DrPraetor wrote:What about the physical quality of the book? The paper, the binding and so on?
I knew I was forgetting something. The printing itself is really well done. The pages are plain white with black text brown headers. Uniform font and reasonable use of formatting (Bold for game terms, italics for names of other books) all throughout. The art is both colourful and legible, to the point where I've used screencaps from the PDF version as tokens in unrelated roll20 campaigns.
Hello, new shugenja token.
The big flaw though is the binding. Whoever glued the pages together fucked up big, as they fall out after a few weeks of use. In individual sheets, not even in clumps of 50 pages at a time. WoTC has a returns policy for this sort of thing, but even then you're out the use of your book for about a month while the new copy ships in from Seatle. Overall grade: C+.
Chapter One: A Word of Your Own
Chapter One of the book claims to be about "building your world and then creating a campaign to take place in it" and largely lives up to the first half of that claim. The very first section is entitled "Core Assumptions" and gives a bullet point list of some basic premises that the rules assume to be true. I like bullet points and I like clear statements of assumptions, so I'm a big fan of this section. That said, it doesn't cover much new ground: Gods exist, but exert influence primarily through their servants. The world is old and contains both ancient ruins and large stretches of uninhabited wilderness. There have been great conflicts in the past which have destroyed most of the ancient civilizations. Geopolitics are strongly factional, with organizations of powerful individuals forming based on common goals rather than geography. Magic exists and magic items can commonly be found in the ruins of ancient civilizations. All basic Greyhawk/Forgotten Realms staples.
The next section is about inverting those assumptions. This had potential, but lacks in follow-through. Take idea #1:
The World Is a Mundane Place. What if magic is rare and dangerous, and even adventurers have limited or no access to it? What if your campaign is set in a version of our own world's history?
These are all fabulous questions. Questions which the book makes no effort to answer. They're more prompts than useful advice.
Next up is "Gods of Your World" which is an overview of how D&D-style religion. It helpfully points out that in 5E clerics choose domains rather than deities, so a cleric can have whatever theology they want and still be a functional player character. The default assumption is labelled "Loose Pantheons" where there are many gods who are acknowledged to exist, but which have little to no formal relationship to one another. The "Dawn Pantheon" is given as an example of this setup, which is an unabashed mashup of the most popular gods from Feyrun, Greyhawk, Greece, Egypt and Norse myth. Want to have Pelor and Athena in the same pantheon? Sure, why not.
Another questionable choice is the "inclusion" of 3E style Divine Ranks in a sidebar. Listed are Greater Deities (who are bigger than you and cannot be summoned or directly interacted with), Lesser Deities (who, like Lloth, can be summoned up by some cultists and then banished when
Drizztthe protagonists stab them), Demigods, Titans and Vestiges. None of this has any game mechanical effect beyond the fact that it specifically calls out those last three as not granting spells. Sigh.
The other religious systems listed include "Tight Pantheon", with the Aesir of Norse myth given as an example; Mystery Cults, Monotheism, Dualism, Animism, and Philosophies. Both druids and Paladins are called out as probable converts to that last one, serving Nature or Justice respectively. This section is long on general principles, but short on actual examples. I'd be interested in a Dualistic presentation of the Gruumsh vs. Corellon conflict, for example. Or a sample Mystery Cult devoted to Vecna. It would be quite a bit more useful than the next section, "Humanoids and the Gods", which points out that while monoracial gods can exist (Gruumsh for the Orcs, Moradin for the Dwarves, Correllon for the Elves), there's usually no monoracial god of Humans and therefore humans usually worship all sorts of gods and are very "diverse". Spending six paragraphs to advise the DM to pigeon-hole all the non-human races in an extremely round about manner is advice I could have done without, DMG.
Third in the chapter is "Mapping Your Campaign" which, unsurprisingly, gives advice on how to draw up maps. Whoever wrote this section apparently has a deep love for hex grids, as the from the second paragraph out it talks strictly in terms of hexes when it talks about the arrangement of the map at all. Province scale maps are supposed to be 1 mile to a hex, such that the entire map is about a day's travel from end to end. Kingdom scale maps are 6 miles to a hex and should cover "a large region, about the size of Great Britain or half the size of the state of California." A continent scale map should be 1 hex to 60 miles, which implies that a continent should be about 30 Californias big. That's not... entirely wrong, I suppose? It then walks you through some basic map scaling math, saying that yes, if two cities are 3 hexes apart on the Continent map, then they're 30 hexes apart on the Kingdom map, and that a single Kingdom scale hex contains a 6 by 6 grid of Province scale hexes. I'm assuming they mean for you to draw up something like this:
but I don't know of anyone who would actually follow that advice. Regardless, once you've drawn up a map, it's time to make a settlement. It starts out with some suitably pastoral art:
and, as you can see above, a bunch of questions to ask yourself about whatever settlement you're designing. The rest of this section deals with possible answers to those questions in admirable detail. There are a few good bits of advice here (If a settlement is only intended as a stopping off point or a place for the PCs to rest for the night, don't bother with more than a name, a size and a brief bit of atmosphere. Fill the rest in when and if they ever become important.), but more than a few disappointments. No real guidance is given for settlements larger than 25000 people, despite this being a big part of several settings. Commerce and Language also get their own subsections, with the incredibly terrible advice of including forms of exotic coinage that are worth more in the issuing city than anywhere else. Probably the most egregious example is the Gond Bell, which is a small brass bell worth 10gp normally, or 20gp if sold to a Temple of Gond. I have no idea who Gond is, but one can only assume he is the God of Bells and Currency Speculation.
Settlements is also notable for containing the first of many random percentile charts in the DMG. In this case, it's a random Government chart, for deciding who the local leader is and how they rule.
Fourth in this chapter (which is a lot longer than I remember it being) is Factions. Factions are supposed to be the new big thing in 5E, but the examples are all drawn from 3.5 Adventurer's League. The Harpers, Zhentarim and so forth. You advance in a faction using a psuedo-XP known as Renown, but since the benefits of getting renown and the rate at which it is acquired are both DM-dependent and never shown to the player, it honestly doesn't really mean much except as a reminder to the DM to keep track of what the player's actions mean in terms of their reputations.
Next is "Magic In Your World", which is perhaps unsurprisingly a small orchestra of "Maybe you should try a low magic setting, DM" dogwhistles. Though the book never outright says that the DM should be heavy handed when slapping down spellcasters who disrupt the setting, it's certainly
implied. There is one actually useful note in this section, though: "Teleportation Circles". The Teleportation Circle spell is the default form of teleportation in 5E and lets you teleport to known special locations that have been imbued with teleportation magic over a year of downtime. The default assumption is that each major city has one or more teleportation circles in it, located in the local chapter of a major temple or faction under heavy guard to keep visitors and returning members safe from ambushes. That's surprisingly logical for 5E.
Next in line is "Creating a Campaign" which lists the following steps:
- 1. Make a Home Base. See "Settlements" above.
- 2. Make a Local Region. See "Mapping" above.
- 3. Make an adventure. See Chapter 3 for details.
- Set the Stage. Figure out what information you need from your players about backgrounds and motives. It also says to write a handout (of no more than two pages) containing all of the in character information that players Need to Know about the campaign. It specifically points out that just because you can write a 20 page novella about your setting doesn't mean you should.
- Involve the Characters. Basically, get the characters "in" on the adventure by using their flaws, bonds and other background information as adventure hooks.
- Create Backgrounds. In 5E, players get Backgrounds in addition to race and class which give real mechanical benefits. This step apparently involves designing some custom for any players who need one to fit their concept. I have no idea why this step goes here, but there's a pointer to chapter 9 "Dungeon Master's Workshop" for ideas on writing rules content.
You may notice that I stopped numbering the steps after #3. That's because the book did the same. For reasons that probably include "We had four editors." and "We probably assigned different parts of this list to different authors without agreeing on a set format."
From here on out it's all random charts for the Creating a Campaign section. The "Campaign Events" section says that you need events to drive the plot and that you should pick some or roll for some off these charts and use that as a scaffold for your campaign's overall story. We start with the 1d20 "Worldshaking Events" chart with Leader Types, Cataclysmic Disasters, Invading Forces, Extinction or Depletion, New Organization and Discoveries subcharts. The advice given is to roll one for the beginning of your campaign, once in the middle of your campaign and once at the end of your campaign. That's is a decent enough way of running a campaign if you're not feeling particularly creative, or even if you're just looking for a prompt. Watch:
Beginning: 6. Extinction or Depletion of... 3. Magic or Magic-users (all magic or specific kinds/schools of magic).
Middle: 4. Assault or Invasion by... 4. A past adversary reawakened, reborn or resurgent.
End: 1. Rise of a Leader or Era of a/an... 2. Religious Nature.
Campaign Seed: The most recent Pelor has ended his thousand year reign, having exhausted his divine might in a battle against the Moon Ghost. With the dawn of the new millennium, the priesthood must now find a mortal with the divine spark of the Sun and place him or her upon the Throne of the Sun so that Pelor can be reborn. Pelor's worshipers have divided into two sects: the Cult of the Golden Child who wishes to find one of Pelor's many demigod offspring for the job, and an ancient Pelorite heresy backing a demon known only as "the Burning Hate" for the new position as Sun God. With their magic gone, both factions are recruiting adventurers to work toward their respective goals through strength of arm and might of magic.
Much like the hexes system given for map-making, there's numerous other ways you
could come up with campaign ideas. But this one is the one they happened to print and works tolerably well.
The final section of Chapter One is "Play Style". I'm not sure why this comes after Creating a Campaign, given that you presumably want to decide the style of the campaign before you write it, but then again I'm not Jeremy Crawford. One can only assume it made sense to him at the time. This section is frankly terrible. It presents the options as a continuum between "Hack and Slash" and "Immersive Storytelling" with all of the other options presented as steps in between. It also tries to get you to care about Tiers of Play (ranging from Levels 1-4: Local Heroes to Levels 17-20: Masters of the World), and the different Flavours of Fantasy, but it's long on references to works of fiction and short on practical advice.
Possibly the most egregious errors are the Starting at Higher Levels Equipment Chart (which can be summarized as: For a High Magic campaign, start players off with one more magic item than normal. For a Low Magic campaign, start them off with one less!) and the Wuxia section, which is includes a Wuxia Weapons Name chart (yes, game, a katana is totally a longsword) and the downright perplexing advice to run all samurai as paladins.
Lets end this with one of the best pieces of art in the book:
I have no idea what modrons have to do with this section and I don't even care. Look at their adorable little faces and let all the disappointment just float way.
