Planar Gates

[Messageboard Golem]

In this 4-page PDF, Philip Reed presents six new planar gates that can be used in any planar campaign. The Door of Fire, The Infinite Ladder, The Unwanted Coach and three others are described in this short PDF. Suitable for use with any D20 System game involving planar travel.

 

[Crothian]

Six Planar Gates

[imager]http://www.rpgnow.com/products/product_4002.jpg[/imager]

Planar adventures are filled with mystery and wonder. The regular fantasy world usually has some physical laws and normalcy, but once people leave that anything goes. Planar adventures have been really popular ever since the D&D second edition setting of Planescape. Now in third edition and with the many d20 and OGL sources out there there are many different takes and ideas linking the planes and defining the planes. The planes are always a topic that has been dealt with creatively and with great depth. It has always been a subject I have greatly enjoyed reading about and using in my games..

Six Planar Gates is a new PDF by Philip Reed published by Ronin Arts. Now, this PDF is small only four pages long and the last one is just the d20 license. The layout and art of the boom is good though only two pieces of art not that the book needs more. The book is book marked and really easy to use.

The six planar gates presented here are pretty damn creative. But the book has a bit more then just that. It also includes rules for knowledge planes checks to determine if the player characters know anything about the planar gates and specifically what they know about them.

The first gate is the Door of Flames. It is a door of great fire and heat that is located in a very remote mountain area. The second gate is the Infinite Ladder. It is invisible and can take the climber to many different locations but holds some dangers of its own. The Obelisk of Planar Travel is an ancient stone constructed by an extinct lizard race. It can be used to travel to specific planar locations but it is very dangerous to do so and not reliable. The Missing Door is a doorway at the top of the world in a glacier or other such desolate frozen place. It has an eeriness about it and can also be used to travel almost anywhere. There is also a simple adventure hook to attempt to retrieve the door that goes into the frame to make the portal a little more particular on who can use it. The Unwanted Coach is another gate that is filled with mystery and possible adventure. The coach is driven byt a man or being that never reveals himself. He charges very high fees to travelers but will take one where he wants to go. The Well of Shadfoe is a stone well in an old and forgotten castle. The gate way only works a short time each day when conditions are right but it will take anyone to the plane of Shadows.

THe book offers some cool and unforgettable gates to other places and they can of course be easily altered to fit a specific campaign. They work very well with the highly rated A DM’s Directory of Demiplanes also published by Ronin Arts. That book is very good and defiantly one that people need to check out. Six Planar Gates offers great new and creative gates that will spark creativity and adventure in DMs.

 

[Ace]

6 Planar Gates

Six Planar gates is a modest little supplement by Phil Reed of Ronin Arts. This little four pager is offers 6 interesting and classic ideas for planar gates for your campaign.

The usual disclaimer applies, this was a compensated review

This supplement is 4 pages long. The first page is half introduction and the last is the OGL so there are about 2 and half pages of material. The layout is in the usual easy use and easy read style of Ronin Arts products, Surprisingly, it also illustrated with some stock Elmore art. The art is pretty and does not distract but is not really relevant to the material. Being black and white it does not cost a lot of ink to print however and it does relieve the format somewhat.

The meat of this supplement are the six gates. This session begins with a handy difficulty modification chart for knowledge the Planes skill rolls. This chart is simple and useful in any campaign. The needed skill base skill difficulties are given with each gate and could easily be adapted for your game needs

6 gates are listed The Door of Flames, The Infinite Ladder, The Missing Door, The Obelisk of Planar Travel, The Unwanted Coach, and the Well of Shadow. Each of these gates has game related information about them as well as some well written flavor text. If your campaign feature planar plugging these into it will be easy. The are generic enough to be useful on many worlds while offering enough flavor to save most DM’s design effort. At least one ot two of those should fit most games.

While the product is D20 oriented it would also be useful in any RPG that featured dimensional gates. Conversions would not be difficult in most cases requiring only some rules work on The Missing Door and The Door of Flames.

At $1 US the supplement provides some good ideas in a nice format. If you need some gates it is a dollar well spent

Style 4 – It is well laid out but the irrelevance of the art detract a bit

Substance 3 Clear well written and entertaining with good rules use and enough genericness to be of value.

Score Average 3.5

 

[Turanil]

6 Planar Gates

6 Planar Gates, by Philip Reed, is a tiny 4 pages PDF (2.5 pages of actual game content) for d20 fantasy games. It features 6 planar gate descriptions for your planar adventures. It retails at 1$ and is 100% Open Gaming Content.

Art and layout: The layout is professional, as I have seen with other Philip Reed’s PDFs. The art consists in two line art illustrations. Believe it or not these two illustrations are by none else than Larry Elmore. The only thing is that they have nothing to do with the subject at hand…

The introduction begins with the author speaking about how little money he made from a precedent similar work, and how little money he expects from this one. The one thing that jumped to my mind in reading this, is that if he did put more content in his PDFs he could probably gain more customers. May I say that my own website proposes several netbooks with dozens of d20 stuff pages for free? One of them is a netbook of 100 demi-planes. 100 for free, not 6 for sale. Anyway.

Now about the planar gates: These six portals are all different, so there is no redundancy in their descriptions. They are: the door of flames; the infinite ladder; the obelisk of planar travel; the missing door; the unwanted coach; and the well of shadows. For each of them are Knowledge DCs to recognize them for what they are and determine how they operate.

Frankly, I have nothing to say bad about the PDF’s content. It is well done. However, I think there is really too little of it. 2 pages and 6 descriptions is just good for a free teaser, not a whole product for sale, even if it is sold only 1$. In addition, the gates presented are not so outstanding that a DM may not come up with similar ideas on his own. In fact, I can really see that some planar campaign would require much more gates descriptions, at least 30. Then, it should have additional details such as special keys or magic rituals necessary to activate them, and other things like that to make it a good addition to supplements such as the Manual of the Planes. As it stands (that is: so short), I have no real use for a so small supplement, no matter how low the price. For that reason I give it a 2: a good product but that gives me a feeling of scarcity…

 

[Turanil]

Well, I must agree that I dislike too small d20 supplement, and thus could only be biased when reviewing this one. But if you don't mind the size, you should not be diasppointed by this product.

In any case, if you download the 100 demi-planes netbook (amateur stuff) that I mentioned in the review (access through the link provided below), there are no planar gates described in it. Hence, 6 Planar Gates would certainly be a useful addition...