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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Psion" data-source="post: 2011132" data-attributes="member: 172">Underdark Adventure GuideUnderdark Adventure Guide is a setting and rules supplement providing "campaign neutral" material for use in underground settings. The book is written by Michael Mearls and Dean Poisso and published by Goodman Games.A First LookUnderdark Adventure Guide is a 144 page hardcover book priced at $28.00.The cover of the book, by V. Shane, depicts a "lava giant" standing before some ready-to-tassle adventurers.The interior art is black and white and features V. Shane, Marcio Fiorito, and William McAusland. Marcio is a well established artist in the d20 segment, and as normal, he has a way of bringing a lot of character to his portraits. V. Shane's artwork is good as well, but some of his interior pictures are a little murky, apparently from printing color pictures with dark shading in black and white. The third artist, McAusland, I am not familiar with, but his art look like fairly primitive ink peices and seems the least polished of the three.A Deeper LookUnderdark Adventure Guide is organized into four chapters.The first chapter encompasses new options for characters originating in an underdark setting, including races, classes, templates, feats, skill uses, and equipment.The races included feature PHB style racial writeups, with details like personality, relations, and land. Most of the writeups are for existing creatures in the MM, like drow, deep dwarves, derro, duergar, svirfneblin, and troglodytes. There are some minor deviations in the writeups. For example, drow are described as being "invariably neutral evil" while their MM description only pegs a few of them as Neutral Evil. Derro lack their madness trait described in the MM on the claim that PCs shouldn't have such traits; I find this a little dodgy as I am not sure that either madness is untenable for PCs nor should these entries be exclusively used for PCs.New races (not in the core rules/SRDs) include half-drow and gloom barbarians. Gloom barbarians are a savage subrace of humans that have adapted to the conditions of the underdark. The statistics of the gloom barbarians are pretty much unlike humans. They receive darkvision and the endurance feat in addition to an automactic mutation, but have none of the bonus skill points or feats humans have.The book introduces a number of "racial templates" intended to create new variants of existing races. The racial templates are exile, shadowkin, vindicator and wolfbred. I find the justification for some of these as templates rather than just backgrounds a little sketchy. For example, the exile template is meant to represent those exiled from their race. As penalties are those typically associated with being an outcast from one's race, and lack of access to racial feats and classes. As a benefit, they receive an attack bonus against their race and a penalty against fear saves. It seems to me that you could handle ones status as an exile non-mechanically, and make the "own race hatred" a feat for those whom would necessarily have such fervor.There is a short section on core classes. After a brief bit on adapting existing classes to the underdark, the book introduces a new core class: the radiomancer. The radiomancer is an arcane spellcaster, that prepares spell like a wizard (but still uses the word "memorization" to refer to it - a common mistake 3 years ago, but I was a little surprised to see it now), but has as many spells per day as a sorcerer. This is supposedly due to the radiomancer "harnessing radioactive energy." The radiomancer lacks a familiar, and also loses a point of constitution at every level, and can cause temporary Con damage to characters with a longstanding association. In addition to the impressive amount of spells, the radiomancer receives random mutations (introduced later in the book.)For a book that advertises itself as "campaign neutral", I found the inclusion of a post-apocolypse fantasy sort of take on radiation rather belied that claim, and it feels rather out-of-place here.There are a variety of prestige classes aimed at underdark characters. Some of them are available to most underdark races, such as envoy or fungal symbiote. However, many of them are specific to races, such as the derro deep sage or the drow gloomweaver. Most of the classes are 5-level classes. This makes many of them seem, on the surface, seem like nice quick-concept classes to shape specialist members of the races to racial specialties.However, not one follows the saving throw conventions, and none of them break with convention for any good reason I could perceive. Further, this is not merely a matter of player confusion; some classes have a save advancement ins some saves much more brisk than is available for character classes that use the convention. I would feel like reworking all these classes from the ground up before using them, which is usually a deal-breaker for me in a product.The feats are similarly divided into general and racial feats. Most of the general feats deal with survival or conditions in the underdark, such as belly fighter or still breath. I generally saw few problems with the feats, but there were some questionable calls. For example, one feat reintroduces infravision to the game. Not that I agree with the reasoning on why it was removed from the game. However, I certainly wouldn't want infravision alongside low-light and darkvision.The new skills uses and equipment sections have a variety of entries concerned with life and survival in the underdark. Perhaps the most notable of these are arcane prosthetics. These are basically artificial body parts built as a specific use of craft (engineering). The choice of having such an item revolve around a craft skill instead of a magical item craft feat seemed a bit odd to me, but overall the system is not bad. Prosthetics have a few basic functions, and have options for additional modifications (additional powers/features such as armor or extra strength); how many modifications can be fit into a prosthetic depends on its size. The second chapter introduces new creatures into the game. Many of the creatures are fantastical animals or other denizens of the underdark. Perhaps the most interesting entry, however, is the Athasi. The Athasi are psionic aberrations which bear some resemblance to a mind flayer, but are different enough to pass muster as original. Nonetheless, it seems to me that those wanting an open version of a mind flayer need look no further. The athasi is a bit weaker than a mind flayer. It does not share the mind flayer's brain munching attack, but has a single tendril that can drain intelligence while sapping knowledge from the creature, in the form of the location of the nearest settlement as well as (if a save is failed) memory of the encounter with the Athasi.Other entries of note include an arachnid template (with four sample creatures) and the huu'lach fungus, a fungus whose spores transform their victims over the course of days.Overall, I noticed few errors in the creatures. As a minorr nit, some creatures round up instead of down for HD averages. One construct seems to use a mix of 3.0 and 3.5 conventions, using the construct's HP bonus for size, but using a 3.0 style DR.In addition to the "true" creatures, the creature chapter has a variety of "hazard" type plants that appear through the underdark, such as blood moss (which is actually edible and grows in areas of strong earth energy, which can help explain what all these creatures are thriving on anyways) and stalactite vines (vines that line a cavern and crush rock, which can cause cavern collapses.)The third chapter, Creating the Underworld,  is a toolkit and an advice section for designing underdark subsettings for your campaign world. This chapter is divides into three basic section. The section entitled The Role of the Underdark provides big picture questions and considerations on what you want you underdark to be and how it interfaces with the rest of the campaign world, including potential consequences of decisions such as the size of the underworld setting you choose to create, amount of contact the underworld has with the surface world, and so forth.The section entitled Mapping the Underworld provides ideas and considerations for a number of elements of a primarily physical or geographical nature. Each of various sections (animals, ceiling, magic, etc.) provides a variety of options and ideas to make parts of your underdark setting as mundane or exotic as you need.It is this section that contains the details about radiation and mutations referred to in the character creation chapter. As mentioned, I find its inclusion in a supposedly "campaign neutral" product dubious. The radiation areas can cause permanent constitution loss along with random mutations. The mutations tables mostly result in benefits to the character; presumably the drawback is the loss of constitution.The third major section of the chapter provides ideas and guidelines for designing underdark civilizations. Many of the factors that you would need to detail when creating a surface civilization are covered here, though there is special attention to how they would differ in the underdark environment. As with the geology chapter, each of several attributes of the civilization (language, etiquette, economics, religion) are provided with ideas and options in varying levels of strangeness, according to your needs. This makes for a nice guide if you are contemplating creating underdark cultures.The fourth and last chapter is a selection of pre-designed locales you can drop into your own underdark setting. Each locale is 1-4 pages and has area descriptions and background, detailed NPC stat blocks for major figures, and plot hooks for involving the PCs in the locale and its details.There is a nicely done map showing sample relative locations of the included locales, as well as individual maps of some locales.ConclusionsThe character options chapter is easily the weakest chapter of the book, with many breaks in conventions and mechanical problems. Unfortuantely, the first chapter takes up almost half of the book.On the other hand, chapters 2-4 are nicely done and have a lot to offer the GM looking to create or expand an underdark setting (and who is does not want to have to sift through FR-specific elements in doing so).Overall Grade: C+ -Alan D. Kohler</blockquote>

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