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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JoeGKushner" data-source="post: 2010793" data-attributes="member: 1129">Oathbound Wrack & Ruin provides a good amount of player material, GM material and an adventure to get the game rolling.The title of the book comes from the primary locations detailed in Penance, a book I believe now has enough information to run several campaigns in it. The outer areas, the wrack, and the buried portions of the old buildings are the ruins. For players, we've got the standard Oathbound goodies. This means new races, prestige classes, gifts and prestige races in the front of the book. The three races may not be perfect for all players as they tend to be odd. Take the Nkoll, a serpent race with four tentacles instead of arms. These creatures have holdings under the city and are building up their numbers in order to strike at the surface world. Could be a good substitute for Drow in a long running Oathbound campaign. Another strange race, the Scar, might have been fully subterranean once as they have light pale skin and beautiful features. However, they burn in the sun and must have parasites placed in them in order to survive for any amount of time in the light. These parasites tend to leave scars and distortions across the skin as they expel waste. And you thought Elric had it bad eh? The worst part about it, is that they know they're ugly and freakish and don't like it. The one race I didn't like is actually a subspecies of drow, the Wyrgith. They're a little better than the drow but use those odd numbers for some of their stats as they're not much better than drow, just a little. For PrCs, we get the Career Rafter, what might be the first potential Epic level Oathbound PrC as one of the requirements is that you have to have ten levels of rafter in order to enter the class. They can detect the strange fields and auras around many of the ruins in addition to knowing how to make their way around the maze or pick up bits of knowledge here and there. The Spellwarden uses the unique channeling found on the Forge, the ambient power of the chained god fueling special abilities. The bad news, as with any channeling class, is that if you leave the forge, any ability reliant on that ambient energy is not useable. Now that's a quick way to make sure that a player stays on. This is a full ten level PrC and gains different abilities as they go up in levels ranging from Bind, placing a spell within an object to Resistance, spell resistance as well as resistance against channeling powered effects.The new gifts tend to focus on survival or concealment such as Night Eyes, giving you darkvision of 60 feet or Bladder of Holding, allowing you to avoid all of that bodily function thing. The new earned gifts include material like Fast Healer and Luck of the Cat, things that help you survive either immediately, as the latter gives you a +4 insight bonus to Reflex saves or long term, as the former gives you double healing.The new prestige races focus on some odd areas this time as we got the arachnid, chameleon, cockroach, exile and mole. Of these, my favorite is probably the Exile as it's definitely a different type of prestige race. You're branded on the face with one of the seven brands of exile and with it, a penalty of death if you go into Penance. There are some benefits to this brand though, and the abilities of the Exile, range from knowing if any of the seven or their spies are within 1,000 feet to basic immortality, immunity to aging and disease in essence.Now note, I mentioned that those player goodies were up front. The first appendix also includes some new spells, equipment and magic items. It's not a huge section, but it does add some new options like the spell, Smokeless Fire where you create fire without the smoke, giving you the heat you may need to survive in something like say, a maze, where smoke couldn't escape.Now that's all well and good for the players, but what does the GM get? Penance is a big city, we've got no doubts about that. Its also old. What happens to those ruins that are build atop of and built above that and then have some more stuff thrown above that? Why, they become underground and abandoned cities is all.The first section for Dms, The Lost City, or the Wrack, explains a great deal about the lawless land and it's lawless because in the city, to be under the law, you have to have a certain amount of people. Most of the Wrack doesn't have enough people to do so with only a few settlers here and there in the ruins. The important thing to remember, is that there may even be a few bloodholds with enough people to sponsor that title but because the place is so huge, they're still effectively isolated.Now for those who explore, the GM has some tools like using predators or collapsing buildings, as well as running into squatters or having whole sections sink. Those who survive find that not everything is profit as there are taxes to be paid and other matters to deal with. Fortunately, there are also survival tips that the GM can pass out to the players in order to increase their chances of surviving. Players may find themselves in the roles of builders, trying to claim salvage from the Wrack or even making a Canton of their own if they can secure enough land and make it safe.In this dangerous area, we've got two groups freshly detailed with rules following Guildcraft, also by Bastion. In essence, you pay experience points for ranks and titles and gain special abilities. Be careful when using this with other experience point costing abilities like the various schools from Fantasy Flight Games , Mystic Eye Games or Mongoose Publishing as you can easily unbalance your campaign. Still, it's unlikely that players will join the Band of the Red Sun or the Ragemaidens. The former an organization devoted to serving Lord Narcis and the latter a group of women warriors determined to free females in need of help.The next section, the Undercity, has material not only on the architecture, climate and air, but the hazards that are part of daily life such as collapsing buildings, plants, animals and locations to explore. If you liked Undermountain in Waterdeep, you've love The Bold Rasher, a 'bar...located on the avenue of 1000 fountains...has a door that opens into the maze...' so go into the bar, pay you fee and go crawling. Classic setup. It is here that the holdings of the Nkoll are detailed, the Sarrissar, a massive 10 cantons with over sixty thousand souls, most of them Nkolls.Under the section Talons of the Undercity, several groups are detailed for GM use including the Grinder, a powerful gnarl who is worshipped as a god by the Ground organizations. Others include the Black Dagger, a group of assassins and producers of poisons as well as the Rafter's Guild.Now all of this information is a lot to take in at one sitting. How to use it? How to mold it? How to run players through it. Why, go through Black on Black, an adventure for 8th-12th level characters. Like other Bastion products, this one has a few bits and pieces taken from Arms & Armor as well as Minions, Fearsome Foes, but the adventure is still useable without them. It  can also be tied into Dark Welcomes and Ascension Day as it assumes those events have happened with the Grey Stranger gaining solid form.The adventure has a lengthy history behind it and is heavily involved with the metaplot of the setting. If you haven't run the previous adventurers, you can still run this one, but players might have some questions about the nature of the setting. In dungeon crawls, it's often a simple thing to go here and do this but here, there are pawns, knights, rooks and kings all moving about the same board but to the players, much of this, if done properly, will be invisible for the most part.There are some other goodies for GMs to experiment with. For example, how to monsters from the Monster Manual or Minions fit into the Maze? There are notes in the appendix providing the GM some hints. How about random buildings in the maze? Covered. Unique monsters? Covered.Wrack and Ruin uses a standard two column layout. Editing could've used one final round as a few sentences seemed to be a little vague but for the most part, the text flows easily. The loss of color and slick paper is noticeable and the book, at 128 pages for $25.95, seems a tad on the high side but in comparison to say, any of the Secrets of the Clans books by AEG or their Swashbuckling Adventure books which are 96 pages for $24.95, it's competitively priced.The book allows the GM to have endless dungeon crawls as the party explores the past of the campaign setting as well as a full fledged adventure that pushes the plot of the setting along. In some ways, this might be a weakness as while it's nice to have an adventure to make the material immediately useful, would more maps, illustrations and PrCs be even more useful for players and GMs? Your mileage may vary, but I think that the metaplot should probably go into its own sourcebook and focus on making the book more player and GM friendly with more options. After all, this is the Forge and who knows what we'll find here right?GMs looking to expand their Penance campaigns and have more information about the Oathbound setting at their fingers, should look into Wrack & Ruin.</blockquote>

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