Planar Handbook and Manual of the Planes

[arscott]

Add me to the group of folks who says that MotP is awesome. Lots of great flavor, and it can be used as-is for a setting, or as a vehicle for further inspiration.

 

[Joshua Randall]

Manual of the Planes is one of the best 3.x books out there. I love, love, love that book. It's inspirations, it's imaginative, it's the kind of book that makes you want to rush off and start ten different campaigns just to take advantage of all the great ideas you'll get from reading it.

Here are some reviews. And hey -- I had forgotten -- MotP won an Enny in 2002 for Best Rules Supplement.

 

[Shemeska]

I disagree. The 3E edition incorporates a lot of tweaks to the setting that Planescape's scrutiny on the planes gave us, minus the cant and the focus on Sigil. In contrast, a lot of the 1E stuff is ill-defined, since it was primarily about establishing the basic vocabulary for anything beyond the simple, simple stuff in the PHB and Deities & Demigods.

Exactly. A lot of material on the planes in 2e, and even 3e, has changed them from the conceptions back in the 1e MotP. For instance, the upper planes are virtually without inhabitants in the 1e MotP (there's talk of 'good spirits', and the beings later codified as aasimon/angels, and the archons are there in the back of the book in an appendix), but two of the primary celestial races (Eladrin and Guardinals) didn't exist till later in 2e. The Outlands in the 1e MotP lacks the Rilmani, the Infinite Spire, and Sigil, etc.

Don't get me wrong, I've got a copy of the 1e MotP sitting on my bookshelf, and I won't say it's a bad book (not at all, it has some nice ideas, but it didn't give a lot of in depth details because it was the first book to really touch the topic and it had to be broad). That given, the book does have to be viewed in light of the fact that what detail it does give has since been superceded and expanded upon by the later sources: the 3e Manual of the Planes gives a very good overview of the planes as they have developed since then, and if you're looking for more specific detail there's the various 2e Planescape sourcebooks and for the Abyss there's the 3.5 Fiendish Codex I.


Edit: The 3e Manual of the Planes is one of the best 3.x books there is, and because of how broad it is, it's one of the few books to see use in each game session I run. One or two superficial changes it made from 2e I didn't care for, but no book is perfect.

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.

 

[3catcircus]

I disagree. The 3E edition incorporates a lot of tweaks to the setting that Planescape's scrutiny on the planes gave us, minus the cant and the focus on Sigil. In contrast, a lot of the 1E stuff is ill-defined, since it was primarily about establishing the basic vocabulary for anything beyond the simple, simple stuff in the PHB and Deities & Demigods.

Exactly...

 

[countgray]

I love the 3E Manual of the Planes. I refer to it often. It has a lot of fluff in there. Also a lot of metphysics. It has some nifty monsters in it as well.

It has a really good survey of the planes of the Great Wheel. It also has a bunch of alternate planes, such as the plane of Faerie, the Mirror Plane, the Plane of Dream, The Spirit World, and alternate cosmology configurations.

It presents a lot of information and options for customizing your own cosmology and planes. Tons of ideas in it. Reading any random page will likely spark many different ideas for campaign hooks and encounters.

Please note it was written by Jeff Grubb, the same guy who wrote the 1e Manual of the Planes.

The Planar Handbook is in part a Player's guide to the Planes, with lots of options for planar explorers and for creating planar pc's. But it is also a bestiary and a DM's guide. There is a lot of good stuff in there. I enjoyed it a lot.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Exactly...

Er, your original post said nothing of the sort, either as a positive or a negative.

 

[pawsplay]

Manual of the Planes is one of the best 3.x books out there. I love, love, love that book. It's inspirations, it's imaginative, it's the kind of book that makes you want to rush off and start ten different campaigns just to take advantage of all the great ideas you'll get from reading it.

Here are some reviews. And hey -- I had forgotten -- MotP won an Enny in 2002 for Best Rules Supplement.

MotP was one of the best 3.0 books out there. So much so, that much of the meat was added to the DMG. It's still a high quality book, but the crunch is outdated, and the useful fluff makes up only a fraction of the book. If you can get it used for half price, snag it, for sure. Otherwise, it's hard to justify it.

I don't care for the Planar Handbook. It covers a lot that hasn't been covered before... probably for good reason. Mephlings are extremely contrived, and those not-slaad things are just odd. Nephs? something like that? Reminds me of kidneys. And some of the feats seem to exist purely to be randomly broken, like one that doubles your carrying capacity (even though heavy gravity planes are not featured strongly in D&D), a feat that allows you to charge an opponent and catch them flat footed (because some creatures in Limbo apparently do this), and so forth. I doubt I will ever own it, despite some nice feats for characters with outsider heritage and some cool substitution levels.

 

[silver_wizard]

The Manual of the Planes is indeed one of the best 3E books I've seen. I cannot compare it to Planar Handbook, however, since I don't buy 3.X books anymore (I have only one 3.5 book, and that is the Player's Handbook).
I've observed that many posters consider the crunch outdated. Isn't 3.0 supposed to be quite easy to convert to 3.5?
Of course, I'd recommend the 2E Planescape supplements over anything else (fluff-wise).

 

[pawsplay]

The prestige classes are all right for 3.5 if you give them a once over, but the monster templates all have to be reworked and eyeballed according to 3.5 DR standards, feat progression, natural attack standards, etc.

 

[Psion]

I've observed that many posters consider the crunch outdated. Isn't 3.0 supposed to be quite easy to convert to 3.5?

I think that the issue here is that most of the plane-detail crunch is in the 3.5 DMG, and much of the spell crunch was reprinted in the Planar Handbook and Spell Compendium.

But planar handbook has planar substitution levels, which go a long way towards making the characters more planar in nature.

Of course, I'd recommend the 2E Planescape supplements over anything else (fluff-wise).

For the outer planes, you are spot on. The outer planes boxed sets are in my "never out of the DM's reach" shelf for that reason.

But there is some excellent material in MotP that does not appear in any PS book that was great campaign building material for me, like the Shadow Plane and Mirror Plane materials, and, of course, all the cosmology building and alternate cosmology material.