The Noble's Handbook

[JoeGKushner]

The Noble's Handbook is the latest entry in the Master Class series by Green Ronin. Like the Shaman's Handbook and the Witch's Handbook, there are other variants of the Noble as a core class on the market.

The core class looks similar to other noble core classes in that it's 1d8 hit dice, two good saves, medium attack progression, lots of starting gold, good range of skills and skill points, and abilities that focus on leadership and social situations.

Part of my disappointment with the product is in the feats. The noble as a core class isn't a new idea. Both Fading Suns and Mongoose's Power Class covered it as core class, and others variants are available from the net. The Social Feats from Fading Suns, one of the most interesting aspects of that Noble, used in other places, are missing here. While there are skill focused feats like High Lord (+2 bonus to all influence checks), many of them deal with the Leadership Feat or dueling.

For example, while it's useful to have Bloodline for it's bonus to Leadership, or Exceptional Leadership for it's higher bonus, where are feats that provide say, Diplomatic Immunity or Imperial Charters or other goods in that vein? While I like having some dueling feats like Cunning Defense for those who wear no armor, it's a stat substitution feat. Here you take Intelligence instead of Dexterity. Interesting twist, but stat substitutions are nothing new. Piercing Blow is another good dueling option as your criticals inflict more damage and Parry Opportunist where you can get an attack of opportunity against those that miss you are all good but not up to Green Ronin's innovations that have brought us various new type of feats.

The prestige classes provide the core options for a noble. One can either take a military path with PrCs like the commander or lord knight, or follow a more skill focused PrC like the master diplomat, impersonator, or mastermind. I like the military based PrCs as they're good for running small battles and can complement other recent core classes in the battlefield. The others fill out nice niches in the campaign but unless the whole campaign is going to have a high focus on role playing in the upper echelons, I don't see them getting a lot of standard use.

Which is part of my problem with the book. For a noble based campaign, it's great. It includes different roles for the noble to play, ways to simulate noble like qualities in other classes like crimelord, high priest and barbarian prince, and even some quick rules for dueling. For a noble based campaign, it's a great sourcebook.

For other types of campaigns, including the standard dungeon crawl or exploration, it's got a lot of material that's not going to see a lot of use and doesn't provide enough material to encourage the GM to use it. One example of this is the Noble House rules. While they have some interesting effects, these are large scale effects and don't have enough details.

Take Manors. When a noble's house gets to a strength of 14, you get a manor but there are no maps or details about what a manor really is. Outside of some Ars Magica, I'm not familiar at all with manor details. How many rooms? What type of fortifications? I don't expect a castle to be fully mapped and detailed here, but what about an estate? Once again, I have no real idea on how to use that type of material to its fullest.

I found most of the rules to be workable with no issue, but some of them might have serious issues. While there are feats and abilities that aid others, some of the material here pushes a little too far without any real drawback. The feat instill martial training provides a weapon proficiency in a martial weapon of your choice to your followers while the house rules, at a rating of 32 mind you, very high mind you, get a bonus feat. Now that's two free feats for the followers and no real drawbacks are provided to balance it.

The art is up to Green Ronin's standard, meaning it's some of the best in the business. Some fan favorites like Toren “Macbin” Atkinson and Storn Cook are joined by otherslike Britt Martin whose work is some of the best I've seen as well as Caleb Cleveland and Richard Pace. Format is standard two column with fair editing and proofreading. White space use is good. For those who want to get into the whole dueling options, two pages are provided for copying. One page is used for credits and table of contents, another for the open gaming license, and one for ads in the Mythic Vistas campaign settings. Internal covers are not used.

If you're running a noble campaign or one with a lot of role playing, this is a four star product. If you're just stealing material for a standard campaign, then it's a solid book, but the overall utility is diminished.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

This Master Class sourcebook introduces the noble as a new core class for the d20 System. The noble derives his power from his breeding and influence, as well as the finest training and equipment money can buy. The Noble's Handbook provides everything you need to add this class to your d20 campaign, from prestige classes like the Commander and Diplomat to feats like Frightful Aura and Smooth Talker. The book also features rules for creating noble houses, a treatise on dueling, advice on integrating nobles into your campaign, and expanded rules for followers. Take your game beyond the dungeon with the Noble's Handbook!

 

[GameWyrd]

I like the regal side to fantasy. Give me courtly intrigue. Give me terse diplomatic relations with the Dwarf Mountain Kingdom and a cold war style standoff with barely secretive cross-border raids with the Hobgoblin Empire to the West. For this sort of game you need nobles; these "nobles" might be those people born into the position or they might be the elected officials, town mayors, or headsmen. This is the point that Green Ronin's Noble's Handbook makes and that makes for a great start. It is this reviewer's option that great starts are a good thing (tm) for a book to manage. Unfortunately the Noble's Handbook promptly forgets this and concentrates on nobles as, almost exclusively, as the feudal elite.

If you think there's anything like a class ethos for D&D and if it's important to maintain it then the Noble class presents something of a challenge. The other classes, fighers, rangers, druids, etc, are all defined by what they do and how they do it. The Noble class, on the other hand, is defined by who the character is, not what the character does or how they do it. Can you have a poor and outcast wizard? Yup. A poor and outcast ranger? Sure. A poor and outcast noble? Um. Dunno... If you see a noble as someone who might be a good figher, for example, and in a position of power and influence then that's a prestige class situation. I'm not making a case as to why I believe the noble class is impossible. I'm listing the problems that I'd want the Noble's Handbook to solve for me. It doesn't really succeed here. However, the Noble's Handbook does provide a playable and mechanically balanced set of rules for noble characters if you decide to suspend those concerns. And why not? I think d20 is at its best when it is nice and abstract.

The noble class makes use of "Breeding" as a class feature. This is an excellent touch for the feudal noble idea and along with the "Noble House" ability gained at level one pretty much kills off alternative noble concepts. In the last multi-year long fantasy game I played the nobles of the land competed in fencing tournaments to prove their worth and so I'd have taken the "Martial Training" sub-option for Breeding, the ladies of court were the shadowy, diplomatic powers behind the scenes, so they would have taken the "Diplomacy" sub-option from Breeding and there was even one noble house in our game which rejected all that as nonsense and concentrated on magic - they would have taken the "Arcane Training" sub-option. So although it might look like there aren't many options for Breeding, especially as the special re-occurs at later levels the noble can take a different option, there's probably enough to go round. The other class specials to watch are the Noble's habit of collecting and organising groups of followers. After all - this is what the noble does. Nevertheless it might prove to be troublesome if the plot doesn't suit a whole bunch of lackies hanging around. I have to say, though, I'd quite like to watch the dynamics of power among the PCs if one PC has loads more cash and a bunch of NPC support. Either the noble PC becomes their de-facto leader of the group, is a total walk over or, more likely, there's some nice tension there.

We quickly get on to prestige classes. Wheel in the Commander, the Master Diplomat, the Impersonator (who looks a lot like Henry VIII), the Lord Knight and Mastermind prestige classes. Most, but not all, of these prestige classes are good through 10 levels. I tend to see the 10 level prestige class as a lifetime occupation-cum-lifestyle and that's what I want for noble based prestige classes.

Sometimes you get a good look into the mindset of the book's author (in this case Rodney Thompson of SWRPGNetwork fame) when you see the subject matter they place under the one heading. There's a fairly significant entry on forgery in the skills chapter. Forgery? I might have come up with rules for subtle poisons or even fantasy (magical even) heraldry. Thompson must think of the money and paper power inherent in a feudal noble system - and then of ways to exploit and cheat it.

I like the feats. You can have the Bloodline feat without being a Noble and you can be a Noble without having the Bloodline feat. That sort of nitpicking does fade in the face of the charmingly non-dungeon feats like Disarming Demeanor, Discreet Reputation, Instill Etiquette or Ruling Family. A rare collection of feats indeed! Oh - and there's a good collection of melee friendly feats too.

The Handbook provides optional rules for duels. Magic. Perfect. Nearly a reason to go buy the book. I want my d20 combat fast and abstract but sometimes when a PC pairs off again the nemesis NPC in a court duel I need the system to scale in closer, to bring tactics into the melee rounds, to bring in the tension and simply to make a meal of the whole encounter. That's what we've got here. Lunge, Lock, Parry, Riposte!

Noble equipment. Jewellery, portraits and furniture. Sadly there is more than just the suspicion of filler material in this brief chapter. Mind you some people will leap at the magic armour and weapons - again.

Chapter Four is all about playing the noble and it's over ten pages long. This is more than a token offer and that's a good thing. I do honestly think many gamers might pause in thought before trying to roleplay the noble (partly due to the class problems mentioned at the stop of the review) and it'll be good to help them. The roleplaying advice is tried and tested. I don't think almost surreal jaunts into conceptual or method roleplaying would be anything other than terribly inappropriate for a d20 supplement and so the solid ground rules we get instead can't be sniffed at. Combine this advice with the fact that the noble class encourages roleplaying with NPCs (and not just different dragon slaying techniques) and the Noble's Handbook becomes a very good book for flowering groups of new gamers who might just be looking to escape the dungeon. There's advice for the GM too.

The book begins to draw to a close as it lists and provides a blend of flavour and mechanics for sample noble houses. This is the sort of supplementary material I would have predicted the Noble's Handbook would have padded up with. It's not padding though, there are just a few pages of some illustrative houses and I think this is pretty much the right amount. There's enough to see what can be done, there's enough to use if you're busy and need to use pre-written material but there's not enough to get bored with or feel it's eating too much into your US $14.95 64-paged book.

The last page of content is a collection of some photocopy ready cards (back and front) for a duelling variant. On my first few flicks through the book I dismissed the page as filler but I've changed my mind. The cards don't take up too much room, they would work and they are different. I'm all for trying something different.

The Noble's Handbook sits in the middle. There's probably something in it for almost everyone's idea of how a d20 noble class might work and how it might be used. I'd stop short of describing this as a lazy position to take because it probably took a great deal of effort to get the balance right. I'd have preferred it if the book took a chance and gone for gold on one particular approach and accepted that it would alienate gamers on the other side of the scale.

* This Noble's Handbook review was first posted at GameWyrd.

 

[Silveras]

The Noble's Handbook

I am disappointed in the Noble's Handbook. Having greatly enjoyed the Shaman's Handbook and the witch's Handbook, I was looking forward to a similarly adept handling of the Noble as a character class.

The Good...

I am not totally against the book.

1. I like most of the Noble House rules

2. I like that they are designed not only to represent noble families but also other types of organizations (although I think that factor also undermines the argument that the Noble class is needed). The scale of the House Strength table needs some adjustment, I think, and it definitely needs not to be tied to the level gains of the leader. I would multiply the threshhold numbers by 100 and use the total levels of Members to determine the score for a given house (a la MMS:WE influence points).

3. The Inspire, Influence, and Contact class abilities of the Noble are interesting and workable mechanics for representing some of what Nobles are best at.

4. The production quality is up to Green Ronin's usual standards. Proofreading, editing, the binding, and so on are solid, although there are occasional errors.

5. The price (USD 14.95) and page count (64) are reasonable and in-line with the other books in the series.

6. The art is generally good. The internal sketches and drawings suit the mood and fit the text appropriately, while the cover painting is just a nice piece of art on its own merits.

the Bad...

1. The book tries to too hard to justify the Noble class. In discussing the Role of the Noble, for example, there are sections explaining why Nobles are not useless in the Dungeon and how helpful they can be in the City. Why do I feel like I am watching a 30 minute infomercial ? The sell comes across too hard, and leaves me feeling like the author was trying to convince himself that the class was not a bad idea. Similarly, suggesting that multi-classing the other classes with the Noble class is a way to model Barbarian princes or Court Vizier mages is iffy. No setup that requires a spellcaster to diminish his/her spellcasting ability in order to be part of the nobility makes sense to me; at least the other classes get some BAB, Skill Points, or other synergystic growth.

2. The Prestige Classes are more readily suited to ennoble the core character classes than to specialize the Noble. Most repeat one of the Noble class' abilities and stack with it, basically allowing non-Noble-class characters to get that ability.

3. Prestige Class mechanics are incompletely thought out. For example, the Lord Knight class requires that the character be a member of a Noble House led by a Knight. Well, that's fine for NPC institutions, but there is no "Member" feat for Noble Houses. All Noble-class PCs start their own, which means that NO Noble-class PC can be a Lord Knight. Nor can any of his/her Followers or Cohorts.

4. The Noble suffers from a lack of context. The Noble is a figure of authority and power, but that is very hard to depict properly without concrete rules for authority and power. The Noble House rules, and the Influence class ability, are Ok at representing the noble's authority against other noble houses (thus, in relative terms), but there is no overall framework to place that in.

5. The Noble House rules have some dubious elements. Coupling the rising power of the noble house to the rising personal ability of its leader (i.e., tying the growth of the Noble House's strength to the character's level gains) is a poor idea. Certainly, a strong and dynamic leader will help a Noble House grow faster, but no Noble should be granted the title of "Monarch" just for making it to 18th level.

6. The Dueling rules are ... misplaced. While the dueling system is meant to replicate the cinematic style of Zorro or the Scarlet Pimpernel, it has some flaws. First, it is designed for use with Renaissance-era weapons and little or no armor; this is not a universally available flavor in all campaigns. Second, although it tries to be different, it essentially duplicates a variant from the DMG: the Defense Roll. Third, having advanced a character to the point where s/he gets 2 attacks per round, or having taken Two-Weapon Fighting, I doubt many are willing to reduce themselves to 1 attack per round to use this system. Finally, many of the "Dueling Maneuvers" are actions you can take normally (Disarm, for example). I know I would find a duel between two combatants with Two-Weapon Fighting and BABs of +6 or greater much more intense than this system.

7. As I mentioned, there is no way to just be a Member of a Noble House without being a Follower or Cohort. You either lead one, are an NPC, or you are not in one. This looks like an oversight. I would replace the "Noble House" feat with two others: "Noble House Member" and "Noble House Leader". The Noble House Leader should be a Bonus Feat for the Noble class at a higher level than 1st; Noble characters should start as Members of an existing House.

8. Alternatives are not presented. Other books in the Master Class series (notably, the Shaman's Handbook and the Witch's Handbook) discussed how to represent the archetype using the existing classes. This is even more necessary in the case of the Noble, whose viability in a campaign is very much dependent on what mechanics the DM chooses to represent power and authority. A discussion of "noble rank as an acquired trait" or the like would have been a good use of space.

and the Ugly
Actually, there isn't anything ugly, but I felt compelled to finish the title.

Rounding Up
Overall, the Noble's Handbook is a decent, but uninspiring, entry in the Master Class series. The Noble class comes across as an NPC class that is trying too hard. For interesting NPC opponents, though, the class will prove far more useful; even if a DM does not want to use city- or political- based adventures, the Noble's abilities to send out followers and draw upon resources to make things happen is a useful tool.

 

[Psion]

Noble's Handbook

The Noble's Handook is part of Green Ronin's Master Class series adding new core classes to the game, with supporting material. The book is written by Rodney Thompson, contributor to the Star Wars and Stargate SG-1 RPG lines and webmaster of the Star Wars RPG network website.

A First Look

The Noble's Handook is a 64-page prefect-bound softcover book priced at $14.95.

The cover has a color illustration by James Ryman depicting a man in rich garb flanked by two women in dresses on some sort of balcony.

The interior is black-and-white, and illustrated by Toren "Macbin" Atkinson, Storn Cook, Britt Martin, Richard Pace, and Caleb Cleveland. The art was generally detailed and well done, though I must admit when I saw the "female" mind flayer noble in all too human garb.

There were more that the usual number of editing and typesetting gaffes for a Green Ronin product, such as (on the same page) a heading without the proper font ran into the end of a prior paragraph, and a reference to a page "@@".

A Deeper Look

The central edifice of this book is, of course, the noble PC class. The class is a more PC style take on the aristocrat class. Like that class, the noble has moderate BAB progression, but for some reason, the author has chose to give the class a good reflex save. I'm not sure of the logic behind this decision. Some nobles might be nimble, but I certainly don't see any special training that would suggest this as a rule.

The main departure from the aristocrat NPC class is the array of class abilities that it receives. The class abilities the noble receives are related to their training, influence, and leadership abilities.

Influence is probably the most central campaign relevant ability of the noble. Influence checks allow the noble to receive a variety of boons by means of influence checks. The check is based on a modifier the character receives as part of the ability. DCs are called out for a number of possible results the noble can bring about, but some of them seem beyond the ability of a noble to get with the listed influence bonuses, and it does not seem like feats can make up the difference.

The breeding ability gives the player a chance to fine tune the character by specifying what sort of special training the character receives as part of their upbringing. This can include such things as a bonus to diplomacy, bonus languages, or a small selection of low level spells. Not a bad idea, but the choices seem a little plain. Anyone using this could borrow some selection from AEG's courtier abilities.

In addition to the core class, there are a number of prestige classes presented that are appropriate to characters in positions of influence, though to be fair, not all of these are exclusive to (or even optimum for) members of the noble class. This is probably not all in all a bad thing; I could easily see a canny rogue rising to the position of a master diplomat in the right sort of campaign.

The prestige classes are commander (a military leader type), master diplomat, impersonator, lord knight, and mastermind.

The supplemental rules include many new character options. The section on skills are mostly limited to defining new uses for existing skills in the context of noble society, such as using bluff to incite suspicion or forgery to forge notes associated with beauracracy. Though these do shine a light on specific aspects of gentle society and give you guidelines that you might consider ahead of time, to be fair many of these uses seem obvious to me and few of the uses stand out as things I couldn't easily navigate on my own.

The new feats are related to the noble's unique perspective, such as discreet reputation (which makes it more difficult to use knowledge checks to identify the character.) Many of these are just what you would expect. The more outlanding and interesting sorts of feats are the instill feats. These feats require you to have the leadership feat, and instead of directly benefitting the character, adds bonuses (such as skill bonuses or proficiencies) to the character's followers.

On major rules variant introduced in the book is the dueling rules. The duelling rules use the normal combat rules with two major departures. The first is that a number of special maneuvers with special effects are available. Second, an implicit part of the maneuver rules is that they are handled with opposed rolls using the character's attack modifier. If you think about it, this is fundamentally similar to the grappling mechanic and is a safe enough way to add this mechanic to the game as any, but there is no mechanic such as the attack of opportunity associated with grappling to match it to the normal combat mechanic.

The equipment chapter is brief. The mundane equipment section includes mainly highly visible staples of stories involving aristocray: caots of arms and carraiges, portaits and signet rings. A similarly brief listing of magic items also is aimed at pertinent magic items, or items exploiting new rules listed herein (such as the dueling weapon quality, which is a boon in a duel situation using the dueling rules herein.)

The fourth chapter, Roleplaynig the Noble, is actually quite sizeable. It presents advice and ideas in a number of areas of roleplaying nobles. Contents include discussions of different dramatic personality types for nobles, common campaign roles for nobles, nobility as applied to different character types, as well as a shorted GM-targeted section discussing handling followers and monstrous nobles.

The fifth and sixth chapters cover noble houses (providing rules for noble houses and sample houses, respectively.) This is possibly the most promising rules addition. It rates noble houses by strength, and provides game pertinent benefits to the noble house and its followers as the house progresses in power. For example, at very levels, the house acheives titles, grooms their followers (giving them bonus skill focus feats), and so forth.

While this is an interesting way to model the power of the house, I still have some reservations with it. The third edition rules made wealth a more explicit part of character power, which made powerful characters like nobles more difficult to model.

This model addresses this by making character level part of the model, but is that sufficient? Tales about aristocracy revolve around losing and gaining power, and attaching power gains to a schedule seems a bit dry to me. At certain levels, the character simply receives a manor. This is not too much unlike wealth progression in the standard game, but at least there, characters earn their expected wealth, with the possibility of varying with respect to the expected scale, and the threat of loss or failure is still everpresent.

That being the case, it seems to me that much like the way that dueling parallels an existing mechanic, the house strength system could parallel the wealth system by granting "influence points" that might be gained much like wealth, very conditionally. I could go on about what such a system would look like and how it would balance with the system, but that would rather be beside the point. Suffice it to say, though on the surface, the noble house system seems like it has some intriguing aspects, I would have reservations about using it to represent nobility in my game.

Conclusions

The Noble's Handbook tackles a tough problem in the d20 system fantasy metasetting: the issue of how to model the power of nobles. Though the book shows great promise and the base class it presents is fundamentally sound, it seems to me that the book doesn't totally navigate some of the stickier issues. Though the mechanics are basically sound, and the class is certainly usable, the GM may be forced to make some adjustments or deal with a system that doles out some perks of nobility on a schedule, which could fly in the face of some more interesting campaign developments.

Overall grade: C+

-Alan D. Kohler

 

[Silveras]

I concur; you seem to be hitting the same points I made in my own review.

The Noble Houses mechanics seem Ok -- except for the schedule part. The idea that a 20th level Noble automatically acquires a title like "monarch" just does not sit well with me.

Also, one thing I found annoying that you did not mention is that there is no content for being a member of someone else's noble house. The Noble class receives the new "Noble House" feat for free at 1st level. Any character with that feat becomes the head of a new Noble House. There is nothing in the book about being a PC part of a noble house -- nothing about trying to gain power *within* a noble house, as opposed to *compared to other* noble houses.