The Book of Adventuring
By Adrian Bott and Alejandro Melchor
Mongoose Publishing product number MGP 8804
256 pages, $34.95
The fourth book in the "Classic Play" series, each of which promises to "cover a topic of focal importance in any d20 game in unprecedented depth and detail,"
The Book of Adventuring certainly meets its stated goal. This book is chock-full of all sorts of odds and ends important to adventurers, including a whole host of useful tidbits I never would have thought of. However, unlike previous books in the series, which covered such focused topics as strongholds and dynasties, dragons, and encounters and lairs,
The Book of Adventuring doesn't have quite as narrow a focus, and the book's organization suffers a little as a result.
The cover is done by Ralph Horsely, and depicts a typical adventuring party in the middle of the forest, looking warily about for whoever might have left all of the skeletal remains bound to the trees. It's quite easy to pick out a dwarven fighter in plate, an elven ranger, a halfling rogue (in the background), and some humans of indeterminate classes (although the guy behind the elf is most likely a ranger as well, judging from his two melee weapons in hand). Ralph uses a nice color scheme, with the elf and dwarf standing out amidst the greenery while the rest of the party (trailing behind them) fade away into the background. I really like the lighting in the background, too - Ralph's done an excellent job in capturing the forest feel, and the bound skeletons and skulls give the picture a real sense of lurking danger.
I should also mention the lack of any warping on the book's cover itself. Unlike my copies of Books 2 and 3 in the "Classic Play" series, my copy of
The Book of Adventuring is perfectly fine.
The interior artwork, as is standard for most Mongoose books, consists of a number of black-and-white drawings done by a variety of artists: 54 illustrations and 9 artists this time around. Many of the pieces have appeared in various other Mongoose books, but I've found I don't mind that too much as they've done a good job of making sure that the "rerun" pieces are appropriate for their location in the book. One thing worth pointing out: the book is divided up into three main sections, and each section begins with a full-page piece of grayscaled artwork serving as the "title page" as it were, with a "Part X" caption superimposed. In each case, the full-page artwork shows up elsewhere in the book as a normal-sized (quarter page or less) picture. As for the artists' work, my favorite pieces seem mostly to have been done by long-time Mongoose artist Danilo Moretti, while my least-favorite pieces are those by Carlos Henry. To use comic book terms, I actually like Carlos' "penciling" work, as he has a good eye for layout, but his "inking" skills need some work, especially when it comes to shading: in most cases, many of the figures blend together and into the background. As an example, on page 222 he has a group of adventurers gathered around a table in an inn, studying a map. There's a dwarf on the right, but he blends right in to the bearded human wizard behind him; you really have to look to see that he's even there. Some of Tony Parker and Moyses Damasceno's works suffer from this same problem: Tony's illustration on page 2 has some hulking monstrosity as part of an adventuring band, and I can't tell for the life of me where his right arm ends and the dwarf standing in front of him begins, nor can I tell where his left arm is or what it's doing. Moyses has a mean-looking armored orc on page 200, but the intricate detailing on his armor gets lost and blends in with the intricate detailing on the stone wall behind him. Still, there are some nice pieces in this book, and I'd rate it above average as a whole.
The Book of Adventuring is laid out as follows:
- Introduction: explaining the concept behind the "Classic Play" line and how this book is laid out
- Part I - The Adventurer's Craft: "detailed advice on the options that depend upon the adventurer's own efforts and planning"
- Gearing Up: packing for different environmental conditions, non-standard uses for standard equipment, "pocket contents" (equipment PCs might have on them), indispensable gear for different character classes, transporting and storing equipment, and unusual carrying options
- Rules of Engagement: roles in an adventuring party, leadership, group tactics, tactical templates (combat actions that grant benefits when two or more party members work in concert), the battlefield, party synergy, victors and spoils, and knowing your enemy
- Intelligent Spellcrafting: using the right spell at the right time, breaking down spells into functional groupings (general combat, direct harm, crippling and indirect harm, tactical, deception and concealment, enhancer, prevention and protection, healing and remedy, communication and information gathering, non-combat interaction, movement and travel, utilitarian, and all-purpose), and spellcaster roles (artillerist, defender, counter, recon/intel, tactician, artisan, booster, healer, explorer, trickster, socialite, and warrior)
- The Home Base: provisioning, stockpiling goods, concealment, lines of defense, entrances, storage, alarms, guards and sentries, and avenues of approach for bases of operation, temporary and permanent bases, and training students in an institution
- Part II - A World of Adventure: "focusing on those aspects of a character's life that are outside of his control and to which he must adapt and learn before trying to survive and thrive"
- Out in the Wild: Challenge Ratings for surviving the outdoors, camping, the seasons, keeping warm, building a fire, shelter, using magic against the elements, animals in the wilderness, and magic items for the wilderness
- Down in the Deep: getting into a dungeon, squeezing through gaps, lowering yourself down, how much load a rope or chain can bear, finding a way out, typical underground environments, natural hazards, fungus and moss, and specialized survival (a new feat allowing you to do more with your Survival skill ranks in a specific environment)
- Social Adventuring: how townsfolk react to adventurers, societal roles, reputation, etiquette, allies and antagonists, retinues, visiting a town, social adventures, and social encounters
- The Otherworlds: the adventurer's guide to the multiverse, planar properties, planar travel, exploring the planes, alternate realities, and travels through time and space
- Part III - Playing the Adventurer: "topics that focus more on the players than on their characters"
- Drives and Ambitions: making characters come to life, symbols, scars, dreams and memories, and changing motivations
- Designers' Notes: Alejandro and Adrian explain how they split up the sections of this book
Despite being written by two different Mongoose authors,
The Book of Adventuring reads like a cohesive whole, although having read several of each author's other works it was easy to see which one wrote some of the sections. (For instance, the Intelligent Spellcasting chapter simply screams "I was written by Alejandro!" as he has made quite a name for himself as a dissector of existing rules to get behind the underlying mechanisms; he's got a very analytical mind. In addition, when I come across a word that sends me scrambling for a dictionary - page 190, "ingenium," page 197, "podgy" - I'm pretty sure that it came from Adrian's ever-impressive vocabulary.) The book reads well, but despite the attempts at grouping the subjects together into three distinct sections, the first two sections are kind of all over the map. This is not necessarily a criticism; after all, "adventuring" covers a very wide ground, much more so than "strongholds" or "dragons." However,
The Book of Adventuring has a rather "stream-of-consciousness" feel to it as far as organization goes; it's as if the subjects were placed in whatever order the authors thought of them. Also, while I can see that they wanted to be inclusive, many of the subjects receive a very cursory glance. Take planar adventuring, for instance: we get a bare-bones look at various planar traits, and that's about it. What we get here is already thoroughly covered by the
Dungeon Master's Guide (you can choose your own "down" on the Elemental Plane of Air; the souls of the dead go to the Outer Planes). Furthermore, these bare-bones facts show up twice: on pages 239-240, and then again on pages 234-235. While they're written differently, they cover pretty much the same ground, and seem superfluous in any case.
However, the authors do cover a lot of completely new territory in here as well, and many of the things they come up with are fantastic. I never would have thought there was a need for a Wisdom check ("pocket rummage check") to see if a given PC has some useful item in his pocket, but now that I see the simple mechanic and the dozens of examples and what each can be used for, I'll be incorporating this into my own game immediately! (We're talking little things like a stub of chalk or the cork from a wine bottle here, not obviously useful things like a master skeleton key or a spare wand. It's much better than having to account for every little object like that on the PC's character sheet, and it actually encourages creative thinking, always a good thing in my book.) I likewise probably never would have bothered coming up for rules as to how many pockets show up on different types of clothing and how much various storage devices can hold, but now I don't have to: these guys have done all of that for me, and the system they devised looks perfectly valid. The various mosses and fungi add a whole new dimension to subterranean exploration, and give PCs something to search for on their spelunking expeditions to add a little nonmagical variety to their "tool kits." The authors came with some very creative uses for spells in the "Using Magic Against the Elements" section on pages 182-186; I always enjoy "out of the box" thinking, and some of these are priceless. The different roles for spellcasters and the functional groupings of spells take up a whole lot of room in the book (56 pages total), but for somebody playing a spellcasting PC - especially a new player, or someone looking for a specialized role in the party - this is very useful information. I really enjoyed the tactical template concept, as well: essentially, combat maneuvers that take more than one person to perform. Talk about emphasizing teamwork in the party!
Still, some oddities abound. There are sections on different types of tents in both Part I (on page 6, discussing what to pack when traveling through the grasslands) and in Part II (on pages 167-172, where the differences between the different types of tents are explained and the rules for putting up and tearing down tents show up). The travel-based magic items are well thought out and useful, but they lack the standard magic item details at the end of each entry: caster level, prerequisites, cost to create, market price, etc. Furthermore, they're not alphabetized, a problem shared in many other sections of
The Book of Adventuring (neither are the mosses/fungi alphabetized, nor are the different functional categories of spells or the spellcasting roles, nor are the useful pocket items, and so on; this further leads to the look of "stream-of-consciousness" organization, with things added as they were thought of with nobody going back to straighten them up into some kind of logical order afterwards). Ordinarily, this wouldn't be a problem, but the book's major failing - especially when dealing with a number of different topics as diverse as there are in this book - is the lack of an index. This book
really needs an index, and it's a shame that there isn't one, as I'm having trouble finding specific sections right now after having just finished reading the book; I shudder to think how long it will take me to, say, find the rules for fighting on a sheet of ice several months down the road when the book isn't so fresh in memory. There's plenty of room for one, as well, as the first three pages that could be dropped are those full-page grayscale "PART X" ones that serve no purpose but to point out that a new section has begun. Most books - even most Mongoose books - do that merely with a new caption at the top of the first page of each new section.
Furthermore, there are sidebars galore in this book, covering such diverse topics as using a paladin's mount as a storage device (difficult for anyone to rummage through the saddlebags when the mount has been dismissed to an Outer Plane until needed again, plus then you don't have to carry the pavilion tent with you), to making land mines using the spells
fire trap and
open/close, to attacking a cleric's holy symbol. These are all very clever ideas, but hellacious to try to track down in a 256-page book.
Proofreading and editing are much, much better than in the recent past. Sure, there are a few typos here and there, but not many. Kudos to proofreader Ben Hesketh and editor Richard Neale for an overall job done much better here than in several others they've been responsible for. (Of course, for all I know, the credit really belongs to Alejandro and Adrian for there not being too many mistakes to find in the first place, but that's mere speculation on my part.) Still, where the mistakes are made, they're often far more confusing than an extra (or missing) letter in a word or two words squished together. I still can't make sense of this sentence: "I have already put The Book of Strongholds And Dynasties together for Mongoose and it was good to be able to get back in would have been great in to that territory again, especially as I had the chance to cover some points about food sources and guarding Strongholds if there had been space." I think I grasp the general idea, but that sentence sure is a puzzler! Likewise, here's the next-worst offender [with my inputs in brackets]: ""The first thing a leader [singular] must do when they [plural] officially assumes [singular again] the [missing the word "role" here] is to learn all that he can about his companion's [should be "companions'" as there are more than one of them] abilities." Still, those are the only two really bad examples of an otherwise pretty decent proofreading job.
There were a few things that fell through the cracks, though: besides the incomplete magic item stats I mentioned earlier, there's an eminently practical metal grinder described on page 18 that would be a valuable piece of equipment for many characters (especially clerics), but no cost is given. Page 26 includes the line "The statistics given are for a metal coffer," but no such statistics appear. The rules for climbing inside the corpse of a freshly-slain animal to stay warm (reminds be of the slain tauntaun riding beast from "The Empire Strikes Back") state that only a Large creature can be used, but surely that should be "Large or larger," and I further assume that the rule as stated applies to Medium PCs -- what about gnomes and halflings? I'd imagine they could snuggle up in the guts (there's a phrase I never thought I'd use) of a Medium animal. Each pouch of a
Belt of Many Pouches can apparently hold a Small or smaller item, but I find it difficult to believe that objects up to 4 feet in size can fit into a belt pouch -- surely that should be Diminutive or Fine objects?
The entire third section of the book is very brief - a mere 10 pages out of 256 (11 pages, if you count the "PART III - PLAYING THE ADVENTURER" section page). It has some useful advice for newcomers to RPGs, but nothing particularly groundbreaking. It made for some interesting reading, but that's about it (although I did enjoy the examples given for motivations). I'm glad this section was as short as it was, because I think the first two sections are of much more benefit to the average user who'd be plunking down nearly $35.00 for a book of this size. Still, it's worth mentioning that this book is useful to players and DMs alike.
All in all,
The Book of Adventuring is a pretty good book, covering a very wide area with an overall measure of success. Collaboration books often end up a mess, but Alejandro and Adrian have very compatible writing styles and the book reads well as a cohesive whole. I give it a "4 (Good)" rating. For those interested in how it stacks up against the first three in the "Classic Play" line, I'd place it third behind
The Book of Dragons and
The Book of Stronghold and Dynasties (in that order) if only because of the lack of index and subsequent difficulty in finding anything in the book without flipping through the whole 256 pages. Maybe (hint hint) Mongoose might put an index to this book on the "Free Material" section of their website?
