Overview
This sourcebook for Dungeons and Dragons provides a wealth of information on three races: Dwarves, Gnomes, and a new race called the Goliaths. About the first eighty-five pages are concerned with providing roleplaying resource material: information on the cultures, philosophies, and legends of these races. The rest of the book provides crunch: prestige classes, new feats, and the like. Ostensibly the book is focused on these three groups because they are all “races of stone.” What does that mean? “Any race that spends its time living in the earth or atop its mountains is potentially a race of stone” (p. 4). If that definition sounds a little vague to you, then you’ve got the right idea about this book: interesting stuff sort of loosely grouped together.
Although it would seem to make sense to put Dwarves and Gnomes together, as the two races are supposedly related and consider each other “cousins,” the overlap between the two in this book is extremely slight. The new race, the Goliaths, fit even less well. So essentially you have three race arbitrarily being discussed in the same book. That’s fine, but gamers who are only interested in one of the races should realize that a big chunk of what they’ll be buying won’t be useful to them.
Physically, the book is a 192-page hardbound volume that looks like the other 3.x Wizards of the Coast products. Illustrations are in color but many of them are cartoony in flavor. Art isn’t a great strength of the book. Organization is clear and straightforward, with each of the three races getting its own chapter and then the rest of the book being divided by types of crunch: a chapter on prestige classes, another on “character options” (feats, skills, etc.), and so on. This means that the basic description of each race is separate, but rules material gets intermingled, so a Gnome-only feat will be listed with all the other feats, but nothing is too hard to find.
The material presented is useful and fairly interesting. The chapter on Gnomes, in particular, finally made them seem like a viable and interesting character choice instead of some kind of strange Dwarf-Halfling hybrid. I can imagine a number of players and DMs finding something here fun and worthwhile. The question is, how much will you find fun and worthwhile? I think that only a small number of gamers will find a large portion of this book worth having. I’m going to follow a common convention by going through the book a chapter at a time: the more of these chapters sound like something you’d want, the better your chance that you’ll be glad to own the whole.
Breakdown
The first three chapters each describe one race in detail. Each chapter contains these major sections: A Day in the Life, Description, Psychology, Dwarven/Gnome/Goliath Life, Society and Culture, [Relations with] Other Races, Religion, History and Folklore, Language, and Creating Dwarf/Gnome/Goliath Characters. The Dwarf and Gnome chapters also include a section on “Cities and Settlements.” Generally these chapters would be helpful for players who want a lot of additional background information to help them roleplay better or for DMs who want to set an adventure or a whole campaign among one of these races.
Chapter One: Dwarves, 26 pages
This chapter uses the common “Player’s Handbook” view of Dwarves as a foundation and then provides much more detail and complexity. The resulting description of Dwarves is consistent with the stereotype but much richer. The reasons behind common Dwarf tropes like “obsessed with the beard” and “taciturn” are given, along with openings for players to develop less stereotypical characters. This chapter not only explains how Dwarves are, but why they are that way. For players who want to play a Dwarf with more detail but don’t want to make it all up, or who want the “official” version to work from, this is very useful stuff. Some of the roleplaying tips and questions seem aimed at less experienced players, but that is a general feature of the 3.x D&D books as a whole as far as I can tell.
Chapter Two: Gnomes, 22 pages
Very similar to the preceding chapter, this section of the book details the nature of Gnomes. Because Gnomes are less commonly depicted in RPGs or fantasy literature, I found this chapter the most interesting in the book. While once again the common stereotype (“little pranksters”) is used as a base, the development of the race does much to allow for the development of non-stereotypical Gnomes or little pranksters with depth beneath the gags. This chapter does for Gnomes what the first chapter does for Dwarves, which I suspect will help many players and DMs to view Gnomes as viable PC choices for the first time.
Chapter Three: Goliaths, 32 pages
This chapter provides the same kind of detail for Goliaths as the first two chapters do for the other races. The difference is, Goliaths are a new race, being presented here for the first time. Goliaths are larger than even Half-Orcs. They are presented as a tribal, nomadic race of hunter-gatherers who live in the mountains, apparently not being smart enough to realize that you can hunt and gather a lot more in more fertile areas. If a reason is given for why this race has remained nomadic while the rest of the world has settled, I missed it. On the whole, this new race is interesting, but I could never shake my initial impression that it didn’t really fit.
Giving the Goliaths a whole chapter helped to offset some of my initial negative reaction. Seeing the race explained in detail let me see the possibilities for roleplaying interesting characters of this race. But I couldn’t ever get them to seem to fit in this book. They don’t live underground, as Dwarves and Gnomes do, and despite the book’s constant assurance that these three races get along well, I couldn’t imagine the smaller races having any particular reason to want to spend time with these giants whose society is so different from theirs.
From a mechanical standpoint, I’d be reluctant to bring Goliaths in as a PC race. I’ll leave it to people more expert in the d20 system than me to judge whether a +1 level adjustment is enough to balance their significant advantages (+4 STR, -2 DEX, +2 CON; +2 Sense Motive; able to be considered a “large” creature in many situations when it is advantageous to do so; plus some others). But I would be very reluctant to let a munchkin-leaning or immature gamer take on this race. Even if careful DMing could avoid the game becoming unbalanced due to the Goliath’s obvious advantages in melee combat, having someone roleplaying an enormous, massively strong barbarian or fighter whose culture is obsessed with competition would be too much for many gaming groups to survive. Again, in the hands of a skilled roleplayer, this race can work. The competitive attitude is well explained, and properly played wouldn’t have to be annoying or dangerous. But on the surface, the race looks like it was designed by a 14-year-old who thought Half-Orcs weren’t tough enough.
Chapter Four: Other Races of Stone, 12 pages
This chapter mostly provides PHB-style writeups of one “monstrous race” (the Stonechild) and four sub-race variants (Chaos Gnome, Dream Dwarf, Feral Gargun, and Whisper Gnomes). None of the richness and detail of the first three chapters is present here. No explanation is really offered for why any of these sub-races should exist. More than any other part of the book, this chapter screams “min-max” to me. The purpose of Whisper Gnomes is to let a PC powergame a Gnome Rogue by giving them a race that’s custom-suited to the class. Nothing here particularly impressed me, and if I were DMing all of these races would be off-limits.
Chapter Five: Prestige Classes, 32 pages
Fifteen new prestige classes are presented here. There is a nice range of options here, although not every campaign will be able to use every class as nearly all have a certain race as a prerequisite. In general, they do what prestige classes should do: increase the options available to characters in a way that encourages diversity in roleplaying while providing some nifty new abilities. Sometimes when I hit a list of prestige classes I find myself flipping the pages pretty fast because they all look like either something I’ve already seen before or something I’d never want to play. These classes are both new and viable, for the most part. I can imagine building a Dwarf character that I would hope to someday be able to become a Battlesmith, or a Deepwarden, or a Runesmith.
Chapter Six: Character Options, 24 pages
This chapter has three subsections: skills, feats, and racial substitution levels. The section on skills doesn’t present new skills, but rather new ways to use existing skills with the kinds of characters and environments suggested by this book, such as using Appraise to recognize that something is of dwarven manufacture. Twelve skills receive such treatment.
An impressive sixty-nine new feats are included, although once again not every campaign will have a use for all of them: eleven are (effectively) for Goliaths only, six are psionic, etc. But there are some interesting new options: Earth Sense, Mountain Fighting, Tunnel Fighting, Clan Prestige, and of course the feat that every gamer already has, Trivial Knowledge.
It took me a few minutes to understand racial substitution levels, but really the idea isn’t that complex. I’ll try to explain it more clearly than the book did (although on rereading it the description seemed clear enough). The idea is this: if you are a certain combination of race and class and about to achieve a certain level of that class, you can optionally substitute a different package of abilities in place of the ones you would normally get for that level and class. So a dwarf fighter at level one can take the package the described in the PHB for a level one fighter, or he can take the level one “dwarf fighter” package described in this book. There are only three or four levels for which level substitution is possible, so most of the time your character still gets the standard benefits of the chosen class. For each of the three races the book considers, three classes are selected and level substitution options provided. The obvious intent here is to still further increase the range of variations possible among D&D characters. For some players and DMs, this will seem like a great idea, as there are some neat choices available. For other groups, this is just another set of super-specialized rules to keep track of.
Chapter Seven: Equipment and Magic, 18 pages
Here’s a mishmash of additional stuff related to these three races. We have new weapons, new and exotic armors, new mounts, and rules for “dwarvencraft” versions of weapons and armor (think mastercraft plus). Seven new spells and eight new psionic powers are included, along with rules for magic forges and a new kind of “environmental element” called rune circles—essentially a magic item that can’t be moved. Again, for some this will be a fun new trove of new options, for others, another push toward information overload in the D&D realm.
Chapter Eight: Campaigns of Stone, 22 pages
This chapter is closer to being a monster manual than a DM’s guide. The actual advice given on how to run a campaign set among Dwarves or Gnomes or Goliaths is brief. Most of the chapter gives sample NPCs and monsters. A brief section discusses holidays in the various cultures; it’s included here as a set of adventure hooks, but it might make more sense to put the various holiday descriptions in the first three chapters. This chapter ends with an “appendix” listing one hundred one-sentence adventure ideas.
Final thoughts
If you’re a DM wanting to introduce Goliaths into your campaign or wanting to base an entire campaign among the Dwarves or the Gnomes, this book is vital. For players of Dwarves or Gnomes (or Goliaths, if you can find a campaign allowing them) wanting a combination of useful roleplaying tips and a wide range of new character choices, this book is worthwhile. For everyone else, the question is just whether the parts you find useful outweigh the parts you will have to pay for but will never use.
For style, this book has all the advantages of Wizards of the Coast production values, but still manages to be nothing very special. The art isn’t bad but isn’t especially memorable, and the overall visual presentation is standard D&D format. So while compared to the whole industry’s work it probably deserves a 4, I’m giving it a 3 to reflect that it’s run-of-the-mill for WOTC.
For substance, the book is solid but again unremarkable. For some players it will provide a lot, but more D&D campaigns can ignore it completely and never miss it. Again, a middle-of-the-road 3.
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