and sidebars to break up the reading.
Production quality score: 4 (Except for the niggles above, I'd give it a 5, and that's mainly opinion anyhow. Nevertheless I rate by rounding towards a 3, so something has to be close to perfect to get a 5. I really don't like the paper quality, even if it's sturdy enough it just feels too much like I'm reading on newspaper pages).
Content:
Introduction: Here you get a brief overview of the entire setting, some stories in sidebars relating to specific events that will be described more fully later, information on how Midnight differs from an average AD&D campaign, etc. It's well done, and whets the appetite for more. The artwork in this section is full color and for the most part, beautiful (if dark in mood). Briefly, for those wondering, a dark god fought other gods a long time ago and was cast out of heaven to Aryth (the world). As he fell, he used the last of his strength to draw a veil between Aryth and the heavens, cutting the gods off from Aryth in an event known as the Sundering. No longer were the clerics able to receive spells or even direct contact with their gods, in all respects it was as if they ceased to exist as far as the people of Aryth were concerned. Over time, The Shadow of the North (Izrador) regained his strength and began corrupting the minds of a dwarven offshoot. These beings became the orcs. Elves and Dwarves were offshoots of a race before them called the elthedar that are only known by their ruins. Gnomes and halflings appear to be offshoots of dwarves and elves respectively. Three times, Izrador's armies came from the north and attacked the continent of Eredane (and presumably other places on Aryth). Twice they were rebuffed. The third time they won, and now the human areas in the center of Eredane are under the Shadow's control, while the Shadow's armies now fight to destroy any memory of the elves in their forest to the west, and the dwarves in their mountains to the east.
Chapter 1: Characters - Here you get information on the races, classes, heroic paths, feats and new weapons of Midnight. The races possible are elves (and four offshoots - wood elves, snow elves, "wild" elves in the southern jungles, and sea elves on the western shore of Eredane), dwarves (in the eastern mountains), human (three races - two being the Dorn and Sarcosans, another being a mix of the above two), halflings (which are mostly nomads on the plains if free, otherwise they live in constant slavery under the orcs) and gnomes (the race most left alone.. they're a rivergoing race, living on barges and barques, once master traders before the economy was shattered - and they seem to have sold out to the Shadow - easy since the orcs hate water, but in reality use their position to get information, weapons, magic items across Aryth for the resistance). Additionally, orcs are described and some half breeds. There are no half elves, since humans are considered to have come from different initial stock, instead you have elflings (elves + halflings), dwarrow (gnomes + dwarves) and dworgs (orcs + dwarves). Each race and group within, have their own special abilities above and beyond the normal AD&D races. Elves, halflings and gnomes for instance all have the ability to cast chosen cantrips as an innate ability, and there are other special abilities to further add flavor to the world.
The classes are where the biggest shock will come into play. The basic classes have only three holdovers from original AD&D: the fighter, the rogue and the barbarian. Astute readers will notice that these are the three non-spellcasting classes. Skimming a bit further, you'll notice that the Wizard and Druid are also present, but as prestige classes. The new base classes are Channeler (the core spellcasting class), Defender (think monk without any innate spellcasting ability), Wildlander (think Ranger without any innate spellcasting ability) and the Legate (the only clerics in the game and since they draw their power from the fallen god - Izrador - they legates are intended to be NPCs).
While the new classes could be considered old classes without spellcasting abilities, they have their own set of abilities at each level, some of which make up a bit for the overall rarity of magic (as will be discussed in chapter 2). The Prestige Classes include the Druid, Wizard, Insurgent Spy (the picture makes them look like a geisha, but the abilities deal with contacts among insurgents, ways to better intimidate minions of the shadow, etc) and the Freerider (horsemen - just about the only 'free' insurgents in human lands).
Then we come to something new, the Heroic Paths. PCs are all special individuals, more so than in standard AD&D. The best way to view these Heroic Paths is as a permanent secondary class that only gives new class abilities (sometimes spell-like abilities) at each level. These paths are inborn so a new character has to choose the one she starts with, and can't add new ones. Examples include Chanceborn (lucky), Charismatic (enchanting and uplifting abilities), feyblooded, Guardian (kinda paladin like), healer, juggernaut, naturefriend and quite a few more.
One of the nice things about these are that combined with a character class, you can recreate the standard AD&D classes at least to some extent. Healing is quite rare in this game comparitively, so by adding the Healing path to a character you create a poor man's cleric. Some of the paths are completely unique to the game. One of my first complaints comes in this section though as two of the paths (Mystic and Mentalist) use spell-like abilities based on the Psionicist's Handbook (I assume this anyhow since I don't have that book, but the abilities don't have corresponding PHB spells) and this isn't mentioned anywhere in the description of those paths.
Some new feats are added, including Magecraft which any character can take and makes Spellcraft a class skill for the character. Yes, any character class can also be a spellcaster. In effect, spellcasting is completely independent of what classes you have, although certain classes make spellcasting in this magic system much easier. Spellcasting is also the name of a feat, and it allows the character to take a school of magic. Greater spellcasting allows you to take one of the two greater schools of magic (greater conjuration and greater evocation) if you already have one of the lesser schools of the same name. When one flips to the back of the book and realizes that these 'new' schools have such spells as Summon Monster I, Magic Missile, Fireball. And then realizes that it takes a 7th level character just to cast a first level spell (Magic Missile for instance) in one of these schools.. well, the changes to magic become even more obvious.
Finally, a few new weapons are described, generally one for each race to given them more flavor.
Chapter 2: Magic - Ok, so I've touched on the fact that magic is different. Except for the Legates (which use standard Cleric rules), all other spellcasting follows the below format. Each character that takes "Magecraft" must choose a tradition of magic. These traditions are charismatic, hermetic and spiritual. If you have channeler classes, you gain a special gift dependent on which tradition you take (Master of Two Worlds is the spiritual gift, and allows you to command animals and plants like a cleric could the undead). A channeler also gets Magecraft as a free feat along with the Universal and Transmutation schools and one other of their choice. They also get five cantrips, and three 1st level spells of their choice.
Other characters have to use a long and torturous process to get spells. Once you take Magecraft, each character has a number of spellpoints based on their level and appropriate ability modifier (INT for Hermetic, WIS for spiritual and CHA for charismatic). A character can learn spells from the schools they know (through the spellcasting feat) if the spell level is half of their current level (+1 if they have more classes in Channeler, Wizard and/or Druid than any other class - this is why a 1st level Channeler can know 1st level spells). The methods for learning spells require varying amounts of time, experience and equivalent of gold and can often be quests in their own right.
When casting a spell, a character doesn't have to have prepared them in advance (although a wizard can do so, reducing the amount of spell energy they cost to cast). A character can cast any spell they know at any time and the level of the spell is the number of spellpoints required to be drawn from their spell pool. When this energy is used up, the character can still cast spells but he takes temporary constitution damage equivalent to the spell level. Both the energy and the constitution damage can be recovered with a good night's sleep. There are also rules for ritual magic (extremely slow casting method requiring full concentration but it causes less damage to constitution and doesn't use any spell points - in other words, use for extremely powerful, area type spells).
Creating magic items is also covered. Simply put, magic items are very rare since they're outlawed by Izrador except for his forces. They can be created only by taking the appropriate materials to a power nexus and draining energy from the nexus (amount dependent on the types of enchantments you wish to put on the item). This obviously will usually be a quest for the characters. New magic items are listed, including charms. Charms have four power levels, and the first three are one shot items. They emit no magic aura until they're used, and then they give a brief one time bonus (like +2 to luck). True Charms give their benefit constantly and don't detect as magic. All Charms tend to look like a normal, everyday item so's not to be suspicious to the Legates.
The most interesting magic items are the Covenant Items. Basically, these are objects (weapons, armor, etc) that never have to be identified (they reveal themselves to a worthy owner) and increase in power as the character increases in level. This is a very nice concept in my mind, and one that makes up for the overall lack of magic items in the game. when someone finds such an item, there's always something new to learn about it.
Chapter 3: Eredane - This is an overall look at the continent, including a more detailed history, the economic status (basically a barter system where a bag of gold is probably less valuable to most people than if you offered them enough food for a day, and where diamonds are likely to be used as sling "stones"), and a quick overview of the geography and the languages.
Chapters 4-9: Here you have an overview of each major area on Eredane: the Erethor - forest of the elves; the north, central and south plains where humans, gnomes, halflings, orcs and legates roam; the Kaladrun mountains where the dwarves live. Each section has an overview, the history, government, people, settlements, trade and craft, language, religion, ways and traditions, sites and a section "Against the Shadow" which describes both Izrador's minions and effects on the region and the insurgents who fight against him. These sections are very well written with only the occasional typo, and really give a good feeling for the ancient history of the area and the current status. My favorite area was Erethor, including how the Wood itself is becoming the Whispering Wood which incorporates the souls of deceased elves to spy on the enemy. One has to wonder if these souls will eventually go insane (as most undead souls do) and become a threat to the elves themselves (only a minor hint at a worry as to what the Whispering Wood might become is given though).
Chapter 10: The Shadow in the North - Here you get a description of the Orcs, Izrador's true goals (he is attempting to drain Aryth of all magic through the use of Black Mirrors, so that this energy can be used by him to return to the heavens), the four Night Kings (including a dragon who happens to be female), the Fell (all intelligent beings can return as stronger, more intelligent ghouls since access to the afterlife has been cut off), laws of the land (it's an offense to not report an offense, death is immediate for any elf or dwarf, having magic items is a severe offense, carrying weapons is a severe offense, etc) and how the occupation affects the plains areas.
Chapter 11: Midnight Campaigns - This chapter describes how to handle the different elements of a Midnight Campaign, a world where the gathering of gold is useless, where having many magic items and weapons is dangerous, and where the average human in a village is more likely to turn you over to the agents of the Shadow for protecting the village against marauding orcs, than he is to thank you. There's a lot of good advice in here, although more specific examples may have been helpful. I would have liked to see this section expanded further, but it still gives a good overview and sparks ideas.
Chapter 12: Monsters - This describes a few of the unique monsters of Eredane, including the Astirax (the magic sniffers used by the Legates), the Oruk (stronger orcs), the Fell, and a few unique dragons (each dragon on Aryth is a uniquely powerful individual) and the Wogrem (large canine types that are symbiotic with the halflings). I would have liked to have seen a list of what kinds of creatures could be expected in each region, but this is mentioned somewhat in each individual chapter (an interesting thing is that all dire animals are found in the Erethor forest, and are on the side of the elves).
Chapter 13: On the Run - This chapter is a quick introductory adventure for new players to the setting. Well laid out it gives the proper feel and mood of a Midnight campaign, and sets the players in the right frame of mind almost from the start. There are a few elements that could use fleshing out (why the elf on the run trusts the characters to begin with, etc) but a clever DM will be able to do so. This to me is more than icing on the cake. For any new campaign world, I almost consider it a necessity to include at least an adventure vignette to give new DMs an idea of what kind of scenarios and mood the writers envision in an adventure.
At the back of the book is a listing of all schools of magic and the spells at each level. One thing obviously missing is a character sheet! I hope that this becomes a PDF download quickly.
Content Rating: 5 (About as complete as you can get).
Overall: This is about the most complete campaign sourcebook I've ever seen. Everything you need, from the races, to the classes, to a new magic system designed for the world, to some new monsters, advice on how to run a campaign and even an introductory adventure is included. The writing is excellent, and feels very epic and even eloquent at times, though there's usually one small typo every couple of pages (no biggie). One thing I really like is the equal emphasis on how things used to be before Izrador won, so that the wonders lost are real to the DM and the players. The DM can "remind" for instance, how the great library in Highwall used to look to a Channeler when all she currently sees is a black tower rising from the rubble of the library strewn around it.
My only major complaint is I want even more! With the book "Against the Shadow" coming out, my desires should be answered. Don't buy this book expecting to be able to run a standard AD&D campaign. While there are areas of Eredane that are relatively untouched by Izrador, and ruins to explore, you won't get the full flavor if played this way. Embrace the differences and run the campaign in the way that it's meant to be run. The characters will never face Izrador directly, he is after all a god. Their main hope is to find a way to tilt the balance more towards the people who fight him though they seem destined to fail.
