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General Impressions
The book is attractive, as most of the Eberron products are, with full-colour illustrations throughout. I found the best and most useful information in it generally fell into two categories - ideas to build a campaign or an adventure around, and little details to bring a character or scene to life. On the other hand, the actual specific adventure ideas the book proposes, encapsulated in ubiquitous "Adventure Ideas" sections, were generally unimpressive. The book seems best suited for moderately experienced DMs capable of coming up with their own adventure ideas, but looking for interesting organisations, characters and conflicts to populate their games with. I would say that I am happy with my purchase of Five Nations.
The Structure and Substance of the Book:
Each chapter has a very different feel to it, despite the fact that they seem to have been written by the same group of authors and have, for the most part, a standard format. The Karrnath and Displaced Cyrean / Mournland chapters are excellent, with the Breland and Aundair chapters being merely good, and the Thranish chapter being the exception, and rather weak.
Aundair is the first chapter, and sets the format for the rest. It opens with the Aundairian national anthem, a nice little flair to give you a shot of what the Aundairians are like. A short one-and-a-bit page blurb details Aundair's history in brief, continuing to the post-war period. A list of monarchs from the dissolution of Galifar is given, and a sidebar containing information about population, coat of arms, current monarch, highest peak and similar Worldbook-style trivia. Much of this sidebar's information is repeated from the core, but it's nice to have it on hand. After this, a section on Aundairian "style" deals with art, architecture, fashion, cooking. I liked this section in each chapter a great deal, as it went a long way towards helping me visualise the look and feel of each nation.
Following that is a sidebar detailing "Five Things Every Aundairian Knows". The variations on this sidebar in each chapter were one of my favourite parts of the book. They are wonderful roleplaying advice, especially for new players, people unfamiliar with all the details of the Eberron setting, and DMs looking for ways to differentiate a Brelish citizen from a Karrn.
As an example, the five things every Aundairian knows are the names of some fine wines (Aundair is Galifar's vinyard), a fancy dueling move or two they know how to imitate (with varying degrees of skill) from public duels, "a bit about horses", a couple of long rhyming songs, and a propaganda epic called "The Epic of the Valiant and the Vigilant" that gets endlessly played in taverns. Little touches like these are nice, and help to give a PC or DM some idea of what the typical citizen of each nation is like.
After that, it's plots and factions for a few pages, which tend to be uneven. As I said, there are a lot of neat groups you can drop into a campaign pretty easily, and some of the plots are genuinely interesting. However, the plots that tend to be most interesting in each chapter focus on the "big picture" - the Aundairian plan to restart - and win - the Last War, or Breland's flirtations with democracy. The plots that are least interesting actually tend to be the ones most obviously designed to get the PCs involved in them - the ones involving demon-controlled groups, especially, tend to be a bit repetitious.
Then we get NPCs. Frankly, with a few exceptions, this is the least interesting part of any of the chapters. Only half or so of the NPCs are the sort of people that the PCs would have reason to fight in direct combat and thus require complete stat-blocks. The others would have been fine with only a minimal stat-block and the description, especially since the book is already struggling for space, trying to cram in as much as possible in 160 pages. There are full stats for a number of NPCs that would make wonderful villains though (the Lord of Blades, Malevanor of Atur, various members of the Aundairian nobility, a Brelish lord who wants to overthrow the Brelish crown to become a dictator, etc.), and this redeems the sections a bit.
After that, we get sections on a potential patron or rival organisation for the PCs, usually revolving around intelligence gathering or covert operations or the like. One somewhat glaring omission is the lack of the Citadel. One part of it is detailed - the Dark Lanterns - as part of a prestige class (more on them later), but the organisation as a whole is not covered in any great depth.
Following this is a long list of strange and interesting places in each nation. As with any long list of material, it's uneven, with some of it being absolutely fantastic stuff (Six cliff faces in the Graywall mountains carved in the likenesses of great Dhakaani warlords where hobgoblin warchiefs gather to pay homage to their ancestors) and some of it being generic towns run by generic corrupt officials or threatened by generic bandits and so on. This one area where the Thranish chapter manages to do well, rising to the level of the rest of the chapters. Along with this list of short descriptions, there's also a section detailing the capital city of each nation. These are unremarkable in and of themselves, but could provide useful information for a game of social or political intrigue set in one of the capitals.
Finishing up each chapter is a prestige class for members of that nation and (usually) a set of monsters unique to that nation. Cyre has the longest monster section, but the Karrnathi and Thranish chapters contain some interesting beasts as well. Continuing a theme, the more interesting monsters are capable of having adventures and campaigns built around them (the Madborn, in particular), while the less interesting ones are random-encounter fodder (I cannot claim in good faith to give a damn about the Karrnathi Bulette).
The prestige classes are probably the most controversial part of this book, at least when it comes to the mechanics. Most of them are somewhat more powerful than ordinary prestige classes, with balance supposedly coming from the numerous restrictions on entry. Most of the restrictions are of a social or in-character nature rather than mechanical limitations though, and a DM who intends to use them had better be prepared to enforce those limitations in roleplaying to preserve balance between characters.
The classes themselves are well integrated into the world, with some serving to emphasise the theme of the chapter (for example, to continue with Aundair, the prestige class is a hit-and-run wizard-warrior who is part of an elite corps of agents of the crown), and others helping PCs integrate unusual character types for that nation into its culture. The Karrnathi prestige class, for example, basically shows how paladins can fit into a culture that worships the undead and is ruled by a lawful-evil vampire. The Thranish prestige class (the silver pyromancer) shows how arcane casters can adapt to life in a theocracy.
Problems:
After praising the book so much, I think it's only fair to point out its flaws as well. The book's layout could have used some work - there is no index, and about five or six pages are wasted - two in an admittedly very pretty illustration at the beginning and several more at the back for advertisements. Because the book is only 160 pages, it really has to cram everything in, and this leads to some parts reading as if they are stealing space better devoted to other matters.
Another problem is the Thrane chapter. As I mentioned way back at the start of the review, it is by far the weakest chapter. It feels like whenever the author of that chapter had words to spare, he spent them repeating variations on "The Thranish aren't fanatics". Thanks to the standard format of the chapters, the entire chapter isn't all like that, but the apologetic tone of it really becomes grating after a while.
Finally, a little less about the prestige classes (which get four pages or so devoted to each of them) and a little more about the various character classes in general and how they work in each nation would have been nice. There's information there, but it's a bit sparser than I wished.
