The book is similar to the main Dragonlance book but is less, about 60 pages less. The art is still great, with some great full color illustrations by fan favorites Jeff Easley, Larry Elmore, Jason Engle and others. The maps, by Ed Bourelle, Rob Lee and others captures the feel and lay of the land greatly.
Margaret Weis and Christy Everette did a fair job on the editing but would've benefited from another pass, not only for grammar and spelling, but repetition and placement. I don't need to read about the same event in four or five different places. The information just isn't that vital. I don't need to read character X's point of view of event Y, and then character's A, B, and C, on that event when it's almost the same. Not to mention the sections where that information is repeated again in general tunes like in history, or in magic, or in Ruins or in other sections just waiting to be read.
In terms of placement, there are NPC's all over the place. We've got Jasper Fireforge and Silvanoshei, a dwarf mystic and elf noble, among others, in the racial section, and then in other spots other characters. Why not a simple NPC chapter to make referencing and finding these characters much easier. Maybe even a section to organize them by dead and living characters as the book covers a lot of territory and not all of those detailed are still in the ranks of the living.
The reduced page count means less of almost everything. The biggest blow to the book here is that lack of starting adventurers. While there are new races like the Tarmak and the Half-Kender, most of the material here relates to how the races introduced in the Dragonlance book are doing now. There are some cultures rising, like the minotaurs, even as others look to hold on, like the elves, who now have no homeland. Reduced classes means we get one core class, the Mariner, and only some odd twelve PrCs, many of them focused on helping the Legion of Steel with variants for most classes like Legion Mystic, Scout and Sorcerer.
The PrCs, for the most part, have a focus on the new era and it's people. The Spellfilch and War Mage however, are fairly general PrCs, the former being skilled at stealing with the use of magic, the latter being a battle capable wizard who can wear armor with less chance of spellfailure and gains bonus points to his damage causing spells per die.
One of the few places that the book doesn't have less than the original is in feats, and that's because the original book didn't have many. Unfortunately, a lot of these are of the dreaded +2 to two skills, something that few publishers have decided we just can't have a feat , “Related Skills: +2 to two skills that are related to one another as approved by the GM.” Instead, we get stuff like Charming with dipolomacy and bluff check bonus or mimic with diguise (yeah, that's one of the editing errors) and perform and others like quick-thinking, sharp-eyed, street smart, and trustworthy. Way too many of those feats.
The area that this book shines is in making the Age of Mortals one of options. You get a full timeline with a breakdown of all the major events from 384 AC (1 SC) The Year of Changes, to 422 AC (39 SC), the Year of Revelations. In that timeline, there are a lot of changes going on. You've got magic working, not working, working under alternative conditions, working with different methods behind it, working as it originally did as the Gods come back. You've got empires rising and falling. You've got dragons taking their traditional roles and losing those as the alien dragon overlords begin a dragon purging. It's a time of change. Mind you, it's change dictated by fiction and you never know when a piece of that fiction is going to be shown in a new light and perhaps ruin a campaign you've got in mind, but as always, you're free to ignore that.
The rules are there to help you. This hails in the form of advice for running games with mystics, clerics, sorcerers and wizards trying to find their place. This includes the section on magic, as the three orders of wizards originally followed three different gods, one for each core alignment, to the section on religion, where mystics who thrive without gods must live in a world with them. There are details on dragons and the ways that they become stronger, more powerful and more dangerous as they remake the land about them as overlords. It includes new spells and magic items given life in 3.5 to show how certain situations in the book came to pass, as well as characters written up as NPCs.
It includes the changes in climate, both from the damage that the dragons did, as well as the change in location that the land suffered when the queen of darkness moved it. It includes details on locations like Lacynos, a minotaur city, and Mount Nevermind, home of the gnomes. All of it updated to the Age of Mortals with ideas hidden in the details so that GMs can quickly craft dozens of adventurers.
Age of Mortals has a lot going for it. It takes the material from the Dragonlance Campaign Setting book and brings all of it, religion, dragons, heroes, magic, monsters, lands, locations, ruins, and brings it into this timeline providing the GM with the tools to craft something that might be unique if the Wizards of the Coast novel division doesn't ruin the setting first.
