Underdark Adventure Guide

[JoeGKushner]

The Underdark Adventure Guide is a great companion for those who want to adventure in the Underdark as non-standard races. When I first saw the book, I thought, didn't Mike Mearls cover all of this in Dungeon Craft ? True, Dungeon Craft wasn't about the Underdark specifically, but there were several parts of it that fit nicely into such a niche. In addition, Goodman Games itself just released Monsters of the Endless Dark. What more really was there to say? Especially at $28 for 144 pages.

With the new races, I didn't think much of the options. In 3.5, the Monster Manual covers a lot of this ground. Deep Dwarves? Drow? Duergar? Svifrneblin? Troglodytes? All already covered with official stats and racial traits. Still, there were some, like the Derro, Half-Drow and Gloom Barbarians that weren't covered. More impressive then the races though, were the racial templates. Little things that make a book stand out more, much like the quick templates in Monsternomicon did. These include the Exile, Shadowkin, Vindicator and Wolfbred These are useful for showing how your drow is different than the other drow and gives role playing notes, minor bonuses, penalties and other notes to incorporate them into your game.

Maybe you're not interested in new races, but would like to know how standard classes could be tweaked to fit into an underdark campaign? The authors provide some interesting ideas like clerics being able to Turn or Rebuke Spiders instead of Undead and different familiars for sorcerers and wizards. Sometimes these benefits might be a little too much. Fighters for example, get to treat derro, drow, duergar and svirfneblin exotic weapons as martial for no penalty.

I found the radiomancer, a spellcaster who uses radiation, interesting, but wonder if perhaps a chain of radioactive feats, similar to the necromancer feats, wouldn't be the way to go. Cast spells like a wizard, have low hit points, attack, fort and ref saves, but get mutations, no familiars, and poison their comrades! Oh wait, those weren't all benefits. No, their benefit is that they don't need spellbooks. Nice beneift and the mutations can be beneficial but feats would've been the way to go here.

Of more use and utility, are the prestige classes. These are broken up into sections, general and then racial, covering most of the races mentioned as player options early. Want to be a Pit Fighter or Envoy? How about a Surface Raider for the drow or a Clutch Guardian for the Troglodyte? Some of these PrCs have been done to death like Pit Fighter, but others, like the Stone shield Guardians, the defenders of deep gnome communities, add details to the underdark setting. The nice thing here is the variety in levels. The author didn't feel that each class warranted a full ten level PrC, but didn't feel that each one was just worth a nod with 5 either. Each feels complete in and of themselves with enough variety that most players will find something to add to their wish list while most GMs can fill out different roles in their dark societies.

Feats include the Radiocative Caster, a metamagic feat that lets you use a radioactive fragment to simulate a metamagic feat without using a higher level slot. The problem is the radiation which causes Con loss and mutation. Use this one wisely. For those who miss the old style infravision, it's back as a feat as are other vision feats like low-light, superior dark and dark vision. A nice but short mix of feats useful for combat and role playing purposes as one could use Slave Leader to avoid a beating and then latter, use Advantageous Blow to lay those guards low latter.

Some will enjoy the racial and cultural feats as they allow more variety in the races. Drow for example, can be masters of dual weapons or use Arcane Prosthetics while troglodytes can be amphibious or swallow their foes whole with Huge Gullet. The troglodtyle feats are nice because they make the creatures much more deadly in hand to hand combat and reminded me quite a bit of some of the feats from the Complete Guide to Velociraptors.

Now I mentioned arcane prosthetics but how do you make them? That would be with craft (engineering), arcane prosthetics skill. Rules and examples provided for many types of artificial limbs and the various materials they can be made of. Different options for masterwork weapons are included like laminated, razor edge or serrated. Some of these I've seen in other books like AEG's Mercenaries but it's nice to have more options. In some ways, the armor options, for example, remind me of Ben's Heroes of High Favor Dwarves book with new options for masterwork armor like Extra Articulation where the Dex bonus maximum is increased or Large Armor Spikes can be added. Good stuff that makes characters different without being magical.

Being in the underdark also requires different materials that standard adventurers would have. So beyond the torch and lantern, we have flash globes, sulfur and starstone minerals that burst with light and brace crossbows with the potential of being made of different metals like starstone and crystalline.

Now GM's may be wondering, what's in it for me? While they can make use of all of the material mentioned so far, that's really for players. No, GMs are going to want to look over Chapter Two, Creatures of the Underdark. Without duplicating material from Dungeon Craft or Monsters of the Endless Dark, the authors have added a few new templates and monsters to make the dark reaches even more dangerous. It could be something as simple as the arachnoid template with it's four examples or the dangerous lava giants, like the one featured on the cover. The only issue here is not every monster is illustrated and the lava giant's illustration is actually the cover show in black and white.

The one creature I really don't know how to feel about is the athasi. These are a 'master' unknown race that keeps to the shadows and are building their power with dangerous weapons like the Bronze Reapers, dangerous constructs, even as they use their psionic abilities to fight the children of the gods. On one hand, it's great to have another dangerous race that can be the great unknown but on the other, do we really need it? Especially since no racial traits are provided for GMs to quickly customize their own versions and NPCs?

So the GM is now going, great, between this and my other books, I have a ton of material to launch at my players, but where do I put it? Chapter Three, Creating the Underworld, will help guide you in making your underdark a unique area by going through basic creation steps that help you define it's size, purpose, roles and factions. This section is great for new GMs but does cross a little with Dungeoncraft in that there's only so many reasons a creature is going to use a cave and easy access to food and water are still high on that list.

I found the most useful aspects of this section are the two tables for mutations, minor and major. These are beneficial but the GM is offered the opportunity to give 25% of these effects their opposite so something like Long Legs, +5 ft. speed becomes short Legs, -5 ft. speed. Another great section is on the intelligent races of the underdark, not because it covers the standards like drow, derro and others, but because it tackles aboleths, driders , ghouls and grimlocks. Now despite reading H. P. Lovecraft and knowing about Pickman, and even having read The Throne of Bone with it's ghoul tales, I never think about ghouls as an intelligent race with their own culture. It's nice to be thrown a reminder that not every undead in the shadows is a beautiful vampire maiden or a crumbly lich king.

But what if you don't want to do all that work and put together your own underdark setting? Well, much like DungeonCraft and its encounters, the authors provide several sample locations. These are 'campaign neutral' if you will and can be taken to most settings without issue. These range from Delvesdeep, a waystation into the underdark, to the Temple of Tirzankuul. Their purpose can be as simple as a place to loot and battle or as mere portals to other parts of the underdark. Each includes background, current events, plot hooks, and rough maps.

The art and layout of the book varied. While some pieces are great, others didn't inspire me. The border, with it's surface dwellers on one side and underdark adversariers on the other, distracted me to no end. For most parts, the white space use was good, but there were several pages that could've been trimmed. The book was easy to read with a good size font though which as I get older, find very important.

This is a companion piece to DungeonCraft. It does a lot of what that book did, monsters, class roles, feats, and other goods, but with a specific terrain target. The book's going to appeal to those GMs who want to try their hand at either running an underdark campaign with all underdark races or for those players who want to hail from the underdark and be different, in terms of possessions, feats, and abilities, than their surface world comrades.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

The Underdark Adventure Guide details the strange, alien world of the underdark. The underdark is far more than just dungeons and caves. It is a veritable underground continent, populated by advanced civilizations, ancient ruins, sunless seas, alien magic, bizarre creatures, and the horrid denizens of the gloom. The standards of the surface world hold no sway in the underdark, and its mysteries, ferocity, and danger will challenge even the hardiest of adventurers.

The Underdark Adventure Guide includes everything you need to create a compelling underdark world. Underdark adventures are easy to integrate with an existing campaign, as the very nature of the underdark lends itself to layering - simply arrange for the discovery of a subterranean portal, and the land beneath your existing campaign has a new life.

The Underdark Adventure Guide is divided into four chapters. The first chapter examines the characters of the underdark, especially among the most populous races: the drow, duergar, derro, svirfneblin, and troglodytes. This section defines the most renowned traits of these races with a variety of new prestige classes, then concludes with new equipment, feats, and skill applications useful to everyone. You can use this section to flesh out the enemies your PCs will face, or apply them to the stats for these underdark races found in the MM and DMG to use them as player characters.

Chapter two introduces a variety of new monsters suitable to life in the underdark, while chapter three provides guidelines for creating an underdark campaign. These are mostly for inspiration - a collection of keywords and ideas that can help you get started on a new campaign, or tie together elements of an existing one.

The book concludes with chapter four, which describes several points of interest in great detail. These cities, camps, and other locations can be dropped into your own campaign as needed, or inserted in their totality as an already-defined area.

The Underdark Adventure Guide is a stand-alone book. It can be used in conjunction with the Aerial Adventure Guide, or used independently. If you're planning an underdark campaign, you might also be interested in Monsters of the Endless Dark, Complete Guide to Drow, and Complete Guide to Beholders.

 

[Scorpio]

Hey Joe,
Just curious what you meant by "rough maps".For future reference.

 

[Derulbaskul]

Joe,

This is a very favourable review but does not mention the mechanical flaws in the book.

For the most egregious example, check out the saving throw progressions of the prestige classes: there must be at least eight different types and at least two are probably verging on random.

In addition, the prestige classes themselves (eg, predator, surface raider) seem to be pretty powerful such as where you have high hit dice classes with sneak attack abilities.

The race description for the derro is simply incorrect. Derro are 3 HD monstrous humanoids. The racial madness trait does not get a mention and, if taken into consideration, would ensure that the encountered derro were NOT clerics. This makes both the "derro as a race" section and the two derro stat blocks (IIRC) practically useless.

Oh, and Scorpio, I liked the maps and basically bought this book based on those (I saw them online) plus this review. I just wish some more attention was paid to the editing process to get the rules right.

 

[Psion]

Underdark Adventure Guide

Underdark Adventure Guide is a setting and rules supplement providing "campaign neutral" material for use in underground settings. The book is written by Michael Mearls and Dean Poisso and published by Goodman Games.

A First Look

Underdark Adventure Guide is a 144 page hardcover book priced at $28.00.

The cover of the book, by V. Shane, depicts a "lava giant" standing before some ready-to-tassle adventurers.

The interior art is black and white and features V. Shane, Marcio Fiorito, and William McAusland. Marcio is a well established artist in the d20 segment, and as normal, he has a way of bringing a lot of character to his portraits. V. Shane's artwork is good as well, but some of his interior pictures are a little murky, apparently from printing color pictures with dark shading in black and white. The third artist, McAusland, I am not familiar with, but his art look like fairly primitive ink peices and seems the least polished of the three.

A Deeper Look

Underdark Adventure Guide is organized into four chapters.

The first chapter encompasses new options for characters originating in an underdark setting, including races, classes, templates, feats, skill uses, and equipment.

The races included feature PHB style racial writeups, with details like personality, relations, and land. Most of the writeups are for existing creatures in the MM, like drow, deep dwarves, derro, duergar, svirfneblin, and troglodytes. There are some minor deviations in the writeups. For example, drow are described as being "invariably neutral evil" while their MM description only pegs a few of them as Neutral Evil. Derro lack their madness trait described in the MM on the claim that PCs shouldn't have such traits; I find this a little dodgy as I am not sure that either madness is untenable for PCs nor should these entries be exclusively used for PCs.

New races (not in the core rules/SRDs) include half-drow and gloom barbarians. Gloom barbarians are a savage subrace of humans that have adapted to the conditions of the underdark. The statistics of the gloom barbarians are pretty much unlike humans. They receive darkvision and the endurance feat in addition to an automactic mutation, but have none of the bonus skill points or feats humans have.

The book introduces a number of "racial templates" intended to create new variants of existing races. The racial templates are exile, shadowkin, vindicator and wolfbred. I find the justification for some of these as templates rather than just backgrounds a little sketchy. For example, the exile template is meant to represent those exiled from their race. As penalties are those typically associated with being an outcast from one's race, and lack of access to racial feats and classes. As a benefit, they receive an attack bonus against their race and a penalty against fear saves. It seems to me that you could handle ones status as an exile non-mechanically, and make the "own race hatred" a feat for those whom would necessarily have such fervor.

There is a short section on core classes. After a brief bit on adapting existing classes to the underdark, the book introduces a new core class: the radiomancer. The radiomancer is an arcane spellcaster, that prepares spell like a wizard (but still uses the word "memorization" to refer to it - a common mistake 3 years ago, but I was a little surprised to see it now), but has as many spells per day as a sorcerer. This is supposedly due to the radiomancer "harnessing radioactive energy." The radiomancer lacks a familiar, and also loses a point of constitution at every level, and can cause temporary Con damage to characters with a longstanding association. In addition to the impressive amount of spells, the radiomancer receives random mutations (introduced later in the book.)

For a book that advertises itself as "campaign neutral", I found the inclusion of a post-apocolypse fantasy sort of take on radiation rather belied that claim, and it feels rather out-of-place here.

There are a variety of prestige classes aimed at underdark characters. Some of them are available to most underdark races, such as envoy or fungal symbiote. However, many of them are specific to races, such as the derro deep sage or the drow gloomweaver. Most of the classes are 5-level classes. This makes many of them seem, on the surface, seem like nice quick-concept classes to shape specialist members of the races to racial specialties.

However, not one follows the saving throw conventions, and none of them break with convention for any good reason I could perceive. Further, this is not merely a matter of player confusion; some classes have a save advancement ins some saves much more brisk than is available for character classes that use the convention. I would feel like reworking all these classes from the ground up before using them, which is usually a deal-breaker for me in a product.

The feats are similarly divided into general and racial feats. Most of the general feats deal with survival or conditions in the underdark, such as belly fighter or still breath. I generally saw few problems with the feats, but there were some questionable calls. For example, one feat reintroduces infravision to the game. Not that I agree with the reasoning on why it was removed from the game. However, I certainly wouldn't want infravision alongside low-light and darkvision.

The new skills uses and equipment sections have a variety of entries concerned with life and survival in the underdark. Perhaps the most notable of these are arcane prosthetics. These are basically artificial body parts built as a specific use of craft (engineering). The choice of having such an item revolve around a craft skill instead of a magical item craft feat seemed a bit odd to me, but overall the system is not bad. Prosthetics have a few basic functions, and have options for additional modifications (additional powers/features such as armor or extra strength); how many modifications can be fit into a prosthetic depends on its size.


The second chapter introduces new creatures into the game. Many of the creatures are fantastical animals or other denizens of the underdark. Perhaps the most interesting entry, however, is the Athasi. The Athasi are psionic aberrations which bear some resemblance to a mind flayer, but are different enough to pass muster as original. Nonetheless, it seems to me that those wanting an open version of a mind flayer need look no further. The athasi is a bit weaker than a mind flayer. It does not share the mind flayer's brain munching attack, but has a single tendril that can drain intelligence while sapping knowledge from the creature, in the form of the location of the nearest settlement as well as (if a save is failed) memory of the encounter with the Athasi.

Other entries of note include an arachnid template (with four sample creatures) and the huu'lach fungus, a fungus whose spores transform their victims over the course of days.

Overall, I noticed few errors in the creatures. As a minorr nit, some creatures round up instead of down for HD averages. One construct seems to use a mix of 3.0 and 3.5 conventions, using the construct's HP bonus for size, but using a 3.0 style DR.

In addition to the "true" creatures, the creature chapter has a variety of "hazard" type plants that appear through the underdark, such as blood moss (which is actually edible and grows in areas of strong earth energy, which can help explain what all these creatures are thriving on anyways) and stalactite vines (vines that line a cavern and crush rock, which can cause cavern collapses.)

The third chapter, Creating the Underworld, is a toolkit and an advice section for designing underdark subsettings for your campaign world. This chapter is divides into three basic section. The section entitled The Role of the Underdark provides big picture questions and considerations on what you want you underdark to be and how it interfaces with the rest of the campaign world, including potential consequences of decisions such as the size of the underworld setting you choose to create, amount of contact the underworld has with the surface world, and so forth.

The section entitled Mapping the Underworld provides ideas and considerations for a number of elements of a primarily physical or geographical nature. Each of various sections (animals, ceiling, magic, etc.) provides a variety of options and ideas to make parts of your underdark setting as mundane or exotic as you need.

It is this section that contains the details about radiation and mutations referred to in the character creation chapter. As mentioned, I find its inclusion in a supposedly "campaign neutral" product dubious. The radiation areas can cause permanent constitution loss along with random mutations. The mutations tables mostly result in benefits to the character; presumably the drawback is the loss of constitution.

The third major section of the chapter provides ideas and guidelines for designing underdark civilizations. Many of the factors that you would need to detail when creating a surface civilization are covered here, though there is special attention to how they would differ in the underdark environment. As with the geology chapter, each of several attributes of the civilization (language, etiquette, economics, religion) are provided with ideas and options in varying levels of strangeness, according to your needs. This makes for a nice guide if you are contemplating creating underdark cultures.

The fourth and last chapter is a selection of pre-designed locales you can drop into your own underdark setting. Each locale is 1-4 pages and has area descriptions and background, detailed NPC stat blocks for major figures, and plot hooks for involving the PCs in the locale and its details.

There is a nicely done map showing sample relative locations of the included locales, as well as individual maps of some locales.

Conclusions

The character options chapter is easily the weakest chapter of the book, with many breaks in conventions and mechanical problems. Unfortuantely, the first chapter takes up almost half of the book.

On the other hand, chapters 2-4 are nicely done and have a lot to offer the GM looking to create or expand an underdark setting (and who is does not want to have to sift through FR-specific elements in doing so).

Overall Grade: C+

-Alan D. Kohler

 

[Derulbaskul]

Psion,

Good review.

I recently made the mistake of purchasing this book after reading a review that didn’t deal with the errors and poor design judgements you mentioned in your review (plus I liked the maps). Afterwards, I posted my questions over at the Goodman boards about the rationale behind the “random” saving throw progressions (http://www.goodman-games.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=154). FWIW, I counted nine new non-standard saving throw progressions just for the first three prestige classes. I counted another four before I lost interest in what was an exercise in futility.

Anyway, this was Joe Goodman’s response to me calling the progressions “wrong” after he commented that they were “innovative”:

(quote)
I think the most important word in your post is "wrong." The saving throw progressions aren't "wrong." They are intentionally unlike the standard progressions. That was an intentional move on the authors' part, and I intentionally left them as-is when I edited the book. (You might want to consider the authors' credentials when making accusations of error.) Intentional deviation from an authoritative rules standard is a mark of design innovation, not error. What determines the ultimate value of the change is how it affects game play.
(unquote)

I must admit that this left me with the “FFE/900 Words”-feeling: “we’re not making mistakes, we’re just radical and innovative”.

The derro is another error. Basically, UAG uses the 3E version rather than the 3.5E version (Monstrous Humanoid; 3 racial hit dice). Again, this is called innovative design... um, I think it’s just an error.

Personally, I felt your rating of 3 was possibly generous. To me, a 2 is more accurate as I can only salvage the maps and the artist has these posted at his website. The rest is useless, although a Gamma World DM might enjoy some of the information on radiation.

However, your colleague’s rating of 4 for this product is simply wrong. I realise judgements about value are subjective but having to completely rebuild chapter one (half the book) means that the book really isn’t “Good”. I would still recommend FR’s Underdark, even to DMs who refuse to touch FR, rather than have them waste money on UAG. Actually, I think even the 1E Dungeoneer’s Survival Guide or the 2E Driz’zt Do’urden’s Guide to the Underdark are better purchases than this book.

 

[Psion]

"However, your colleague’s rating of 4 for this product is simply wrong. I realise judgements about value are subjective"

I think your second sentence answers your first. He's not really wrong, he has a different take. Some people out there really DON'T care about consistency of saving throw advancement, and he probably represents that. Some would call me anal for caring.

But hopefully, review readers learn which reviewers are more in line with their own values. Which is part of the reason that I tell people "don't just look at the score, read the review."

 

[Derulbaskul]

Of course. I should have tied those two comments more closely together. Sorry, JGK.