First let me start off by saying that I actually obtained this copy of MotP by spending a weekend with 27 future gamer children (ages 7-12) at Dragon*Con (obviously, protecting them from others who would use them as building material, ritual sacrifice, and/or catapult fodder). For my devotion, the kindly D*C staff gave me a $25 gift certificate good at any Titan books, and although I normally like to patronize my favorite local game store,
The War Room, I figured I would plunk down $7 for MotP at Titan, which ain't a bad game store in and of itself, it's just a fur piece from the Chuppstead.
I've maundered through these gilded pages and I'll say this for 'em: they really know how to answer the kind of questions referees want to answer.
Each plane is given traits such as gravity, area, etc. There are prestige classes that are created to help players interact with the planes. There are nifty new spells to help you get around and survive in the planes. Nice work (but see below).
MotP is a very good resource for conducting stories in the magical planes of existence. It is one of those books where you say to yourself, "You know, I could've made all this stuff up on my own, but why bother? I've got this now."
Continuing with the "tools to make tools" design philosophy, the designers of MotP give us a lexicon of terms and ideas with which to understand extra-dimensional realities. This set of guidelines is very valuable in deciding your own campaign's cosmology.
And they don't stick you with the D&D (tm) Cosmology and have done at that. They let you in on all the possible options they envision, then show you where they've left room for you to fill in bits and pieces. The whole book is this way.
Although the endless descriptions of the various "official" Outer Planes are themselves not exactly the most exciting reading, the ideas that they generate are interesting. Some of them have SND (Silly Name Disease), like "Neth: the Plane that Lives!" but most of them are fairly nifty. The designers have clearly edited out boring afterlives and have kept only those which may serve as cool adventuring spaces. This is a Good Thing (who wants to go to a Nothingness Nirvana, anyway?).
Having said all that, however, at $30 a pop, you'd think they could've sprung for more art than they did. The stuff that is there is pretty good, mind. But they could've taken the point size on the text down a little and fit in a lot more cool art. I'd love to be able to show my players cool vistas of worlds never before imagined. Right now, though, I'm stuck with small grey-scale maps of vistas, most of which look like pie plates floating in space.
At least they give me descriptions of potential encounter areas within the plane, even in potentially boring places like the Negative Material Plane (ewwww). Otherwise, I'd be saying, "Well, uh, it's dark. And...um. You feel cold. And ahhh....it's kind of negative."
Basically folks, let's get serious. How many campaigns that go into the Planes ever escape the whiff of twinkdom? Once you hit Other Dimensions (besides, maybe perhaps the Ethereal plane), the Twink Scale ratchets up to 11, or if it doesn't, your players are pretty much doomed. Nothing destroys the importance of day-to-day life in you campaign like having your characters be able to hop off this world to some other nicer locale, where nobody can find them and they wield supreme power. Give me a break!
So, what real use is this book? Well, I could see you using it kind of like the old TSR used the Abyss in Queen of the Demonweb Pits. Basically as the pinnacle of a long, drawn out saga, something really big, a grand epic environment that is both hostile and exciting. Not the stuff of everyday adventuring.
You could also use it when you get bored of the low-fantasy, muck-around-in-the-mud sort of game that many people prefer. It is fun, for a time, to wield supreme power and fly around, destroying demons with a particle incinerator. Just don't pretend it's D&D.
Otherwise, you're just playing some kind of Woo-Hoo Fantasy game, where you're a mischevious band of dimension-hopping little people, running from God, and you've stolen a map of the universe and the Almighty's trying to get it back. Heyy.....not bad. Sounds like a good Mage game - but not D&D, in my opinion.
I wanted MotP because I'm a completist, I like to own the whole schmear if I can, because I hate little gibbering gamegeeks who start chattering about things that I have no clue about, even if I would never in a thousand years use the thing.
OK, well, maybe now that I've gotten MotP and read it, maybe I'll take my characters back into the Elemental Plane of Air. The last time they were essentially prisoners on a flying ship, and there was no chance they could get stuck there (I wouldn't let them.) This time, however, it might be fun to plop them down and see what happens. Subjective gravity anyone?
p.s. I couldn't get away from this review without mentioning how very much like the Umbra (in Werewolf: the Apocalypse) the Ethereal plane has become - amazing, that! (Of course, it could be said that W:TA has 'borrowed' a lot more from D&D than D&D has from W:TA!)
Go to forum!
(Due to spamming, old forum discussions are no linked.)