Lords of Madness: Not bad.

[Wrenfield]

That's why Illithids call them "smartasses".

When out of telepathy range that is ...

[SuicideChump]

Illithids are strange.

Their ultimate wish is joining an Elder Arse afterlife. And becoming part of it. It is their 'Heaven' ...
No surprise they have no nostrils.

God, as a DM I will forever use the Elder Brain 'Underdark' picture with my players...If I know them well, faced with the W. England version of the monster they will start with endless remarks:

"Hey, it's going to cast Stinking Cloud!"
"Hum, can you tell me from where exactly these 'Brain' Golems are spawned? You know, I suspect I spawned one of them...about three hours ago"

...and so on

[Username17]

OK... a review of sorts.

Chapter One: How to Ruin your Campaign with Aberrations

The first chapter is aptly named. Mostly it goes so deep into fluff that you are no longer able to breathe. And it doesn't help that the fluff is crappy. Mostly it goes down the "dragons are awesome" road, in that it tells you that the proper way to run Aberrations is to set the CR up until the PCs all die. I'm not making this up, they actually suggest that a typical Aberration-based adventure should be structured like this:

First encounter EL +3
Second encounter EL +2
Third encounter EL +1 (+2)
Fourth encounter EL +1 (+3)
Fifth encounter EL +4 (+5)

With the parenthetical values being applied if the PCs don't "pay a frightful price" to gain "horrible knowledge". Sigh. An EL +4 encounter is a mirror-match. An EL +5 encounter is your party going up against itself with an extra guy or two of your level in it. If you take this advice even once your chances of having your party reach the next level is very small.

Then it talks about advancing Aberrations with class levels and hit dice simultaneously. It doesn't talk about what would happen to the CR, it just tells you to do it. All part of the plan to ruin D&D I suppose. The discussion of how to integrate other books is similarly Pollyannaish in its simplicity - "Combine the Book of Vile Darkness with Aberrations? Sure, go for it dude!" Possibly the least helpful advice I've ever seen on any subject.

Chapter Two: Everything you Never wanted to know about Memory Fish and didn't care to ask.

It has multiple drawings of the insides of an Aboleth. I'm not even fvcking kidding. It's so. much. crap. that. I don't. care. about. At all. It talks about the big power: Aboleths get your memories when they eat you. They still don't provide rules for this, so the entire chapter is wasted space.

Flying Aboleths! Dumbest idea. Ever.

The Savant Aboleth is a noble attempt to make a PrC that advances a monster's abilities and keeps their CR up. It is a miserable failure, mostly because it doesn't actually keep track of whether it's adding caster levels to Sublime Chord or Assassin, and as long as a class is doing that it can't ever be balanced, can it? If you are asking whether you can qualify for this class as a Wizard and add 4 to her intelligence without losing any spellcasting levels, the answer is yes.

Aboleth Glyphs are complete crap. Consider this 120,000 gp gem:

Otherwise, only a DC 15 Heal check can empty the creature's lungs of water and save it from a watery death.

First, it uses "water" twice in the same sentence which is dramatically clumsy. More importantly, it requires a 15th level opponent, so it's literally incapable of doing anything. Even if it has been made by the kind of crazy over-powered enemies this book seems to think can be thrown around, it's still impossible that a character with the heal skill of even that level couldn't simply take 1 and save their allies.

However, it introduces the idea that you should be allowed to make slotless items that allow you infinite uses of charge-limited feats for 20,000 gp. I have to say that's an interesting idea. The gems are hard to find, but when there's stuff like Glyph of Extension in there, you know the Aboleth Glyph feat is going to be totally worth it...

More later.

-Username17

[Username17]

Of course, the important part of this book is:

Chapter 3: The Beholder Mage

Sure, like all the chapters it has some pre-packaged adventures that appear to be reprints from Dungeon Magazine, but the only thing we really care about is the Beholder Mage.

The Beholder Mage has no meaningful entry requirements at all, so absolutely anyone can qualify with a casting of Polymorph Any Object. Anyone. Now, here's what happens:

[*] You learn spells just like a Wizard. Except that you get a new spell level every level.

[*] Your caster level is double your level. Since +1 spellcaster level classes are defined as "as if you had gained a level in blah blah blah", this means that your caster level is doubled even if you jump out of Beholder Mage to a PrC. You want to do this, because there are no more meaningful class features in this class.

[*] You can cast spells on the fly as a Sorcerer from your entire wizard spell-list. This is separately defined from the discussion of spellstalks (see below).

[*] You lose the use of one of your eye stalks every time you gain access to a new spell level, and your eyestalk becomes a spellstalk at that time. It does not say what happens when you gain a new spell level and don't have an eyestalk to sacrifice (as will eventually happen to every normal Beholder Mage, since they can take Epic feats before they complete the class). Seemingly nothing.

[*] Spellstalk casting is the most broken thing ver, where all your spells cast in this manner are used as a free action, allowing you to cast 10 spells a round (or more if you cheese out and take Epic Feats and Eyestalk Implants from the Fiend Folio).

[*] You don't need material components, but a ruined central eye is an arcane focus for all spells on your list.

So what does that mean? It means that you become a Beholder Mage, turn back into a human, and then can cast spells like a Sorcerer out of your wizard spell-book. And your caster level is doubled, and it takes only one level to get a new spell level. You have to carry a discarded beholder central eye with you at all times to cast spells at all. You don't get to multi-cast unles you also take iend Folio grafts at some point to have actual spellstalks implanted.

The sacrifice of an eyestalk is made when you gain the new spell level, and is a one-time deal. If you don't have an eyetsalk to sac, nothing happens. So the longer you wait to have the stalks implanted, the more powerful the crazy is going to be when you bust out the multi-casting. In the meantime, you'll have to settle for "just" being a wizard who progresses at double speed and casts spontaneously off his full list.

Also interesting: Gyth can use "skilled telekinetic", which in turn allows them to use wands around corners at will. You need line of effect from yourself to the magic item, and you need line of effect from the item to the target, but you don't need line of effect from yourself to the target.

Metaray is, of course, horribly broken. What did you expect?

-Username17

[Username17]

But there's more:

Chapter Four: Rants about Mind Flayers

OK, first of all I have to get it off my chest that I thought the entire process of ceremorphosis from the Ilithiliad was retarded. It was designed to be pointlessly disgusting, while at the same time being entirely unnecessary because Mind Flayers are already really gross! I vastly prefer the pre-Ilithiliad Mind Flayers, who had males and females and tadpoles and grew their own bodies which was why they had a different number of fingers, you stupid dumbasses! This section attempts to reconcile the Ilithiliad with the Fiend Folio and fails (repeatedly stating that implantation into reptillian creatures is impossible, whilst apparently ignoring the Half-Ilithid Lizardfolk on page 90 of the FF). The entire ceremorphosis/elder brain plot line has always been retarded, and its presentation hasn't gotten any better here.

Now that my personal prejudices are out of the way, I'm sure that it's no surprise to any of you that I think the concept of the Ulitharids is moronic. If the Mind Flayers pull the tadpoles out of the broth after ten years and then insert them, it is logically impossible for there to be an otherwise unidentifiable subspecies that needs to stay in the broth for twenty years. The regular Ilithids can't tell the difference until ceremorphosis does its stupid, so they'd just implant these bad boys somewhere around the ten year mark and this entire subspecies would never be born in the first place. Ugh.

Other than some minor magical items that are themselves simply spell effects in rune or stone form (and thus reverse engineerable with the DMG), there's no crunch in this chapter at all. It's all fluff, and it's all dumb.

Chapter Five: Neogi
The write-up of the Neogi here isn't a direct reprint of MM2 pages 159-160. It's just really close. The Great Old Master now has a climb speed, and the Neogi Adult now has a maximum number of simultaneous slaves separate from, and less than its number of slaves it can maintain by using up its charges of enslavement every day. This new stipulation does not come with rules for turning off enslavement, and the Neogi getting new slaves (which it can still do) is not listed as one of the "only ways" to escape enslavement by a brutal Neogi overlord. Dumbtastic.

Neogi are bizzarely enough considered acceptable as player characters for some reason. You are ECL 8, which seems pretty fvcked up when you realize that you are CR 3. But actually that's just your CR, remember that every Neogi is actually an army of sorts, and that you are Encounter Level 8 or more, because you come with at least one free Umber Hulk. I'm not sure how you could advance such a character, but you're practically broken in an 8th level adventure.

Some of the backstory here is actually pretty cool, but the only hard mechanics in the section are very poorly conceived indeed.

-Username17

[SuicideChump]

And what about the pathetic crossover with the Myths of Cthulhu?
"OK", they must have thought, "we are going to write down a book on Aberrations on our 2-splatbooks-per-month routine shenanigan. How are we going to justify the expense of 30 bucks for this book? The egg-heads have run out of ideas..."
Dumbass #1: "Let's rewrite the Beholder Mage!"
All: "..."
Dumbass #2: "It is not enough. We have to fill 224 fvcking pages, #1..."
Dumbass #3: "The answer is: fluff. Tons of fluff. People like fluff. Me like fluff."
Dumbass #2: "OK, good. Still not enough, though. We need something original. Original, I said."
...
Dumbass #1: "Hum, Aberrations are ugly. Aberrations are tentacled. Aberrations are Evil. Aberrations are mysterious. They are like...CTHULHU! Why don't we relate them to the Call of Cthulhu setting?"
All:"Great, #1, very original. Something that's been never heard of. This is what we and our supporting players mostly needed: a crossover! YES, LET'S SCARE THEM WITH ULTRAMUNDANE TERRORS!"

This is why this book is filled with blowjob exercises on the rancid carcass of HP Lovecraft.
Yes, they couldn't find anything more creative to characterize the Aberrations.
So throughout the pages you are constantly annoyed by retarded names with too many consonants, dark prophecies, Elder Evils, The Nightmare Out of Time, Him Who Watches From The Shitpool, The Dark Assblaster from the Outer Spheres, a table to convert Aboleths' gods to the Outer Gods and similar crap. It's even worse if you (as myself) really don't give a fvck about Lovecraft's works and you have left the Call of Cthulhu RPG books on the shelves.

And remember (LoM pag. 28): "Of all the major aberration races in the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS game, the aboleths best personify the sense of cosmic horror and the ultimate insignificance of humankind expressed in Lovecraft's writings".

*yawn*

[User3]

I am a fan of H. P. Lovecraft's writing, and I can't tell you how much is pisses me off every time I see this kind of Farm-Realms shit blasted across H.P.L.'s name from an Elder Asscrack.

Yes, he was a racist bastard and a self-righteous weenie. He was still a damn' good poet (if you like that kind of "fantastic" stuff), and does not deserve to be so horribly aped.

[User3]

OK, I just got a look at the book. Just thought I'd mention the book's original namesake in the Magic Items section. It is unremarkable except in its capacity to grant a total of 9 skill points, possibly in excess of a character's normal maximum ranks. Which makes it a decent way to sneak into PrCs with the right skill rank reqirements.

[Murtak]

OK, I just got a look at the book. Just thought I'd mention the book's original namesake in the Magic Items section. It is unremarkable except in its capacity to grant a total of 9 skill points, possibly in excess of a character's normal maximum ranks. Which makes it a decent way to sneak into PrCs with the right skill rank reqirements.

You mean until WotC pulls a precocious apprentice and declares that only "real" skill ranks count?

[User3]

1116693194[/unixtime]]
You mean until WotC pulls a precocious apprentice and declares that only "real" skill ranks count?

You mean, until WotC pulls a Precocious apprentice and someone posts on the boards that the book doesn't work that way, but it is nowhere is the errata?

Ya...