Sorry folks, I was in Moravia. There was a village festival, where we dressed up in costumes and ceremonially buried a cello and went trick or treating for booze. I almost ended up dressed in the town's ceremonial bear outfit and forced to drink all the booze and dance with all the women, but I narrowly missed that honor/obligation and merely drank most of the booze. Noone got put in a wicker man and lit on fire, so I think we're OK. For now.
Brief replies before I get back to the review:
- Kuo-Toa do in fact just sit in their hidden domains and murder stab anyone who comes into it, and they are supposedly as evil as they come. So claiming that Wood Elves are any different is just... weird.
- I didn't call attention to the Grey Elves' really creepy society where social engineering has forced everyone of the low castes to accept a life of menial labor, because while the writing style is a bit on the creepy side that is actually par for the course in D&D. Any society that has hereditary leadership and also crap covered farmers must logically have hereditary underclass, and those divisions must be maintained by social engineering or force of arms or both. Since virtually every society in D&D land, "good" or "evil", has hereditary leaders and also underclasses, every society has to be doing something horrible to keep that status quo. Every. Single. One. The Grey Elf line where they use heavy handed propaganda to keep everyone in line, but at least they guaranty all their casteless underlings a roof over their head and a place inside the city walls, that's one of the best deals the crap covered farmers get in any D&D society of any nominal alignment. The thing which is bullshit is actually the High Elves and Sea Elves, where there are kings and queens who are born into the roles, and a majority of the population are crap covered farmers - but supposedly everyone is self actualized and doing whatever they want to. That is some seriously fucked up shit. How the fucking hell have the Sea Elves managed to self actualize everyone and have a majority of the population decide that they want to do menial labor tending kelp beds in shark infested waters all day as a commoner?
Anyway, what we're actually here for is the blatant powergaming and madness that is Chapter 10. So here it is.
Chapter 10: Character Creation and Kits
This chapter is not like the ones before it in that it does not begin with in-character fiction at all. No, this chapter is all crunch. And it starts with the Random Elf Table. This is possibly the most useless thing I have ever seen in my entire life. You roll a d100, a d8, a d20, three separate d6s, and a d3. And then each of these dice spits out a result that is evenly distributed among the possibilities for an Elf. So your d8 gives you an equal chance of encountering an Elf Thief as it does of having you encounter an Elf Fighter/Thief. Fighter/Mage is mysteriously on that chart twice, but I think that is probably a typo because triple class is not on there at all.
Not enough can be said of how crazy this chart is. It gives an equal chance of you encountering a Drow or a High Elf or a Sea Elf. This is so fucking insane that even the book seems apologetic and says the DM should modify as necessary for terrain. That being the case, why are Sea Elves on that chart at all? They don't leave the water, and no one else breathes fucking water! The only bit on here that is even
weighted is the die roll to determine alignment, and
that doesn't change its weighting dependent upon what kind of Elf you are encountering. So the Random Elf Table spits out the same alignment spread for Grey Elves (LG), Wood Elves (N), High Elves (CG), and Drow (CE). What the shitfuck? Although the best part is the part where you roll a d6 for personality and get one of the six available choices: Compassionate, Cruel, Haughty, Frivolous, Proud, and Obsessed. Note that Haughty and Proud are basically the same thing.
Then it gives you the page worth of Elven bonuses. It is important to note that things in 2nd Edition AD&D are crazy, so Elven perception bonuses are phrased in terms of an enhanced chance of finding a secret door, but even in that context this shit is weird. This book not only has all the crazy stacks of bonuses that Elves actually get in 2nd Edition, it right here adds some more. Apparently they can now have specially made Elven Bows that allow them to add their Elvish Bow Training to damage rolls, and they also get to turn invisible in natural surroundings. Just to make sure that I hadn't forgotten some of the crazy that was the 2nd edition AD&D Elf bonuses, I checked that against the PHB. Nope: was not there. This book just fucking makes up extra
extremely powerful abilities for Elves to get for free. This is on top of the
other extra powers it suggested in Optional Rules and Elven Physiology. I don't even know what game they thought they were writing for.
Then it talks about the various Elvish subraces, and how to go about playing them. Remember that this is the 2nd Edition rules, so that races not only have stat modifiers, they also have allowed stat ranges. So while Aquatic Elves have an Intelligence
penalty, they also have an Intelligence
minimum. You dump stat Int, but you can't
all the way dumpstat Int, because it's 2nd edition and shit is crazy. The Drow have a Charisma
penalty, but also a Charisma
minimum, again because shit is crazy. Drow also have an experience penalty, where you multiply the XP required to reach each level in each class by 1.2. This is the most irritating and ineffectual way to pay for additional character power I have ever seen.
But it gets worse, because Grey Elves pay for
their heaping helping of overpowered crazy by having you multiply the XP values at every line in the chart by 1.15. Yes, really. So if you're a Grey Elf Ranger, in order to get to 2nd level you would normally need to have 2,250 XP. But because you're a Grey Elf you need 2,587.5 XP, and I haven't the faintest idea what the fuck happens to the fraction. Note that Grey Elves don't actually have any
powers worth mentioning, they just have stat modifiers that are ridiculously awesome if you happen to be a Wizard (+2 Intelligence). So you would never, ever consider being a Grey Elf Ranger even if it didn't turn your XP progression into a kaleidoscope of agony and despair. If you were going to play a Ranger you would be a Wood Elf. Because they get a Strength bonus. And being a Wood Elf doesn't cost you any XP at all, although it tells the DM to punish a Wood Elf player for bad roleplaying by docking the XP they actually get if they aren't a raging asshole to everyone they meet. How this is supposed to be at all conducive to playing a cooperative storytelling game I have no idea. Playability does not seem to be much of a concern with this book.
But then we get to the Kits. This is where the shit really hits the fan. There is one kit for Priests. It lets you flawlessly identify plants in your chosen terrain at level 5. No one fucking care. There are no less than 3 kits for Warriors, and we still don't care. One of them gives you a free Griffon to ride around on at level 6, but only after you take a year off from adventuring to acquire it, at which point you will have presumably missed the entire campaign. One of them allows you to make crude traps out of wood and vine and forbids you from adventuring with the other player characters if they want to enter cities or dungeons, which they do. The only one you'd actually take is the Archer, because that basically lets you trade your Elven to-hit bonus with Longswords away for a rate of fire increase with bows. Firing 3 shots a round at first level before you even dip into the extra bullshit in the optional rules is what passes for real ultimate power in 2nd edition AD&D. It reminds you that the Elven Minstrel kit exists, which is the Elven option to play a Demi-Bard. But in "the interest of saving space" they ask that you go buy the Complete Book of Bards if you want to actually
see those rules. Because fuck you.
What really sets this book apart though is that there are kits for multiclassed characters. As a Mage/Thief, you can be a Spellfilcher. That's a special kit that gives you a bunch of magic detection and the ability to suppress magical traps. Note: this is 2nd edition, where Thieves were expected to go on point because they could find traps, but were absolutely powerless against
magic traps, which was most of the high level traps, so the ability to actually do anything about magic traps was paradigm breaking in that it involved Thieves who weren't
completely useless at their job at mid levels. Never to let a decent idea go without shitting on it, this book then announces that as a pure RP thing, characters with this kit are all part of a guild that won't let them go on adventures with the other player characters. Again, I have no idea how the author thought these rules should be "played" considering how many cockblocks there are to actually participating in the adventure with other player characters.
There are other multiclass kits that simply don't matter. As a Fighter/Thief you can take a penalty on talking to strangers for some minor bonuses to your Thief Skills. As a Fighter/Mage/Thief you can move stuff around in ways that are too complicated to even describe and you don't care. As any class at all you can announce that you are an "Undead Hunter" now, which like every other Undead Hunter kit I've ever seen, mostly involves you signing up to get your face punched in by a Specter.
But all that pales in comparison to the main Fighter/Mage kit: the Bladesinger. Note, we are no longer talking about "bladesingers", we are talking about "Bladesingers". With a capital B. The "B" is for "Better than you". There's also a War Wizard who is better than you, and that doesn't even matter because the Bladesinger is
more better than you. First of all, before even getting into the kit itself, the section says that Elven Fighter/Mages can cast spells in any "elven made" or "magical" armor. That means you can get platemail up in this bitch, which is
way better than the "only mithril chainmail" that the losers trying to use the PHB get to contend with.
The Bladesinger trades away all his weapon proficiencies except the Longsword. He doesn't even get the +1 to-hit with a bow for being an Elf. In exchange they get bonuses to... everything. Attack, Damage, Defense, Special Attacks (reduce the penalty for any special combat maneuver), Special Defenses (bonus Parry each round), all get bonuses. Quite large, and level scaling bonuses. They can cast their spells not only in armor but can explicitly cast their spells one-handed and in melee. It's just all around superior with no real drawbacks to speak of.
Next up: Chapter 11: Elven Equipment. This is where we get to more familiar ground of explaining how Elves have stuff that is better than your stuff.
-Username17
