Environment books

I finished Dungeonscape before heading out of town for a work trip, so last Sunday evening, I guess. It's the last of the environmental books in my somewhat extended re-read of the environmental books, both in terms of when it was released (if I remember correctly) and definitely last in my read-through. It's also the last that I actually read; I was never very excited about the concept of it to begin with, and I don't think I ever actually read the whole thing before now. It's also the only one that I don't have physically; I had to go buy a pdf several years ago, but my track record for reading pdfs that I own is even worse than reading books that I own; they can sit for many years without me every once thinking about them before I finally remember that I have it and pull it back down. 

While I'm in a more forgiving mood to 3e's obvious flaws these days, they are still incredibly prevalent and blatantly obvious in these books. While many who played, and most who designed for 3e forgot the early motto "tools, not rules", the marketing drive to create player facing resources, which presumably had a bigger market than GM facing ones, which in turn created—perhaps unintentionally at first, but later I think the designers embraced the idea—of the power-gamer's optimized build with all kinds of rules that gave him an edge rather than a few ideas that made him interesting. What I really wanted these books to do was to provide interesting design ideas and adventure seeds that I could use to run more interesting adventures. Instead, what I got was mostly a whole bunch of rules to give monsters, NPCs and most especially players ways to build more powerful characters with a slight focus on an environmental theme. Which, unless the GM specifically telegraphs that he's going to focus on, probably isn't all that attractive to many players. Who wants to play a character focused on the frozen northern environments in a campaign that's going to be set on the Isle of Dread or in Undermountain or the Temple of Elemental Evil? This doesn't mean that these books are useless, just that they disappointed me; I wanted really interesting campaign or adventure hooks based on the environments, and most of the flavor, customization options, and adventure hooks that I got were kind of an afterthought, and usually not really all that compelling. I'd say that in general, the books had about 20% good, interesting material, 20% "what were they thinking" useless material, and about 60% mediocre, average material that I didn't really care for, but at least it didn't actively make me roll my eyes about how stupid it was. It just wasn't really all that useful. 

The monster focus books, like Drow of the Underdark, Lords of Madness or the two volumes of the Fiendish Codex and the rest of that series were significantly better. While they still focused way too much on mechanical gimmicks and dubious player-centric options, their ratios of good/bad/meh material was probably more like 50%/15%/35%. On average. These are all averages. 

Dungeonscapes at their best

Dungeonscape was always the one I was the least interested in, and I was sure that of the environmental books, it is the one that I would like the least. This is because I'm a confirmed non-fan of the activity of dungeon-crawling. It's one of my earliest and deepest dissatisfactions with D&D, dating at least back to the early/mid 80s... and I only played my first game of OD&D in 1980, and really only got "into" the hobby in 1982-3 or so. By 1985, I was already over a lot of the D&Disms, like magical superheroes that broke any verisimilitude in a setting that was familiar to me from my reading of the genre, and dungeon-crawling. Those still, over forty years later, are the very things that I don't like about D&D and am always trying to minimize. When it gets too unwieldy trying to minimize them, I get tired of D&D and look for other alternatives that do what I want better, or more recently, I just freakin' design my own.

Anyway, Dungeonscape is, as I said, both the last one published and by far the last one that I acquired and the last one I read. While all of the others were re-read recently for the first time in nearly 20 years, Dungeonscape is the only one that I read completely for the first time just now. As I expected, it was probably the one that I liked the least, but it's not without its charms. For someone who actually likes dungeon-crawling much more than I do, it might possibly be the best of the bunch, because it offers lots and lots of text about how to dungeon-crawl and create dungeons specifically for crawling. But my rankings of the environment books are probably Cityscape at the top, although still disappointing, Frostburn, Stormwrack and Sandstorm about equal in the middle and Dungeonscape at the bottom. I'm curious how well this book pairs with the 3e Forgotten Realms title Underdark, but I'm not very close to that in my FR trawl, and I'm not willing to go out of order to explore it. In general, Dungeonscape was more about focused dungeons, not mega-dungeons, and not crawling something like the Underdark, where literally the entire environment is effectively a dungeon of sorts, although maybe one less focused on gimmicks, puzzles and traps and more like "hexcrawling" through a wilderness that looks more like a dungeon. I'll see when I read it if that's the direction they took or not, though. 

Dungeonscape doesn't have any environmental races. Neither did Cityscape but both of those were shorter than the other three, and that was clearly one of the main features to be cut from both. Maybe that makes sense. It also is a little light on prestige classes, and the Dungeon Lord was clearly a villain-oriented option, and the Trap Smith makes more sense as a cohort or other NPC specialist rather than a PC. The new base class, the Factotum is pretty cool. Other than the name. Which is a perfectly serviceable word, of course, except that it's a Latin word that hasn't really been adopted into English, so it sounds really weird and not in harmony with the oeuvre of D&D generally. It looks like someone picked the word out of a thesaurus list and ran with it. At least, they do appear to have used it correctly as a jack of all trades. It's actually kind of a neat class. They also give it a little bit of an (optional) flavor spin to suggest that factotums are kind of academic, intellectual, adventuring scholars, and they explicitly suggest that Indiana Jones is the archetypal character that the class is meant to emulate in the D&D milieu. I hadn't really remembered the class very well, and was always put off by its name, but on re-reading it (I had read portions of the book previously) it was a much better and more interesting class than I remembered. It also offers another option to add some magical f/x to the game without having a dedicated magic-using class, so my earlier efforts to make D&D more sword & sorcery would actually work quite well with the factotum. 

(I'd also highly recommend the Occultist advanced class from d20 Modern as a 1-10 levels, at most, D&D class in a pinch. All you'd have to do is make sure that there's no modern skills associated with it, and do something about the Defense bonus that all d20 Modern classes have that has no real equivalent in D&D. Probably simply ignore it.)

I didn't expect to like anything from the very lengthy traps chapter, since I dislike traps on general principle in role-playing games as a artifact of dungeon-crawling that makes little sense in any other context, but they did have this concept called traps as encounters. Again, making an Indiana Jones reference, if you remember the room in Temple of Doom where the spiked ceiling booby trap nearly crushes Indy and Short Round, that's a good example of what a trap as encounter would play like. Much to my surprise, I actually thought this concept sounded pretty fun, and I could imagine myself using traps as encounters to actually add some traps to my adventures. At least from time to time. 

Traps as encounter... with a "factotum".

But overall, Dungeonscape was mostly exactly what I expected it to be. I'm about to head out of town for another week, but it's not business travel this time, and I don't know how much free time I'll have. I'm bringing the 3e Fiend Folio with me, and I also have the last two Curse of the Crimson Throne adventures on my tablet to read. I also have the second Sandy Petersen 5e campaign (in four parts), the one focused on Yig and time traveling back to dinosaurs or something like that. I wasn't all that impressed with the ghoul themed tropical island one which started the series, so I've put off reading the next one, but I'm determined to power through and read it after I finish Crimson Throne. I've also started reading Buccaneers of Freeport. Freeport was the first official "trawl" that I started, and I could conceivably finish it within a couple of months if I stay focused on it. I'm actually a little bit excited, although also wary, to do the Pathfinder style adventure path that is at the end of it, which I now own all of the books of, but which have never read before. 

I've also finished two of the ten "T. H. Lain" iconic characters novels from the 3e era. They were... OK. I'll keep trudging through them, I suppose. And I'm bringing a few other novels with me, the first two of the Horned Helmet quadrilogy, the first Gor book, and The Mad King by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Not really very fantastic, it's a Ruritanian romance, but still one of my favorite of ERB's stories. The Gor series is infamous for being weird and misogynistic, even before feminists got so out of control that they called normal behavior misogynistic. I think that they were probably right to put that label on Gor. But the first book or two hardly had any of that, it always just came across to me like a reasonably good pastiche of Barsoom or Flash Gordon. The love interest was a little bratty and she had more of a character development arc than the main character, because she became submissive and more pleasant... although... a little too submissive. I found that just a little bit off-putting, but it's such a muted theme in this book compared to what it—apparently—develops into, that I still remember liking this book in spite of it.

So yeah, there's my near-term reading prospects. And here's one more dungeoneering image, just for the heck of it.