OSSR: Book of Exalted Deeds

[fbmf]

[The Great Fence Builder Speaks]

The discussion on "What is [Good]?" is here:

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=54037

The discussion on Epic Feats/Spell Slots being allotted their own barrel of cocks is here:

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=54036

Let's keep it that way.

[/TGFBS]

[Username17]

Chapter 3: Exalted Equipment

It isn't strictly a requirement to drink two gallons of beer in order to appreciate the chapter about items of good in the Book of Exalted Deeds, but it certainly helps. The chapter starts in on a thing about "sanctified weapons". That is, weapons that have been "made holy" in the Christian sense. The effects of these are exceedingly inconsequential and fiddly (1 extra point of damage to evil creatures, for example), but they fall into a weird space where they have these effects because of holy radiance that isn't magic. I don't even. In D&D, miracles are performed with magic, while Christianity claims that miracles and magic are two distinct things. So these sanctified weapons violate basic assumptions of the D&D universe in favor of Christian teachings in order to get an effect that is still too inconsequential to bother tracking in the vast majority of cases.

Then we get a few extra "non-lethal" weapons. These include lassos and truncheons and stuff. The difference between a truncheon (this book) and a sap (original PHB) is somewhat lost on me. It's exactly the same thing except that it does an extra point of damage & it is mysteriously missing from the Rogue's default weapon lists. Except of course that 3.5 already left the sap off the Rogue's weapon list because Andy Collins is a shitty editor. I also should point out that tying people up with ropes gets really different rules in Complete Warrior, so this is like 2nd edition's fascination with writing and rewriting different rules for ostensibly the same things in different books so as to make the rules of the game a confusing and contradictory mess.

But the real money when it comes to stupid in this book is the section on Ravages and Afflictions. These are special poisons and diseases that only damage bad people and are therefore usable by good people. This is absolutely incomprehensible from any ethical standpoint you could conceive of having. Poison on a dagger is only going to be used against one target (the target it is stabbed into), so if you only stab bad people with your dagger, then your poison will only affect bad people whether it's one of these special poisons or not. If causing ability damage to people you are trying to incapacitate or kill is unconscionable (as described in this very section), then the fact that all of these Ravages and Afflictions cause ability damage should make them equally morally unusable.

The core claim made here that it is not morally acceptable to use poisons that slow or paralyze in lieu of lethal force is something that does not make sense and cannot be made to jive with any ethical system I am aware of. I simply do not know of anyone anywhere who would sign on to the claim that it is morally superior to fire upon a crowd with live ammunition than it is to throw CS gas at them. But the secondary claim CS gas magically becomes morally righteous the moment everyone on your side gets a gas mask just makes it even weirder.

But that's not even the end of this fuckery up with which I shall not put. The actual Afflictions and Ravages themselves are super messed up. They are things like Unicorn Blood, which you apparently coat your arrows with by stabbing Unicorns (who are a Good creature in D&D) so that you can weaken enemies your arrows strike. But the absolute most fucked up one is this:

Raging Desire: This affliction causes insatiable sexual desire while preventing any possible fulfillment of that desire.

Yes, you read that right: this is a thing Good people use in order to slowly kill people they don't like while turning them into perpetually frustrated sex slaves. For great justice.

Then we get Relics. These have the same name as the Relics in Complete Divine, but have a completely different set of rules. These are various minor magic items that are based on Christian relics. So you got fragment of the true cross rack of tortured saint, shroud of turin saint's burial shroud, and of course the bleeding statue bleeding statue.

Thereafter, the book descends into more carbon copies of Book of Vile Darkness items. Specifically it pulls out the optional spell components. Like the Vile Components in the BoVD, these are reasonably expensive things that you can burn off in order to make your spells slightly better. However, instead of hacking bits off of good or innocent creatures to get your evil components, you're... hacking bits off of good or innocent creatures to get your good components. Because you're good, so ripping teeth out of the mouths of good creatures and draining the blood of heroes is not only totally OK but sacred and praiseworthy. It doesn't make a lot of sense, and confirms once more that simply copying noteworthy acts of evil and writing the word "good" on them doesn't work as a narrative device very often.

There are weird special materials. These are mostly noteworthy for non-magically replicating explicitly magical effects through holy fappery. Because Christians. And that's the chapter.

Chapter 4: Feats

The feat section is a short chapter. Just ten pages and it is a list of feats that are terrible. Most of them are terrible to have (in that they are horribad in their weakness), but the few that are powerful enough for players to consider using them are generally terrible for the game. Also, most of them are terrible conceptually.

The most major mechanic introduced here is the "Exalted" Feats. These are an exact carbon copy of the "Vile" feats from the Book of Vile Darkness, but with "Evil" crossed out and "Good" written in its place. Many of these are super puzzling. I have no idea why you need to be especially Good to get skill focus in your Wild Empathy class feature (the thing that Druids use to talk to animals). There are evil Druids in D&D. Lots of them. Many of them are super pointless. Like getting a small increase to your SR when attempting to resist spells with the Evil descriptor or doing inconsequential damage to undead when you successfully turn them and have thus already won the fight.

The ones that get the most attention are the Vows. These are feats where you declare that you're not going to allow the rest of the party to have adventures that are incompatible with an arbitrary restriction on your own actions, and in exchange for that (and the cost of a feat of course) you get some power. Mostly people rant about the Vows of Poverty (which as previously noted is easily broken and generally ruins the character who takes it if something cheesy isn't being done) and the Vow of Nonviolence (which literally punishes the entire team with morale penalties if they attempt to fight with weapons while you are around). But the Vows are all kinds of stupid and offensive.

The Vows are Abstinence, Chastity, Nonviolence, Obedience, Peace, Poverity, and Purity. These are especially noteworthy for being terrible. While Nonviolence and Peace could plausibly be taken as being Good in a general sort of way, they are extremely incompatible with Dunegons & Dragons adventures (where I remind you: demons are fought with swords on a regular basis). The others aren't even "good" things, just personal preferences (unless you get deep into Christian moralizing). I mean, you have good mother goddesses and good love goddesses, there is absolutely nothing specifically "good" about not having sex in D&D. Or anywhere else when you think about it, seeing as how very few people are going to go on record being against motherhood. Basically, we're just talking about Mitt Romney. But aside from the fact that the Vows are conceptually horrible, they are also a slow motion train wreck from a rules standpoint. The Vow of Chastity, in addition to being incomprehensible to exist in the first place, only gives out an extremely circumstantial bonus to saving throws that might never come up in the game at all. The Vow of Purity represents your great goodness by having you refuse to touch dead bodies (in a game where hauling around the corpses of your fallen comrades and looting the corpses of fallen enemies is both important work), so basically you're just a work-dodging asshole. For great justice. Also, the bonus is situational and likely to never come up.

But the Vow of Nonviolence, in addition to being a really shitty way to derail the entire campaign, is fairly game breaking in that it makes your spells so much harder to resist that you basically aren't even playing the same game. Coming and going, these feats are a catastrofuck.

Next up: the Prestige Classes.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

Man, the Prestige Classes are the part of the Book of Exalted Deeds that I actually remember, years later, as being horribly, transparently stupid even to my high-school aged newbie GM self. With I think only a single exception, they're all just Good versions of the 11 PHB base classes. That's a spectacular failure of imagination.

[virgil]

But the secondary claim CS gas magically becomes morally righteous the moment everyone on your side gets a gas mask just makes it even weirder.

Jedi might view it that way.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

The ravage that makes evil outsiders sex slaves sounds pretty awesome to me. How does one get a ravage like that? And where can I find mariliths or succubi or nightmares?

[RobbyPants]

The core claim made here that it is not morally acceptable to use poisons that slow or paralyze in lieu of lethal force is something that does not make sense and cannot be made to jive with any ethical system I am aware of. I simply do not know of anyone anywhere who would sign on to the claim that it is morally superior to fire upon a crowd with live ammunition than it is to throw CS gas at them. But the secondary claim CS gas magically becomes morally righteous the moment everyone on your side gets a gas mask just makes it even weirder.

I never even understood why poisons were evil in the first place. It's made perfectly clear that the only ability damage that can kill you is Con damage; anything else incapacitates you in various ways. So, most of the poisons listed in the DMG and MM are effectively tranquilizers, and using those in lieu of face stabbing is... evil.

But, yeah, I never thought of the whole CS gas/gas mask analogy. That makes this even more funny/stupid!

[Lago PARANOIA]

I never even understood why poisons were evil in the first place.

1.) Because ingested poisons were one of the few ways an average peasant could threaten the upper class in the old days.

2.) Because it was fucking up Gygax's games, probably. In Realms of Arkania -- a 1E/2E D&D TTRPG and cRPG clone -- poisons are near game-breakingly powerful.

[Prak]

Finally the UC Davis pepper spray incident makes sense, the cop was secretly an exalted paladin.

[Username17]

Chapter 5: Prestige Classes

For a book that sold itself as a source of power creep, it is perhaps unsurprising that it has a lot of prestige classes. And it has really a lot of prestige classes. It has twenty two. For comparison, the original Book of Vile Darkness had 18, and Defenders of the Faith only had 14. To an extent this shows how ultimately futile the Prestige Class system as envisioned in 3rd edition really was. Thirty three actual pages are given over to Prestige Classes, and it has more actual PrCs in it than almost any other book in the line. And yet, the conceptual space covered in this book is ludicrously small.

Prestige Classes are intended to provide choices in advancement that are dependent on the choices they made earlier. A knight character can go on to becoming an Anointed Knight, while a wizard character can't. But the thing is, you make way too many choices in character creation and development to ever get a reasonable coverage of Prestige Classes so that players have any real choices when it comes to character advancement. Consider: this book has a class called the Slayer of Domiel. It requires that you be a single classed Rogue (one of the 11 classes in the PHB), and that you max out your stealth (one of the more common things for Rogues to do, but by no means required), and that you be Lawful Good (one of the 9 potential alignments), and that you flush two feats down the drain into obscure Exalted Feats (which is both of your feats at level 5). Even discounting the skill and feat requirements, that is still a Prestige Class that gives just a single advancement option to 1/99th of the play space. At that rate, getting even a single advancement option to every single classed character (we haven't even touched on multiclass combinations yet!) would require four more books with as many Prestige Classes in them as this book has. To get the kind of choices you get at level 1 in the core rules (with 11 classes to choose from), the Book of Exalted Deeds or something like it would need to be written about 55 times. Obviously that never happened, and equally obviously it never was remotely plausible that it ever would.

So obviously, the Book of Exalted Deeds was working in a flawed paradigm. People wanted advanced options that they could take with their advanced characters and there was no way it was even possible to provide decent coverage using the Prestige Class framework. However, even within those limitations, the Prestige Classes in the Book of Exalted Deeds are amazingly uninspired.

Many of the Prestige Classes in this chapter are simply formulaic additions of Exalted Power to a regular class progression. The most grotesque example of course is the "Exalted Arcanist", which is just a Sorcerer who gets some Exalted crap (normally the shitty Exalted Spells are not available to Sorcerers, as an Exalted Arcanist, they are). When "flavor" is given at all, it is in more than half the cases (12 of 22) simply "X of Y" where X is some descriptor and Y is the name of some jankass god of Good. In almost every case, this god is a god that you will never read about anywhere other than the Book of Exalted Deeds. Yes, Barachiel was mentioned in Planes of Law, but his only mention in 3rd edition is the Book of Exalted Deeds. No one wants to write Barachiel down on their character sheet because he is a complete non-entity and there were already numerous Lawful Good gods that a player might actually give a rat's testicles about one way or the other.

A major problem then is that the book not only fails to cover a terribly large amount of the conceptual space for potential character advancement, it actually increases the space that needs to be covered! It introduces the Stalker of Kharash, which is an advancement option for Rangers who are Neutral Good and pay homage to Kharash. I can absolutely guaranty that before the Book of Exalted Deeds came out, there were zero characters who fit that bill. Because Kharash is an entity who was made up for this book: apparently because whoever wrote this particular book couldn't be fucked to look up Lucan, who used to be the chief Lupinal before the BoED went to print. And let's be honest: the chief Lupinal is obscure enough that I have a very powerful suspicion that there were zero people who made a Neutral Good Ranger who spent their time revering the fourth weakest of the chiefs of an obscure clade of furry celestials who run around in the woods on an outer plane known primarily for being the home grounds of the Gnomish pantheon before this book came out. I mean, what if we wanted to play a Neutral Good Ranger who revered the 3rd largest solar angel who worked for Pelor? Would we need some sort of "Morninglord" Prestige Class for that?

In short, by making the Prestige Classes that they offered so incredibly tiny in their covered niche, they ensured that not only would even modest splotchy coverage of the play space not happen in a reasonable number of books, it couldn't happen. You could put a thousand times a thousand books into print and fill them with Slayers of Domiel and Beloveds of Valarian and whatever X of Y classes you thought up and still never ever give players genuine advancement choices.

But it's not all about filling up the conceptual space and giving players genuine choices for their advancement options. In fact, it seems like basically none of it is. So let's get our jazz hands out and try to figure out what the fuck these things are actually for.

Jazz hands activated.

The author of the Prestige Class chapter intro (who I believe to be Darrin Drader, for what that is worth) starts with the hard sell right away. He really wants you to believe that the classes in this book are straight up overpowered. That is a really weird thing to try to tell the reader, because the first step of any player getting any use out of any expansion material is convincing every other person at the table that they should be allowed to do so. And that very frequently means convincing everyone at the table that the material is "fair". So when the chapter opens up like this:

There are prestige classes, and then there are prestige classes. Members of the prestige classes detailed in this chapter may well be among the most prestigious characters in any campaign world.

Yeah man, don't undersell things or anything. Fuck.

The thing is that most of these classes are actually fairly horrible. The balance point seems to be similar to that of the Sword and Fist days - you get classes whose levels give out about as much as the first levels of any other class. This is of course completely insane, because what you're actually supposed to do is to grow exponentially. So even though the authors decided to error on the side of "unreasonable power", it doesn't add up to anything because they are on the wrong end of this:

Even if the red line starts growing twice as fast, it is still going to be lost in the dust.

So all the classes where you restart with first level spells at the first level of the class (which is actually like 6th to 8th level as an actual character are unmitigated horse shit. A cruel hoax perpetuated on an unsuspecting public. Except the Apostle of Peace, which is a whole other piece of crazy. See, back in the Book of Vile Darkness, they had this class called the Ur Priest and what it did was bootstrap you into becoming a powerful late game caster by giving you spell levels really fast. That was a horrible thing for the game, because it involved spending several levels being far behind the curve and then later on you got ahead of the curve, and there were all kinds of stupid ways to break the game even more by stacking that onto other things. Go look up The Wish and The Word. But even if used "as intended", it still looked like this:

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M7yJxeDBu2j6OH7T4nDgoRlovkjg/wCnD+2TuH/M2HgBVKhOPXKDcDId/T17/wB53ESciGxt+1uKf9y+i8jg/wCnD+2TuH/Mz/Tl/bJ3D/md3Efh8PYv5vxX7vBeRwg/6cv7ZO4f8zu4idIYcYdDycTxmLxNcx3X3Erts/hfEU/qZYyt27TDLTU7jXpg6kc/SNRNnmXzJOI2jTp6O6g+rvY+5Rqeyaft7t5ukx/NUPFDsN2/jJGHwSUxZFVfcAL+8883zNM6ZoLor7/JeZA+yVW8urlHq0ly9rtc9lp7o7Kpqc2XM3rOTUbvNcj5SZEZUR4sui07tBERNHMREQBEg1troDlW9R/VpjOR7zuX5kTxxVar5TCivqoczn3udF+Q+ctEs34vaKUzYkljuRRmc+5R9d0j8RVrecJpJ6inlt+px5PuXtkrC4BKQ5CgX3nezfqY6mSIuugq+pqw+GWmuVFCgcwFptiJCiIiAIiIAiIgCIiAIiIAiIgCIiAIiIAlftj8L4in9TLCVu3WIWmQLkV6dhe1zfdfmgFlErxi63sB/wDsP7LM8ZiDuSivvqM30WWiWT4kDicQd9Skv6aZb9y39o8GMfLr1T1Llpj+Iv8AvFCya7gC5IA6SbSE+2qV7KTUPRTU1P3XT95lNi0hqUDHpcmof5XkxUAFgAB1aRoNSAuLrVPNoqD1qjZj3E/uRHgnP56o9T8vm07q7/mTN2J2eGOYFkf10Nj/AMhub5iV9baNfD+dQVqY/EpizAfmT/Gkq+Rl/Mt6NBUGVVCjoAsOwTZOSxvC13qomFyEMB5akEPc6EkjqkY8JsXZTkTlZrAUyTZSA1xm01M1y2TmI7aJxH3pxegCIbjMLUydLA8x6GHbPCcL8UQWCoQN5FMkD3nNHLY5qO6icSvCbGE24tb5gvmmHKO4HlaHUdsw/CjFi10XlbvFnXUr63SCI5bHMR28Tik4TYs0+MC0yubKOQSSbgaAHpIE8NwrxYFyigai/FNzb+fmjlscxHcROG+9eL15C6Xv4ptLaG+um49k9HhTiwLlE32txZv6NtL7uUO2OWxzEdvE5rg5t6tWrNTqhRlQmwUqb3Ua69c6WYarQ2nasRESFEREAREQBERAEREASu2z+F8RS+pkzE4haaNUc2VFLMehVFyewSDgcbSxtJr02srgNTqplZWyq63U/ldWH6hALKLyj2thcLhqRqvQQqCBZUUnU25yJF2LXweKZlp4cDKATmpqN5I0sT0TOZXXadlgYksN4iXurtOnvF5SLhMGbWp0dQp8jmYMRfTTRW7JvOysJ7OhuvuXd0+6W0c3CS6otLxeVSbKwp/Cogm9gVAJsbHQ+6ek2PhToKdE6X0CnTp90WTKyyvE5/aa4SgwV6CkkX5KKee3ORN2EweFqUxVFFApOXVBe+bKN1+czVPqZtdCs4QbDqHECph6a2yi9rAFrte4uOYiRKOzsYpBNIORexYgkXy84b8gHbOhp7PwjbqVI9eTTew1PNqjdk2jZGFO6nQ1F9y7hvM3nfQxkT1s5lNnYwW8UNECDlBTlBBXUNzFb/M/LXQ2HiUQqKNyWJzFhoCuU2GbeRff0zqDsvCXA4uhqpbyRuHP7tZtGwcOd1Gl3RHMexOWtzlRs3GeyHnDU8oAXLByCM1iLgb4pbIxK3tRA8WyLZh6TZhe7eiSSDv3TqvAGH9jS7gmfAGH9jS7gjmMvLRx+H2Ji0AApDQ31K+sjet00x+82Utl4xQgFIcg6coWIuxsy5rEctubnnV+AMP7Gl3BHgDD+xpdwRzGTlrc5Vtm4w+VSBNgASwuCFZS2jakh2vfnM8jZOLsRxQszhzygOUMtiCGuPJ/czrPAGH9jS7gjwBh/Y0u4I5jHLW5TcG9mVkxL1atMIGQjQi17r0HqvOpvK/wBh/Y0u4JnwBh/Y0u4JiTt2biqVE+8XlPjNn4Wlkz0afjKi01tTB5TXtfoGh1mvisBnan/wBrnU2ZbpdSFLG45uSrH3KeiQ0Xl4vOfvgCwRVw7sai0yECuVZwzLmA3AhTr1T3Wp4BHam/2RXRC7KxRSqAAlmBOgAINzAL28XlATs/la4TkKrPykGVWtlLa6A5h3h0zDvs4DMWwYAVGJzJYK/kMddzcx54B0F4vKJqeABIP2W4dUIumjsLqv6iATbqM8U/sBsCMMrFXYKxRWyoWDNa+4ZGN/ynoNgL+8zKSlh8C9PjVGFancjOChS4NiM17XvLmnawy2tYWtutzWgGvF4VatN6b6q6MjC9rqwKnUbtDI2x9kDDqwz1KjO2ZnfLmYhFpr5IAFkpqN3NfeTEQDG3NkfaaJpFst2U3tm3G+6QuD3BcYRnYVC+cAeTltYk9PXETDhFyzdp6I8Tixwngp+6+wk+AVBLKzAnjNdNM9rd3UD9RnqhsNVFrk6odQPRdnHyu37TES5EZePiNVYOwlvfMee+g5zUIsebzp9+k34fZwR84NhkC5QLA2tYnpOn7+6IjKiPGm9GyLtjYAxDKxcrZbeTfnv0zfhdkhKBoZiQQwzWsRfnHWIibzOqOOVXZlNkqt8pI5WYbjbxZQWB5tSfeTNZ2ICAMxsEK2sOdXUn3nOb9YmIi2KR7qbIBZjfRgRbKLC4Ue/0B7pNo08qgXJsALnebDeYiLFHuIiQoiIgCIiAIiIBB2rsoV1UFnQpUWorLluGW9tGBBGp5pUHgFQIqhy7cbUFQmyKwbOaj2dVDZXZnupNrOwFgYiAbqXA6klRqiM6lq4riy07q2d3Zc2S5Qmo+hJtfS0xiuCS1q1apVqOUqG601ygKTQSizElblsqkb7AHdfWIgGvaPA8MXqU3cOX4ymCyhKdQ1aVVmByEm7UUNmzDfYa6a6XASmcMlGq7M68UxcBSC9OkaV8jqQQVZrg3380RAN9TgXTLMwqVUzVaVQBAiBDTBAyWXkkg2LjlEAC9p4rcBKLenWClWUqCtiWFcBr5bgqMTUtY23XBtriIBYVeDdJqNWic+Ss4d9bG4CCwNtB4tf3k/CYRaVNaaCyooVRvsqiw1PUIiAf/9k=[/img]

So naturally, if the Book of Vile Darkness did something that was best classified as a crime against humanity, which even on first consideration was a priori a terrible idea for which there could be no excuses or mitigations, then the Book of Exalted Deeds had to do it too. And scratch the word "Evil" off and write "Good". But even at that, they managed to make it more upsetting and cover the table with more poop miasma. The Apostle of Peace is a class which is literally based around taking the vows of Peace, Nonviolence, and Poverty at the same time. Then it does the whole crazy accelerated but restarted casting progression thing from the Ur Priest on top of that. It is quite simply the worst class ever written. It destroys the game in every manner it is possible to destroy the game. It's kind of beautiful in a way: no other class could ever reach the heights of game defecating ineptitude that this does. Sure, you could write a class that was worse in some metrics, but I can't envision how you would do so in a way that wasn't obvious parody. And once something is relegated to the joke bin, it's so much less likely to be allowed into a game unmodified that the damage to the game would be incalculably less.

By the way: special props go out to the authors for making the Exalted Wizard Prestige Class (the Celestial Mystic). Not because you would ever take it, because you would not. But because it both metaphorically neuters you (by making you lose all important caster levels) and literally neuters you (by making you take a vow of chastity). No one is ever going to take the Wizard prestige class in here, which highlights another problem with this whole method of handling Prestige Classes: even if it wasn't a Sisyphean task to provide Prestige Class options for all the possible character types, actually providing options that are worthless and instantly rejected is a whole lot like not providing an option in the first place.



Next up: Chapter 6: Magic. We're spliting chapters 5 and 6 up because they are really long.

-Username17

[zugschef]

not to forget how terrible the editing of the prestige class chapter is. just look at initiate of pistis sophia which has sanctify ki strike as a prerequisite which itself has ki strike (lawful) as a prerequisite which you get at monk level ten. does there ring a bell? you can enter this prestige class at level 13 at the earliest, but it has 10 levels. on top of that this class gets improved evasion twice.

btw, they didn't even adress this in the official boed errata.

[fectin]

I like how apostle of peace can't use armor, but can use rings of protection and bracers of armor, as though it weren't completely moot, because Vow of Poverty is a prereq.

Though, I would be up for dipping Apostle of Peace in a Dread Necro build. That actually seems pretty sweet for a Great Leap Fantasy campaign (if convoluted from alignment shennanigans).

[Koumei]

So here's the question: could they have possibly done a better job with BED? I mean, did they have anyone competent on staff who could have kept their penisreligion out of it, understood what D&D alignments, deities and planes involved and could have made a good product?

I'm not talking about making good feats or prestige classes: there aren't many books that are good at that. We'll assume that they'd still have feats like "Your Favoured Enemy bonuses apply against all monsters with the [Evil] Subtype (requires Favoured Enemy: [Evil] Outsiders)" and prestige classes like "The Assassin... but GOOD" and "The Nonlethal Damager".

But with a chapter that talks about what Good means in D&D, a world where you can literally detect Good. And about how various people might view their Alignment and justify their actions even if they know they're not Good. A thing on the kind of major goals the Exalted person should have, and how being Really Good can still mesh with being a murder hobo.

And then with rules to cover doing Really Good actions, and a bunch of Ultragood monsters that can be encountered as opposition for Evil teams, opposition for teams that aren't totally super Good (with a specific callout to how Angels Are Jerks), a mention on how the CG and LG Outsiders are totally arguing and fighting each other until they find something Evil to gang up on, and similar crap.

Could they have done that, or was WotC basically doomed to make a terribad BED?

[Prak]

And let's be honest: the chief Lupinal is obscure enough that I have a very powerful suspicion that there were zero people who made a Neutral Good Ranger who spent their time revering the fourth weakest of the chiefs of an obscure clade of furry celestials who run around in the woods on an outer plane known primarily for being the home grounds of the Gnomish pantheon before this book came out.

...I thought the companions came from the Beastlands, while the gnome pantheon comes from Bytopia?

Oh, apparently the Companions come from Elysium. Still, though, Garl comes from Bytopia.

The author of the Prestige Class chapter intro (who I believe to be Darrin Drader, for what that is worth) starts with the hard sell right away. He really wants you to believe that the classes in this book are straight up overpowered. That is a really weird thing to try to tell the reader, because the first step of any player getting any use out of any expansion material is convincing every other person at the table that they should be allowed to do so. And that very frequently means convincing everyone at the table that the material is "fair". So when the chapter opens up like this:

There are prestige classes, and then there are prestige classes. Members of the prestige classes detailed in this chapter may well be among the most prestigious characters in any campaign world.

I'm reasonably certain he meant prestigious as in "acclaimed" or "well respected," as one might reasonably expect of a champion of good. ..at least amongst other good characters. One could argue this is meaningless, since a Thrall of Demogorgon is as acclaimed amongst Demogorgonists as a Slayer of Domiel is amongst the forces of good, but a Slayer of Domiel is at least vaguely likely to be well respected by Joe the Crap Covered Farmer, as well.

[Chamomile]

One could argue this is meaningless, since a Thrall of Demogorgon is as acclaimed amongst Demogorgonists as a Slayer of Domiel is amongst the forces of good, but a Slayer of Domiel is at least vaguely likely to be well respected by Joe the Crap Covered Farmer, as well.

Additionally, it's quite likely that the author, being demonstrably incapable of leaving his real world baggage out of D&D Land, simply hasn't thought of the possibility that child sacrificing cultists have actual entire societies where they are totally respected as a cross between a rock star and a saint. That this sort of thing totally happens in the real world also is probably also something a cloistered, self-absorbed Christian wouldn't realize, as he lives in a tiny bubble where Christian values are exalted and believes that all fiction should also exist in this bubble.

[Username17]

So here's the question: could they have possibly done a better job with BED?

Not with James Wyatt at the writing helm. There are actually lots of frameworks that could have done OK with the Book of Exalted Deeds. you could have gone with the full "Good is golden light instead of red light, fucking deal with it". You could have gone with the "different meanings of good" route and talked about how while "Good" has an absolute meaning in the game, that meaning is going to be different at different tables based on the zeitgeist of the gaming group and you might want to have a mature conversation about it. Or they could have gone the full "fingers in the dikes" and said that actually since the D&D world is so crawling with evil and danger that being good really is just about running around putting out fires and keeping things from getting any worse. Heck, you could even have done a "moral options" chapter to start things off and given the golden light and firefighter options as ways to smooth over table arguments when you have players with incompatible ideas of what "good" should mean.

And yeah, Chris Perkins obviously doesn't know enough about this topic to even block out a book for development that would do that well. And James Wyatt is a bad writer at the best of times and really shouldn't be allowed near a keyboard on matters of faith and justice. What they needed was someone trained in philosophy or anthropology or both. And while I don't know if any of their staff members counted as such, it is inconceivable to me that they don't know anyone with a humanities degree.

As for the Prestige Classes and other players' options, I genuinely think they were worse than they had to be. The whole thing where they ran up a bunch of shitty carbon copies of Book of Vile Darkness stuff was just mind bogglingly stupid. Book of Vile Darkness got a fair amount of traction with some cultists of Demon Lords and Archdevils, so they decided to make a bunch of cultists of various Celestial named characters? That's stupid. Being a cultist of a Demon Lord has panache that being a cultist of an angelic functionary simply does not have. There are a lot of Dungeon Magazine adventures about such-and-such a cult of Devil Worshippers or something. Cults of Eladrin, not so much.

For fuck's sake, they could have written up a short list of stuff "good people" might be expected to do and then written up some prestige classes that do those things. So like Healer, Diplomancer, Van Helsing, Demon Hunter, Investigator, and so on. And yeah, most of them would be fucking terrible, but at least they wouldn't be "Champion of Gwynharwyf" levels of "no one gives a shit about this concept". I understand that Gwynharwyf is sort of based on something from the ill-fated Blood Wars card game, but for fucking fuck it's even misspelled. No one fucking cares about that card enough to decide that their Barbarian wanted to be in her retinue.

And if they did care enough, they would probably want the Hs in the right place.

So while I think Book of Exalted Deeds was in serious trouble from a conceptual standpoint, I think it could have been a book ranging from decent to very good if they had bothered to think the book through rather than just do a shitty copy of everything in the Book of Vile Darkness and then let James Wyatt jerk off on top. If they had started from the premise "We're going to make a 190 page D&D book about Good" rather than the premise "We're going to try to make a book that is just like the Book of Vile Darkness", I think it is possible that they could have had something. No guarantees of course, but I don't think they were predestined to fail.

-Username17

[Koumei]

Not with James Wyatt at the writing helm.

Oh, that goes without saying, yeah. Well it would, except you said it. But he has proven what he would do, by actually doing it.

And we also know that it could be done well by someone. It'd be harder than "an awesome book about necromancy" or "a book where we make dungeons interesting again" or whatever, I'm sure that's part of why you and K held off on Tome of Virtue and it'll never be completed. But it was at all possible.

I think it is possible that they could have had something. No guarantees of course, but I don't think they were predestined to fail.

That's pretty much what I was wondering. So if they had looked carefully through their roster, and paid the ten dollars to consult someone with a humanities degree, then maybe they could have made a hit. Which makes the result so much more disappointing.

[Username17]

And we also know that it could be done well by someone. It'd be harder than "an awesome book about necromancy" or "a book where we make dungeons interesting again" or whatever, I'm sure that's part of why you and K held off on Tome of Virtue and it'll never be completed. But it was at all possible.

I'm not really sure that making a book about "Good" is really that hard. I mean, when was the last time you threw a book across the room because "it only had player usable material in it"? Even if they had just gone with their initial inclinations and made a book that was just a bunch of power creep for good characters it would have stood at about the level of Magic of Feyrun or something (that is to say: reasonably well selling and absolutely despised for being full of shitty rules and ridiculous infinite power loops).

The real culprit here is that there seems to be a huge dropoff in quality every time WotC puts out more books in a series. There's nothing special about cold climates that makes for an especially grabbing D&D book concept, but Frostburn was pretty great (as 3.5 books go). Sandstorm was constrained into using exactly the same format, and was only kind of OK, and Stormwrack was completely stupid once it was shoved into that formula and I don't give a fuck about it at all. When the Races of Short books got to Races of Humans it was completely ridiculous and we just wanted them to go away.



I think basically what we're seeing here is a failure of developers. That a first title in a series might be pretty inspired because it's compiled out of chapters that people submitted as suggestions for the title because they were things they wanted to do. The subsequent books in the series are just written to formula and no one is really asked or allowed to submit fresh ideas. For Races of Stone, people probably submitted various proposals and the developer compiled the suggestions that sounded coolest. For Races of the Wild, the developer was asking for submissions for "Chapter 3: the new playable race with a small LA that does something we don't normally let players do with the chapter subheadings: 'A Day in the Life', 'Description (secondary headings 'Overview' and 'Racial Traits'), Psychology..." Is there any wonder it reads like warmed over boiler plate? That's exactly what it is!

So while a huge part of the failure of the Book of Exalted Deeds is that James Wyatt can't shut up about Jesus, it was probably destined to be at best "not very interesting" as long as Chris Perkins was submitting chapter requests along the lines of "write some rules and flavor text to make something that works exactly like Corrupt Spells, but for Good".

As for the Tome of Virtue specifically, I don't think it was the hardest thing on our list. The hardest thing on our list was the Book of Gears. And that was next. We stopped because K and I were no longer able to work together because of physical distance and because the Tome project was getting too divisive. With each level we added, the changes required onto the game system became more severe. Heck, I think with Races of War we had already stepped over the line of "minimal changes" and "backwards compatibility". I'm not saying that it was wrong to do so, but I admit that I think we did. Really, we were looking at having to write a new system from scratch, and with it being so much rarer that we got to have face to face discussions that was just really hard to do.

-Username17

[codeGlaze]

I don't necessarily think a book on Good being the reversal of Evil has to be a terribad thing.

At the very least it's a good starting point. Because you know people will compare the two and go "THAT'S NOT FAIR! EVIL GOT fnsdfk;scnascd!!"

I think what made it bad was exactly what you've pointed out about a dozen times by now, they were lazy with it. They didn't innovate at all.

[angelfromanotherpin]

AEG gave this idea a shot with their d20 Good book, which I recall thinking was pretty decent back before I developed critical thinking. If I can dig up a copy, I might give it a go-over as a comparison.

[name_here]

I think that stylistically doing a straight inversion of the Evil book was doomed from the very beginning. Can anyone think of media where angel cultists are even a thing?

Their prestige classes should either have been generic or been dedicated to the major gods, like the Radiant Guard Of Pelor or something. If they really wanted to get the Good Outsiders in there, they could have simply said that Solar X represents Pelor's aspect of Protection or something. Also, good-aligned spells are drawing from a smaller conceptual space than evil spells once you consider that Create Food and Water and the like already exist and are NOT good-aligned spells.

[codeGlaze]

Their prestige classes should either have been generic or been dedicated to the major gods, like the Radiant Guard Of Pelor or something.

That's something I forgot to mention, too. They could have *easily* just made Champion/Saint/Xtreme Worshipper of Lawful/Chaotic/Neutral Good; and allowed you to fill in a Deity that fit that particular PrC's good alignment.

I wonder if it ever even occurred to them to do that. Shit, they could have wasted page space with EXAMPLE npcs of like 3 or 4 different deities for EACH alignment PrC.

[OgreBattle]

I think that stylistically doing a straight inversion of the Evil book was doomed from the very beginning. Can anyone think of media where angel cultists are even a thing?

REAL LIFE:

Taiping Rebellion, guy insists he is the brother of Jesus and converts a ton of people to Christianity and destroyed a lot of Buddhist temples.

Today in Taiwan, you have cases of Christian converts being told to go "convert their ancestors" so they smash the Buddhist imagery off their graves and drive crosses in. You now have people making sure in their will that when they die their weird kids can't go convert them after death.

Crusaders in the holy land. Knights Templar are kind of both as they are also accused of being a demon cult.

Old Testament has plenty of examples of the chosen ones being saved while meteors fall or the angel of death descends to cut down the infidels. The angel cult in Egypt manages to call down plagues and darkness, and even kill the Pharaoh's son.... yeah it's kind of hard to tell it apart from a demon cult huh.

Angel cults have successfully exterminated many American cultures. As recent as 50 years ago you had native american kids taken from their homes to "kill the Indian, save the human within" to make sure they become good Christian people.


VIDYAGAMES

The badguys in the latest Pokemon game, Team Plasma, use the Chi-Rho (sign of Christianity to Emperor Constantine of Rome) as their symbol and run around dressed as crusaders telling people they are morally inferior.



The Order of Messiah in the Shin Megami Tensei series are most literally an Angel cult as they are lead by the 4 Archangels trying to create an artificial messiah to bring God back.

The Temple in Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga. Their leader's name is 'Angel', the protagonists are considered dangerous 'demons'.

Final Fantasy Tactics. Divine beings which founded the church are now manipulating events to bring about the rebirth of the messiah.

Final Fantasy XIII, Cocoon is a society ruled by various divine beings. They will occasionally mark a human to be "chosen", they either fulfill their task and turn into crystal, or fail and turn into a monster. The protagonists fight against them and their fate.

Final Fantasy XI. The Worshippers of the Goddess Altana battle against the beastmen and their mysterious demon allies. It turns out that the beastmen actually won the war, but the Goddess had changed the flow of history and the protagonists are the force of the new timeline. Demons are actually people from the 'true timeline' which is being erased, they don't want to disappear into nothing.


MANGA

Shaman King, one of the antagonist groups are Christians who could summon angels, they see all other spirits as the work of evil.

Naruto, one of the villains belongs to a 'weird cult' where salvation can only come from their one true god. Shikamaru fights him and it's basically the triumph of Confucian bonds over montheistic salvation values.

Drifters. Fantasy setting. The beastmen have a new leader appear among them who can heal the sick and wounded with a touch. This mysterious man says he will lead the 'meek' beastmen to inherit the earth from humanity. Joan of Arc is one of his minions.

Berserk.

I hope this fulfills your criteria for angel cult, unless there was a misunderstanding. I would have liked a Book of Exalted Light which is more about the ABSOLUTE RIGHTEOUSNESS aspect of good so you could still have antagonists of them if you wanted, or provide antagonists for a BoVD evil campaign.

[Chamomile]

Final Fantasy X also has an entrenched hierarchical religion with vaguely Christian overtones being shown to be hypocritical power-mongers who are continuing the cycle of death and destruction followed by brief periods of peace so that they can reap the benefits of the people being in a perpetual state of fear for their lives that the giant Satan-kaiju will attack or else a state of gratitude that it's been driven off for a few years. The Satan-kaiju was supposedly summoned because people used too much technology and otherwise violated the canon of the religion that emerged in the post-apocalyptic ruins of its first attacks. In case that was too subtle, the name of the kaiju is Sin. Like, that is actually its name.

Final Fantasy XII also has a cadre of angel-looking overlords commanding the princess and arguably the main character (XII is weird about main characters, and really the only thing we're sure of is that it's not the viewpoint character) to use magical nukes on her enemies, something which she ultimately refuses to do. You don't have an actual confrontation with any of the angels except for the one who went rogue, but it's still pretty clear that they're the bad guys.

So yeah, Final Fantasy games love themselves some angel cults.

[Grek]

I honestly think if they'd started out with the BoED first and then published the BoVD, things would have turned out much better. You can have an Evil character who does nice things occasionally, and people will accept that as long as the character does something Evil as well. And they'll also accept Evil people being written as foils for Good people much more readily than they'll accept the reverse. As long as the BoED had a strong showing and a clear idea of what Good was supposed to mean, people would have bought it. And since they weren't doing a palette swap of the BoVD, nobody would have even considered Ravages and Afflictions as a thing that should exist.

[Torko]

I would immediately believe in a benevolent Christian God if He incinerated any writer who forgets that theology and ethics in RPGland is different from medieval Christianity.