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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Messageboard Golem" data-source="post: 2009660" data-attributes="member: 18387">By John Grigsby, Staff Reviewer, d20 Magazine Rack The Book of Templates is a new release for the d20 System from Silverthorne Games. This 69-page PDF is written by Ian Johnston and can be downloaded from the Silverthorne Games website (http://www.silverthornegames.com/products.htm) for $7.00. The Book of Templates leaves no doubt as to what it’s all about. It’s a book that is chock-full with templates. As anyone familiar with D&D 3E knows, a template is an overlay which can be applied to certain creatures to make them more powerful. This is one of the new concepts of the 3rd edition of the venerable RPG and also one of the more interesting. The book is sparse on flash, with no artwork beyond the Celtic knot-design on the cover, but what it lacks in style, it makes up for in content, offering 30 brand-new templates for DMs to use to spice up an otherwise boring encounter. In addition, it contains a special password which can be used to unlock a free web enhancement with eight more templates! Combined with the two free offerings available at the Silverthorne Games site, that’s forty new templates to bother and bewilder your players! So who wants more templates? The Monster Manual offers up a solid dozen or so, with a handful of others to be found in Monsters of Faerûn, the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, and the Monster Manual II. Why would you ever need more? If your players are like mine, you already know the answer to that question. Sometimes you want to spice up a monster without having to create a brand new creature. That’s a perfect use for The Book of Templates. Best of all, just perusing the book has given me plenty of ideas for encounters! Each template is very detailed, with an introduction, a paragraph describing the appearance changes to the base creature, what kinds of creatures can benefit from the template, and the effects of applying the template to the creature in question. Each also has a sample of a creature to which the template has been applied. The templates offered in this book range in power from the relatively mundane half-human (designed for use in campaigns where humans are a rarity) to the über-fearsome dread vampire. None of the templates seem overpowered (of course, that’s a matter of opinion), but just as there were some really good ones, there were a few that made me ask, “Why?” Take, for example, the half-orc. There’s nothing all that special about this template. Essentially, it just adds half-orc traits to whatever creature you apply it to. I didn’t need a template for this. Same goes for the half-human. Fortunately, the sensible templates outweigh the nonsensical by a wide margin. While the prospect of a half-orc/half-bugbear left me dazed, I cackled with glee at the idea of unleashing a ferrovore (they breathe a cone of rust) goblin against my players. All templates and game-related content are designated as Open Game Content, which seems to be the trend. The templates are compliant with the established format for such, but as the Introduction states, the CRs are arbitrary and subject to interpretation. Personally, I found one or two that seemed too low to me, but that may be my quirkiness. While certainly an original idea, the book is intended for GMs only and players will get little or no use from it (and, in fact, should stay away). It suffers slightly from the inclusion of a few templates that I saw mostly as “filler,” but overall, the good outweighs the bad, making it a worthwhile purchase for any GM interesting in expanding their selection of foes.To see the graded evaluation of this product, go to The Critic's Corner at <a href="http://www.d20zines.com" target="_blank">www.d20zines.com.</a></blockquote>

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