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The book weighs in at 160 full color pages in hard cover. The art is all recycled from previous products but most of it is top notch by artists like Wayne Reynolds, Ron Spencer, William O’Connor, Tony Diterlizzi, Sam Wood and Michael Phillippi, among others. The book has been compiled by Chris Sims and edited by Kim Mohan. One thing I thought WoTC did well with this book that they failed on the Forgotten Realms historical one is they lowered the price. 160 full color pages in hard cover usually runs the old $29.95 but this one is $26.95. Not a huge savings or anything but it beats paying the standard.
While is has a nice table of contents, its index is telling. For example, under Senses are listed skills like listen, spot, and search, but the table of contents doesn’t show that and lacking an index, if you were looking up skills, well, you could find skill checks on the topic index but as each skill is broken up into its topic, you’d have to look up each skill individually in the index.
Outside of what I’d call some minor organizational problems, my only other beef with the book is that it’s not complete in a manner I’d have done so. For example, it doesn’t include feats nor does it include skill tricks or a host of other minor rule tweaks. Instead this is fairly the core rules organized in a way that a person who already has an idea of how the rules should work, can easily reference the material. It’s like a cheat guide to the 3.5 edition as opposed to a huge compilation of the rules.
This isn’t to say thought, that nothing is updated. For example, if you’ve never bought beyond the core rule books and are looking at action types here, you may wonder what the heck a swift and immediate action is. There are also several spells that have been revised like animal shapes and baleful polymorph. This has caused a bit of a stir among some gamers who feel that to play the ‘proper’ game they must pay for the ‘errata’ that this book provides as the book notes, “”When a preexisting core book or supplement differs with the rules herein, Rules Compendium is meant to take precedence.” I can see where those people are coming from but I’m not going to lose sleep over it.
Thus far I’ve used it to look up various conditions, special attacks like sunder, throwing splash weapons and the effects of various types of fear. It’s been a godsend. Many attacks are illustrated like throwing splash weapons, area of effects, attacks of opportunity,
One of my favorite things about the book though, isn’t how useful it is in terms of the game rules but rather, how entertaining and enlightening some parts of the book are as they look at various designers takes on different parts of the system. For example, there are a ton of bonuses in the system, but Logan Bonner points out that alchemical, morale, and profane/sacred don’t get a lot of love. There’s some back details that pretty much everyone suspected like Christopher Perkins talking about the great axe doing a d12 simply because the d12 wasn’t getting a lot of love. Even when it’s something stupid, at least their putting it in and not trying to sell a ‘pure’ history. Some of the bits are ‘campfire’ tales from the designer’s own gaming tables, like Rich Baker’s tale of mounted combat against a dragon.
The book isn’t the compendium I would’ve wanted to see but that doesn’t stop it from getting used in both 3.5 games I’m currently involved in. If you’re still playing the core rules of 3.5, hide the disappointment of not having a Feats or PrC Compendium and enjoy the utility provided by an alphabetically organized book of rules.
