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Something that’s always bothered me since the second adventure of my first 3rd ed D&D campaign has been clerics. They’re dull. Admittedly, far less dull than they were in 2nd edition, but they’re still dull. And if you play with the core 11 classes, barring a druid who spends a lot of money on wands, you’re pretty much stuck with ‘em.
Then Miniatures Handbook came out. They did what I’d never considered before. They had new base classes! I marvelled, I thrilled at the favoured soul, the healer, the marshal and the warmage.
Then Complete Divine came out, and divine casters went back to being relatively “meh”.
The Classes
Before we really dig into the actual classes in this chapter, we’re presented with reasons why and what characters might worship. Nothing revolutionary, but it’s nice to see in there.
Then we open up the base classes. The favoured soul’s back from Miniatures Handbook, with slightly worse art (Baxa’s getting better with his D&D stuff, but this wasn’t one of his good moments). They’re not bad – a spontaneously casting divine class, with a couple of divine abilities thrown in there to keep ‘em interesting. They’re definitely a viable alternative to clerics, but they can fill pretty much any role desired.
Number two out of three is the shugenja. They’re all about the primal energies, and tapping into the earth to cast spells – but at their core, they’re relatively standard charisma based sorcerer-style divine casting class, with a spell list biased towards elemental spells.
The spirit shaman’s very unusual for a D&D spellcaster. They’ve got a fairly narrow divine spell selection, and they cast like sorcerers do – but they can change their spell selection each day by sending their spirit guardian into the spirit world to negotiate for some new spells. It’s a fairly novel idea, and it’s backed up by a load of abilities that effect spirits (incorporeal undead, fey, elementals, stuff like that).
None of them are bad, but I would have preferred to see the healer rather than the favoured soul be reprinted from Miniatures Handbook - as it is, favoured soul and shugenja don’t have that much to distinguish between them, mechanically.
Prestige classes in the following chapter are largely cribbed from other sources, primarily Defenders of the Faith. A couple of nice new additions are Entropomancer and Void Disciple, but the others will do if you’re looking to spice up a cleric (or other divine character… but most of these seem to have clerics in mind). The Prestige Classes here didn’t draw me in the same way that the Complete Warrior and Complete Arcane books did, though.
Feats
A couple of the feats in this chapter are sure to see heavy use. Augment Healing (+2 hit points healed per spell level for healing spells) is incredibly useful for primary healers, Practised Spellcaster (+4 caster level, caster level may not exceed HD) is remarkably useful for multiclassed spellcasters, Sacred Healing is handy (spend a turn/rebuke undead attempt to give fast healing to allies), but aside from that there’s nothing revolutionary in here. There’s a fair few Divine feats (feats that require you to expend turn/rebuke undead attempts), which makes clerics a little more interesting, but they don’t do anything essential.
There’s a couple of variant rules in this section. The first is Faith Feats – the DM allocates faith points ad hoc when your character performs particularly pious acts, and they can be used to power these feats. Problem is, there’s only three of them, and three feats and an extra point pool does not a complete variant system make.
The other rule is one I definitely plan to use in my future campaigns. It alters turning and rebuking so that they damage or heal undead, respectively. It’s a good alternative for DMs who don’t like watching the 12th level vampire NPC they spend an hour creating disintegrate on the first turn attempt (that’d be all of them then). It’s simple, but it works.
Magic Items
Only two sorts of magic items feature in this chapter. The latter is staffs, which are the standard assortment of 2-4 themed spells stuck in a 50 charge stick. The majority of the chapter is dedicated to relics, though. The concept’s not bad – religious magic items positioned about halfway between normal items and artefacts. Problem is, they’ve got one for each of the famous deities spread across the Greyhawk setting. And that’s it. If they’d been made a little more generic, and had a list of a few deities who could grant the item, I think the system would have worked a little better. As it is, it’s something of a pain filing off the serial numbers for other settings. The items aren’t bad, though, and if you are willing to tinker a lot they are adaptable.
Deities
This chapter? If you’re playing in Greyhawk, this is a poor man’s Deities & Demigods. If you’re playing in the Forgotten Realms, this is a poor man’s Deities & Demigods, restricted to the monster deities. Not playing either of those? This chapter is honestly of no use to you whatsoever. Okay, perhaps that’s a little harsh. There’s some layouts of temples that you might find handy as a plug in and play addition to an adventure. After that, there’s not a lot to interest.
The Divine World
I love the intro picture to this chapter. Jozan, Hennet and Lidda are gathered around the corpse of Alhandra. Lidda’s mourning, Jozan’s preparing to resurrect her (holding hands with her vaguely upset looking ghost), and Hennet? Hennet’s just kinda intrigued.
The section on What Happens When You Die appeals to the Planescape player in me (and there’s a lot of Planescape player in me). It’s very handy if you’re working with any of the established D&D settings (death can get confusing at times), but it’s not massively useful if you’re not. It’s quite an extended section, and it’s one of the highlights of the book. It’s also a good primer to new players who don’t know their D&D lore.
From there, it moves onto organised religion, theocracies, churches and a very classy picture of Tiamat. There’s plenty of material for the DM here, but players won’t get much from it. We’re talking a series of different aspects of religions, and how they can be turned into adventure seeds. It’s moderately useful.
Spells
The book closes with the spells section. There’s some new cleric domains here, as well as a few reprinted ones. Interesting ones include competition, Dream, Madness and Force (they get magic missile as a 2nd level domain spell). I’ve already mentioned my dislike of clerics, but these domains can help to spice some of them up a little.
Notable spells include cometfall (divine comet sent from the heavens), golden barding (conjures armour made of force for a paladin or blackguard’s special mount), phantasmal disorientation (blurs and distorts the local surroundings for one target via illusion), shadow landscape (twists the local terrain for high level sinister druids) and storm of elemental fury (storm of vengeance for druids) are the only ones that stand out to me. There’s a lot of dull stuff in there as per normal.
Overview
As far as D&D books go, I’d say that this is less pretty than normal. I’m fond of the D&D art, and this one doesn’t seem up to standard to me. Of course, a lot of the book doesn’t feature any people in it at all, just temple floor plans, deity descriptions and relics, so perhaps it’s not so surprising. The praying paladins on page 163 are very nice, but I’m sure I’ve seen them elsewhere (Faiths & Pantheons?).
If you have Deities & Demigods or Defenders of the Faith, unless you’re a completist collector, I wouldn’t recommend this book. If you’ve got neither, I’d recommend you bought Complete Arcane or Complete Warrior first, and came back to this later. There are lots of better 3.5 books out there. That said, it’s not too bad a book, and there is some stuff in there that’s genuinely useful (especially to Greyhawk players). If you’re planning on playing a dedicated cleric, the prestige classes and feats will help you no end.
