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Book of Exalted Darkness (5E)
Publisher: Legendary Games
by andrew e. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 04/04/2018 16:49:40

Practice your evil laugh, warm up the sacrificial altars and pull the lever, because the Book of Exalted Darkness does the corrupted and dark justice that a proper evil campaign deserves.

Our playgroup has twirled their mustaches, laughed maniacally and sent many a do-gooder to their doom. Throughout my years as a GM I’ve had several evil campaigns pop up both on purpose and on accident, but they rarely went well for long. Evil campaigns have inherent problems that are hard to shake, problems that inevitably degrade and undo the notion of a coherent adventuring party.

The Book of Exalted Darkness addresses all the problems with an evil campaign and wraps it up with a neat little bow for you.

I had given up on evil campaigns but with the Book of Exalted Darkness I feel like it’s time to tie some more maidens to the railroad tracks. Every problem that I’d encountered in our evil endeavors of the past have been smoothed out by this book.

The first problem was usually a matter of setting and threat. Your average campaign can often be boiled down to an essentially neutral world threatened by some oncoming threat either on a small scale, or up to a world ending one. In many evil campaigns this is still somehow true, your party still needs to save the world, just for evil reasons. Just how am I supposed to eat my orphans in peace while all this end of the world nonsense is going on? The setting presented in the Book of Exalted Darkness takes care of this swimmingly. The world in the Book of Exalted Darkness is painfully and oppressively good and presents many prominent magical restraints and enforcements of “goodness” that the party can seek to overturn. The status quo is the goodness in the world and is riddled with tinges of hypocrisy and tyranny (such as the secretly undead paladins and a virus that turns rapists into werewolves), that just gives you that wonderful manic fulfilment when demolished. This allows the party’s resistance to the status quo to be the conflict that can drive a plot forward.

The second problem with an evil campaign is usually motivation. In 5th edition as in most editions, there really isn’t an incentive for most evil acts. Yes, you can go burn down the orphanage and slowly pull out the hero’s spleen, but what’s the point? Beyond the roleplaying experience there wasn’t much to gain. In the Book of Exalted Darkness you can literally make a kickass magic item out of those useless orphans, and a whole section of horrific medical experiments to perform on those unfortunate enough to be on your operating table. Heck, there’s a whole section about painfully dissecting and eating what are clearly legally distinct smurfs™. This book lets you become mad scientists, twisted mutant abominations and cannibalistic casters, not just as roleplaying but as detailed class options that entice you to play them and revel in their evil deeds. On that note I should warn you, this book is dark. It can be played off as mustache twirling Saturday morning villain fun, but a lot of it goes into very bloody detail for the more deranged among us, we know who we are.
Fundamentally, the Book of Exalted Darkness is full of classes, archetypes, spells and features that make you want to play an evil character. After reading it I already had a dozen ideas for characters I wanted to play and that’s the highest praise I can possibly give.

The third problem was party cohesion. My mad scientist really doesn’t have an inherent reason to get along with Gromak the baby eater. The Book of Exalted Darkness gives you plenty of plot reasons to stick together. Such as the oppressive goody-two-shoes authority breathing down your necks, the anarchic goals of their destruction and mysterious evil benefactors and agents that can bind you to one another. But it also gives you mechanical reasons to help each other’s actual evil plots, an element that always seemed missing from our previous evil campaigns. Helping your cultist friend catch the innocents needed to perform a ritual to benefit you all, helping the mad scientist get the fleshy components needed to graft you a new tentacle arm. The wealth of actual mechanical reasons to pursue these evil schemes and cooperate for mutual fiendish benefits helps your dastardly team stick together.

Being critical for a moment, some of the art feels very stock but that’s understandable as the book is massive, weighing in at over 400 pages. My strongest issue with the book was just a formatting issue, it does a white with black text when describing the good in the world and black with white text covering the evil. It’s neat but the black with white text hurt my eyes after a while and I found myself closing it up just to rest my eyes.

Even if you aren’t planning on running an evil campaign you should still give the Book of Exalted Darkness a read. It’s full of concepts and sections that I’ve already stolen and started implementing in my existing campaigns. The vehicle section was a welcome surprise with a detailed and comprehensive system to use everything including motorcycles and jetpacks. The madness system is wonderfully twisted, and the plethora of poisons perked my interest and have already sizzled their way into the veins of some of my players. Great monsters and NPCs, evil spells and feats, even two full short campaigns at the end. There’s a lot here to work with. Have fun with this book, I know my playgroup will be cackling maniacally for quite some time.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Book of Exalted Darkness (5E)
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A Guide to Storm King's Thunder
Publisher: Dungeon Masters Guild
by andrew e. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 09/12/2017 19:27:30

A very helpful little primer, this has definitely helped me overcome a few stumbling blocks before I encountered them in the campaign.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
A Guide to Storm King's Thunder
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