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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Flynn" data-source="post: 4726220" data-attributes="member: 1836">This is a review of the War of the Burning Sky Campaign Guide, by Ryan Nock. The Campaign Guide is essentially the Gamemaster's guide for the War of the Burning Sky campaign saga published by ENWorld Publishing. This product is for the v3.5 Edition rules set. In the interest of full disclosure, this review is based on a PDF donated by ENWorld Publishing for this purpose.The PDF is 23 pages long, and contains a front cover, a back cover, and a page for the OGL, leaving 20 pages for content. The Content is divided into four Sections: the Introduction, a Campaign Outline, some Campaign Variants, and Rules Material. Each section, other than the Introduction, provides a significant amount of background detail to support the campaign described by the series of adventures that make up the War of the Burning Sky campaign saga.Section One: Campaign Outline provides the Gamemaster with an overview of the entire Burning Sky campaign saga. The goal of the Burning Sky campaign saga is to allow players to take characters from first to almost twentieth level. The backdrop of war provides an excellent opportunity for heroes to shine, and a good number of very cool events of a High Fantasy flavor are detailed in the adventures of this saga. (I'll cover some of these in my reviews of the individual adventures.) For those that do not wish to pursue a long-term campaign, this section also mentions a number of shorter options for story arcs that range over a small handful of adventures instead of the complete range of a dozen. This section also provides a rather simplistic line drawing map of the campaign region, a list of key NPCs and places, and a detailed timeline of events over the course of the campaign saga.Section Two: Campaign Variants explores a number of variants that the Gamemaster can apply to the War of the Burning Sky Campaign. This section provides a lot of specific details and suggestions for implementing abridged campaigns for those that wish to pursue a shorter story arc, providing four alternatives that address options for low-level, mid-level and high-level play. A section entitled "Tweaking the Setting" discusses how to adjust the campaign elements to better fit into your own personal campaign setting, be it a published setting or one you create yourself. A sidebar discusses the use of psionics in the setting, and how a GM might implement it within the flavor of the saga. Finally, there are a number of developed adventure seeds that expand on the locales, events and power groups of the setting, suggesting adventures that maintain the flavor and support the campaign direction for GMs that want to further explore the Regasia region.Section Three: Rules Material contains game mechanics that support the NPCs and the background of the setting. This section starts by describing the Burning Sky phenomenon that impacts the setting, making teleportation dangerous without aid of a certain artifact that the PCs will discover over the course of the campaign saga, and greatly impacting the region's climate. The GM can also find details on the special weapons, magic items, feats, special abilities and alternate class features of the Inquisitors. This section also provides a new monster subtype, the trillith, which are a race of dream-spawned monsters that hold some significant roles in the campaign. A new bardic song ("Song of Forms") and a new spell ("Enforced Flesh") provide some great non-standard treasure that will impact the game further on.All in all, I found this to be a well-conceived and evocative campaign guide with a lot of great information packed in its few pages. I think this campaign guide provides GMs with a good overview of the campaign saga. I think the game mechanics offer some interesting options to GMs in running the War of the Burning Sky. Unlike the player's guide, however, I do feel that the material in this book is more closely tied to the campaign itself, and understandably so. Still, when you consider it's free, I'd definitely recommend checking it out. Unless you're going to play in this campaign, that is!</blockquote>

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