Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Messageboard Golem" data-source="post: 2009155" data-attributes="member: 18387">I grabbed the Stronghold Builders Guide when it came out, mostly for the fun of skimming through it, rather than for any pressing need to build a Stronghold (as a character) or to populate a world with sensible buildings (as a DM).  Since intent colors what I get out of the book, I'll just mention that up front.  It also means I havent gotten a chance to playtest either, so bear that in mind too.The Stronghold Builders Guide is a nice, chunky 128 page soft-cover.  There are 4 chapters, with the first two covering the crunchy rules bits of stronghold building, the third offering musings about strongholds, and the last presenting sample strongholds ranging from very simple to very complex.  In more detail:Chapter One: Building a Stronghold. (9 pages.)This section covers the mechanics of actually building your castle.  It provides a series of steps, starting with "Choosing a Location" and leading up to "Map Your Stronghold", which should guide you through the building process.  The rules here seem very clean; they are purposely kept simple in order to make stronghold building fun while keeping a veneer of realism.  Chapter Two: Stronghold Components (73 pages.)This chapter gives you a system and a set of modular components for creating buildings.  There is a lot of material in here; standard room, magical rooms, useful items, heavy weapons, traps, walls and so on.  This is the real meat of the book.  Some of it is very narrow (like a paragraph on the use of "Mattock of the Titans" for building or attacking strongholds) but much of it, like room types, descriptions and cost applies to everything you would ever want to build.Chapter Three: Strongholds in Your Campaign (17 pages.)A bit of colorful, inspirational material about the uses of strongholds in a campaign.  It includes suggestions for attacking other peoples castles and for defending your own.  There are a few crunchy rules scattered throughout, things like modifiers to the standard Spot checks for watchmen or a discussion of precisely how much damage a "Soften Earth and Stone" spell might do.Chapter Four: Example Strongholds (24 pages).This section has maps and commentary about five totally different strongholds.  They demonstrate that the book is not about building a couple variations of a simple European castle; its about building fabulous and strange edifices in a magical world.  One, for instance, is underwater; another one flies.  So, now on to the subjective part.The Good: 1)The basic building rules seem rock solid, and they are pitched at a level of complexity I think is just right.  D&D is not a game about building castles, its a game about heroic adventurers; and these rules reflect that.  Thats not to say that they are shallow; there is enough depth and variety here to keep people interested for a long while; but you will, mercifully, not be calculating stresses on load bearing walls or using your Appraise skill against DC35 to determine if a quarried stone has a hidden structural flaw in it.  You will be able to generate a highly individual building with a minimum of effort, which is beautiful for both DMs and stronghold-building PCs.2) The amount of imagination put into the Stronghold Components and the Example Strongholds is just fabulous.  There were individual ideas and even whole classes of ideas there that I had never considered or had thought could never be quantified nicely in rules.  All in all, the content of the book is just great.  You expect this book to perform a certain task and there is no question in my mind that it does its job.  But, all is not perfect.The Bad:1) The editing.  Oh my.  Someone needs to have their hand slapped with a ruler for this editing job.  The book is filled with the sort of sentence fragments and disjointed words you get when you cut and paste too quickly in a word processor.  I'm not generally picky about this sort of stuff, but that means that when I notice it, you've done a really bad job.  Here's one from the "Desecrated Shrine" - "Undead cannot be created within nor summoned into this space.  Undead summoned or created in this space gain +2 hit points per HD."  Huh?  It seemed that there was something jarring like that every couple of pages or so.  And since I bought the book for enjoyment rather than for a particular purpose, I was extra-aggravated when I came across something like this.The Unknown:1) Permanancy.  There are tons of fabulous rooms listed in Chapter 2; at their core they are common spells made permenant during the creation of the room.  Some of them are incredibly powerful; things like the "Bier of Resurrection".  How much would you pay for a "large stone platform that casts Resurrection on any corpse laid upon it"?  There are certain other ones, like the "Hall of Truth" that you'd expect every courtroom in the land to implement.  Without watching players (and DMs) try to abuse these things I cant tell which ones are broken, but I'll bet that some of the about 150 rooms are.The Nitpicky:1) The Traps section from Song and Silence is reprinted here.  There are probably other reprints in here as well.The Result:Its a good solid book at its core, but its not like you cant run a campaign without it - hence I gave it a baseline value of 4 points on the 5 point review scale to start with.  The problems with editing dropped it a third of a point, and my worries about play-balance dropped it another third to 3.33.  Rounding that off gives a rather harsh 3 points.  I feel a little guilty rating this "average", because I enjoyed the book on the whole.  If its time in your campaign for characters to be building their strongholds and you dont know where to start, I wouldnt hesitate to buy a copy of the book for your group.</blockquote>

Verification