Planar Handbook and Manual of the Planes

[Shade]

The 3.5 Planar Handbook isn't all bad. The first 2/3 of the book are pretty good, the monsters are nice, and the details on Sigil, the City of Brass, and Tun'arath are nice if somewhat dry in tone. The only bad part of the book is the way they handled the "planar touchstones", about 30 odd pages worth of them. Though some of the locations were nifty ideas, the implimentation of the concept came off poorly, making locations of mystery and intrigue come off as so many planar powerups like aasimar Mario might collect a fireflower and spit fireballs at Githyanki, etc. So the book isn't bad, and I've marginally warmed to it over time, but it fell short of what it could have been if so much space hadn't been used on the touchstones.

Indeed. The planar touchstones were the dragonspawn of that book....a ginormous space-gobbler that could have been better dedicated to numerous other more widely-usable design elements.

 

[Gez]

The Manual of the Planes is a very good book, but it's a "toolbox." If you're not interested in building up a cosmology for your homebrew, you'll find it much less useful.

If you do want to have the planes occupy an important place in your campaign, it'll be invaluable.

The Planar Handbook is more player-centric, there's not much space devoted to "howtos", it's more a list of game mechanics (classes, races, feats, etc.) to populate the planes. There's also some very interesting locations, unfortunately most of them are ill-presented as they're in the form of "touchstones", an idea that could have been much better used.