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Feb. 2nd, 2009
Review: Open Grave (4th Edition D&D book)
Feb. 2nd, 2009 02:04 amI mentioned the other day that I got the D&D book Open Grave. I was planning on reviewing it as I did Manual of the Planes, but the fact is, I don't have as much to say about it in particular because as far as I'm concerned it does most everything right. More, it's exactly what I needed.
See, one of my nitpicks of the 4th edition lies with a side effect of the designers' approach towards keeping the game equally playable all the way through. The Monster Manual has roughly as many enemies at each of the thirty different experience levels... as many 1st level monsters as there are 5th, 10th, 15th, 20th, and so on, and all the levels in between. Great, but when a party is 10th level, they could be fighting large numbers of monsters of several levels lower than them and/or a few monsters of higher levels. At 1st level, there's quite literally nowhere to go but up, so the choice is somewhat restricted.
I don't blame them. The alternative would be to double up the amount of weak monsters and end up doing extra work for creatures that will become "obsolete" fairly early on in a campaign. And frankly, the way monsters and combat work in the 4th edition, there's a lot more to an encounter than the name at the top of the stat block. (I approach them as short-short stories in their own right.) And it's not like there aren't plenty of options for customizing.
But when it came to putting together encounters with "off the shelf" baddies, I found my options pretty limited. There are the tiny evil humanoids, there's vermin like bats and rats and insects, there's skellingtons... those are the basic options, and they're all fairly clichéd at this point.
"You have to fight rats for a couple levels then you get to save a princess."
So I thought, "How do you make rats interesting?"
And then I thought, "Lovecraft did."
Boom. Horror campaign.
But even after setting on a theme that transformed a lot of the low-level monsters from stock fodder to pieces of a story, I found myself hungry for to work with. Sure, I'm a creative person and I could come up with new varieties of creepy crawlies, or rework some of the existing ones (and my campaign is going to involve a good bit of that), but the appeal of using something like D&D... especially the new edition where each monster comes in several varieties to serve multiple combat roles... is having ready made pieces to assemble a story. It's like the difference between sculpting something from scratch and building it from LEGO brand bricks. Not all of us can be Michelangelo, and in terms of time cost vs. amount of fun had, LEGO does me just fine.
So, I had high hopes for Open Grave... specifically, I was hoping that it wasn't just going to be Harryhausen skeletons and fantasy liches. I was not disappointed on that score. It has rules for plague zombies and zombie apocalypse-style throngs and it has a category of monster for Pet Semetary-style "came back wrong" undead and it has disembodied body parts and it has suggestions for hauntings that are resolved as something other than "beat the ghost into submission"... hauntings as hazards, as difficult terrain, as skill challenges. The "fluff" section is all about "how undead work" and it's not terribly interesting to me but the meat is so much meatier than that of Planes.
Now, I'm not going to be doing Dawn of the Dead in my campaign, but the fact that they thought to include it shows that they took the right approach to the material. In 4th Edition D&D, your character is a Big Damn Hero from level 1 and is pretty close to a physical god at level 30. Characters like that demand cinematic-style challenges.
The adventures seem to be well-designed, and easily insertable into an ongoing campaign.
Even if you're not running a horror campaign, it's got monsters you can plug in to your evil wizard's lair or your dragon's den or whatever. Many of them are expanded varieties of existing monsters (i.e., more zombies, more skeletons, more wraiths, more ghouls, more vampires), so chances are you're already using them and this allows you to shake things up a bit. The other that monsters are new and unique (in 4th edition, anyway) are all interesting and well done. They also thrown in such iconic baddies as Strahd and Vecna, for people who care about them.
I'm going to wrap up my review of the book's positives here because it's likely that some or all of my players are reading this and I don't want to spoil anything for them by emphasizing anything in particular.
Negatives:
No player content.
I know this is essentially a DM's tool, but since there aren't any plans for an undead player's handbook, I think they could have added some space for the players. For instance, I'm not a big fan of the "rehabilitation" that vampires have been undergoing in fiction, but I was surprised that there is no love for undead player character types. I was disappointed that there were no new rituals, particularly as I feel that rituals in the Religion category are underrepresented in the core rulebooks and this would have been an ideal place to rectify that a bit. I suppose the Divine Power sourcebook might take care of that, when it comes out. But a few paragon paths certainly would not have gone amiss (Undead slayers?) No new magic items, either, which are something I consider to be a DM's tool as much as a player perk. The artifacts that are included are well-done, but artifacts are less "plug-and-play"... you pretty much have to design a story around them instead of including them in one.
Final conclusion:
I would strongly recommend this book to anybody who's running a horror-tinged campaign, anybody who wants an expanded bestiary and can't wait for Monster Manual 2, anybody who's stumped for adventure/campaign ideas, and anybody who is dissatisfied for some reason with the way any of the traditional undead are presented in the core book. (In addition to having other varieties, there are suggestions on "swapping out" powers, and numerous templates that can be applied to modify undead and related creatures.)
See, one of my nitpicks of the 4th edition lies with a side effect of the designers' approach towards keeping the game equally playable all the way through. The Monster Manual has roughly as many enemies at each of the thirty different experience levels... as many 1st level monsters as there are 5th, 10th, 15th, 20th, and so on, and all the levels in between. Great, but when a party is 10th level, they could be fighting large numbers of monsters of several levels lower than them and/or a few monsters of higher levels. At 1st level, there's quite literally nowhere to go but up, so the choice is somewhat restricted.
I don't blame them. The alternative would be to double up the amount of weak monsters and end up doing extra work for creatures that will become "obsolete" fairly early on in a campaign. And frankly, the way monsters and combat work in the 4th edition, there's a lot more to an encounter than the name at the top of the stat block. (I approach them as short-short stories in their own right.) And it's not like there aren't plenty of options for customizing.
But when it came to putting together encounters with "off the shelf" baddies, I found my options pretty limited. There are the tiny evil humanoids, there's vermin like bats and rats and insects, there's skellingtons... those are the basic options, and they're all fairly clichéd at this point.
"You have to fight rats for a couple levels then you get to save a princess."
So I thought, "How do you make rats interesting?"
And then I thought, "Lovecraft did."
Boom. Horror campaign.
But even after setting on a theme that transformed a lot of the low-level monsters from stock fodder to pieces of a story, I found myself hungry for to work with. Sure, I'm a creative person and I could come up with new varieties of creepy crawlies, or rework some of the existing ones (and my campaign is going to involve a good bit of that), but the appeal of using something like D&D... especially the new edition where each monster comes in several varieties to serve multiple combat roles... is having ready made pieces to assemble a story. It's like the difference between sculpting something from scratch and building it from LEGO brand bricks. Not all of us can be Michelangelo, and in terms of time cost vs. amount of fun had, LEGO does me just fine.
So, I had high hopes for Open Grave... specifically, I was hoping that it wasn't just going to be Harryhausen skeletons and fantasy liches. I was not disappointed on that score. It has rules for plague zombies and zombie apocalypse-style throngs and it has a category of monster for Pet Semetary-style "came back wrong" undead and it has disembodied body parts and it has suggestions for hauntings that are resolved as something other than "beat the ghost into submission"... hauntings as hazards, as difficult terrain, as skill challenges. The "fluff" section is all about "how undead work" and it's not terribly interesting to me but the meat is so much meatier than that of Planes.
Now, I'm not going to be doing Dawn of the Dead in my campaign, but the fact that they thought to include it shows that they took the right approach to the material. In 4th Edition D&D, your character is a Big Damn Hero from level 1 and is pretty close to a physical god at level 30. Characters like that demand cinematic-style challenges.
The adventures seem to be well-designed, and easily insertable into an ongoing campaign.
Even if you're not running a horror campaign, it's got monsters you can plug in to your evil wizard's lair or your dragon's den or whatever. Many of them are expanded varieties of existing monsters (i.e., more zombies, more skeletons, more wraiths, more ghouls, more vampires), so chances are you're already using them and this allows you to shake things up a bit. The other that monsters are new and unique (in 4th edition, anyway) are all interesting and well done. They also thrown in such iconic baddies as Strahd and Vecna, for people who care about them.
I'm going to wrap up my review of the book's positives here because it's likely that some or all of my players are reading this and I don't want to spoil anything for them by emphasizing anything in particular.
Negatives:
No player content.
I know this is essentially a DM's tool, but since there aren't any plans for an undead player's handbook, I think they could have added some space for the players. For instance, I'm not a big fan of the "rehabilitation" that vampires have been undergoing in fiction, but I was surprised that there is no love for undead player character types. I was disappointed that there were no new rituals, particularly as I feel that rituals in the Religion category are underrepresented in the core rulebooks and this would have been an ideal place to rectify that a bit. I suppose the Divine Power sourcebook might take care of that, when it comes out. But a few paragon paths certainly would not have gone amiss (Undead slayers?) No new magic items, either, which are something I consider to be a DM's tool as much as a player perk. The artifacts that are included are well-done, but artifacts are less "plug-and-play"... you pretty much have to design a story around them instead of including them in one.
Final conclusion:
I would strongly recommend this book to anybody who's running a horror-tinged campaign, anybody who wants an expanded bestiary and can't wait for Monster Manual 2, anybody who's stumped for adventure/campaign ideas, and anybody who is dissatisfied for some reason with the way any of the traditional undead are presented in the core book. (In addition to having other varieties, there are suggestions on "swapping out" powers, and numerous templates that can be applied to modify undead and related creatures.)