Old Fezziwig
this is a low-flying panic attack
Reviewer's Bias: I received a review copy of this product.
The Verdant World: A Handbook to the Green, the first release from A New Arcadia Publications, is a 109-page PDF focused on plants in d20 fantasy gaming. Comprised of seven chapters, the PDF covers everything from prestige classes and feats, from monstrous plants to new spells, with the largest segment of the book (some 65 or so pages) covering new plant life.
Aesthetically, it's a very good-looking product, especially on the inside. The cover is somewhat underwhelming and stylistically odd for a fantasy book -- the splotches of green, which are arranged in a way that reminded me of foliage, work well, but the fonts used for the title and the subtitle are slightly modern and futuristic. They feel wrong for the cover of a fantasy book. The end result, for me, was a cover that didn't really match the content. On the inside, the pages are bordered with vibrant painted vines and flowers weaving through the margins, and the in-text art matches the borders in feel, both because of its use of color and the style of the artist's painting. My first reaction to the PDF, as I browsed through it, was that it was a beautiful product, and this reaction held after I finished reading it. The pieces selected are appropriately placed in the text and of a consistently high quality. Particular pieces I liked included the images for the Nature's Avenger prestige class, the Rambling Rose, and the Leafer. The latter one had some energy and action in it that I liked, particularly compared to some of the other pictures, where the plants looked as though they were posing (of course, they're plants, which makes action pictures difficult to say the least).
On a similar note, the product looks clean and professional, with occasional problems in justification (words spaced out to a silly level) and layout (for instance, the Nature's Avenger PrC has the "Class Skills" header at the bottom of one column with all of the following text at the top of the next column). Unfortunately, the editing is not as good as the layout or art, with frequent, intrusive errors in grammar and style, from agreement errors ("a immunity," p. 41) to dangling modifiers ("Though an awkward mode of transportation, they are surprisingly quick and agile," p. 81; "often bandits will collect sacks of leafers to drop on innocent travelers, waiting for them to finish their meal before stripping the victims of their treasures," p. 83) to just plain awkwardness ("Even if the player fails this roll, the batch is considered a failure and the entire quantity of plant matter is used, along with the time, experience and necessary materials," p. 29). There are also references to non-existant feats (the Nature's Avenger PrC refers to the feat Free Passage, which is not in the text), unidentified page numbers (the Strangle Vine write-up referencing a specialized and non-existant lasso on p. xx), and Wizards IP (Ehlonna and Obad-Hai are both mentioned in the text). Although not entirely damning, consistent issues like these were frustrating for me to find in a text that looked so slick and professional.
As for the content itself, some of it is excellent, some less so. The seven chapters, in order, deal with prestige classes, feats, a system for creating herbal items, mundane plants, monstrous plants, and spells. Generally, I found something to like in every chapter, as the ideas, consistently, were excellent. Unfortunately, the mechanical execution was not as strong as the ideas themselves. Before delving into a chapter-by-chapter look at the text, it bears noting here that, based on the monster descriptions and some other points, The Verdant World was designed with 3.0 in mind -- Face/Reach is used instead of Space/Reach, there are no listings for BAB and Grapple, and references are made to the skills Pick Pocket and Wilderness Lore instead of Sleight of Hand and Survival. Easily to convert, but the fact remains that it will take some conversion to use with the 3.5 rules.
The first chapter presents six prestige classes, all of which revolve around the relationship between man and nature:
The second chapter, Woodland Secrets, detailing the new feats, also made me a bit wary. I really like the Repulsive feat (plants want to physically avoid the character, granting a +4 deflection bonus to AC when the character fights plants and bending and moving out of the way as much as possible), which I felt had excellent flavor text and nice abilities while still being balanced. In general, however, balance wasn't so much the issue with the feats as design choices were -- lots of feats had very narrow areas of application (Botanist, Natural Healer, Natural Poisoner), were rather redundant with existing skills (Forage covers some of the same area as the Survival skill; three new creation feats seemed like a lot when the new items could probably be covered by one), and granted automatic success (Botanist, Forage). If feats get too narrow, then I really wonder why it's necessary, as it'd be hard to get characters to take it unless it fit their concept exactly. As for the other concerns, redundancy is a major issue in d20 game design in my opinion -- I feel like there's a tendency to reinvent the wheel a lot, when existing systems cover the material well already. For instance, rather than having Forage grant automatic success at a task that can be covered with a Survival check, have it grant a substantial bonus to that check when specifically looking for food. You can get the systems to work together rather than having one being overridden by the other. Also, this still allows for a degree of competency based on level -- the 20th-level ranger with the forage feat will still be better than the 1st-level ranger with the forage feat -- which is my primary objection to automatic success (the design of the spell true strike almost grants automatic success, but works well within the nature of the d20 system, in my opinion). Finally, there are some more minor terminology and design issues at work here, such as even-numbered prereqs (Brachiation requires Str 12 and Dex 12) and the splitting of some of the rules for the new creation feats from the feats themselves (Chapter 3 states that only people with Intelligence scores higher than 7 can use the feats, which means they have a functional requirement of Int 8, which, as it's an even number, I'd rachet it up to Int 9). I can't, however, stress enough, that, although the execution is a bit rough through these first two sections, the ideas are there, and some of them, like the Repulsive feat, are, in my opinion, gems.
The last three chapters of the book worked a lot better for me than the first three -- the mechanics are smoother, particularly for the monsters and spells, and the ideas, already good, are more evocative. I felt that Chapter 4, Flowering Satchel, was the most promising chapter of all, as it details different types of plants to insert into your game world. Ever since the Magic Candle series of computer games and the incident on Weathertop from The Lord of the Rings, I've liked the idea that plants and herbs can provide palpable benefits to people -- it fits the genre, in my opinion. On top of that, it also gives the ranger and druid another niche to make them more useful to a party. So what's in the chapter? It provides three types of plants: Healing, Exotic, and Poison, all of which can do different things if prepared in the proper ways, with exotic plants providing benefits that don't properly belong to healing or poisoning. Again, McGuigan provides excellent flavor text. Even if the DM decides to ignore the mechanical benefits listed in the text, the plants could be dropped into any campaign easily -- for instance, blood palm and bittersweet could be used as ingredients in potions or even as metamagic components (per Unearthed Arcana). Again, there are some odd design choices here, but, as noted, they're very easily ignored. Some of the exotics grant really off-the-wall powers and abilities, essentially becoming stand-ins for magic items. These abilities include breathing frost, detect magic, x-ray vision, levitation, speaking with plants, and polymorphing into a tree. They just strain my disbelief and turn what could be a really neat subsystem into a stand in for magic items that can be acquired at less cost. Finally, a lot of the poisons cause standard damage rather than ability damage (Bee Flower, Blowball, Grace Bloom, Sharplobe, Snakeweed, Sourwood, and White Salmba). Substituting in Con damage for the standard damage would probably alleviate this nicely, as the character would still loose hp, but the mechanics would match the ones established for poisons in the Dungeon Master's Guide.
Following the mundane plants, naturally, are the monstrous plants, which, as McGuigan notes in his author's preface, were where the idea originated from -- he feels that monstrous plants are underrepresented in the core rules and in D&D in general. It would seem, then, that part of the reason for this book was to rectify that. I found a number of the monstrous plants in the book to be pretty interesting and useful, including the blood root, curio vines, drooler (which has a nice regurgitate attack), leafers, rambling rose (despite the name, I like the idea of trained guard plants -- there's a sinister whimsy going on there, and I'm certainly down with that, which would make them tremendously useful in a Grimm game), the shanela, and the sould harvester (a malevolent tree that releases ghosts when killed). In all these cases, the thing that worked for me was the flavor text, the germ of an idea that I felt was really solid -- they all could have a place in my game. Mechanically, the monsters are, aside from the use of 3.0 rules, in line with what I expect from a product -- on a spot check, all the numbers add up correctly. I was confused, given the number of intelligent plants, that none of them had any skills or feats that I noticed or any information on Hide bonuses (as many of them are supposed to blend into their natural environs). Three monsters in particular struck me as a slight bit overpowered for their ability level: the cradle tree (CR 9, Str 35, Grapple +37, Reach 15 ft.), the soulful mirror (CR 5, domination with a duration of 1 month, constant natural invisibility), and the wind whisperers (CR 1, charm effect with a DC 20 Will save along with poison, for which no save DC is listed). In the end, though, the problems with the monster section are of this sort -- bumping up CRs, dropping durations, lowering DCs. Nothing struck me as so viciously unbalanced as to be useless, but most will require a little attention to be game-ready.
Finally, the last chapter, Spells of a Different Color, presents around 40 new spells, which range from the extremely cool photosynthesis and verdant oubliette to the rather questionable (and tongue-in-cheek) create vegan food and water. Photosynthesis grants temporary regeneration as long as the character remains in the sun, which is entirely appropriate for a druid (it's so natural for the class, that I wonder why it hasn't been done before -- at least not to my knowledge it hasn't), while verdant oubliette creates a vine cage around one creature (again, so natural a spell for the druid, that I wonder why it hasn't come up before, as it plays really well on the entangle spell -- it could even be its natural next step). There are, again, some problems, which mirror a lot of the problems I had with feats, mostly in the forms of redundancy and utility. Awaken tree, beroot, and plantmorph to a large degree duplicate the effects of awaken, entangle, and polymorph, respectively -- I'm not sure as to what the use of these spells is, with maybe the exception of a slight gain in power at the cost of specialization or even just to make a more powerful version of an existing spell. On the other end of the scale, devastate and drought (along with their lesser iterations) seem almost useless to a druid -- why would any druid want to damage the plant life in an area to that degree? I could see them (and vegetate) as rituals, per Unearthed Arcana, but they don't work for me as is. Finally, the text, previously professional, loses a bit of that edge as it delves into spells like create vegan food and water and its references to murder and meat or invisibility to plants, with its description of "Figure it out." I'm all for fun and games, but this just didn't feel like the time or place (this material, to be honest, screamed "web enhancement" to me).
In the end, I found a lot of the ideas to be valuable as such, but the execution of them to be consistently lacking, particularly in the more rules-heavy sections at the beginning of the book. If you're looking for a bestiary of monstrous plants and a field guide to exotic herbs and roots, I think this is a great resource, but most DMs are going to want to examine things closely and tinker with them as necessary. In the end, it's a beautiful looking product with a lot of potentially useful material and ideas, but many mechanical and design issues lurk beneath the surface.
Score: 2.25.
The Verdant World: A Handbook to the Green, the first release from A New Arcadia Publications, is a 109-page PDF focused on plants in d20 fantasy gaming. Comprised of seven chapters, the PDF covers everything from prestige classes and feats, from monstrous plants to new spells, with the largest segment of the book (some 65 or so pages) covering new plant life.
Aesthetically, it's a very good-looking product, especially on the inside. The cover is somewhat underwhelming and stylistically odd for a fantasy book -- the splotches of green, which are arranged in a way that reminded me of foliage, work well, but the fonts used for the title and the subtitle are slightly modern and futuristic. They feel wrong for the cover of a fantasy book. The end result, for me, was a cover that didn't really match the content. On the inside, the pages are bordered with vibrant painted vines and flowers weaving through the margins, and the in-text art matches the borders in feel, both because of its use of color and the style of the artist's painting. My first reaction to the PDF, as I browsed through it, was that it was a beautiful product, and this reaction held after I finished reading it. The pieces selected are appropriately placed in the text and of a consistently high quality. Particular pieces I liked included the images for the Nature's Avenger prestige class, the Rambling Rose, and the Leafer. The latter one had some energy and action in it that I liked, particularly compared to some of the other pictures, where the plants looked as though they were posing (of course, they're plants, which makes action pictures difficult to say the least).
On a similar note, the product looks clean and professional, with occasional problems in justification (words spaced out to a silly level) and layout (for instance, the Nature's Avenger PrC has the "Class Skills" header at the bottom of one column with all of the following text at the top of the next column). Unfortunately, the editing is not as good as the layout or art, with frequent, intrusive errors in grammar and style, from agreement errors ("a immunity," p. 41) to dangling modifiers ("Though an awkward mode of transportation, they are surprisingly quick and agile," p. 81; "often bandits will collect sacks of leafers to drop on innocent travelers, waiting for them to finish their meal before stripping the victims of their treasures," p. 83) to just plain awkwardness ("Even if the player fails this roll, the batch is considered a failure and the entire quantity of plant matter is used, along with the time, experience and necessary materials," p. 29). There are also references to non-existant feats (the Nature's Avenger PrC refers to the feat Free Passage, which is not in the text), unidentified page numbers (the Strangle Vine write-up referencing a specialized and non-existant lasso on p. xx), and Wizards IP (Ehlonna and Obad-Hai are both mentioned in the text). Although not entirely damning, consistent issues like these were frustrating for me to find in a text that looked so slick and professional.
As for the content itself, some of it is excellent, some less so. The seven chapters, in order, deal with prestige classes, feats, a system for creating herbal items, mundane plants, monstrous plants, and spells. Generally, I found something to like in every chapter, as the ideas, consistently, were excellent. Unfortunately, the mechanical execution was not as strong as the ideas themselves. Before delving into a chapter-by-chapter look at the text, it bears noting here that, based on the monster descriptions and some other points, The Verdant World was designed with 3.0 in mind -- Face/Reach is used instead of Space/Reach, there are no listings for BAB and Grapple, and references are made to the skills Pick Pocket and Wilderness Lore instead of Sleight of Hand and Survival. Easily to convert, but the fact remains that it will take some conversion to use with the 3.5 rules.
The first chapter presents six prestige classes, all of which revolve around the relationship between man and nature:
- Nature's Avenger, someone dedicated to the protection of the wilderness against the encroachment of people.
- Forager, a survivalist capable of finding plants and food in the most dire situations and unlikely places.
- Nature's Scourge, someone dedicated to the absolute annihilation of all plant-life.
- Green Man, a person so strongly in touch with nature that he eventually becomes a plant.
- Sylvan Spellcaster, a caster able to tap into nature to strenghten her spells.
- Woodland Barbarian, a prestige class that models a Tarzan-type character.
The second chapter, Woodland Secrets, detailing the new feats, also made me a bit wary. I really like the Repulsive feat (plants want to physically avoid the character, granting a +4 deflection bonus to AC when the character fights plants and bending and moving out of the way as much as possible), which I felt had excellent flavor text and nice abilities while still being balanced. In general, however, balance wasn't so much the issue with the feats as design choices were -- lots of feats had very narrow areas of application (Botanist, Natural Healer, Natural Poisoner), were rather redundant with existing skills (Forage covers some of the same area as the Survival skill; three new creation feats seemed like a lot when the new items could probably be covered by one), and granted automatic success (Botanist, Forage). If feats get too narrow, then I really wonder why it's necessary, as it'd be hard to get characters to take it unless it fit their concept exactly. As for the other concerns, redundancy is a major issue in d20 game design in my opinion -- I feel like there's a tendency to reinvent the wheel a lot, when existing systems cover the material well already. For instance, rather than having Forage grant automatic success at a task that can be covered with a Survival check, have it grant a substantial bonus to that check when specifically looking for food. You can get the systems to work together rather than having one being overridden by the other. Also, this still allows for a degree of competency based on level -- the 20th-level ranger with the forage feat will still be better than the 1st-level ranger with the forage feat -- which is my primary objection to automatic success (the design of the spell true strike almost grants automatic success, but works well within the nature of the d20 system, in my opinion). Finally, there are some more minor terminology and design issues at work here, such as even-numbered prereqs (Brachiation requires Str 12 and Dex 12) and the splitting of some of the rules for the new creation feats from the feats themselves (Chapter 3 states that only people with Intelligence scores higher than 7 can use the feats, which means they have a functional requirement of Int 8, which, as it's an even number, I'd rachet it up to Int 9). I can't, however, stress enough, that, although the execution is a bit rough through these first two sections, the ideas are there, and some of them, like the Repulsive feat, are, in my opinion, gems.
The last three chapters of the book worked a lot better for me than the first three -- the mechanics are smoother, particularly for the monsters and spells, and the ideas, already good, are more evocative. I felt that Chapter 4, Flowering Satchel, was the most promising chapter of all, as it details different types of plants to insert into your game world. Ever since the Magic Candle series of computer games and the incident on Weathertop from The Lord of the Rings, I've liked the idea that plants and herbs can provide palpable benefits to people -- it fits the genre, in my opinion. On top of that, it also gives the ranger and druid another niche to make them more useful to a party. So what's in the chapter? It provides three types of plants: Healing, Exotic, and Poison, all of which can do different things if prepared in the proper ways, with exotic plants providing benefits that don't properly belong to healing or poisoning. Again, McGuigan provides excellent flavor text. Even if the DM decides to ignore the mechanical benefits listed in the text, the plants could be dropped into any campaign easily -- for instance, blood palm and bittersweet could be used as ingredients in potions or even as metamagic components (per Unearthed Arcana). Again, there are some odd design choices here, but, as noted, they're very easily ignored. Some of the exotics grant really off-the-wall powers and abilities, essentially becoming stand-ins for magic items. These abilities include breathing frost, detect magic, x-ray vision, levitation, speaking with plants, and polymorphing into a tree. They just strain my disbelief and turn what could be a really neat subsystem into a stand in for magic items that can be acquired at less cost. Finally, a lot of the poisons cause standard damage rather than ability damage (Bee Flower, Blowball, Grace Bloom, Sharplobe, Snakeweed, Sourwood, and White Salmba). Substituting in Con damage for the standard damage would probably alleviate this nicely, as the character would still loose hp, but the mechanics would match the ones established for poisons in the Dungeon Master's Guide.
Following the mundane plants, naturally, are the monstrous plants, which, as McGuigan notes in his author's preface, were where the idea originated from -- he feels that monstrous plants are underrepresented in the core rules and in D&D in general. It would seem, then, that part of the reason for this book was to rectify that. I found a number of the monstrous plants in the book to be pretty interesting and useful, including the blood root, curio vines, drooler (which has a nice regurgitate attack), leafers, rambling rose (despite the name, I like the idea of trained guard plants -- there's a sinister whimsy going on there, and I'm certainly down with that, which would make them tremendously useful in a Grimm game), the shanela, and the sould harvester (a malevolent tree that releases ghosts when killed). In all these cases, the thing that worked for me was the flavor text, the germ of an idea that I felt was really solid -- they all could have a place in my game. Mechanically, the monsters are, aside from the use of 3.0 rules, in line with what I expect from a product -- on a spot check, all the numbers add up correctly. I was confused, given the number of intelligent plants, that none of them had any skills or feats that I noticed or any information on Hide bonuses (as many of them are supposed to blend into their natural environs). Three monsters in particular struck me as a slight bit overpowered for their ability level: the cradle tree (CR 9, Str 35, Grapple +37, Reach 15 ft.), the soulful mirror (CR 5, domination with a duration of 1 month, constant natural invisibility), and the wind whisperers (CR 1, charm effect with a DC 20 Will save along with poison, for which no save DC is listed). In the end, though, the problems with the monster section are of this sort -- bumping up CRs, dropping durations, lowering DCs. Nothing struck me as so viciously unbalanced as to be useless, but most will require a little attention to be game-ready.
Finally, the last chapter, Spells of a Different Color, presents around 40 new spells, which range from the extremely cool photosynthesis and verdant oubliette to the rather questionable (and tongue-in-cheek) create vegan food and water. Photosynthesis grants temporary regeneration as long as the character remains in the sun, which is entirely appropriate for a druid (it's so natural for the class, that I wonder why it hasn't been done before -- at least not to my knowledge it hasn't), while verdant oubliette creates a vine cage around one creature (again, so natural a spell for the druid, that I wonder why it hasn't come up before, as it plays really well on the entangle spell -- it could even be its natural next step). There are, again, some problems, which mirror a lot of the problems I had with feats, mostly in the forms of redundancy and utility. Awaken tree, beroot, and plantmorph to a large degree duplicate the effects of awaken, entangle, and polymorph, respectively -- I'm not sure as to what the use of these spells is, with maybe the exception of a slight gain in power at the cost of specialization or even just to make a more powerful version of an existing spell. On the other end of the scale, devastate and drought (along with their lesser iterations) seem almost useless to a druid -- why would any druid want to damage the plant life in an area to that degree? I could see them (and vegetate) as rituals, per Unearthed Arcana, but they don't work for me as is. Finally, the text, previously professional, loses a bit of that edge as it delves into spells like create vegan food and water and its references to murder and meat or invisibility to plants, with its description of "Figure it out." I'm all for fun and games, but this just didn't feel like the time or place (this material, to be honest, screamed "web enhancement" to me).
In the end, I found a lot of the ideas to be valuable as such, but the execution of them to be consistently lacking, particularly in the more rules-heavy sections at the beginning of the book. If you're looking for a bestiary of monstrous plants and a field guide to exotic herbs and roots, I think this is a great resource, but most DMs are going to want to examine things closely and tinker with them as necessary. In the end, it's a beautiful looking product with a lot of potentially useful material and ideas, but many mechanical and design issues lurk beneath the surface.
Score: 2.25.
