John Cooper
Explorer
SECRETS OF SARLONA
By Keith Baker, Scott Fitzgerald Gray, Glenn McDonald, and Chris Sims
Wizards of the Coast product number 955677200
160-page hardbound book, $29.95
Secrets of Sarlona is a recent (as of February 2007) sourcebook for the Eberron campaign setting, detailing life on the continent to the east of Khorvaire. While it's not entirely to my tastes at all (I'm admittedly not a big fan of psionics, and Sarlona is where they've pigeonholed the majority of the psionics material in Eberron), it's still a well done book.
The cover, as is true of most (if not all) Eberron material, features a composite painting by Wayne Reynolds. The full painting is shown on pages 2-3 of the book, but the cover contains chunks of the larger image superimposed onto the standard Eberron cover dress. For Secrets of Sarlona, Wayne details a group of adventurers (including a male soulknife, male shifter, female rogue/swashbuckler type, and female arcane spellcaster type) running from a quori and up against a couple of humans wielding fancy polearms. Wayne provides his traditional standard of excellence in the details of the work, including some very fine armor and weapons and an overall very nice action scene.
The interior artwork consists of 48 full-color illustrations by 15 different artists, plus 11 color maps by talented cartographer Lee Moyer. The artwork is for the most part pretty good, with my favorites including Fred Hooper's very detailed Adaran earth painting on page 23 (excellent color use and perspective on a very complex design); the picture of the ship entering the port of Dvaarnava on page 34, by either Warren Mahy or Martina Pilcerova or Mark Tedin - the artist signs his/her work with an "M" (in any case, nice weather effects, and the sailing vessel definitely looks like it's seen better days - and I also like the little detail of the skeleton on the flag from the highest mast); Howard Lyon's depiction of the ruins of the war mazes on page 76 (nicely muted color scheme, and good job on the labyrinthine ruins themselves); James Zhang's depictions of humans from four different cultures on page 110 (a well-chosen selection of diversity, and each is nicely detailed); and Ron Lemen's psionic whip-wielding duergar on page 131 (I love the fierce expression on his face - that's one duergar I hope never to meet up with!). Most of my least favorite artwork can be found (as is often the case in Eberron books, in my experience) in the full-page comic book style artwork at the beginning of each new chapter. I don't know why the artwork for those pages never really seems to come out as good as the rest of the artwork. Of course, there are a couple of poorly-done pieces in this book as well that aren't comic book pages, like the strange perspective and body proportion work on David Birchim's portrait of a Haztaratain on page 123; or his mess of a cradle of healing depiction on page 140, where his garish use of light makes the two figures and the psionically-charged device all seem to blend into one big blob. Upon closer look, David has similar problems with his pieces on pages 121 and 128 - it looks like he should maybe work a little on realistic body proportions and delineating where one body ends and another begins. Also, Kalman Andrasofszky's essence reaver on page 146 shouldn't have wings. Still, the artwork in Secrets of Sarlona is for the most part pretty good, and we do get an illustration of each creature in the Sarlonan Monsters chapter, with the exception of the two templates (and the sample creatures look like a normal wolf and a normal ogre mage, so no harm done by the lack of illustrations there).
Secrets of Sarlona is laid out as follows:
Riedra not only covers the most territory in Sarlona (compared to the other three regions), but it's also the most disturbing. There, humanity is pretty much cast into slavery by their psionic overlords, and worst of all they are raised to actually enjoy their slave status. I had a former player (who's now moved away) that would absolutely love fighting psionic tyranny in Riedra - I think "rebel" is hard-wired into his DNA or something. In any case, the "Day in the Life" fiction blurb was particularly well done in the Riedra section of chapter one, as it got my hackles up and made me feel sorry for the main character, all in the course of less than a full page.
Adar is a much smaller land, and it can be best summed up as "those who most strongly oppose Riedra and their psionic overlords." I like the psionic shroud that encompasses the land, based in eight different monastery-fortresses throughout Adar - not only does it make perfect sense in the game's history for the Adarans to have come up with something like this, but I like the game mechanics behind it, and I also like the fact that if I peek back at the Eberron Campaign Setting book I see that the psionic shroud was already a feature of Adar at the game's very beginning! Things like that really make the campaign setting feel like a unified whole, rather than being made up piecemeal with each new sourcebook.
Syrkarn is a land of deserts, steppes, and grasslands (with a shape rather like that of Africa, now that I look at it), which is not as tied up in the "psionic monsters from Dal Quor" overarching plotline as are Adar and Riedra. There's a new PC race presented, the eneko, which is an ogre/half-giant crossbreed featuring the "powerful build" feature first seen in the goliaths of Races of Stone. I like the history of Syrkarn, especially the fact that there are ruins dating back to the yuan-ti empire scattered throughout the land. (In that respect, I guess Syrkarn reminds me a bit of Xen'drik, which I like much, much more than Sarlona as a whole - maybe that's why Syrkarn is my favorite land on the continent.)
Finally, there's the Tashana tundra, a cold land inhabited by shifters, savage human barbarians, and wild zones of planar breaches that cause all kinds of disruptive effects. At least one of the authors is apparently a big Firefly fan, because the savage Kalaak raiders seem to be that show's "Reavers" transplanted into a D&D game. The best parts of the different sections of this chapter are the sidebars detailing what's common knowledge among the locals, and sample names and naming schemes. The authors also did a good job in making the naming conventions (of the folks living there, place names, and so on) seem different in each region yet internally consistent. For instance, many of the Tashana tundra names seem based upon the Eskimo/Inuit language, while many of the city/fortress names in Riedra start with "Dar," "Dul," "Kintam," "Tam," or "Tol."
Of the new feats, spells, magic/psionic items, and so on, they were all pretty much okay. Some of the feats seemed a bit odd, like Ascetic Psion, which allows you to become psionically focused as a standard action and freely multiclass between monk and psion; I don't think multiclassing between monk and psion (which are thematically similar enough in my mind - focus on improving the body, focus on improving the mind) should require a feat (or even "half a feat," as is kind of the case here) so much as be a standard rule. I also kind of laughed a bit at the "base attack bonus +1" prerequisite for the Stone Breaker feat (which allows you to rend when dual-wielding two picks), considering that the other prerequisites include four other feats - I would hope that the character would have attained a BAB of +1 by the time they had 4 feats! (In fact, it makes me wonder whether that "+1" was a typo and it wasn't supposed to be something a bit higher.) Neither of the two new prestige classes, Fist of Dal Quor (psionic melee combatants) and Haztaratain (mountain-dwelling psionic monks), particularly grabbed my imagination. Of the new spells, I rather liked fleshbound and lifebound, which imprison a possessing spirit into the body in which it's currently residing - take that, quori spirits! I also liked constrictor's touch, which allows you to "shrink" an item of clothing that somebody's wearing. (It brings to mind the scene in Red Dwarf where the polymorph creature is disguised as Dave Lister's underwear....) Some of the spells (energy trap, stone mind, tail of the dragon) had a "?" in their Duration entries; I'm still unsure of what they're intended to signify. (Possibly a shorthand reminder to check something out that a developer forgot to remove afterwards? I dunno.) It was nice to see a full-page sidebar on common psionic powers in Sarlona that duplicate spells, even though they were of the more mundane, day-to-day use spells instead of the flashy combat stuff. I got a kick out of some of the new weapons, like the monk's cane, with which you can emulate the combat style of Major John Steed of "The Avengers" (just pretend it's a rolled-up umbrella instead of a cane). I'm not a big fan of the quori as a whole, so the three new quori in the last chapter didn't do much for me, but oddly enough I really enjoyed the "quorbound creature" and "quorbred creature" templates - they seem like a nice way to "power up" a standard creature a bit without going too wild.
Proofreading and editing in Secrets of Sarlona was pretty good for the most part, with just a few mistakes getting past editor M. Alexander Jurkat and editing manager Kim Mohan. These were for the most part little things like incorrect word usage ("story" instead of "stories," "instrument" instead of "instruments," "warrior" instead of "warriors"), typos resulting in incorrect word usage ("that" instead of "than"), simple typos ("psisonic" instead of "psionic"), words missing from sentences, the occasional slip back into 3.0 terminology ("large shields" instead of "heavy shields"), two words missing the space between them (this was a rather frequent error, oddly enough), failure to correctly spell some of the place names ("Kaashta" showed up as "Kasshta" in a couple of places), a question ending in a period rather than a question mark, indecision as to whether or not the "f" in "Fist of Dal Quor" is supposed to be capitalized or not, a premature carriage return bumping half a line to the next line, a shading problem in a table on page 144, and some text formatting issues like part of a word not being italicized. All in all, not bad, but most of these errors were things that should have been caught.
As for the stat blocks, there weren't a whole lot of them, but I found some errors in those that were there. Here's my "unofficial errata" for Secrets of Sarlona:
With no inherent dragonmarks at all and very little in the way of dragonshards (just the occasional Khyber dragonshard), Sarlona as a whole has a different "feel" than Khorvaire or Xen'drik (where the majority of Eberron adventures have taken place thus far) - and that's a good thing. The psionic focus of the book was not entirely to my own preferences, and it might have helped for a refresher early on as to some rather important definitions - like Inspired and Chosen, for instance, both of which caused me to go scurrying to the Eberron Campaign Setting book to refresh my memory - but in all this is a good sourcebook for the continent, and Eberron DMs would do well to give the book a look to see if they're interested in expanding the scope of their Eberron game. Despite its limited usefulness to me personally, I give Secrets of Sarlona a strong "4 (Good)."
By Keith Baker, Scott Fitzgerald Gray, Glenn McDonald, and Chris Sims
Wizards of the Coast product number 955677200
160-page hardbound book, $29.95
Secrets of Sarlona is a recent (as of February 2007) sourcebook for the Eberron campaign setting, detailing life on the continent to the east of Khorvaire. While it's not entirely to my tastes at all (I'm admittedly not a big fan of psionics, and Sarlona is where they've pigeonholed the majority of the psionics material in Eberron), it's still a well done book.
The cover, as is true of most (if not all) Eberron material, features a composite painting by Wayne Reynolds. The full painting is shown on pages 2-3 of the book, but the cover contains chunks of the larger image superimposed onto the standard Eberron cover dress. For Secrets of Sarlona, Wayne details a group of adventurers (including a male soulknife, male shifter, female rogue/swashbuckler type, and female arcane spellcaster type) running from a quori and up against a couple of humans wielding fancy polearms. Wayne provides his traditional standard of excellence in the details of the work, including some very fine armor and weapons and an overall very nice action scene.
The interior artwork consists of 48 full-color illustrations by 15 different artists, plus 11 color maps by talented cartographer Lee Moyer. The artwork is for the most part pretty good, with my favorites including Fred Hooper's very detailed Adaran earth painting on page 23 (excellent color use and perspective on a very complex design); the picture of the ship entering the port of Dvaarnava on page 34, by either Warren Mahy or Martina Pilcerova or Mark Tedin - the artist signs his/her work with an "M" (in any case, nice weather effects, and the sailing vessel definitely looks like it's seen better days - and I also like the little detail of the skeleton on the flag from the highest mast); Howard Lyon's depiction of the ruins of the war mazes on page 76 (nicely muted color scheme, and good job on the labyrinthine ruins themselves); James Zhang's depictions of humans from four different cultures on page 110 (a well-chosen selection of diversity, and each is nicely detailed); and Ron Lemen's psionic whip-wielding duergar on page 131 (I love the fierce expression on his face - that's one duergar I hope never to meet up with!). Most of my least favorite artwork can be found (as is often the case in Eberron books, in my experience) in the full-page comic book style artwork at the beginning of each new chapter. I don't know why the artwork for those pages never really seems to come out as good as the rest of the artwork. Of course, there are a couple of poorly-done pieces in this book as well that aren't comic book pages, like the strange perspective and body proportion work on David Birchim's portrait of a Haztaratain on page 123; or his mess of a cradle of healing depiction on page 140, where his garish use of light makes the two figures and the psionically-charged device all seem to blend into one big blob. Upon closer look, David has similar problems with his pieces on pages 121 and 128 - it looks like he should maybe work a little on realistic body proportions and delineating where one body ends and another begins. Also, Kalman Andrasofszky's essence reaver on page 146 shouldn't have wings. Still, the artwork in Secrets of Sarlona is for the most part pretty good, and we do get an illustration of each creature in the Sarlonan Monsters chapter, with the exception of the two templates (and the sample creatures look like a normal wolf and a normal ogre mage, so no harm done by the lack of illustrations there).
Secrets of Sarlona is laid out as follows:
- Introduction: A single page (plus full-page comic book styled art) describing how to use this book and what other books you'll need to have on hand
- Chapter 1 - Welcome to Sarlona: The vast majority of the book's contents are here in these 99 pages, where we learn a bunch about Adar, Riedra, Syrkarn, and the Tashana Tundra, with sections detailing each land's history, geography, inhabitants, current plots, places of interest, adventure sites, and maybe an organization or two and stats for some NPCs
- Chapter 2 - Sarlonan Characters: Sections on the various races of Sarlona (including where to plug in races from other books, like Stormwrack's aventi), a psionic assassin alternate (prestige) class feature, 29 new feats, 11 new spells, 10 new psionic powers, and 2 new prestige classes
- Chapter 3 - Treasures of Sarlona: 7 new weapons, 3 new armor qualities, 4 new special substances and items, 6 new magic and psionic items, and 3 new magical locations (one of which is covered in a sidebar, as it covers free-floating planar breeches that travel through the tundra)
- Chapter 4 - Sarlonan Monsters: 4 new monsters (3 of which are quori) and 2 quori-based templates
Riedra not only covers the most territory in Sarlona (compared to the other three regions), but it's also the most disturbing. There, humanity is pretty much cast into slavery by their psionic overlords, and worst of all they are raised to actually enjoy their slave status. I had a former player (who's now moved away) that would absolutely love fighting psionic tyranny in Riedra - I think "rebel" is hard-wired into his DNA or something. In any case, the "Day in the Life" fiction blurb was particularly well done in the Riedra section of chapter one, as it got my hackles up and made me feel sorry for the main character, all in the course of less than a full page.
Adar is a much smaller land, and it can be best summed up as "those who most strongly oppose Riedra and their psionic overlords." I like the psionic shroud that encompasses the land, based in eight different monastery-fortresses throughout Adar - not only does it make perfect sense in the game's history for the Adarans to have come up with something like this, but I like the game mechanics behind it, and I also like the fact that if I peek back at the Eberron Campaign Setting book I see that the psionic shroud was already a feature of Adar at the game's very beginning! Things like that really make the campaign setting feel like a unified whole, rather than being made up piecemeal with each new sourcebook.
Syrkarn is a land of deserts, steppes, and grasslands (with a shape rather like that of Africa, now that I look at it), which is not as tied up in the "psionic monsters from Dal Quor" overarching plotline as are Adar and Riedra. There's a new PC race presented, the eneko, which is an ogre/half-giant crossbreed featuring the "powerful build" feature first seen in the goliaths of Races of Stone. I like the history of Syrkarn, especially the fact that there are ruins dating back to the yuan-ti empire scattered throughout the land. (In that respect, I guess Syrkarn reminds me a bit of Xen'drik, which I like much, much more than Sarlona as a whole - maybe that's why Syrkarn is my favorite land on the continent.)
Finally, there's the Tashana tundra, a cold land inhabited by shifters, savage human barbarians, and wild zones of planar breaches that cause all kinds of disruptive effects. At least one of the authors is apparently a big Firefly fan, because the savage Kalaak raiders seem to be that show's "Reavers" transplanted into a D&D game. The best parts of the different sections of this chapter are the sidebars detailing what's common knowledge among the locals, and sample names and naming schemes. The authors also did a good job in making the naming conventions (of the folks living there, place names, and so on) seem different in each region yet internally consistent. For instance, many of the Tashana tundra names seem based upon the Eskimo/Inuit language, while many of the city/fortress names in Riedra start with "Dar," "Dul," "Kintam," "Tam," or "Tol."
Of the new feats, spells, magic/psionic items, and so on, they were all pretty much okay. Some of the feats seemed a bit odd, like Ascetic Psion, which allows you to become psionically focused as a standard action and freely multiclass between monk and psion; I don't think multiclassing between monk and psion (which are thematically similar enough in my mind - focus on improving the body, focus on improving the mind) should require a feat (or even "half a feat," as is kind of the case here) so much as be a standard rule. I also kind of laughed a bit at the "base attack bonus +1" prerequisite for the Stone Breaker feat (which allows you to rend when dual-wielding two picks), considering that the other prerequisites include four other feats - I would hope that the character would have attained a BAB of +1 by the time they had 4 feats! (In fact, it makes me wonder whether that "+1" was a typo and it wasn't supposed to be something a bit higher.) Neither of the two new prestige classes, Fist of Dal Quor (psionic melee combatants) and Haztaratain (mountain-dwelling psionic monks), particularly grabbed my imagination. Of the new spells, I rather liked fleshbound and lifebound, which imprison a possessing spirit into the body in which it's currently residing - take that, quori spirits! I also liked constrictor's touch, which allows you to "shrink" an item of clothing that somebody's wearing. (It brings to mind the scene in Red Dwarf where the polymorph creature is disguised as Dave Lister's underwear....) Some of the spells (energy trap, stone mind, tail of the dragon) had a "?" in their Duration entries; I'm still unsure of what they're intended to signify. (Possibly a shorthand reminder to check something out that a developer forgot to remove afterwards? I dunno.) It was nice to see a full-page sidebar on common psionic powers in Sarlona that duplicate spells, even though they were of the more mundane, day-to-day use spells instead of the flashy combat stuff. I got a kick out of some of the new weapons, like the monk's cane, with which you can emulate the combat style of Major John Steed of "The Avengers" (just pretend it's a rolled-up umbrella instead of a cane). I'm not a big fan of the quori as a whole, so the three new quori in the last chapter didn't do much for me, but oddly enough I really enjoyed the "quorbound creature" and "quorbred creature" templates - they seem like a nice way to "power up" a standard creature a bit without going too wild.
Proofreading and editing in Secrets of Sarlona was pretty good for the most part, with just a few mistakes getting past editor M. Alexander Jurkat and editing manager Kim Mohan. These were for the most part little things like incorrect word usage ("story" instead of "stories," "instrument" instead of "instruments," "warrior" instead of "warriors"), typos resulting in incorrect word usage ("that" instead of "than"), simple typos ("psisonic" instead of "psionic"), words missing from sentences, the occasional slip back into 3.0 terminology ("large shields" instead of "heavy shields"), two words missing the space between them (this was a rather frequent error, oddly enough), failure to correctly spell some of the place names ("Kaashta" showed up as "Kasshta" in a couple of places), a question ending in a period rather than a question mark, indecision as to whether or not the "f" in "Fist of Dal Quor" is supposed to be capitalized or not, a premature carriage return bumping half a line to the next line, a shading problem in a table on page 144, and some text formatting issues like part of a word not being italicized. All in all, not bad, but most of these errors were things that should have been caught.
As for the stat blocks, there weren't a whole lot of them, but I found some errors in those that were there. Here's my "unofficial errata" for Secrets of Sarlona:
- p. 29, Yuzdeep Xeel, male human warlock 10: Skills should include Disguise +3 (+5 acting) [0 ranks, +3 Cha, +2 conditional synergy bonus from Bluff].
- p. 66, Du'ulora Champion, Du'ulora Inspired psychic warrior 12: It looks like AC should be 20, not 19 (+2 Dex, +8 inertial armor), and flat-footed AC should be 18, not 17. His "Survival +17" should be followed by "(+19 following tracks and on other planes)" due to +2 synergy bonuses from Search and Knowledge (the planes).
- p. 67, Tsucora Dreamblade, Tsucora Inspired soulknife 6/psionic assassin 2: Flat-footed AC should be 19, not 16, due to uncanny dodge. Another of his feats should be annotated as a bonus feat; as an 8th-level character, he should have 3 "normal" (nonbonus) feats, not 4. Skills should include Balance +5 [0 ranks, +3 Dex, +2 synergy bonus from Tumble] and Survival +4 (+6 on other planes) [0 ranks, +4 Wis, +2 synergy bonus from Knowledge (the planes)].
- p. 91, Fraihna Lohazzen, male eneko ranger 8: Will should be +3, not +2 (+2 as Rgr8, +1 Wis). 30 ft. does not equal 8 squares; since an eneko has a base speed of 30 feet and this is not altered by his class or equipment, that should be 6 squares.
- pp. 91-92, Creysaa, Hunting Hound Companion: Initiative should be +3, not +2 (+3 Dex). Flat-footed AC should be 15, not 16 (+5 natural) - if we accept that the "+5 natural" is correct. If, however, this "hunting hound" uses the stats of a riding dog, then its natural armor bonus should be +6 (+4 as a riding dog, +2 for being the animal companion to an 8th-level ranger). Of course, then it should only have 4 HD, not 6 HD (2 HD as a riding dog and +2 HD as an animal companion), so your guess is as good as mine. For now, we'll stick with the "facts" as given in the stats. Fort should be +8, not +5 (+5 as a 6-HD augmented animal, +3 Con). Will should be +3, not +1 (+2 as a 6-HD augmented animal, +1 Wis). Bite damage should be 1d8+3, not 1d8+2 (+2 Str, but 1.5 times Str modifier for it being the creature's sole attack). Trip attacks should be made at +2, not +1 (+2 Str).
- p. 105, Kunigal the Desecrator, male human barbarian 11/fighter 2: When raging, claw attacks should be at +19/+14/+9 melee, not +18/+13/+8 (+13 BAB, +6 Str). Intimidate can only be as high as +21, not +22 (16 ranks max for a 13-HD creature, +1 Cha, +2 Willing Deformity feat, +2 Deformity (face) feat). (These two feats are from the Book of Vile Darkness, by the way.)
- p. 122, Aesteraan, male Chosen soulknife 5/fist of Dal Quor 3: Skills should include Balance +3 [0 ranks, +1 Dex, +2 synergy bonus from Tumble], Jump +5 [0 ranks, +3 Str, +2 synergy bonus from Tumble], and Survival +0 (+2 on other planes) [0 ranks, +0 Wis, +2 synergy bonus from Knowledge (the planes)]. It looks like he's got the skills Diplomacy, Disguise, and Intimidate listed there as the result of a +2 synergy bonus from Bluff that he hasn't actually earned, as he doesn't have enough ranks in it. Finally, at the ultimate height of nitpickiness, I'll point out that his Languages aren't alphabetized correctly, and that "+2 leather armor" and all of his Combat Gear should be italicized, as they're magic items.
- p. 125, Bhimaani, female human monk 2/druid 3/Haztaratain 1: Ref should be +9, not +8 (+3 as a Mnk2, +1 as a Drd3, +2 as Haz1, +3 Dex).
- p. 147, Essence Reaver: Bite attacks should be at +18 melee, not +19 (+13 BAB, -1 size, +6 Str). Claw and tail slap attacks should be at +16 melee, not +17 (+13 BAB, -1 size, +6 Str, -2 secondary attack with Multiattack).
- p. 150, Quorbound Wolf Spy: Trip attacks should be at +2 to the die roll, not +1 (+2 Str).
- p. 151, Gedrun, male ogre mage quorbred fighter 1: Darkvision should be at a range of 90 feet, not 60 feet (the same as a normal ogre mage). Languages aren't alphabetized correctly. +1 composite longbow damage should be 2d6+9/x3, not 2d6+8/x3 (+8 Str, +1 magic weapon).
- pp. 153-154, Du'ulora Quori: Skills should include Disguise +4 (+6 acting) [0 ranks, +4 Cha, +2 synergy bonus from Bluff]. "Survival +16 (+18 on other planes)" should be "Survival +16 (+18 following tracks and on other planes)" due to a +2 synergy bonus from Search as well as the one from Knowledge (the planes). Oddly, he has 10 HD and yet his advancement only goes to 24 HD - why not 30 HD, since most creatures' advancement goes all the way to triple normal HD?
- pp. 154-155, Hashalaq Quori: Likewise, this one has 8 HD, yet its advancement stops at 20 HD instead of 24 HD.
- p. 156, Kalaraq Quori: Skills should include Survival +8 (+10 following tracks, in aboveground natural environments, and on other planes) [0 ranks, +8 Wis, +2 synergy bonuses from Search, Knowledge (nature), and Knowledge (the planes)] and Gather Information +9 [0 ranks, +7 Int, +2 synergy bonus from Knowledge (local)]. It has 18 HD, yet its advancement only goes to 50 HD instead of the expected 54 HD.
With no inherent dragonmarks at all and very little in the way of dragonshards (just the occasional Khyber dragonshard), Sarlona as a whole has a different "feel" than Khorvaire or Xen'drik (where the majority of Eberron adventures have taken place thus far) - and that's a good thing. The psionic focus of the book was not entirely to my own preferences, and it might have helped for a refresher early on as to some rather important definitions - like Inspired and Chosen, for instance, both of which caused me to go scurrying to the Eberron Campaign Setting book to refresh my memory - but in all this is a good sourcebook for the continent, and Eberron DMs would do well to give the book a look to see if they're interested in expanding the scope of their Eberron game. Despite its limited usefulness to me personally, I give Secrets of Sarlona a strong "4 (Good)."
