I have a copy of Planes Below next to me right now. I like it a lot but there’s room for improvement.

It’s pretty small, at 160 pages, and expands on the Manual of the Planes, which is probably one of my complaints. It has a fair bit of crunch, with an excellent set of tiered terrain, environmental effects, monsters, skill challenges, items, and a set of delve-style adventures for level 8, 15, and 25.

I think I’ll end up using this book more at my table than I have with the Manual of the Planes, but there are a few things I’d love to see in future books.

First, I really really want flavor-text I can read out loud to my players instead of long descriptions of places that I have to then paraphrase into something. Even a paragraph of italicized text at the beginning of each section would make me a lot more likely to use it.

Second, I wish the three delve-style encounters used terrain from the Dungeon Tiles. It never ceases to amaze me when WOTC products don’t support other WOTC products like adventures that don’t use Dungeon Tiles or existing D&D minis. I’m one of those DMs who likes to have the right mini at the table and I didn’t bother to buy two sets of every dungeon tile set only to whip out the dry-erase mat.

I think books like Planes Below would be a lot more table-usable if they included these two features.

I also feel like WOTC is covering the same ground over and over, getting closer each time to more detail. The Abyss is covered in at least three books now, each one spending more time and attention on it but none of them dedicating themselves to it directly. I think I liked the idea of the Fiendish Codexes back in the 3.5 days a bit more since they had more focus. I think if you’re going to have an Elemental Chaos book, focus it on the Elemental Chaos totally and write a separate book just on the Abyss. As it stands now, we get 20 pages on the Abyss, a limitless world of stuff for my epic-tiered PCs to carve through.

I’m guessing we’ll see another Abyss book in the future and then it’s up to us to deconflict having four books of Abyssal stuff to contend with.

I also would have liked a lot more detail on the City of Brass. According to this book it was “explained in detail” in MotP but I don’t remember it being that detailed. I want what we got with Sigil in the DMG2 with a couple of pages of notable NPCs, a sample adventure or some sample hooks I can use, some ongoing plots in the city that the PCs might get involved with – all that stuff. Oh yeah, and more flavor text.

Still, I’m being overly hard on the book. I actually find this book far more useful with a lot of the crunch I want as a DM. I’m just hoping for more with future books like this.

Thanks,

Mike Shea
.-= Mike Shea´s last blog ..Giving 4e an Old School Feel =-.