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Welcome to Adobe GoLive 6
D&D has always fallen prey to what I like to call the curse of the catalog. In short, the curse of the catalog goes basically like this: Given a choice between describing an item in terms of its metaphorical intent and in the terms of a catalog, D&D will always pick the catalog approach. In other words, if you describe a dragon, D&D won’t describe it in terms of how it represented the pinnacle of a human vice, or how it acts as a combination of hero and villain in human myth; it’ll stat that dragon out and remove anything that made it interesting.
You can see see it happen a lot when you’re reading the original source material that the monsters are derived from. What was a remarkably cool monster in the original context – for example, the killing hate-mist in one of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd + Grey Mouser stories – becomes just “Creeping Fog”, with a rather vague and generic mention of how evil cults like to create it to sneak around killing people. It’s accurate in the broadest sense of the word, but it conveys none of the atmosphere of the original story. You can create a creature that’s fast, hard to see, and like to dwell in hives, but you won’t know how cool they can be until you see Aliens, and understand how they exist in myth, rather than in real life. I keep getting the feeling that, at some point, somebody’s going to come out with a wandering monster table that has Jesus on it.
Or maybe I’m just hung over from the TSR years of D&D; I don’t know. I do know that 7th Sea and Legend of the Five Rings did journeyman service in making monsters metaphorically significant, which was one of the things that helped me to realize just how stale D&D’s presentation is.
So: What does this have to do with Lords of Darkness?
Well, it’s a description of the various villainous groups of Faerun in catalog format, which managed to reduce my interest level in them pretty quickly. While there is an attempt to make them more “moist”, with fluff text and the like, the book doesn’t capture the hooks behind the group – the casual sadism of the Drow, or the mercantile plots of the Iron Throne. I have the suspiscion that, much like a monster drawn out of a movie, these groups have been removed from their original context in an adventure and reworked into a more generic format, which in turn removes what makes them interesting. If you, as a GM, know of a group called the Iron Throne that goes to extremes to corner markets, then you have to work from the bottom up in establishing what they’re up to; whereas if you’ve played the first Baldur’s Gate game, then you’ve already had them established in your head as a merchant Illuminati, willing to “poison” iron in order to ensure that they have a monopoly on the iron trade in the region. It’s not that the book doesn’t mention the general kind of plots that the Iron Throne like to get up to, but they don’t devote enough time to really establishing the Iron Throne except in general terms.
Let’s take another example: The Drow. The Drow, as I’m to understand, are one of the more popular aspects of the Forgotten Realms – or, at least, they were mighty popular before Drizzt Do’Urden became hated as everybody’s favorite example of an author’s favorite pet. The Drow get a pretty thorough explanation of their culture, their cities, so on and so forth – but the original atmosphere of the Drow, the stuff that made them interesting to a whole horde of fifteen-year old gamers back in the nineties, seem to have been lost. You get the notes, but not the music.
The same holds for true for a lot of the groups in the book. The Cyricists come off particularly badly, acting as a sort of generic evil faction for characters to slap around. The problem, however, is that Cyric doesn’t have any particular reason to be. Cyric is an evil god because there needs to be a god of evil in Faerun; and if there isn’t one, then one has to be invented in order to provide the PCs with something to fight. If Cyric does have plans and schemes, they’ll likely be expressed through localized conspiracies, like the kind you hacked through in the Gold Box games in the early Nineties. There’s no particular reason why people worship Cyric otherwise than he’s evil, and…I think that I’m beginning to complain less about the book and more about the static nature of D&D’s game worlds as a whole.
Still. Sauron had an idea behind what he was doing. So did Fu Leng. So did Lo Pan. So do the Z’bri. And all of them have been defeated, some of them thrown down and danced upon with great vigor, and none of them got back up again to torment the heroes down the road, like a Republic serial villain. Because of its lack of continuity, the villains of the Forgotten Realms feel less like organic creations and more like the bosses in video games; knock them down, and they’ll be there the next time that you restart.
So, as a result, the Cyricists come off as…well, generic evil cultists. Like all evil cultists, they hate good and love evil. You’re going to find this as a recurring theme throughout the book, incidentally, where the morality acts as a replacement for motivation.
I don’t particularly feel like going through each group and summarizing what each of them has, how the chapter is good or not, so I’ll just hit the highlights. The first chapter lists a variety of the heavy hitters of the evil groups in Faerun – the Drow, the Zhentarim, the Cyricists and so forth. Each group gets a brief breakdown on its structure, its (rather nebulous) goals, sample groups of that organization, separated by encounter level, and a description of a dungeon relating to that group. The Cyricists and the Zhentarim are the plasticky toy soldiers of the lot, the evil baddies who…well, are evil. Their stated motivations are to destroy good (Cyric) and to rule the west coast (Zhentarim.)
The Cult of the Dragon is a little more interesting, but in an example that I like to use of how to make a normally fearsome cult look silly, the entire cult is based around the misreading of a particular prophecy: “And naught shall be left save shattered thrones with no ruler but the dead. Dragons shall rule the world entire” becomes “And naught shall be left save shattered thrones with no ruler. The dead dragons shall rule the world entire.” If you know that you’re fighting somebody whose entire reason for fighting revolves around the misplacement of a period, you’re not going to respect him; as a matter of fact, you may even find him silly. If you know that you’re fighting the supernatural side-effect of something like a magical Chernobyl, then there’s a faint aura of unease, and the danger is heightened. I know which one I prefer. The Cult of the Dragon’s stated goal is to rule the world with the dead dragons.
The Drow: Are fortunately expanded beyond their original conception as subterreanean elves, so we get dissident drow who live on the surface and loathe the Spider Queen, some of the Drow pantheon other that Lolth, and so forth. Most of the chapter is taken up with a new prestige class, the Darkmask, and a map of a Drow lair. The Darkmask lokos pretty decent, although I’ve come to an early conclusion that my skill at judging prestige classes is pretty much nil. (“+20 BAB at first level? Sounds good to me!”) The Drow, weirdly enough, also want to rul the world.
The Night Masks are particularly interesting, an organization of vampires led by the vampiric clone of one of the leaders of the Zhentarim.
I’ll let you have a second to try to parse that sentence.
Yes, he’s a clone.
Also, a vampire.
First he was cloned from Manshoon, then turned into a vampire.
Yes, it sounds kind of silly, although I actually kind of like the idea of a bunch of clones of a major baddy running around causing trouble – sort of like the way that Superman was killed and then had four different clones, each different, running around Metropolis. The Night Masks are actually a guild of thieves with a vampiric punch lurking in the background – it’s kind of a cool idea, sort of like the Nosferatu of Vampire: The Masquerade. Sure, you can track down one thief and break his hands for stealing from your temple, but the next night, you’re going to be facing a pack of vampiric lackeys who are interested in proving themselves to their master by tearing off your head. As a matter of fact, you could have a great urban campaign, with the PCs representing a competing thieves guild fighting off the Night Masks and their exploits. The “I want to rule the world, provided I’m not destroying good at the time” motivation is slightly dulled down to a wish to establish a kingdom of vampires.
The Red Wizards of Thay are the newest group of villains in the Forgotten Realms – and because they’re freshly designed, they’re also a lot more interesting. Instead of the mustache-twirling, bland evil of the Zhentarim, the Red Wizards of Thay are more a product of their hypercompetitive environment, in which only the ruthless and the magical prosper. To boot, the Red Wizards haven’t made the mistake of – well, I don’t exactly know how the Cyricists made themselves so obnoxious as to cause other evil groups to attack them on sight, but they did it somehow.
The Red Wizards, by comparison, are evil – but they also set up “enclaves” which sells magic items, don’t cause any trouble for those around them, and generally maintain a façade of relative neutrality. It still makes them bad guys, since they’re actively engaged in slavery, and they’d still pawn their own mother to win a sack race, but it’s nice to see a group that isn’t duh-duh evil, to coin a phrase. (I also imagine what it would be like if you had a magical prodigy who would have been artistic and vaguely spacy if left to her own devices, but who had to shunt all of that energy into surviving as a Red Wizard – instead of spending her time sculpting a valley into a gigantic rock garden, she winds up putting the same energy into sculpting guardian monstrosities to prowl her enclave. Sort of like the Drakan series, where somebody who would have been an artist instead spends all of her time coming up with ways to break the will of her slaves.) Disappointingly enough, the Red Wizards of Thay also want to rule the world.
I’m going to stop for one second just to say something: “Rule the world” is the motivation for Dr. Claw, Gargamel, Megatron, and the Brain. If you are not one of these people, then you are going to be compared to them when somebody tries to describe your motivations. (Also: If you were one of those people who looked up from the monitor and said “Hey! Gargamel didn’t want to take over the world; he was just trying to make gold using Smurfs as one of the ingredients!”, then there’s absolutely no hope for you.)
At some point, somebody is going to have to come up with a new goal for an evil group, and the Red Wizards of Thay offer a perfect one: Rather than ruling the world, they’d simply like to subvert societies all over the world, sort of like a more malign version of McDonalds – ten years after the Red Wizards move in an enclave, magical addiction is beginning to grow, slavery is becoming more and more attractive of an option, and the local Red Wizard has dozens of perfectly legal, but binding contracts with people all over the city. Geez, the City Guard would like to do something about that one wizard whom they think is dealing mageroot to the locals, but the captain of the guard said that the mayor doesn’t want the wizards bothered...and after a while, they’re entirely off limits, and the wizards don’t bother to use the mayor as a front anymore, and there’s people disappearing into their compound every day…
The Shades aren’t quite as interesting as the Red Wizards of Thay, but they’re pretty cool because they resolve an issue that’s been bothering me for a long time: Exactly how is a magic-heavy civilization supposed to evolve? The question’s always bothered me, mostly because our civilization is marked by a painfully slow climb out of barbarism and darkness, only to explode in a white-hot frenzy of technology innovation in the last two centuries. Faerun, by contrast, feels like it’s always been a Middle-Earthesque setting, with all of the rough edges caused by the lack of technology filed off with magic; it was an unbelievable setting because it never seemed to evolve in any particular way.
The chapter on the Shades, though, explains exactly how the Forgotten Realms can – and probably will – evolve, with magic becoming more and more a part of everday life until it’s become practically transparent. (Props also to Shadows of Undrentide, the Neverwinter expansion which showcased the golem stores and casual use of magic in the ruins of the Netherese empire.) The Shades themselves are from a magic city that had been shifted into the Plane of Shadow when the magical catastrophe that wiped out the Netherese occurred. In the years intervening, the residents of the city have themselves become shadows, and they’re interested in…oh, yay, taking over the world. Somebody has got to give these villains something more interesting to do. Of course, the Shades are meanwhile fighting with an inhuman race called the phaerimm, who were trapped by the Netherese a long time ago and who have just gotten loose; the interplay between the two could provoke some interesting adventures. (Who to kill first? Who’s right and who’s wrong?)
The remainder of the book is dedicated to the various subgroups of the Forgotten Realms – the Arcane Brotherhood, the Daemonfey, beholders, Illithid and so forth. Most of the human conspiracies on the lower level have somewhat more realistic, if not clichéd, goals – the Church of Shar wants to convert people to the worship of Shar, the Iron Throne has been subverted into one man’s personal quest for a lost love, and so forth. (House Karanok is due for one mother of a good kicking, being both hypocritical – using magic while persecuting mages as “witches” – and stupid, since they’re worshipping a Sphere of Annhilation which an evil deity is using as a blind to grant spells. Yes, indeed, kicking in the teeth of House Karanok would be a good thing.)
The non-human groups also get some interesting goals. The Kir-Lanann are a race of gargoyles who loathe all faithful groups within Faerun, being magically-created creatures without a god – similar to Warren Ellis’s Uncreated, who appeared during his run on Starjammers and Excalibur. The Illithid and the Beholders get brief writeups, although they’re really not that much in depth; more brief sketches of the monsters, and I imagine that they’ll be fleshed out in greater detail elsewhere. (Incidentally, there was a great article about the homeworld of the illithids in Dragon magazine a while ago – I think that it was around issue 143 or so – and if you’ve got the Dragon magazine archive on CD, it’s definitely worth checking out.)
Of course, it’s not all happiness and light. The People of the Black Blood – lycanthrope cultists – could easily be the inspiration for a really great campaign, but the problem is that they wind up coming off as one-dimensional, and eeeeeeevil where they could have been really interesting. White Wolf’s Werewolf does this very, very well, incidentally, but there’s still yards of material to be explored in the concept. It’s a shame that the authors didn’t put more effort into the conception of the cult.
The book closes off with a few miscellaneous magic items and spells, including a page-length list of drugs and their effects. (They’d make a great character class, sort of like UA’s Dipsomancers – you’re constantly running from one drug high to another as you try to conceal the fact that you’re not quite as fast, or smart, or as agile as anybody else in the party. Or maybe you’re just using the drugs to augment the rush that you get from battle.)
The spells are interesting, although there’s nothing really flashy – a variation on eyebite, greater and lesser shadow tentacles and so forth. There’s also some new feats – Eschew Material Components (doesn’t everybody just ignore components in the game?), Phalanx Fighting, and Tattoo magic, which comes perilously close to a joke that I made about Palladium’s Tattooed Men. To wit, I suggested that it was telling that only in Palladium’s games could you gain power by repeatedly touching yourself.
Is it worth picking up? I suppose that if you’re a big fan of the Forgotten Realms, but I just found it to be too unwilling to take chances or do anything really interesting with its setting. There’s a lot of products out there – ranging from Midnight to White Wolf’s Scarred Lands series – which are forced to go outside the usual “Because they’re eeeeeevil” box in order to attract sales, and I’d say that their products are going to be more useful to you than this product.
-Darren MacLennan
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