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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Messageboard Golem" data-source="post: 2011420" data-attributes="member: 18387">Requiem for a God is an "event book", which means that it falls into a special category. It provides materials and ideas for staging the death of a god as a campaign event. The book is deliberately vague about how the god's demise came about and its consequences, trying to cater to a number of different campaign assumptions about the nature of the gods.I must that the book was a great disappointment. The idea is thrilling, and much of the execution is good, which checklists at every point where the DM must judge how things work in his or her world, covering issues like what the god's dead body would look like and where it would be situated, what consequences the god's demise has for the world at large and the effects on the site of the death etc.There is just one major problem here, and that is that Monte Cook seems to conceive of gods not so much as embodiments of metaphysical principles, but basically chunks of material. The proposed rules for the godly remains, "godflesh", "godsblood" and "divinity sparks" more remind me of Terry Pratchett's The Fifth Elephant, where a cosmic elephant crashes into the earth, leaving strata of lard and crispy bits to be mined by the dwarves. The divine remains seem to be basically chunks of cosmic lard. They provide hefty bonuses to characters using them, but there is very little flavor to them. It hardly matters what god they used to make up. They are just pieces of raw power for the characters or possibly some more unscrupulous figures that specialize in using this power.The bulk of the book is made up with rules for exploiting these kinds of remains, including a number of new spells and a few prestige classes with two organizations centred around the remains of the dead gods. The biggest problem I had with these is that gods would have to die rather frequently for there to be any point in taking levels in these classes, or else you would have to play in some kind of post-apocalyptic world where dead gods abound. This is of course feasible and even an interesting option, but it would be difficult in an existing campaign world.Now for a closer look:The book has eight chapters, and I'll review each briefly in turn. The first chapter is called Preparing for the event, and discusses what issues the DM must address in order to stage the death of a god. It is reasonable and generally well written, even if I don't quite see the point in the concept of the "demiurge", which is a kind of divine entity that monitors the deity's relations to the world and that remains even after the deity's demise. It is essential to some of the mechanics, so it can't be easily removed, but I still think it is metaphysically dubious as well as superfluous.Then follows a chapter calle Integrating the Event, which continues reasoning about how to implement the event in the campaign, and also introduces two organizations, the Cabal of the Dirge that's devoted to letting the dead gods rest in peace, and the Memento Mori that utilizes the remains for their own purposes. This could lead to interesting conflicts. As I said, the rules concerning godsblood are my greatest grievance with this book, as I feel that it's more going to promote powergaming than any kind of veneration of the dead gods.Then follows a chapter on Prestige classes. Of these, the Disaffected, fallen clerics, and the Necrotheologist, a kind of divine necromancers, are the most interesting and useful outside the setting. These two classes are very good indeed.The chapters on feats, spells and magic items are heavily dependent on the godsblood rules, and some of theses feats (that require absorbing some of the power of a dead god) are quite powerful, but also have a lot of flavor, so they could be of use in an epic-type or high-powered campaign. The same goes for the spells, that are mostly high level and delineate ways of manipulating concentrated divine energy. The magic items are few but interesting, especially the artifacts, including a weapon designed to slay the sun.The seventh chapter details a few monsters that can be found around the site of a god's death. They look rather bland to me. Lastly, we are treated to a number of adventure suggestions for varying levels. They are interesting insofar that they show that the death of a god can become a concern for characters of any level, but none of them stands out.Overall, I'd say that Requiem for a God is a well-written and professionally executed product, but I find it fundamentally flawed by its weird conception of divinity as some sort of cosmic rocket fuel. I think it deserves a 3: average.</blockquote>

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