OSSR: Ghostwalk

[Username17]

OSSR: Ghostwalk
Campaign Option

Yes, it says Sean K Reynolds. Be afraid.

So it's a new year, and now Ghostwalk is more than 10 years old. So let's bust out the booze and start the reviewing of 2003's experiment with reviving the “campaign option” series: Ghostwalk. The campaign option series was thing that happened in the 90s, where weirder setting ideas were given single-book or single-box-set treatment. They were called “campaign option” to stress the optionality of all of it. Which considering that this was fucking 2nd edition and the entire skill system was considered “optional” meant that these things were really optional.


This is the only thing in the campaign option series anyone actually remembers.

Ghostwalk came out in June of 2003, which is coincidentally the month that 3.5 D&D came out. This book doesn't really say what edition it's for, but it's actually 3rd edition. Classes have a Scry skill to spend points on, fucking deal with it. This is fairly odd, since obviously the 3.5 previews in Savage Species had come out four months earlier, indicating that most of the major changes for 3.5 were known by people working at WotC for months. The logical conclusion is that Ghostwalk was in the pipeline for a long, long time. Monte may have been sitting on early drafts of this thing in 2nd edition days.

In the credits section, the book tells you that it is going to be using stuff from the Forgotten Realms. It mentions some generic books, but also such books as the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting and Magic of Feyrun. These are setting specific books, and you might think that this is because the book is tied into the Forgotten Realms. You'd be wrong. This book is about a standalone campaign setting with its own afterlife stuff that is wholly incompatible with the soul wall and all that Forgotten Realms garbage. What's really going on here is that those two books had Sean K Reynolds as a contributing author and so does this book. So at various points he felt it was less work to simply reuse stuff he had already gotten published. Well, let's go – this bourbon won't drink itself.

The Introduction



Ghostwalk centers around one big conceit: there's an area where ghosts are solid (the campaign takes place there), and player characters get to have two “lives” in the video game sense. The first as living people, and then once they die they get to play their second life as a solidified ghost. The city that the campaign is in is named “Manifest” because ghosts are manifested there, and now I'm drinking. It's like a fermented mash miracle. Ghosts are solid here because it's close to the big hole in the ground that leads to the land of the dead. For some reason, many ghosts don't want to jump down a giant hole in the ground that is called “The Veil of Souls” and thus there's a city with a lot of ghosts in it, and it has an unimaginative name.

That's about all you get before it starts telling you about how different character classes are handled in the game's setting. It comes out swinging by reminding us that “Barbarian” is a terrible name for a character class, and an even worse name for a character class that is supposed to be “core.”

Barbarians are rare around Manifest, usually hailing from the Varlin Mountains near Bazareene.

That is literally the first fucking sentence that mentions Barbarians, the Varlin Mountains, or Bazareene. The Varlin Mountains and Bazareene are never mentioned again in any WotC book, and Bazareene doesn't get a proper writeup until page 135. Really I'm not sure how that could have been written to be less informative or helpful than it is. They could have told you something about Varlish culture or what Barbarians were actually about in this setting, but instead they chose to name drop a bunch of places no one cares about. Honestly, does being told that you're probably from the Varlin Mountains in the setting make you more or less likely to play a Barbarian? Answer of course is neither, because those words don't mean anything.

Most of the other class descriptions are slightly less horrible, mostly telling you that the class is indeed available to be played. It does go somewhat off the rail with the Clerics and Paladins, where it drops that this book is insisting on using its own stupid pantheon. How stupid, dare you ask? So stupid that the gods being worshiped are characters that Sean K Reynolds made for new players to use in convention games. Yes, really. You're apparently supposed to worship Aluvan and Dracanish. It was a little bit dickish when Gygax pulled this stunt in the early eighties, no idea why Sean K Reynolds thought it would go over well in 2003. The page ends with two paragraphs reminding you that some spells may work differently (or not at all) on ghosts, and that spellcasters should probably read the part of the book that talks about that shit.

The monsters section is mostly a tirade about how it's fuckin D&D and you're gonna fight some monsters. Also, that the main villains of the setting are Yuan-Ti, because why not? The big WTF?! comes right in here:

The spirits of all intelligent humanoids, except elves and half-elves, come through Manifest when they die.

Wait, what? Can I play an Elf or not? Do I not get a soul form second life if I do? What the actual fuck is going on here? There's a whole section on how “Fighters are common most everywhere you go, and in Manifest, it's no different.” but there's no bit of the introduction given over to whether and how the basic races fit in. And since you just casually dropped the bomb that two out of six of the core races have a different set of afterlife rules in a paragraph ostensibly about monsters, maybe you should have fucking done that. Anyway, don't be overly alarmed, because when you get to page 90 of this fucking book, they will bother to tell you that actually Elves just get called to the Spirit Wood, which is a forest next to Manifest, instead of passing through the city itself, and that entire detail is pretty much completely pointless. But in the entire 85 page intermediary it is exceedingly unclear whether you get to take advantage of the extra life rules as an Elf or not. Really makes this feel like a setting that was written for 2nd edition.

Next up: All About Ghosts!

[deaddmwalking]

I'm glad you're writing this one. Ghostwalk has been sitting in the back of my car for almost 6 weeks. I had been trying to read through it and somewhere I gave up. Must be because drinking and driving is wrong.

[Antariuk]

This is great, thanks for doing a Ghostwalk review! I actually own that one, but only ever used two ideas from it, one of which was the map of the book's setting (it's a pretty decent map).

[Prak]

Yeah, I own it too after vague memories of paging through it in Borders back in '03. I think there's little to no difference between an orc ghost and a human ghost, or whatever, and what really makes a mechanical difference is how you died. I think. It's been a while.

[Blicero]

Frank, minor aside: Why do you consistently spell "Faerun" as "Feyrun"? Casual googling doesn't suggest that your spelling has any history associated with dnd. (Not that it particularly matters, but I'm kind of curious.)

[codeGlaze]

Probably a stab at the fey-boner that the major Faerun authors have.

[Username17]

Technically, the correct spelling of Faerun has a thingy over the e that I can't make on my keyboard without a bunch of ass pain, so sometimes I just write it like it's pronounced: Fey-run. It's not super important.

Chapter 1: All About Ghosts


Unfortunately, not that kind of ghost.

The first chapter is 67 pages long and is about various new rules to make ghosts playable. I understand why you would need to do this, K and I ended up making an entire sourcebook ourselves on this exact topic, because quite frankly the rules in 3rd edition for the undead did not work very well. And they especially didn't work very well in the specific aspect of actually playing with that stuff on the player's side. I'm not saying you needed 67 fucking pages to rework the rules into something players could actually use, our own Tome of Necromancy came in under thirty thousand words and covered a lot more ground than just how to make a +0 ECL undead. But I can certainly see the need to do some heavy rules revamping – they decided to go straight for playable ghosts, which are the floobiest and least playable of the standard undead concepts. Hell, even After Sundown doesn't suggest allowing people to play ghosts.

So the first thing they have to nail down is their soul cosmology. This is really long winded, but basically it boils down to all animals having souls, but only things that are basically humans in forehead alien makeup get to have their soul turn into a ghost when they die. Except Yuan-ti, because fuck those guys. They may literally be humans in forehead alien makeup, but they don't make ghosts because mumble mumble. When ghosts get formed, they are insubstantial, and the closer they get to the giant hole in the ground, the easier it is for them to become solid (and if they get close enough, the harder it is for them to become insubstantial again). So in the actual campaign setting, ghosts are pretty much solid, making it fairly pointless that they are ghosts. It's actually pretty puzzling. There's a whole lot cosmological hoohaw being thrown around to justify people getting a second life as a ghost, but their second life as a ghost is also walked back so far that they might as well have cut the crap and just let everyone rise from the dead as a revenant or ghoul or something instead.

This book attempts to tell me that there is a fundamental difference between a disembodied yet hollow soul that is wandering around the material world and undead. Yes, really. I don't understand why you would try to make ghosts be not undead. There is a vast amount of space given over to the ethereal current and shit, which basically boils down to: when you die you have the choice of becoming a ghost or not. That's it, I just saved you like a page and half with that sentence fragment. There's also quite a bit given over to the minor bonuses and penalties ghosts get to various social skills because when they are formed they come in with their injuries intact and you get to play


...of course, as a ghost you also get to sculpt yourself and make the injuries go away (or make new ones appear), so really this is a lot of extra text that could have been replaced with “if you want to sculpt your body into something gruesome, you can power attack your diplomacy, gather information, and bluff into an equally large bonus to intimidate. I mean, it's still RNG breaking to give people random +10 bonuses to Intimidate at any cost, but I just saved a fair amount of text. Also, raise dead doesn't cost levels when you use it on ghosts because reasons.

The big thing they introduce is the eidolon and (sigh) eidoloncer classes, which are classes that you take once you are a ghost. You don't have a choice about it (except later on they tell you that you do), you have to take the special ghost classes when you level up once you're dead. There is a fair amount of text spent on discussing whether the DM should force every character who gains too many levels of eidolon to jump into a big hole and leave the game. I would submit that if you wanted to play a Ghostwalk campaign at all, that obviously you should not do that. But for some reason the default campaign rules are supposed to be that every player character has to jump in the hole and stop playing eventually, with the prospect that you might actually be allowed to see the campaign through to the end being a DM-option. It's just really puzzling. Anyway, the two classes are basically Fighter and Wizard. Seriously, one gives you +1 BAB and a feat every other level, and the other gives you BAB and feats at half that rate but advances your spellcasting. These are so comically obviously unbalanced that they look like a parody of 3rd edition design principles. But they were written up in 2003 or perhaps considerably before that, so it's entirely possible they were written up seriously.



Anyway, there are also a bunch of prestige classes that are included here because they sell 3rd edition books. They are all laughably terrible except for one that requires you to be a dwarven cleric. Thus, none of them have ever or will ever see play in actual games. You also get a page and a half dedicated to the various penalties and bonuses minor and major that ghosts provide and incur on various skill tests. The most important one is that you suffer a -5 penalty to your Wilderness Lore (remember: 3e) skill when attempting to track a manifested ghost. The other modifiers are less important than that.

Feats get their own section, and it's important because this is where all the ghost powers go. I mean, sure, you get crap like “Dancing Blade” which is literally worse than Weapon Focus: Rapier in all ways. But you can also get a feat chain that lets you magic jar people or corpses, so there's that. Feats are actually an incredibly terrible currency with which to buy powers such as these, because they are unleveled. So if you spend two feats in one direction you get an incredibly shitty at-will faerie fire that requires a successful touch attack (thus negating the point of faerie fire in 99% of circumstances), and if you sink 2 feats into a different direction you get to replace all your physical stats with awesome ones because you spend the rest of the game possessing a dead Marilith. Some of these powers are really powerful, some of them are virtually meaningless, and they are divided up into various numbers of feats wholly arbitrarily and it makes no fucking sense. Ghost Telekinesis costs like 6 feats because it's subdivided up into a whole bunch of minor improvements (would you like strength with that? How about dexterity?), but ghost possession is just one feat to jump in and a second feat to take control.

There's a sub-section called “changes to the rules” which is actually a list of minor addenda to some core spells. As you'll recall, the actual changes to the rules were in earlier subsections with other names. Did you know that you can use mending to extend the shelf life of shaped ectoplasm? Well, now you do. Do you care? No? Awwwww... This is interrupted very briefly with some extra equipment, including some exotic weapons you will never use and don't care about like the bola flail, but then it goes back into magic with a subsection called “new magic.” Some of these are forgotten realms reprint spells like weapon of the deity, that I assume SKR pushed in here to extend page count with minimal work. Some of these are new spells that interact with the subsystems of this campaign setting. Honestly, big piles of crappy spells with a few gems for spellcasters to dumpster dive through for modest but noticeable powerups was just a way for 3e to sell books and fill up page space. This book takes up 19 pages with bullshit about spells, which is almost a third of this overly long chapter.

The last 11 pages of this chapter are magic items. Some of these are again reprints. This book has the version of Screaming that does an extra d6 of sonic damage and is just a +1 bonus, so there's that. Bunch of other things in here are reprints from Magic of Faerun, and are just as shitty and/or overpowered as you'd expect.



Yet for some reason, SKR's keep coming back over and over again.

Next up: All about Manifest.

[shadzar]

This is the only thing in the campaign option series anyone actually remembers.

yeah because quite frankly, settings are optional and quite pointless to state so.

[FaerieGodfather]

Technically, the correct spelling of Faerun has a thingy over the e that I can't make on my keyboard without a bunch of ass pain, so sometimes I just write it like it's pronounced: Fey-run. It's not super important.

I use UniChars.

[name_here]

I can't understand why you would make a book about ghosts and have them be not incorporeal. Especially if you want it to be a full-on ghost campaign instead of a character option for regular play, where you might want to avoid dealing with the problems of integrating an incorporeal guy into challenges for a corporeal party, particularly at low enough levels that "a wall" and "a bunch of guys with non-magic weapons" are an appropriate challenge.

But in an entirely ghost campaign, you don't have to worry about that. They can very well just fight things they actually get to touch. Hell, it's a perfect opportunity to introduce all sorts of freaky spirit monsters. And if you're not going to have either of the signature ghost traits of being incorporeal and hanging around haunting places over unfinished business or vengeance, why even have a ghost book?

[deaddmwalking]

I think I got to about the feats section before my eyes glazed over. After that, I spent way too long thinking about whether it would be possible to make a race that can briefly become incorporeal a few times per day (sort of like the Ninja from Complete Adventurer?). I'd really like to see a +0 LA race with that type of ability.

[talozin]

I remember thinking that this sounded like a pretty sweet idea for a book, and then after buying it and reading it, deciding that it was ten pounds of ass in a five pound bag. So I am pleased, sort of, to see that memory has not failed me. Put it this way: it's a highly likely candidate for inclusion in the eventual RPG Book Giveaway II: Electric Boogaloo.

[Meikle641]

I sorta thought the ectoplasm feats had neat ideas. Basically, you can make gear out of bullshit you conjure, sorta like wraithbone. Of course, it evaporates unless treated with some kind of item.

Still, fuck the feat chains in that book.

[Antariuk]

I sorta thought the ectoplasm feats had neat ideas. Basically, you can make gear out of bullshit you conjure, sorta like wraithbone. Of course, it evaporates unless treated with some kind of item.

Still, fuck the feat chains in that book.

Yeah, I immediately thought of that stupid drow gear you cannot bring to the surface without melting it because reasons. Also, everyone who watched Ghost will not be able to shape ghost goo without some very unpleasant associations.

[Username17]

Chapter 2: The City of Manifest



Now let's get this out front and center: while this book is a “campaign option” book and thus nominally about the campaign setting – you don't actually care about the campaign setting. People didn't pick up Ghostwalk because they were terribly interested in the Varlin Mountains, and this book doesn't tell you very much about them anyway. People came for the idea of playing living people along side ghosts in a high fantasy scenario, because that is awesome. So each and every thing that this book that isn't about that core issue is pretty much out of place. It would have to be very awesome to make people care, and obviously most of the setting elements in this book fail to live up to that standard.

The chapter begins with what is perhaps the cardinal sin of fantasy world building: talking about shit that happened a long ass time ago that no one gives a fuck about rather than talking about shit that's going down now that might actually matter. Look, when I see a wikipedia entry on Paris, the first sentence is “Paris is the capital and most populous city of France” not “The earliest archaeological signs of permanent settlement in the Paris area date from around 4200-4500 BCE.” And yet, the first sentence of the main chapter here is “In its earliest incarnation, Manifest was nothing more than a camp around the entrance to the dwarves' cave – a ramshackle collection of tents pitched by clerics, pilgrims, and those who had brought their dead to the Deathwardens.” All of that shit is meaningless. The entire first section is a four and a half page timeline, and “today” gets two fucking sentences explaining that things are prosperous and relatively peaceful. Today is the time period you're actually fucking playing in, you dumb assholes! No one gives a second shit about thousand year old wars, the important thing is plot hooks right now!

We get a couple paragraphs to tell us that making undead is illegal in Manifest (but that's totes different from ghosts because fuck this book), and then reminding us that raise dead doesn't cost a level in this setting because reasons. Then we're off to the races talking about special gods no one gives a shit about. No one gives a shit about these guys, because most of them are just characters SKR made and never got to play and then elevated to godhood because it was easier than making up new names. Some of the others are old school demon lords written up as gods – so say hello to Orcus, your big bad for the day. And when we're done talking about gods you don't give a fuck about, we are now 15 pages into a chapter about the city of Manifest without even mentioning a single thing you might actually care about. Demographics? System of government? Architectural styles? Economy? Major industries? City threats? Important city organizations?



So finally on page 89 they deign to start talking about the actual fucking city that chapter 2 is nominally supposed to be about in a section called “the living and the dead.” This section raises more questions than it answers. Apparently new ghosts often rent little shelves in coffin motels called “spirit lockers.” I'm not sure why we needed a new word for that, as “coffin motel” already exists and is plenty morbid as-is. But the big WTF is that they apparently “rent” things at all. I mean, ghosts show up to the city naked and foreign, what are they paying with? Currency in this setting appears to be gold coins rather than electronic credit, and you don't get to take those to Manifest if you die in the lands of insubstantial ghosts that comprise most of the planet. Most of the subsection is rumination on the relations between living and dead people, which are mostly given over to anecdotes from a hundred or more years ago that probably have little to do with anything.

The next section gets even more surreal in that it is about “Races in Manifest.” Apparently, almost everyone in town is a human, gnome, elf, dwarf, or halfling. Considering that all the gnolls and orcs and hobgoblins and lizardfolk and shit from the entire fucking planet also send their ghosts through this town, how could you possibly justify claiming that non-PHB races amount to only a “smattering” of people. This is also where we get some decidedly 2e style Elf Wank, where apparently Elves go to the Spirit Wood next door instead of jumping down the hole, because Elves have a different afterlife than you do. This bit is so out of touch with how 3rd edition D&D does things that I can only assume that part of the setting has been kicking around since the mid 90s.

The actual description of the city takes about five pages and meanders from describing individual taverns to more high angle description of wards. This town only has five fucking wards, because it apparently only boasts a permanent population of 22,000. That's not a misprint, the whole “city” is less than a mile square and a commoner can probably run across it in about 4 minutes. The whole thing is roughly the physical size of Ocean Grove, Massachusetts or Biggs, California. It has roughly the population density of Shanghai, which it achieves by having some people live in coffin motels and also have an under city full of dwarves, though it appears to be surrounded by fucking wilderness and you'd think people would consider spreading out a bit and maybe having a yard. Really though, I am absolutely flabbergasted by how bullshit this city is. Here you have a setup where you could justify a city as titanic and cosmopolitan as you wanted – everyone who ever lives must eventually pass through at least for a while. If the population of the planet was anything near to Earth, you'd be measuring your huddled masses of new naked ectoplasmic immigrants in the hundreds of thousands per day. If the number of humanoid species was anything remotely like D&D standard you'd have dozens if not hundreds of races represented. But instead, we get this bullshit where we're supposed to be impressed by a city with five major races where fucking Lizardfolk have to travel in disguise and the entire fucking city population could simultaneously be seated to watch the fucking Akron Zips play college football.

The city government is apparently a council of five dudes, and they have a city watch that is composed of 120 warriors and fighters ranging from 1st to 3rd level. There is an 11th level Wizard who runs a curio shop and could conquer this entire city in a day. There are two factions you're supposed to care about because they are so powerful: the Guild of Morticians and the Yisa-Khardomas. You don't care about those two factions. The other groups are pretty generic. You have a chamber of commerce, some anti-ghost advocates, and a couple of groups that represent various character classes (thieve's guild, wizard's guild, necromancers' circle). Most of this is about what you'd expect, but there are a couple of neat touches – the wizard's guild is led by an intelligent staff of power. Because a Staff of Power is damn near an 11th or 12th level Wizard by itself and this town is so bullshit that that makes it the most powerful dude around.



The whole place has a dungeon under it, and that dungeon has a Lich in it. I don't know why the Lich skulks around in the darkness, he's actually more than powerful enough to just come to the surface and conquer all this crap. He's...

Ermm... he's not actually alive. But you know what I mean.

But basically, there's a fundamental problem with the dungeon scenario. The city has 120 soldiers who are fighters and warriors from 1st to 3rd level. The dungeon underneath has umber hulks, red dragons, and stone giants in it. It strains believability. The undercity could wipe out the over city. In like, an evening of rampage, when it comes down to it.

The last two pages of this section are about the Spirit Wood. Basically, I can't even read this crap, because there is a limit to how much elf wanking I can stand. I got about as far as them talking about their all-elf group of tree protectors named (and I am not making this up) “The Spiritsong Court” before I just fucking gave up. I just can't bring myself to give a damn about this shit. Elves don't jump in a hole, they merge with a forest. Because elven afterlife is slightly different than everyone else's afterlife because reasons.

But the bottom line is that if you're going to run a city campaign, the city actually has to be big. Having a city campaign based around a “metropolis” that has less people than the University of California, Los Angeles has administrative staff just comes across as stupid. This chapter needed way more ambition and way less time talking about shit no one cares about.

Next Up: The Ghostwalk Campaign!

[Chamomile]

This is mostly just making me think how awesome it'd be to have a campaign where everyone's a ghost. You could just use regular mechanics for the PCs, with the exception that they are incorporeal and can only pick up other incorporeal stuff. And then of course you have to build a bunch of incorporeal stuff into your setting so that there are spirit monsters and evil ghosts and some kind of ghost treasure so you can do your regular D&D type stuff, but the city your characters all protect is full of regular living people who seriously don't even know you're there, they just know that the plague-causing nightmares about ghost shoggoths stopped happening.

[Username17]

Chapter 3: The Ghostwalk Campaign

The first thing you need to decide as a DM with this product in hand is how you're going to use it.

The Ghostwalk Campaign chapter is 20 pages, and it jumps around a lot. The actual campaign seeds are extremely brief. There are four campaign seeds and six one-sentence adventure seeds. This takes up a page and a half, because they really don't try very hard to sell this stuff. One of the proposed campaigns is to strike off and have the DM make up some answers to “really big questions” about life and death. Their example is to discover what the true difference between Elf souls and other humanoid souls is. I can't imagine giving a shit, but in any case there is pretty much by definition not a lot of help in this book for a campaign whose stated purpose is to answer questions this book does not. About the only one of the campaigns in here that there's actual solid support for is the “dungeon crawl” where you go into the catacombs under Manifest fighting monsters and looting treasures. There isn't a lot of reason to do that in this world instead of Waterdeep or whatever, but you totally can.


About as good an idea for your dungeon crawl as you're gonna get.

The main villains it wants you to use are the Yuan-Ti and the Undead. This is equal part surreal and retarded. The split between “ghosts” and “undead” doesn't really work, and trying to push it front and center just means you have a central theme that doesn't work. The Yuan-Ti are just weird. It seems like an enemy chosen at random. They don't seem to have any goals that are distinct from generic evil goals, and there doesn't seem to be any especial reason that the Yuan-Ti are today's big bad rather than any other group of villains. This could have been the Gith or Demogorgon cultists or whatever.

There's quite a bit about adventuring next to or beyond the big hole in the ground that leads to the afterlife. It's fourteen fucking pages of this twenty page chapter, despite the fact that it has almost nothing to do with the rest of the book or the campaign setting. It goes into amazing detail about some of this crap you don't care about. I mean seriously, there's this body of water that spirits cross after they jump down the hole, and there are some little islands on that lake. One of those islands has a guy named Deeran living on it, and there is a little map of Deeran's house. What the fuck? There are twelve other named islands on the unimaginatively named Soul Waters, and each one is dedicated to a group or dude. One of them has a halfling restaurant on it. Another has a lighthouse operated by dwarves. Other than filling up page space, I have no idea what the purpose of the entire “beyond the veil” segment is.

Earlier in the book, we were promised that in Chapter 3 we'd get some ideas for melding this setting with other settings and putting Manifest into settings like Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk. I will now produce the “Inserting Manifest into an Existing Campaign” subsection in its entirety:

Manifest can, with only a little work, be inserted into an existing campaign. All that is required is that the cosmology of the campaign be altered (or defined) to include the concept of the physical land of the dead and the entrance as described in this product.

Seriously. That's the whole subsection. Due to the change in font, the heading is actually bigger than the text.

Next up: Countries! That's the part of the book where they discuss setting elements that no one cares about.

[John Magnum]

Shouldn't they tell you the first thing you need to decide with the product somewhere at the beginning, not chapter fucking three?

[NineInchNall]

Well, considering it's around the same level of obviousness as rule zero, that they even stated it is puzzling.

"You mean I can totally do what I want with rules for a game I play at home with my friends? No way!"

"You mean in order to use something I have to decide how I want to use it? No way!"

[ubernoob]

Off topic:

About as good an idea for your dungeon crawl as you're gonna get.

For the record, I think this App is damn good at what it claims to be.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... xeldungeon

[Username17]

Chapter 4: Countries

This chapter is 22 pages long, and covers six countries where the special ghost materialization thingy does not actually happen. So... really these could be any fantasy countries in any fantasy game world at all. They are wholly interchangeable with other fantasy countries, and have essentially no bearing on the nominal target setting at all. Really, none of these places are countries that are relevant to anything. There are four human nations, an elf nation, and an undead nation. One of the human nations has halflings in it, one has dwarves, and one has gnomes. There are apparently no orcs or giants or lizardfolk or whatever. This makes these countries bullshit useless even if you wanted to run a standard D&D game, and none of them showcase anything interesting about this setting. The overall feel is that these are ideas from the cutting room of the FRCS book that have been given new names. Despite being a chapter about other nations surrounding the city state this book nominally cares about, the chapter has no map of the region. There is a map of a demiplane that has ten thousand Yuan-Ti in it that is attached to a sidebar, but that has honestly nothing to do with anything and would have probably been better in the previous chapter where they were trying to make you care about the Yuan-Ti menace in the first place.

We start with an enatic noble republic called Bazareene. The authors don't know what enatic succession is or what a noble republic is, so we are told that their government is a “Matriarchy.” Really. It says that. The country itself is pretty uninteresting, it's 99% human and includes some mountains where there are barbarian tribes. This is the main source of barbarian characters in this book, as apparently the authors hadn't grasped the 3rd edition conceit that you can play any core race with any core class. The discussion of character classes is how the book manages to squeeze three and a half pages per uninspired generic fantasy kingdom. Yes, it literally gives a mini-paragraph to each of 3rd edition's core classes talking about how they fit in to each of the countries. Note that for most of these countries, the first sentence is something like “There are no true barbarians in Tereppek.” Seriously, it says that. We have an entire paragraph given over to each of these classes in each of these countries and they haven't bothered to actually come up with a means to play each of the classes from each of the countries. It's mind boggling.

Anyway, the capital of Bazareene is three times the size of Manifest. The capital of Tereppek is bigger still and Manifest would apparently be the sixth largest city in Tereppek. By the way, Tereppek is a land where philosophers and learned savants rule, which in this book is called a “Pedocracy.” That's not what that word means (when actually used, a “pedocracy” is rule by children), but the thing I find really interesting is that that is the name used for that hypothetical government in the original AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide (page 89). This indicates that these countries were literally designed with the 1979 Campaign builder by Gary Gygax. This fucking blows my mind. Either Monte or SKR had these bad boys lying around in their notes for a very long time, or one or both of them still opens up the old book with the Efreet on the cover when generating content. Or I suppose it's also possible that one or both of them simply learned to read with AD&D books like I did and are permanently scarred by the process. They probably put “q.v.” instead of page references and say “N/A” out loud when they want to say it is irrelevant. Their poor, poor editors.

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[/img]

The generic evil nation of Xaphan is generic and evil. They are a theocracy with three religions (no idea how that works) and 95% of the population are undead. They do bad stuff because they are bad. This book wants ghosts to fight against undead, which doesn't get any less stupid each time I think about it. Anyway, the Xaphanese want to destroy the city of ghosts and replace it with a city of wraiths, and I just fucking don't care, alright?

Next Up: Monsters. That is where we deliver the “big reveal” of this book.

[deaddmwalking]

I'm guessing they wanted to use Yuan-Ti since they're not open content? If you really cared about the campaign setting, then you'd be compelled to abandon the SRD... Or something.

But maybe you could do Serpent Kingdoms next. I remember opening it to a random page and having my eyes assaulted by a glaring typo in the first paragraph I looked at - so I never even tried to read it. But I wonder if there might have been a plan to connect them. I see they were published a year apart (Serpent Kingdoms came later) and SKR isn't credited on the cover...

[Koumei]

The Yuan-ti are awesome in a number of ways - the appearance, the way they can turn people into their own and they have rituals to pokevolve, the fact that snakes are awesome. But I don't think they've ever been utilised by WotC well - all this potential and the best they can manage is "These are the bad guys who want to do bad things". Give them a strong motivation to do some specific evil goal, get them all working towards that (and have that goal involve inconveniencing the PCs), they'd be great.

I did not expect this book to do that for them. My expectations were met.

Also, wouldn't it be a net gain to stop being a lame "ghost" with stupid notghost classes and start being a wraith with all their benefits?

[Username17]

Chapter 5: Monsters


This is an Artaaglith, which because of alphabetization is the first monster in this chapter. We will not be talking about it.

So chapter 5 brings the big reveal. The big reveal is that the rules for ghosts you got in the chapter called “all about ghosts” are not in fact remotely complete, and the actual rules for ghosts are in the Monster chapter. Oh goodie. Ghosts are Outsiders rather than Undead because reasons. But the big big reveal here is that they are probably a +1 Level Adjustment template and the entire game is fucking unplayable. I say “probably” because this is a 3e book that despite taking things from the FRCS book doesn't even bother to use the ECL nomenclature from that book. So it says that ghosts get +1 CR. Does that mean that their level adjustment is +1? Probably. And of course if it is, the entire system falls apart because you dynamically gain and lose level adjustment with deaths and resurrections but your XP totals don't rise or fall to correct for that.

Now Ghosts are not “Ghosts” from the monster manual. They aren't even Undead. They are Outsiders, which as I understand it means that they gain proficiency with martial weapons because type-based classes are terrible. This means that there are no function calls at all to any undead rules in any other book. It's all reinvention of the wheel here, and it's stupid complicated. Ghosts here are immune to crits and sneak attack – but if they do get critted or sneak attacked with a silver weapon they have to make a DC 15 Fort Save or be stunned for a turn. Why? What the fuckity fuck does that add to anything? Why is this system so complicated? How can you be critted if you are immune to being critted? The fuck does that even mean?

Ghosts have an ectoplasmic body, which if you use other expansion books may be something of a problem. They have an easier time hiding (+4 to hide checks) but muted sensations (no rules given, but it's supposed to be kind of a big deal).

All in all, this template is a word salad. The people who wrote it had multiple incomplete and/or incompatible ideas and just jumbled them into a list form. And it's all in pursuit of a frankly puzzling goal: segregating ghosts from undead so that you can have playable ghosts without fixing the undead type. Frankly, more than half of this book could be condensed to like 15-20 pages if they just opened with fixing the undead type so that it was more playable and just went from there. You could have playable ghosts, playable vampires, playable ghouls, and playable revenants in less page space than this book has spent trying to explain how this book's ghosts are conceptually different from undead.




For some reason, D&D has a lot of “undead bard” monsters. One of them is in this book.

All told, you get 14 monsters in 20 pages. Not a terribly good ratio, but I've certainly seen worse. Unfortunately, some of the stuff in here is reprints from Monsters of Faerun. Yes, really. So the ratio is actually even worse than that, and a little worse than 1.5 pages per monster.

Most of the new monsters are actually just undead + thing in the same way as the Libris Mortis monsters were. Although bizarrely, none of these monsters were reused in Libris Mortis despite in some cases covering similar or even identical ground. So you get spirit trees, spectral steeds, a different mummy template, a new template for monster vampires, and so on. I don't think any of this is important enough to care about one way or the other, but I'm genuinely surprised that WotC doesn't seem to have reused this art at all.

Next up: Adventures! Seven pre-written adventures, because actually filling this campaign book with campaign relevant information is too much work.

[Prak]

They are a theocracy with three religions (no idea how that works)

A triumvirate theocracy would actually be pretty interesting. I suppose there would be a "Council of High Priests," which is comprised of the highest ranking official of each of the three churches. Matters would decided through debate, and the nature of that debate would depend on the nature of the religions.

That's actually a really cool idea.... if only Ghostwalk had elaborated on a three religion theocracy...