Café de Nuit

what ever happened to the "Lords of Madness" book?

It was released a few months ago. Check the WotC website.

how is this book? does anybody in Frat-land have it? use it?

i'm interested in the aboleth section.

Shoon VII wrote:how is this book? does anybody in Frat-land have it? use it?

i'm interested in the aboleth section.

The aboleth's sections really good. It connects them with the Cthulhu mythos.

It takes several aberrations and gives them a comon sense expansion not really detailing all of them as much as you would like to make for the new aberrations. Several ideas such as cults and the like are added but not given enough details, most of the NPCs tend to be hyper-fantastic and high level it really fits the 3E version of D&D. You know, where everyone has to be 'something' and you just can't have two humans side-by-side.
There's also alot of references to other 3E books such as the Fiend Folio and others making those books helpful if you want to use this.

There is some nice stuff but there could have been a heck of alot more. And the focus is on Player classes, feats, spells and the like with few improvements on the monsters beyond varients. You want a tougher version of monster X? Then forget special powers, feats or PrC and just use this new varient monster.

If you're doing something with Bluetspur you might find something of use and there's alot neat stuff in the aboleth section.

Drinnik Shoehorn wrote:The aboleth's sections really good.

David of the Frat wrote:If you're doing something with Bluetspur you might find something of use and there's alot neat stuff in the aboleth section.

I want to do something about Bluetspur but it doesn't have anything to do with aboleths.

Lords of Madness in the top book I want to buy. In fact I'll spend 36 Euro = 45$ for this book in Friday. I want to buy a lot other books but this one goes first.

Since I play generic D&D in Ravenloft domains I'm not disappointed if the Book is more fantasy oriented (I can fix that and I don't have a problem with that).
But if ONLY the aboleth section is good and not the entry I care more for then I'll still buy the book, but I'll be sorry. And please if the whole book in general isn't good, tell me to buy something else instead.

I like Mind Flayers and it's a passable illithid but it's not hard to imagine a better one. It does describe a city and their society and background but it's far too short and much of it is spent describing 'rare' varients. Improvements to the illithid come in the form of new monsters as varients, no new PrC, feats and the like.
That's what made the abothel section so good, it focused a bit more on improving and making unique monsters while making giant psychic fish seem like an interesting monster.
It really isn't hard to think of ways to improve the book, they just focused too broadly on too many monsters, many unremarkable, and didn't give the same extra information for every monster. Some of the writers were simply better.

It's not a poor book and does give a range of creey, icky monsters that could be lurking in Bluetspur or dark places in the Core but it could have been soooo much better.

David of the Frat wrote:I like Mind Flayers and it's a passable illithid but it's not hard to imagine a better one. It does describe a city and their society and background but it's far too short and much of it is spent describing 'rare' varients. Improvements to the illithid come in the form of new monsters as varients, no new PrC, feats and the like.
That's what made the abothel section so good, it focused a bit more on improving and making unique monsters while making giant psychic fish seem like an interesting monster.
It really isn't hard to think of ways to improve the book, they just focused too broadly on too many monsters, many unremarkable, and didn't give the same extra information for every monster. Some of the writers were simply better.

It's not a poor book and does give a range of creey, icky monsters that could be lurking in Bluetspur or dark places in the Core but it could have been soooo much better.

What made the Illithid section, though was their history.