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Message: <blockquote data-quote="edbonny" data-source="post: 1711537" data-attributes="member: 1119">The Planar Handbook appears to have been poorly concepted and thus has now become a missed opportunity on many fronts. The decision to create new races was misguided. Not only do these new races fail to capture the mystery and wonder of the planes but they just don't make sense from this player's perspective (buommen, neph, shadowshyft nd the mephit-guys top my list of bad new races). The Planar Handbook couldhave explored previously established planar/planetouched races created in the age of 3e that have seen almost no development (such as from the MM2 and FF: shyft, chaond, etc.). This was a chance to take some "audience-familiar" planar beings and flesh them out. Instead, there are now more player races on the playing field. The plane-blooded material in Unearthed Arcana is excellent stuff for planar characters and merited a mention if not a section in the Planar Handbook. Two missed opportunities here.The feats were likewise uninspired if not rather generic. A look at the planetouched feats in Races of Faerun gives a good idea of what kinds of wondrous planar feats this book could have given us.I could have gone either way with the publishing of PS setting material. I am a PS fan but the Great Wheel with a diminished Ps presence equally acceptable. That said, the effort to bridge the gap with PS continuity could have been greatly improved had original PS designers been consulted (I know consultation of this kind is not normally done but in this case it was worth exploring). Since they were going to put in some PS, I, for one, would have liked to have seen Sigil moved a year or two forward past the Faction War with a small timeline of events. Lastly, the page allocation for planar touchstones should have been cut in half. Too much information and space was given to this lackluster concept (The Amazing Race meets the planes?). The places described are interesting, the touchstones themselves are not. This space could have been given to new monsters (or to update old ones such as the modrons), new spells or classes (and thus round out all the factions). There is also a huge amount of wonderful 2e planar stuff just waiting to be upgraded to 3.5 (like four entire 2e monstrous compendiums of planar critters; planar sects; a tasked genie template; elemental clerics - and that's for starters).What I did like about the book: the prestige classes; some new spells; and the monster table in the back of the book that lists monsters found on each plane by reference book. The prestige classes were well done thus making it this book's best feature.- Ed</blockquote>

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