Oathbound: Mysteries of Arena
Mysteries of Arena is the latest sourcebook for the Oathbound d20 setting from Bastion Press. If you're not familiar with Oathbound, you might read my earlier reviews of it, but basically, it's set in a world that is essentially a prison for a god and its 7 head minions (angels, really). While it's a prison, the 7 angels can escape it, if they can find someone strong enough (and gullible enough) to beat them in a fight. So they came transformed the prison world into a world that would build strong people, a la Darwin, and called it the Forge.
Arena is the domain of Barbello, one of the least sophisticated (and youngest) of the imprisoned god's minions. She's essentially very petulant and warlike for the sake of being warlike. So her domain, Arena, is essentially one great big eternal battlefield. It was detailed pretty well in last years (November of 2003, I think) release, "Oathbound: Arena".
Crunchy Stuff
Despite the name, "Mysteries of Arena", this book is really sort of a companion volume to that book, Arena. It can roughly be broken up into 3 parts: new crunchy stuff (races, classes, feats, spells, critters, etc), the Mysteries themselves, and lastly an adventure. With the crunchy stuff filling up most of the book (say 100 pages of it or so). So to a certain extent, this book can be used for any fantasy d20/D&D game, since much of it, while tailored to Arena's environs, isn't exclusive to Arena.
The new races are pretty alien, pretty much what you expect from an Oathbound product. You have a rock eating species of Dwarves (called Rockbiters); Karnos, which look suspiciously like the bad aliens from Star Trek Deep Space 9 (not what the guy from Benson was, their lackeys); Ramzadi, who are basically Wookiees, except instead of being really tall and hairy monkeys, are really tall and hairless lizard people (But they have the same personality and live in trees and such - even have something like bowcasters, kinda); Sythiss, which you might guess are snake people; and Ok'weel, which are really weird - they look like mollusk-humanoids.
If you have Torn Asunder, you might remember the Ramzadi from it, but in that, they were just a monster race, in this they are statted up for players. The Sythiss seem a bit too silly - they have clans, and each clan name happens to be one of a real world snake species. Only like it were spoken by a snake person (or person with a lisp or Castillian athent). Aspiz, Cobriss, Viperiss, Gartiss, etc. Too cute by far. Also, all of the races have level adjustments, ranging from +1 (for the Rockbiters) to +3. Personally, I think once you get that far (+3), you should do a "monster class", a la Savage Species (or before that, the Second World Sourcebook), because otherwise, these don't work all that well as player characters.
So honestly, the races didn't do all that much for me. Though they do fit in pretty well in the world of Oathbound, which is the thing that actually counts..
The class section is interesting, as while there is an assortment of prestige classes, we also get 3 new core/base classes. I love those. There's the Duneslayer, which is a fighter type, only specialized for desert warfare (presumably we'll see a dessert warfare class in Oathbound: Candyland); the Operative, which is a rogue like class that is basically a spy or espionage type; and the Sand Mystic, which is a sort of arcane spellcaster similar to a wizard but only occurs in Arena. Essentially, they use magic crystals made from the sand of Arena, instead of spell books.
On the prestige class side, we get 5 of them. The Spellbinder, which is a prestige class for arcane casters that lets them cast spells in co-ordination with other casters. It's meant for army units of spell casters. It's kinda neat how they work - when 2 or more Spellbinders cast the same spell together, it works as that many number of spells, plus various other improvements (depending on level in the class). This is the best of the bunch, I thought.
There's also the Forest Slayer, which is sort of a sniper/archer type. The Legionnaire, which doesn't sound like it's name - rather than being a Roman army type, they bond with special mounts, like giant scorpions, dire bears, or enormous penguins. Though just to have the name make sense, apparently they dress like Roman soldiers.
The last two are pretty much tied into the setting. First off is the Shadow Assassin, which are agents of the dreaded Shadow Mage. They are sort of a cross between the regular Assassin prestige class (sans the spellcasting) and the Shadowdancer. They not only work for a specific NPC/Faction in the world of Oathbound, they have to take a couple prestige races as requirements.
Lastly is the Wellspringer. This is essentially a Druid prestige class. But instead of the annoying, smelly, hippie sort of Druid, these are my sort - capitalist Druids. Basically, instead of hugging trees and such for fun and mother nature and all that junk, they do it for money. Because Arena is a desert, it's very dependent on Oases. These Druids can create and maintain Oases and do so for cash. A Druid with a job - amazing!
So for the most part, the classes are pretty good. I'm not sure how appealing they would be for players, but definitely most useful for NPCs. They do seem pretty balanced. Nothing overpowering, nothing too weak. I especially liked the descriptions of them - very descriptive, with very evocative imagery. For instance, the start of the description of the Wellspringer:
"From the dawn of Arena's creation the intoxicating allure of unearthing a mother lode of buried mineral riches ignites and captivates the vivid imagination of Arena's avaricious warlords and ambitious usurpers."
This sort of writing goes on for about 2 paragraphs before you actually get to what the Wellspringer is. Kind of wordy, yes, since you can basically sum the class up as saying they are "Druids for hire". But a simple description doesn't inspire it's use in the game, and how the class fits into the Oathbound setting. This paints a vivid description of what life is like in Arena, and the Wellspringers role in it. (I suspected these bits were written by Thomas Knauss, and this was actually confirmed by an email from him in response to the version of this appearing on RPG.net)
There's a grab-bag of other Oathbound stuff. For instance, there are a couple Prestige Races (basically, where a character pays XP to "evolve" into a sort of advanced critter), Focus of the Gloom, Focus of the Grave and breaking the goth theme, Focus of the Lodes. I can't easily describe the last (basically Lodes are intelligent rocks), but Focus of the Gloom is about adapting to an underground environment. (As an aside, Bastion should consider gathering all of these Pathes into one book or PDF and putting them out)
The Mass Combat system gets a short but major improvement. Basically, units can now gain feats. There's a huge list of them.
There's a range of feats and spells. One of the feats lets a character have a glowing nose (or other organ/appendage), so you can finally play Rudolph in d20. One of the spells is like the portrait of Dorian Grey, basically the spellcaster makes a portrait of himself, and the portrait takes the damage, not the caster. But it's a lot more limited than the one in the book/movie. And a spell that seems to have been inspired by Vogon poetry. "Rhyme of Despair" it's called. Actually, I like how the spells are presented, as part of lost & famous spell books.
A few new skills are introduced, and I think probably shouldn't have. "Sand Surf" at least. While it's a neat idea, it's probably a bit too specific for a d20 skill. Same with "Find Water". "Sand Surf" possibly could have been folded under the Profession meta skill as Profession (Sand Surfer). Don't laugh, dude! There's more to surfing than just being able to physically perform - you have to know a lot about the mechanics of it -what to use, when you can do, etc. And Find Water is probably covered by Survival/Wilderness Lore. There should be a specific DC for finding water, and maybe a feat to make it easier.
Mysteries and Mayhem
The Mysteries of Arena section is actually pretty short. Maybe 38 pages. Much of this is actually tied into the other parts of the book, for instance, one of the secrets is that the Sythiss exist.
There are some problems, for instance, the text doesn't really agree with the rules elsewhere (or what is in Arena). For instance, the Sythiss are supposed to be fairly powerful, maybe soon being more powerful than the Grand Asherake (but not yet), and it mentions they can field an army of 6,000. But that's not many at all. That's 6 units in the mass combat system in Arena. It mentions that the rest of Arena fields 5x as many units, total, as the Sythiss, but that's definitely not true. 500x maybe. In the adventure in this book, the PCs are presumed to be the rulers of a very small holding, and have an army of 8 units.
The real trouble is, most of the mysteries just aren't very mysterious. Usually they are just sort of out of the way towns or places. Usually just isolationists, not something wild or exotic, like say, Shangra-La or Brigadoon or Atlantis or the 7 Cities of Gold, or even Branson.
You do get some dirt on Barbello's past fights that went badly. While she can only lose for good while she's in her citadel, she's been beaten in a fight a few times and you learn who and what she did to them when she reformed. I would have liked more on her personal history. I mean, surely she has some sort of love life or something.
Lastly, there is an adventure. It's basically a follow-up to the one in Arena. In that adventure, the PCs ended up (hopefully) with the control of a 'holding' or basically the rulers of a small city-state. It's a direct follow-up, and in many ways strikes me as something of an unfair adventure, from the PCs point of view (based on lots of experience being griped at, anyway).
Basically, it assumes that in-between the adventure in Arena, nothing has happened except what it has said. That could be the case if you just happen to now buy Arena and this book, or just now plan on running the two adventures. But Arena came out almost a year ago, in mid October of 2003 I believe, so if you ran it then, well, presumably your PCs have done a lot of stuff, and you the DM have no doubt fleshed out the area of their holding pretty well. The adventure actually sort of admits this at the beginning.
It also springs on the PCs some stuff from this book. Which is unfair. I mean, the PCs should have knowledge of the area they are in, ie, the Arena portion of the book. Rather than be surprised by new enemies that just pop up in the this book. (Though the adventure does do a good job of showing how the material in this book integrates into Arena).
Actually, that's part of a problem with the book itself. It adds some completely new stuff to Arena, which your game didn't have before. Integrating new stuff out of the blue is always tricky, but is harder when it's fairly big, which some of the stuff in this book is. Including the villains of this adventure. I mean, they are based in a gigantic canyon not far from the PCs town. Surely someone would have noticed the canyon?
This isn't a problem if you are just getting into the Oathbound setting, or Arena in particular, but for long time fans with ongoing games this could be tricky.
But I do like the premise of the adventure. I just think it should have been presented in a more non-linear manner. Maybe sketchier. Because when the PCs are the rulers of a place, they should be fairly pro-active - searching out the area for potential problems and such, so they should run into conflict with the enemies in this book. The first module for the old D&D Companion Rules, CM1, was a good example of how to do a module like this right.
I also think if you have adventures like this, you need some sort of rules for running a domain/city-state/kingdom, etc. d20 has some of those, but none that I've found that were very good. I was enamored with Fields of Blood when I first got it (to the point of writing something of a hex mapping program in visual basic for it), but once I actually started using the rules, I found them to be unsatisfactory. It also doesn't mesh very well, scale wise, with Arena. I would like to see Bastion someday come up with a book on this subject (they already have a pretty good mass combat system, after all).
Woops, almost forgot about the Appendices, which are stats and writeups. The first is just the NPCs from the adventure, but the second are all sorts of new creatures that were mentioned all over the course of the book, plus some extra.
Most of the new critters are fairly grotesque or alien (again, sort of fitting Oathbound's theme). There are a couple rock creatures (including one called the Cryshma, which harasses people at airports), a Lovecraftian thingie (a "Glebe'marl") that looks like something Cthulhu sneezed out, a few lizards, an evil dwarf race with cat whiskers, a really angry super-Treant, a sand worm out of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (the thing that ate Boba Fett). Each critter has an adventure hook or three associated with it, which is something Bastion usually does, and is a nice touch.
Final Thoughts
Arena was probably Bastion Press's best looking book. This is something of a step down from that, but is a lot better quality than their last two releases in terms of readability of the print and clarity of the art, though the art is still be bit spottier than it should ideally be. The art is excellent - a lot of the interior art is done by Christopher Pickrell, who did the cover of Arena, and whose work is very very good. (All of the art is good, but his stuff was notably excellent). Another artist's style reminds me a lot of Jim Holloway's, which IMHO, is good. And like pretty much all Bastion products, the layout is excellent. Typos seem to be pretty rare, too, I haven't spotted any.
All in all, it's a good book, even though it's more of a grab bag of stuff than detailed mysteries. It goes a long way towards fleshing out Arena. It's actually the same size, but $2 cheaper than Arena was, so it's a good value. A solid if unspectacular
B
They've got a small preview of it on their website, so check it out if you are interested.
