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The Good: The writing is very enjoyable and fans of epic, apocalyptic scenarios will enjoy reading the book. The variety of threats offers the DM a lot of options for bringing in an appropriate apocalypse. Excellent suggestions for slowly incorporating rumors and legends of these entities into a longer campaign are provided, complete with interesting villains.
The Bad: The book lacks the promised guidelines for elder evil creation mentioned on the back cover. Even if the players are victorious most elder evils still destroy the world. The book incorporates a lot of rules from a lot of other books and isn’t very accessible to readers who aren’t well versed in the Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 product line.
The Physical Thing
This 160 page full color hardcover showcases excellent production values for its $29.95 price tag. Good editing and layout, beautiful artwork, and artwork closely connected to the text all come together to bring this book to life. The encounter maps are well done, easy to use, and require nothing more from me than to set them up for play. While the book does lack an index, it’s extremely easy to navigate thanks to each elder evil being contained within a single chapter.Under the Cover
These end of the world scenarios can work well as a late game campaign ender or as the focus of an entire campaign, and Elder Evils makes no assumptions about how the DM might use them. Each entry includes information on Background, Goals, the evil in different campaign settings (Forgotten Realms, Eberron), the evil itself, supporting creatures/templates, and several adventure locations connected to destroying the great evil.It’s important to note that the elder evils are extremely nasty. They range from CR 16 to CR 25 and come with an enormous number of immunities and special powers. What makes them even more difficult to defeat is the dangerous environments they tend to be found in. Atropus, my favorite elder evil, is a still born god that travels from world to world on its undead moon (really its malformed head) and destroys all that is created. If the PCs want to stop Atropus they have to go into space to do so, and the terrain they fight on is an undead god-being. To make matters worse, Atropus is covered with other powerful undead and the planet Atropus approaches is undergoing an enormous cataclysm where the dead are quickly rising from the graves across the world.
The evils presented here are very intuitive and fit many campaign roles, but there are also unique evils that aren’t easily guessed. Leviathan, the mother of all monsters, and a plague of evil worms are easy for players to wrap their heads around, but golems sent by an alien race to speed colonization and an undead moon are strange enough to leave players guessing. The entries give the DM a lot of flexibility, as each one is distinct and can play off certain themes.
In addition to the elder evils, each entry has several monsters, templates, or servants prepared for play. These tend to work much better if the DM is incorporating the evil from the start of a campaign, but they can still be useful as late game antagonists (especially with a moderate power boost). What’s excellent about this supporting material is that most sections have a capable NPC villain with an interesting backstory, which can be extremely useful to the DM who wants to incorporate a given elder evil. Why would someone want to destroy the world? The backgrounds lay it all out. A selection of new Vile feats for entities that serve these world destroying evils are also included, and they tend to build on each other in power (such that characters truly dedicated to the elder evils gain a much greater power boost).
It’s important to note that elder evils don’t just spring up all of a sudden out of nowhere. Signs of their arrival are important, and as they grow nearer to the world or to release they begin to inflict nasty effects on the entire world. How nasty? Everything rises as undead. All life processes super accelerate so things are born, grow, and die in hours all while hideously mutating. World ending disaster, to say the least, and it’s up to the PCs to do something about it. Some worlds (Forgotten Realms) might suffer these fates better than others (Eberron) due to the prevalence of powerful spellcasters, but then again when there’s an undead moon on a collision course for your world the best thing to do may be to jump ship and head to another plane of existence.
Finally, each scenario includes several pages (about 6-7) of encounter maps complete with NPC tactics and special rules for groups that enjoy the miniatures aspect of the game and want a tactical challenge. They’re an excellent way to support a DM who doesn’t want to run a preconstructed adventure, and they’re easy enough to ignore for those who aren’t interested in the minis scenarios presented (though there are a lot of them). The downside to some of these is that they’re not all as epic as I would like for them to be. They do, however, showcase a lot of variety and it would be easy for a DM to take some of them and use them for different encounters.
