The
Aerial Adventure Guide Volume One: Rulers of the Sky fell into my hands quite unexpectedly. I had heard of
Goodman Games, but only in association with their D20 dinosaur game,
Broncosaurus Rex. A quick read-through of the book left me impressed, however, and when I flipped to the table of contents, I knew why. The Guide was written by the prolific Mr. Michael Mearls. He has written quality products for
Fiery Dragon Productions and others in the past, and so I am not surprised at the level of quality in the Aerial Adventure Guide.
The Guide is a slim, 32-page volume with a color cover and black-and-white interior. Layout is clean with no funky fonts or text-obscuring backgrounds. Mr. Shane’s interior art is quite good in my opinion, but I was not particularly impressed with the cover painting of (what I assume is) a sky elf city.
The book is divided into seven sections and the ratio of crunchy bits to background information is quite high. The book packs three new races, two new prestige classes, eight new monsters, thirteen new aerial feats, rules for building aerial ships and rules for expanding aerial combat.
The Guide presents adventure areas called “cloud realms”. Cloud realms are basically solid clouds of various types that float magically in the sky. These cloud realms are inhabited by a variety of creatures, including arachial (evil intelligent spiders from the elemental plane of air), avians (barbarian birdmen) and sky elves. Magical sky ships sail between the cloud realms and the world below.
The Guide’s biggest strength (and biggest weakness depending on how you look at it) is the fact that the information is presented in a pretty generic fashion. The upside of this is that it should be very easy for you to slide the cloud realms into your campaign. The downside is that there is not a great deal of meaty detail included about the cloud realms or their inhabitants. Of course, there are two more volumes set to be released in the series and these may go a long way toward fleshing things out.
Mr. Mearls is an extremely talented writer and designer and I was extremely impressed at the amount of material he did manage to cram into such a small book. He covers everything from the types of cloud realms to how to introduce them into your campaign to a decent set of rules for designing sky ships. He also covers small details like what monsters are appropriate for the setting. The new feats introduced have an appropriate flavor and appear well balanced with previous feats.
My only real gripe with the book is that if you buy all three volumes, you are going to end up paying thirty plus dollars for less than a hundred pages of game material (assuming the next two books are the same length and price). Other than that, I whole-heartedly recommend Volume One of the Aerial Adventure Guide. If you are looking to inject a little something different into your D20 fantasy campaign or if you just think the idea of sky ships and cloud realms is cool, you really can't go wrong. On a final note, if you like the guide, Mr. Mearls has a short adventure using the book’s rules and setting in issue 71 of Knights of the Dinner Table Magazine.
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