Sheoloth: City of the Drow

[Messageboard Golem]

This great and powerful city of the drow is built around an ancient shaft, at the base of which is a great cauldron of molten lava. Tunnels connect natural caverns to the main shaft and to drow-carved chambers. Near the upper end of the shaft lies the site of the original elven fortress, and the stark white fortress raised by the elves still stands guard, albeit cloaked in shadowy webs and surrounded on all sides by the silken homes and shops of the drow. Known as the Glory Crypt, this fallen fortress reminds the drow of their victory over their hated foes, while reminding them of the eternal danger lurking in the lands of the sky.

On the level below the Glory Crypt crouches the Blood Tithe. This commercial centre contains one of the greatest markets in the known worlds. The drow have created a thriving economy within Sheoloth and are careful to nurture it as best they can. Though separated from the Foreign Ward, the Blood Tithe still manages to see a great deal of goods from outside Sheoloth as a result of trade agreements the drow have forged with their foreign guests. In these winding streets and shadowed doorways, virtually anything can be purchased provided the buyer is willing to pay the price. The drow have slave traders here, as well as houses of pleasure and pain, drug dens, and more common goods such as food and wine are also available. Over the cries of the peddlers, one can hear the screams of tortured servants and the shouts of gladiatorial slaves attempting to convince potential buyers of their prowess.

If one follows a passage away from the Blood Tithe, the businesses give way to the homes of affluent commoners. Most of the homes crowded on the winding streets in this area of the city belong to merchants and traders who choose to dwell away from their business, yet remain close enough to deal with any problems or late-night customers should the need arise. The whole area is known as Silver Streets and its residents work hard to maintain the image of their neighbourhood by adorning their gates and walkways with hammered silver plates and flowing silver sculptures.

The Vault of Tombs is below, but connected by winding passages to, both the Blood Tithe and the Silver Streets and serves as the only banking area in the entire city. Promissory notes and letters of credit are issued from the banks here, where one may also inter the bones of the recently (or long since passed) dead. The Vault promises to keep all goods and bodies kept here safe, far from the hands of thieves or prying necromancers, out of sight until the items in storage are needed. Records of the accounts here are kept in a ridiculously complex code that is incomprehensible to most. While the church of the Dark Mother has keys to the codes used here, they rarely go to the effort to decode any records and take the information they are provided at face value.

Easily accessed from within the Vault of, the Haedistika is the dark underbelly of Sheoloth. In a city renowned for the evil it presents to visitors, Haedistika is the darkest and least-discussed area. The drow come here to forget themselves, to indulge in passions and satiate hungers they are fearful to acknowledge, much less analyze. The businesses found in this confusing warren of tunnels and pocket caverns cater only to the most perverse of drow needs and make a very tidy profit in the process. Outsiders who find their way here do not last long and are normally destroyed, spending their last hours as torture victims of the drow.

 

[John Cooper]

Sheoloth: City of the Drow
Mongoose Publishing product number MGP 5005
By Sam Witt
256 pages, $34.95

Sheoloth: City of the Drow was a massive undertaking. In 256 pages, Sam Witt attempted to create an entire Underdark drow city, giving it a coherent history filled with specific happenings yet generic enough to plug into most campaign worlds, designing it in a way that is both logical and out-of-the-ordinary, and populating it with interesting characters and factions. His purpose is to give the DM a city he can use in his game world, either as a place to visit when running his players through a series of Underdark adventures, or possibly as the main setting for a drow-based campaign. He took on a rather heavy load with this one, and he did an okay job with it. I think he's got a lot of cool ideas in here, and a fair share of problems as well. I'll try to spend equal time at both ends of the spectrum.

First, let's look at how the book is laid out:

• History: 8 pages of the history of the schism between elf and drow and the founding of Sheoloth
• An Overview: a down-and-dirty thumbnail sketch of Sheoloth as a whole, including a city-wide map of the caverns making up the city
• Life In Sheoloth: the different social castes living in Sheoloth, from disposable slaves to drow clergy, and including such things as drow holidays celebrated in the city
• Powers of Sheoloth: various factions in Sheoloth, from powerful merchants and nobles to the leaders of the drow religion, to hidden arcanists trying to undermine the power of the clergy
• Magic of the Drow: necromantic domination (using the energy of the undead to control living beings), fleshbuilding (altering living tissue into building materials), and virurgy (disease-borne spell energy)
• Darkness and Heresy: the Incabulos Heresy (arcane spellcasters stealing divine spells from the gods) and the Woven Mothers (an undead template for drow priestesses)
• Ward Descriptions: the majority of the book - over 125 pages describing each section of Sheoloth (there are 25 total, from the Ashen Bulwark to the Witch Daggers)
• Ward Summary: charts listing the quantities and types of buildings - shops, offices, and workshops - in each ward of the city

I like to start my reviews with the cover, so I'll just say that this is another excellent use of Chris Quilliams' considerable talents. (Anne Stokes is given co-credit for the cover, but as only Quilliams signed it, I'm willing to bet Stokes was responsible for just the lettering and general cover layout.) There is a good level of detail, not only in the female drow in the foreground (wearing a very intricate metal headdress with what could be either devil horns or insect antennae, and with elaborate trim along the neckline of her robes) but also in the drow in the background and the coral-like stone structure behind them, and the stone-carved buildings behind it. Despite the drow having dark skin and wearing dark clothing (as you'd expect them to), Chris managed to add some nice color contrast in the orange and yellow stone in the background. I personally wouldn't have gone with purple as the non-artwork background of the book, but I guess purple does have a "drowy" feel to it.

The interior artwork is for the most part pretty well done, this time by five different artists - four of whom also contributed to The Quintessential Drow. In fact, this is a good place to point out that several pieces of artwork appear in both books, specifically those on pages 33, 51, 80, 113, 147, 150, 164, 165, 191, and 193. Some people really hate "rerun" art - I don't have that much of a problem with it, and I was glad to see that at least the "reruns" were all drow-themed. (On the other hand, the "reruns" look like they were commissioned for The Quintessential Drow, since more times than not they "fit" the nearby text better there than in Sheoloth.)

And that segues nicely into my first real criticism of this book. Nowhere is it mentioned that Sheoloth: City of the Drow is in effect volume 2 of a 2-volume set, but it references stuff from The Quintessential Drow (while not always stating that that's where the item in question can be found) so often that it might as well be. There are numerous references to fleshcrafting, the rules for which are found in The Quintessential Drow. Likewise with ovarisites, the spiderlike creatures intrinsically linked to drow gestation (which is itself an inherently cool idea, and one I like much better than the supposition - put forth in a Dragon Magazine article a year or so back - that drow females always gestate twins but one kills the other in the womb, and the pregnant - and evil - female drow really, really likes the feeling of one embryo strangling another). I much rather prefer Sam Witt's chilling - and more plausible, even in a fantasy setting - idea that these ovarisite spiders take the embryo from the drow's womb at an early stage of its development and provide a womblike environment in their own bodies, while they suck nutrients out of the slave creature they adhere to during the fetus' growth. Still, my point is, as cool as these concepts are, they are mentioned but not detailed in Sheoloth - if you want details, you'll have to pick up The Quintessential Drow.

Unfortunately, there are other undoubtedly cool concepts referred to in Sheoloth that are not detailed in either book. Sheoloth makes numerous references to something called necrore, which I'll go out on a very small limb and assume is some sort of "necromantic ore" mined by the drow - or better yet, by their nondrow slaves. But what is it? What does it do? What game effects does it have? How rare is it? I've read both books cover to cover, and I still have no idea. Likewise with the necromaton, which may be nothing more than a fancy term for a skeleton or zombie ("necromantic automaton?") but which is not explained in either book. Sam also mentions (on page 25) that the drow of Sheoloth have categorized at least three different types of undead created when slabs of loose rock crush victims into paste. This is an intriguing concept and I'd love to see the stats for these creatures, but unfortunately they don't exist in either book, either.

On page 194 there is a reference to Appendix B: Adventuring in Sheoloth. However, not only is there no Appendix B in this book, there's no Appendix A either! (I saw no references to Appendix A, so I have no idea what it's supposed to be about.) I would hope that this missing material might someday soon show up on either the Mongoose website or their Signs & Portents magazine (preferably the website, where those who already paid $34.95 for this book might get the missing stuff for free).

Interspersed throughout the book are pages or half-pages of fiction. I'd like to go on record here by stating that in my opinion, Sam Witt does the best tie-in fiction I've ever seen in the pages of any Mongoose book. In Sheoloth, each of these fiction blurbs is a continuing story of a drow male (with the unfortunate name of Blade, proprietor of a weapon shop called...groan with me now..."Blade's Blades") and the half-drow female he finds in the streets of Sheoloth and trains over the course of the next few years. The fiction is entertaining, and Sam Witt is the master of placing interesting fiction blurbs that actually cover the game material you just read on that or the previous page. Some people see such fiction blurbs as frivolous page-fillers; I think Sam's fiction is entertaining as-is but definitely enhances the game material presented, emphasizing an important point or adding on another relevant fact about the topic in question.

The "Magic of the Drow" section is 67% cool: necromantic domination is a very powerful tool, and strikes me as something the drow race would discover, but it's also dangerous enough to have definite limits and isn't something anyone in their right mind would want to trifle with. Similarly, virurgy is appropriately disgusting (the associated fiction has a drow virurgist scraping the oozing pustules from a mind flayer's body, harvesting material for his craft) and has rules that seem to work well. Fleshbuilding, on the other hand, seems nothing so much as just downright silly. (The nondrow male victim illustrated on page 87, with his bloated body and dangling genitals, wasn't really necessary in my view, either.) However, even though I liked two of the three concepts listed here, these seemed much more appropriate in The Quintessential Drow than here in Sheoloth. I can only suppose what didn't fit in The Quintessential Drow showed up here - if nothing else, it would explain why the 128-page Quintessential Drow had an index in the back and the 256-page Sheoloth: City of the Drow, which arguably needed one even more, didn't - the pages were put to use on overflow from the first book.

I'm actually of two minds about Sheoloth (the city, not the book about it). I think Sam did a pretty good job of designing an Underdark drow-filled city, as far as coming up with 25 distinct districts (or wards, as they're referred to) and filling them with interesting people and factions. I really like the fact that each of the 25 wards has a list of several of the more important buildings found there, complete with stats for the people running the shops (or residences, or whatever) and a plot hook for each building detailed. That really makes the DM's life a lot easier! On the down side, despite the fact that both covers say the material in Sheoloth is 3.5 compatible (the back cover states: "This product utilizes updated material from the v.3.5 revision"), much of the material is in fact 3.0 - the spells are 3.0 (change self instead of disguise self, polymorph self instead of polymorph, polymorph other instead of baleful polymorph), the skills are 3.0 (Pick Pocket instead of Sleight of Hand, Wilderness Lore instead of Survival ), the statistic formats are 3.0 (no Base Attack or Grapple bonuses listed), and so on. Also, I was rather disappointed with the maps. Maps seem to be one of Mongoose's overall weak points: they seldom have scales posted or even square grids, and these maps fail on both counts. In addition, several maps are incorrectly numbered (the map of the Vault of Tombs on page 211, for instance, has the guard towers marked as area 2 while the description lists them as area 3, and area 4 (the Adamant Spire) does not show up on the map at all, unless it's the area marked as "2" (the Moneylender's Bazaar - in which case where's area 2 supposed to really be?). Most of the maps look pretty much the same, too: rather stomach-shaped, with a narrow corridor at either end and a "bulge" in the middle where all the buildings are.

Finally, here's my biggest problem with the maps: all we get are overall areas of vast sections of the city, with not a single building map at all. I would have liked to see some unique drow architecture. For instance, Sheoloth is ruled by female drow clerics. Wizards (mostly drow males) have been given a section of the city to "rule" by themselves, partly to keep them all in one place where the priestesses can keep an eye on them. This wizard-area of the city is a cavern of hanging stalactites known as the Witch Daggers. The nine most powerful wizards each live in one of these hollowed-out stalactites. Cool idea, and this would have made for an excellent map. I would have been content with just one of these wizard dwellings, no need to do up all nine. But a wizard's inverted tower hanging from the ceiling of the Witch Daggers cavern would be a cool place for an adventure, whether the PCs were infiltrating the place and stealing something of importance, or assassinating the wizard (and his minions) living within, or perhaps fighting off enemies attacking the wizard for an appropriate award. Similarly, I'd have liked to see how a temple to the Dark Mother (only Wizards of the Coast can use the name "Lolth") was laid out, or a couple of sample drow shops. The big-picture maps presented in the book serve their purpose for the DM, but several building maps would have been as big a help, if not more so.

I was surprised to see that there were as many errors in the book as there are, especially with two editors assigned, Matthew Sprange and August Hahn, as well as a third person (Mike Jeff) assigned as proofreader. I can only guess that they let a spellchecker program do most of their work for them, because I found an inordinate number of errors with just one read-through of the book, and most of these were of the missing-word variety, or the dropping of a letter in a word that formed another word (and that a spellchecker would therefore miss). Since I harp on this problem rather frequently in my reviews, I thought this time - since this book is such a bad offender in this regard - I'd name some specifics:

• Page 6: "at are gates" should be "at our gates"
• Page 12: the map has a location marked "Outland Theives" which should be "Outland Thieves"
• Page 25: "attacks by other salves" should be "attacks by other slaves"
• Page 40: "Blade sent most of the next three days" should be "Blade spent most of the next three days"
• Page 40: "she kept stumbling among to his orders" should be "stumbling along to his orders"
• Page 42: "Not only must the provide assistance" should be "Not only must they provide assistance"
• Page 44: "all the real decision" should be "all the real decisions"
• Page 46: "an hours' time" should be "an hour's time"
• Page 46: "the first days is" should be "the first day is"
• Page 76: "'No,' hew hissed" should be "'No,' he hissed"
• Page 101: "his immediately family" should be "his immediate family"
• Page 131: "then he nodded and her off to bed" should be "then he nodded and sent her off to bed"
• Page 141: "Looking around the hop" should be "Looking around the shop"
• Page 143: "pungal pit" should be fungal pit"
• Page 145: "haold" should be "hold"
• Page 194: "Leviathon" should be "Leviathan"
• Page 210: "baking institution" should be "banking institution" (that was a rather humorous one!)
• Page 210: "had to found" should be "had to be found"
• Page 234: "Panwbroker" should be "Pawnbroker"
• Back Cover: "Adaptable to any exisdting campaign" should be "Adaptable to any existing campaign"

I think that's more than enough to make my point, but there are also instances of sentences being cut off at the ends of the boxed fiction blurbs (see page 123) or in some of the charts (see page 116).

There were some other things I found odd in this book as well. Some of the NPC stats had half-points in their skills. Now, I can understand if you're in a character class that only gets, say, 2 Skill points per level, and there are some cross-class Skills you want for your character, that you could end up putting your final Skill point into a cross-class Skill and only end up with "half a point" for the effort. But why in the world would you have two different Skills with half-points in them at one time, like Garis Friloshallika on page 63? (And he claims to have an Intelligence 17! For shame!) Is Fyarril Isthaza, on page 116, a male as his stat block claims, or a female as her description claims? If Croula Luzkar (page 179) is only 3 feet, 1 inch tall due to fungal preservative gels stunting her growth as a child (cool background, by the way), why is she listed as a Medium creature? And how could she possibly ever be mistaken for her Chief Accountant, Thelozi Luzkar, who stands 6 feet tall? On pages 215-216, why do Kevvett and Darnev Olnarvyn, two 14th-level wizards who are brothers as well, have exactly the same 69 spells in their respective spell repertoires? For that matter, the only differences in their attribute scores are Strength 10 vs. 12 and Intelligence 19 vs. 17. Even if they were identical twins (which is not mentioned), you'd think they'd have learned some different spells. And how is it that Darnev manages to have Spell Mastery of disintegrate when that spell isn't even known to him (according to his "spells known" list)? Either somebody was taking a shortcut, or one brother's spell listing was accidentally copied onto the other. But the question remains: with two editors and a proofreader, why am I still catching all of these mistakes after reading the material only once?

I can heartily recommend Sheoloth: City of the Drow to those DMs looking for a ready-built drow city for their Underdark campaigns, but only if they: 1] already have, or are already planning to purchase The Quintessential Drow, 2] don't mind creating all of the building floor plans themselves, and 3] don't mind playing the "figure out what word is missing from this sentence" game. If you fit the criteria, then by all means pick up the book - it is, despite its flaws, filled with all kinds of disgustingly appropriate and flavorful Drow features. (One of my favorites is the corpselight, a "streetlight" made from the body of a still-living torture victim kept alive by magic so his body can be siphoned away at the rate of 20 lbs. per month. I also loved the Incabulos Ritual and the Woven Mothers template in the "Darkness and Heresy" chapter.) If you don't fall into the above category, however, I'd recommend carefully looking the book over for yourself before plunking down your $34.95.

Oh, and the spiders on the outside borders of the pages are very cool, and rather realistic. Arachnophobes be warned!

 

[Selvarin]

"Likewise with ovarisites, the spiderlike creatures intrinsically linked to drow gestation (which is itself an inherently cool idea, and one I like much better than the supposition - put forth in a Dragon Magazine article a year or so back - that drow females always gestate twins but one kills the other in the womb, and the pregnant - and evil - female drow really, really likes the feeling of one embryo strangling another)."

Aha, the infamous rock 'em sock 'em drow baby battle of the womb. I remember that(and the rest of the article in question) well. I'm very interested in getting a copy of Sheoloth, even have one on order at Amazon, but this review gives me some reason for pause. Perhaps I should get the Book of Exalted Deeds instead and wait for a better discount somewhere else?

As for the purple-and-gold cover look, the exterior of the Menzoberranzen boxed set certainly had an influence.

(Oh, and if anyone from Mongoose Publishing reads this review (and this comment), please note: I'm a fantastic speller/proofreader, and I charge reasonable rates. Try me, it's obvious you could use the extra help.)

 

[Psion]

"Some of the NPC stats had half-points in their skills. "

You noticed, eh? Anyone who has used NPCgen will realize that these NPCs were made with NPCGen, which pretty much randomly allocates skill points and feats. If you look through the feat choices, you will find some of those bizarre too. Oh, and NPCGen is a 3.0 product; you will find that the bards have skill points for 3.0 bards; where skill names were changed between editions; they are alphabetically in the list in the place where they would have been in 3.0 (i.e., search-and-replaced).

 

[John Cooper]

Selvarin - I hope I'm not steering you away from the purchase of the book. On the one hand, I'm sure you're probably getting a discount through Amazon, and that's a good thing. Also, if you're interested in purchasing Sheoloth: City of the Drow - admittedly a significant expenditure - you're likely also interested in The Quintessential Drow anyway. (I gave The Quintessential Drow four stars in a review a few days ago.) I was thinking about that last night after I had gone to bed: while I was a bit disappointed that Sheoloth referred back to The Quintessential Drow so frequently, it does make sense that anyone willing to plunk down $34.95 for a drow city is probably also going to want to get the drow sourcebook. I just wish that Sheoloth had been a bit more self-contained, and that room for the "generic" stuff (like the virurgy, fleshbuilding, and necromantic possession) had been made in The Quintessential Drow. But I suppose it doesn't really matter if you're planning on getting both books anyway.

Psion - Ah, that explains it. I've never used NPCGen myself.

John Cooper

 

[Selvarin]

Not necessarily, just that it's making me think a tad harder about whether it's a must-buy at this moment. I'm a bit bothered that no building maps were included, if anything because I'm hopeless when it comes to designing them myself and that would've been doubly helpful (I did see the preview of the Sheoloth maps that were included, they looked okay although I agree they tend to have the same cavern shape). Can't say I'm too bothered about the Quintessential Drow tie-ins, although I'm not as interested in that book and would instead replace those bits with material from Plot & Poison. By the way, the part of your QD review does beg the question regarding driders and drow, as well as other related questions that spring to mind. For example, if spiders are so sacred why would a drow cast 'spider climb', considering that the spell requires the consumption of a live spider and in many drow settlements it's a punishable offense to harm or kill arachnids? I'll add it to my list of "What the heck?" items, such as why mind flayers--who eat brains--would create golems made of brains, or why vampires would create creatures which drink blood. It would make more sense to have servant nasties which got rid of the 'leftovers', but I'm going way off-topic here.

 

[trancejeremy]

Great review, BTW

 

[Selvarin]

My copy of Sheoloth arrived on Thursday, what a surprise, and after looking it over thoroughly I still agree with the review for the most part. I didn't feel any great loss by not having Quintessential Drow on hand, but all things considered it would've made sense to include the bits on fleshcrafting and ovarisites instead of Mongoose assuming (or hoping) you already have/will purchase QD. Bad, bad, bad. As for the Incabulos, I found it too 'wasteful' a concept. So many creatures sacrificed in order to get a cleric spell in place of an arcane spell? If one doesn't have access to the ur-priest prestige class found in the Book of Vile Darkness then I suppose this is the Incabulos ritual found in Sheoloth is the next best thing.

 

[Selvarin]

Hmm, should I or shouldn't I? That was the question I asked myself after reading the first thorough review of Sheoloth (John beat me to it, drat!), both whether to keep Sheoloth on order as well as whether to post a review of it myself in the event I'd get it. Surprise, Amazon.com kept telling me it was on hold or something even as the package arrived on my doorstep. So much for indecision. Since then, the more I read and re-read the book the more I found my own angle on this and just feel like posting my own thoughts on the subject. This will be a shorter review, hopefully--it would be redundant and boring if I went through every detail when someone else has already done a good job of it. However, maybe it'll be helpful to bring up a few other points.

Sheoloth: City of the Drow is a 256-page hardcover from Mongoose Publishing detailing--what else?--a drow city. When I first got it I was somewhat impressed with the thickness (most gamebooks I get are tighter and lighter, as they say). Then again the paper used is a little thicker than I normally find in the gamebooks I purchase. No big deal, really, just something I noticed. So far the spine seems to be holding up to regular usage, which is important since I can't stand to have a book fall apart on me. The size of the type font used in the book seems to be 10-point, which may not matter to some but when I compare it to books with smaller type I can't help but feel that Mongoose would've had enough room (and then some) in Sheoloth for an index just by dropping the font size down a notch. Am I being too nitpicky here? I probably look like it, but in this day and age where book prices keep going up I can't afford not to. Other than that, the layout is pretty good. The interior artwork ranges from good to "do we really need to use up needed space with this?". A number of artists can take the credit (or blame, as the case may be). I must say I like Alejandro Villen's work, which captures drow in all their dark majesty. Then there's the boxed art that can be seen on pages 33, 37, 90, and elsewhere. They don't look much like drow and they don't add to the feel or the flavor of the material, either. The cover, of course, is fantastic. The purple and gold is reminiscent of the Menzoberranzen boxed set of years gone by, but what really strikes me is the cover art itself. Chris Quilliams' piece is beautiful, and it makes me wish that it was available as a lithograph or poster. As for the mapwork, it's decent and does the job. I've seen the best and the worst, this is in the middle and it fits in with the rest of the interior. A scale for figuring out the size and distance on each map (or even just one of the maps) would've been helpful, though.

Now, onto the substance of the book. I have to agree that Sam Witt did a good job overall. Even if I wasn't going to use Sheoloth as a whole within my own campaign world, it's chock full of bits that can be snipped and used elsewhere. Part of what initially got my attention concerning this product (aside from the drow aspect) was seeing the maps in the preview PDF that was made available at the Mongoose Publishing website. It wasn't a drow city crammed within a 'bubble' in the rock, it was a series of interconnected caverns that made up the city, with the 'Falling Road' (essentially a long shaft leading to hot magma below) right in the center. This is how I imagine many drow cities would be laid out, among several large caverns. Great idea. In addition, there are several NPCs listed and detailed in each ward, something that I can appreciate even if there are discrepancies in a few. What does puzzle me is why there weren't any solid stats for the Faceless Watch (law enforcers controlled by the Church of the Dark Mother) and the Eight-Eyed Masks (who act more as detectives and are in the employ of the nobles). They're likely to be encountered sometime during a party's stay, it makes sense (and would've been helpful) to have a typical member's stats, what a patrol or strike force of them is comprised of, their encounter level (as a group), and so on. For a good example of a general (EL) outline of this nature, try page 31 of Lords of Darkness, a WotC product. As much as I'd like to see full stats, even sample groups listed according to EL would've been a boon. (It pays to look at what the competition does right.)

When it comes to fluff (setting, history, etc.) and crunch (prestige classes, feats, spells, etc.), this is most definitely a fluff product in the good sense of the term. Despite my gripe about the lack of full stats for law enforcment individuals in the Overview section, I was more than pleased by the detail of how the city functions as well as by the details on the churches and nobility in the Powers of Sheoloth section. There are a few new crunchy bits, that is true, but in reality Sheoloth's crunch lies within The Quintessential Drow accessory, also by Mongoose. Some material from that book is mentioned in Sheoloth, although not always saying that X can be found in QD. This is a bit of a no-no in my opinion. Regardless, while it's fair to say that QD may be needed to fully utilize all the magical crafts mentioned in Sheoloth it's also fair to say that references to QD material can be easily ignored and replaced with something else. Of the 'crunch that stands on its own in Sheoloth I found that the concept of the necromantic domination ritual was intriguing--a bit too wasteful and in need of tweaking, but intriguing nonetheless. The bit on fleshbuilding was, well, you know. It isn't a good concept. Buildings made from crushed or 'grown' bone, that's one thing. A room or building made of a creature's bloated body, still alive...No. A few other magical concepts are also discussed in the book, some of which don't fly right either, but that's okay. They aren't critical, as far as I'm concerned.

Concluson

When all is said and done, Sheoloth: City of the drow is a book with a lot to offer. It provides a setting that can be dropped into virtually any campaign setting, the politics are dealt with in detail (which I appreciated) and I loved the layout of the city itself. The history, the way the city functions, etc...Yet it still gets a 3. There were a few things that could've been better executed. Besides the typos and the lack of an index (which is damn-near essential in this case, and which a smaller font size would've helped made room for), it could've used more stats for certain groups (and a few sample encounter tables) in order to take more of a load off of the DM. It's a bunch of little things that, when taken together, collectively drag down the rating a bit. The Quintessential Drow tie-in doesn't factor into this much at all, in fact if they didn't make use of (or reference) QD material I would've been scratching my head wondering why they didn't bother to include some of it. It's all the other little things. When you're paying $34.95 for a game accesory you want your money's worth. A big thing for me is DM utility, at least in this instance. Tables and stats aren't the be-all and end-all, but(!) they do help. Some are perfectly happy to do it themselves, others are beginners or don't have the time. Sheoloth is a grand city setting, even with its quirks. If you plan on doing something drow or Underdark-themed, give it a try. It does do a lot of the DM's work when it comes to painting the picture of a drow city. If it did a little bit more (and with fewer typos) it could rate a 4.

Which reminds me...Why in the Nine Hells would the drow of Sheoloth--indeed, any drow-- be trading water to deep gnomes? The mushroom wine they sell to the drow in return must be mighty good.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

Your binding is holding up so far? Okay Selvarin, give. What epic powers do you possess? Because, like another Mongoose product I purchased not so long ago, my copy of Sheoloth started falling apart within a couple of days of receiving it.