Monte Cook Presents: The Year's Best d20

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Bring the Best to Your Game Table!

The sheer volume of d20 System products, especially those with small print runs and low profiles, makes it impossible to find out about them all -- let alone read them all. That’s why this collection of The Year’s Best d20 game material is vital if you want the best of what the industry has to offer.

Compiled and introduced by 3rd Edition codesigner Monte Cook, The Year’s Best d20 presents a unique collection of classes, feats, magic, monsters, and variant rules that illustrate the d20 System’s flexibility. The contents, drawn from a thorough examination of products released in 2004, represents a variety of authors and publishers. This invaluable reference is a treasure trove of material suitable for any campaign.

If you buy only one game product this year, make sure it's the best!

 

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Years Best d20

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I can remember last year when this product was announced. At the time I thought it was a great idea and there are not that many people in the industry like Monte Cook who can do such a thing as the Year’s Best and have their opinion matter so much. At the same time as a reviewer I thought to myself that such a product would be hard to review since it is different then most books. It is a book that I very much wanted to read through and see what was chosen and why and at the same time a book I really did not want to review. The book has a different focus and offers some interesting things that people might have missed.

The Years Best d20 is anew PDF by Malhavoc Press. The ninety eight page PDF is well laid out and easy to read like people expect from the company. There are plenty of sidebars in the book talking about the different selections and they are well placed, easy to read and find and do not get in the way of the rest of the book. It is well book marked and good production values in the art as well.

This book I think will be seen in one of two ways. The first is as a collection of some of the best gaming items seen in the past year of d20. These include classes both prestige and base, spells, feats, monsters, and variant rules. I imagine many people like myself were very curious to see what was selected in this. The other use for this book is as a game book. Everything selected to be in this book is fully written up making them easy to use with the need for the original source material.

As a collection of the best things in d20 the book does very well. There are a lot of things selected from a wide variety of books. I do admit the first thing I did was see what books had stuff come from them and see how many I had in my personal collection. Many of the books like Advance Bestiary and Denizens of Avandu were books I had reviewed and given high marks to. So, I was pleased to see that. Other books like Modern Magic and Strange Lands: Lost Tribes of the Scarred Lands I do not own or have read so they go on my list of books to look into for the future.

Each selection has a nice little sidebar explaining why Monte picked it. I think this is very fascinating as it shows what the thought process on some of these are and why he liked what he did. The Cosmosopher is one of the great classes that I am glad to see in here. It does not fit in ever campaign since it deals with stealing power from the gods to cast spells and not worshipping them. There is a class in Complete Divine I believe that is similar to this, but the Cosmosopher is just so much more creative and interesting that it easily replaces all other classes that may be like it. It is also a prestige class that many people might have missed as it appeared in Aasimars and Tielflings: a guidebook to the Planetouched by Green Ronin. That is one neat thing that this book does, it showcases some really creative ideas that were in books that people might have missed or just not noticed them as the theme of the book was not on these ideas.

Using the book at the gaming table is a little more hit and miss. Many d20 books have a central theme so you get a lot of abilities that options that go together making more parts of these books usable. But with Years Best d20 there is such a wide variety of material in here that not much here will really be used all the time. It is good material but many of it fits a small niche that might not be generally useful to people.

The Years Best d20 does what it says and presents some of the best from a variety of different publishers and authors. These are some of the people that are really starting to stand out in the community if they have not already.