It’s safe to say that a good majority of Dungeons & Dragons players saw that the first of Wizards of the Coast’s two “Wizards Presents” books,
Races and Classes, was a shamelessly overpriced marketing gimmick. The lack of general interest in
Worlds and Monsters, then, is understandable.
Still, while I felt Wizards Presents: Races and Classes was a pile of laughable bullshit, I was compelled to buy its sequel, Worlds and Monsters, after flipping through it at Barnes & Nobles. There is much more substance in this book – primarily a brief walk-through of how a small design team took 30 years of a game’s sacred cows and gleefully shoved them in a blender.
The result is a surprising grab-bag of long-overdue changes, clumsily-applied clichés, naked marketing and, more than anything else, breaking a great deal of what didn’t need to be fixed.
Worlds and Monsters is a slim, 96-page softcover book that can be read in a single sitting. It’s jammed with art, most of which is very good, and is fairly light on text. The book flows by in sections that tackle specific areas of the new world and big zones of redesign, and is generally meant to serve as an introduction to the changes we’ll all encounter when we plunk our cash down for Fourth Edition.
The sections covered are: The 4E world creation process, the new cosmology; the new world setting and some of its specific locations; dragons; giants; the Underdark, the Feywild, the Shadowfell, the Elemental Chaos, the Astral Sea and the Far Realm, all new “world zones” of 4E; and “staff thoughts on 4th Edition.”
The book starts off well, with members of 4E’s design team explaining what they were tasked with. Reading different takes on what they felt was broken in 3.5 was very refreshing. Most of this will appeal to DMs who have struggled with 3.5’s clumsy CR system, the weird “four encounters of equal strength per day” methodology, and the stupid layout of the Monster Manual books. (We're promised that the 4E Monster Manuals will return to the one-monster-per-page layout, something I am very happy about.)
Then we start getting to the big changes, many of which left me scratching my head.
The 4E world design team felt the need to completely change D&D’s “Great Wheel” cosmology and ecology, machine-gunning most of it to bits. Why Wizards feels the need to fuck with this to no end makes absolutely no sense. The Great Wheel is gone, replaced by a hodgepodge of poorly-conceived replacements. The Nine Hells are now part of an Astral Sea. The Inner Planes are now mushed together in one place, the Elemental Chaos. The Plane of Shadow and the Negative Energy Plane are mashed into a new place called the Shadowfell. Asmodeus is now a god. On and on.
What’s striking here is Wizards felt compelled to make all of these changes. Having played and DM’ed D&D since the red boxed set Basic Rules days, I didn’t hear people complaining about the set-up of the Planes, or the lore behind succubi, or how travel in the Astral Planes works. What most of us groused about with 3.5 were the mechanics – the CR system, the over-complex calculus involved in assigning class levels to monsters and advancing them in power, magic item creation rules, the Vancian magic system, attacks of opportunity, etc.
Wizards seems to have forgotten that TSR’s Second Edition “core books” contained absolutely no information pertaining to a setting, and the first three Monstrous Compendium supplements were fairly “setting neutral.” Why Wizards thinks it’s so important to have a radically redesigned “default setting” contained within the 4E core books is very strange, and I think it is the changes made in this realm, more so than any overhaul of the mechanics, that will have seasoned players crying foul and posting nasty threads on ENWorld.org.
Some of it is interesting. The Feywild is a good idea, creating a more compelling and mysterious home for fey and all things sylvan. The extension of the Underdark is pretty cool. Heck, I even like the whole “points of light” concept that 4E revolves around, and the attempt to not have humans be the dominant race. Even the modular nature of the new world setting "zones" is a decent idea. Wizards makes it clear that there will be no map in the default 4E world setting; it’s up to DMs to put the Feywild, the Astral Sea, and the Shadowfell where they see fit.
So why couldn’t this be a new setting introduced at the same time as 4E, something like the next Eberron? Wouldn’t it have been “safer” to do that rather than change so much of what makes D&D what it is – its monsters and its cosmology?
Overall, Wizards and Monsters is worth the read, mostly due to the fascinating irreverence the design team has for the game’s past and the explanation behind the sweeping changes. I wouldn’t recommend buying this book – you’re better off reading the parts that interest you in a bookstore. I will say that the inclusion of material from the Staff Blogs on wizards.com, which closes out the book, is absolutely pathetic, and makes me wonder about the content quality of what is to come.
Review Summary