Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Messageboard Golem" data-source="post: 2011029" data-attributes="member: 18387">I am running an underwater game and I was very excited when I heard about the deep so I ran out and bought it when it first came out. Perhaps I expected too much from this product, but I have been sorely disappointed with it in general.     The main problems of this book are not evident by a casual scan of it. In fact, you can not even see them by reading the book cover to cover. The problems arise when you try to use it. It does very good at creating the illusion of being complete, but nearly every rule, and every mechanic, is missing vital pieces.     Take depth sensitivity for example, its a mechanic that gives rules for creatures who are acclimated to the deeper deep, and take damage from low pressure. The rules refer to a table that describes it (and are useless without this table) and the table simply does not exist.      This is just one example, there are too many to even count. Tables with things like "sudden death from damage" which is never covered. Creatures statistics are promissed but never delivered. Races presented are missing important information like starting age and age progression. Spells, feats, skills, and so on really only touch on some of the problems, and if you look closely most of them are just copied out of the players handbook with certain words changed to make them aquatic.      At best, when you strip away the fluff (like an expanded armor speed table that defines redundancy) the deep is a rough outline that details a few ideas for an underwater game, and a few rule ideas that you could develope for your game. Good for a 10$ pdf perhaps, but a 40$ hardcover is a bit of a waste. Ok, beyond the disappointing incompleteness of the book, I personally have some issues with it, that are perhaps more related to taste rather than just glaring filler and missing information. I will list them here: 1. A beautiful cover art marred by a crappy, off-center, photoshop rendering of the title. Also, i think the picture would look better if the mermaid was not outlined in purple. 2. The outrageous price is in a big bold font right on the binding of the book, so it can mock you from the bookshelf, and tell all your friends how much you spent. 3. Buoyancy rules that ignore physics. Once again, 100 lbs of styrofoam will make you sink like a rock. Ok people: weight is NOT density. 100000 lbs of styrofoam will float, 1 millionth of an ounce of lead will still sink. Lets try to make a buoyancy mechanic that makes sense? Oh, and I might want to add that a 100 lbs lead ball and a 1 lb styrofoam ball (without wind/air resistence) fall at the same rate. Same kinda thing with sinking and floating (in their  rules, the heavier the thing is, the faster it sinks...and thats not how it works in real life...not even close!)4. Jellypods and coral magic is over-the-top for me. Why cant creatures of the deep develop denser than water potions in glass containers? Or paper that works underwater? I mean they are interesting ideas, but seem a little extreme and alien when most of these races live less than a 100 feet from the surface. 5. How do delphins and sharken put on their items? 6.Flip book margins are nice, but take up too much space, and weren't that great of art. Seems like a waste of effort. 7. The art was great in some places, weak and "kindergartenesque" in others, and totally missing in places where it was really needed. 8. Organization: stuff is everywhere. Tables are all over the book, with no table index. Rules are scattered everywhere.9. Web support/errata: Web enhancements were promised as "coming soon" in october...but no sign of them yet. An errata is desperately needed to make this book some semblance of whole. Support fo this product is virtually nill. In MEG public forums, while they have a section for nearly all of their books, the Deep was denied its own section. Questions posted about the Deep presented on their forum seem to be quietly swept under the carpet. Basically it looks like MEG themselves wants to let this product fall into the depths of the sea and forget it exists. Good stuff:1. It has some good art and the cover art is good except for the aweful cover treatment. I feel sorry the cover artist whose work was mangled.2. It has some neat ideas (too bad they weren't fully developed).3. Hardcover. I like hardcovers. In conclusion, this book would have made a good first draft or outline of an excellent book. Either much needed information was edited out or the book was sent to the shelves incomplete. It seems to have been pushed from "proposal" to final product in too short of time as it lacks evidence of playtesting and playability and shows evidence of hasty production like second-rate cover treatment, loads of missing, misleading, or incomplete information, and organization akin to tossing pages in the air, gathering them up and stappling them in random order (ok, not quite that bad, but it did make me wonder a few times). In essence, I find the book a waste of money and space; too specialized for a land-based game, too vague for an underwater based game, and lacking in vital details and realism for a short encounter. If you collect d20 books for the sake of owning them, then maybe this book is for you.Well, thats my review. -Jessica</blockquote>

Verification