Necromantic Lore

[Messageboard Golem]

Following in the footsteps of Draconic Lore, this book contains more than thirty new undead, with half a dozen templates among them. These ghastly creations will haunt your players' dreams for years to come. They can cower before the soul-destroying power of the necromentals, or flee before the mind-shattering horror of the atrocity wight. Only a lucky few will survive to seek help from the guiding spirit and legion of the dead, but those who fall in combat may rise again as a foreverjack or an eternal confessor.

The undead in this bestiary were created to fill specific roles in your campaign. Whether you need a particularly challenging encounter to spring on your players or just want to add a touch of exotic flair to your world, Necromantic Lore has just the undead you're looking for.

 

[Desferous]

Necromantic Lore - Legends and Lairs

First look - At 25 cents a page (63pages for 15 dollars), I really had to think if I could justify buying this bestiary of undead. This turns out to be one of the most costly items I have bought. Wizards of the Coast player soft-covered books are somewhere around 20 cents a page, and Legends and Lairs hardcover books are more like 15 cents a page.

The art in this book is good. You get about 1/4 page illustration per page. The artwork is pretty good through out. The artwork won't sell this book on its own, but it is not bad. Every monster is illustrated which is nice.

The layout is standard for Legends and Lairs, very clean and organized. There is a table of contents with the challenge ratings. There is no index or glossary.

In Depth - This book is set up like an encyclopedia. There are no chapters. There are something like 36 undead in this book. Roughly, 5 were poor or difficult to use, 12 were really interesting, unique, and looked like they would be fun to use, and the rest were standard fare.

The book starts with a one-page introduction, that I actually found interesting to read. The monsters were designed to fit into various categories. It would have been interesting if they had listed by the categories they used for monster design, but still not a fault, no one else does it. The categories are: grudge monsters - designed to give your party trouble, terrain creatures - designed to fit into various odd locals, chase creatures - designed for your party to chase (either for their benefits or to destroy them), plot creatures - designed to develop an adventure around, flavor creatures - designed to spice up what the party might normally expect, and finally, there is one species, which is available for pc and npc use.

Each entry starts with basic stats, followed by a history/ecology section of about 3 paragraphs or so. After, there is a combat section that gives ideas of how that particular undead deals with encounters and combat and then the special abilities end each entry. Overall, they have done a nice job giving the right amount of useful information on each entry.

To be fair, let me give some of the good, typical, and the poor.

Poor - Grave Leech - leeches that make zombies...just seemed hard to use
Poor - Fade - I may have been looking at this one the wrong way, but it is a neutral undead that just
hides and wants to be left alone. I kept thinking, so what is the point?

Typical - Charnel Wagon - Huge wagon of bone for the undead, I could see some people really liking
this one.
Typical - Famine Haunt - a spirit that has a famine attack, a neat idea but very specialized.
Typical - Grim Stalker - a powerful undead to hunt down and kill those who use healing magic, cool
and tough!
Typical - Spirits - all good aligned, they can all help parties, something neat and specialized.

Good - Bonecast - a template for undead with a bad luck aura, after they die, they explode a random
effect on those in range. A neat way to spice up the expected.
Good - Eternal Confessor - an evil cleric brought back to finish business. This villian could terrorize a party for many adventures.
Good - Horrid Murder - an ethereal soul that forms a body out of crows to terrorize the countryside.
Too much fun!
Good - Heirloom Wraith - a wraith that hides in an items and comes out a night to murder. Lots of
potential!

Dhampir- template for a half-vampire that is born of a vampire - Daywalker or Nightstalker - seems
well done.


Really, it does seem like a well rounded group of undead. Most of the undead seem fresh to me, which is a bonus. Several of the plot creatures are motivated by vengeance, which does get repetitive.

Conclusion - This is an expensive but interesting product that is mostly successful. If this had been put into hard -cover format and paired up with draconic lore (I haven't read it) they might have had a 5 star product. The monsters are specialized but if you like using the undead, I would recommend you hide in the store where you make your purchases and read through this some so you can consider if this is the best way to spend your hard-earned dollars. It is a good product, but costly.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

That should be a FIVE star rating, not three. Blacksway, please delete this review. The other copy has the correct rating. --

 

[Messageboard Golem]

"Necromantic Lore" is a compendium of unusual undead to add to any role playing campaign (although written for d20 games). There are no necromantic spells or feats presented for wizards, just brilliantly conceived undead. Among the monstrosities presented are the "Atrocity Wight ... a depraved jigsaw puzzle pieced together out of dozens of hunanoid corpses," the "Bloodpool ... created when innocents are killed en masse and their blood is allowed collect and merge. ... A bloodpool in its natural form resembles a roiling pool of bright crimson liquid, and can be mistaken for a new type of ooze or slime." There are "Dream Phantoms," the souls of those who died in their sleep and now haunt the living, and "Eternal Confessors," undead clerics carrying on the work of their god even after death -- try turning one of those! "Forever Jacks" are thieves who cheated death and now are nearly impossible to destroy (CR 12!).

The term of venery for a group of crows is "a murder" -- a murder of crows. "Necromantic Lore" gives us the "Horrid Murder," a flock of crows possessed by a malignant undead intelligence. Think of Alfred Hitchcock's "Birds" coming at a party. Think of a party afraid of every bird call for fear that it is a "Horrid Murder" of crows coming to get them! In the alternative, think of a group of villagers asking PCs for help against a "Horrid Murder," and the PCs refusing their assistance, then let the ghastly consequences of their refusal come back to haunt them, as they are blamed as cowards "afraid of a bunch of birds," who let some awful fate befall the villagers (there's no reason for other NPCs to necessarily know that the "bunch of birds" itself was the monster).

Does the party's wizard think he can handle planar creatures? Let him face a "Necromental" -- an undead elemental -- and watch him run! Malevolent whirlpools, giant apparitions in the sky and troops of wind-swept zombies are enough to make all but the toughest parties tremble.

Want something smaller to horrify your players? Try unleashing the "Pale Masker," an undead face-hugger that forms a symbiotic bond with its victim, or the "Shadow Parasite," which merges with its victims shadow.

Not ALL of the beasties in "Necromantic Lore" are malevolent. The "Guiding Spirit" protects its loved ones from beyond the grave. What might happen if a cleric determined to rid the world of undead decides that a party member's ghostly Grandpa has got to be destroyed? What should a party do? Help destroy an undead thing or fight a cleric to protect their ghostly ally?

The "Legends & Lairs" books are great for encouraging "role playing" (as opposed to "roll playing"). Do the PCs regard clerics as just field medics and not as sacred vessel anointed by a divine power? If a DM gives the local high-level cleric a divine command to destroy all undead creatures as unholy abominations, Grandpa's ghost will stir up some active role playing when the PCs discover that their "Guiding Spirit" is standing between them and their too-often-relied-upon source of "cures," "heals" and "resurrection" spells. They are going to have to make a choice: recognize the spiritual authority of the cleric and let him vanquish their Guardian Spirit, or else they are going to have to find another source of medical care (and ignore the state of their souls in the process). Should they opt for the cleric as their HMO, then I, as a GM, would unleash Granny on them as an avenging CR14 "Grim Stalker," a powerful undead creature which hunts down and kills "those who rely too heavily on healing magic!" (But that's just me, of course.) "Necromantic Lore" needn't be just a compendium of undead beasties -- it can be the source of ongoing ROLE PLAYING campaign seeds as the PCs stir up a higher CR undead each time they think they've gotten rid of a lesser one.

"Necromantic Lore" is filled with terrific undead monsters to unleash on a party or to be placed to plague a location with which the party is familiar. This is a GREAT addition to any DM's library. Five stars!

 

[d20books]

I must say that this book is a solid 4, IMHO. I say this while saying I'm an ardent FFG fan and own all the Lore books. If you were blown away by this book, you need to pick up Giant Lore and Elemental Lore.

FFG improves on their lines as books are released. They seem to take into account all the criticism and reviews to improve their books. Necromantic Lore was second out of five books. Giant Lore was fourth and Elemental Lore was fifth.

 

[Krug]

Necromantic Lore was the second of Fantasy Flight Games' themed monster sourcebooks. It's now available from DriveThruRpg.com for $5, which was just too tempting to pass up. It's jam packed with undead, and FFG have really stretched their minds to come up with interesting creatures. Not everything works but there's some exceptionally interesting monsters in this supplement.

The 'hits' -
Atrocity Wight - Reminds one of a creature from a Clive Barker short story; composed of multiple rotting corpses
Necrocorn - An undead Unicorn
Bloodseeker - Undead wolves who hunt down those whose blood they have tasted
Famine haunt - Undead that leaves their victim starving
Forever Jack - A template; basically for thiefs that have cheated death
Horrid Murder - A murder of crows gathered together to... well the name says it all
Necromentals - Undead elementals, though I think the concept could have been pushed further
Pestilent Queen - Undead Ooze
Charnel Wagon - Construct made out of undead parts; seen similar concepts in other necromantic books and Warhammer

The 'not so hits' -
Heirloom Wraith - Spirit attached to an object
Warning Spirit - Blah; as its name says
Unvanquished - Undead whose skill have not been surpassed; example given is a chess master. Good, I guess, but not too inspiring
Dancing Bones - as name suggest...

Internal art is consistent and gives atmosphere to the creatures. There's nothing startlingly fantastic, but it is pretty decent work.

Necromantic Lore, being one of FFG's earliest products, shows the great imagination and creativity that's been maintained in most of the company's products since that time. At the original price of $14.95 I'd be rather tentative about the product, but at it's present sales price of $5 for 64 pages I'd heartily reccomend it. The undead are quirky and imbued with enough weirdness for them to be interesting additions, and you can build an adventure around some of them.

 

[Psion]

"If you were blown away by this book, you need to pick up Giant Lore and Elemental Lore."

I have them both. All the lore line, actually. So far, Necromantic Lore is my favorite.