Key Our Cars

I’ve had a chance this weekend to go through my copy of Open Grave the new YASBBWTMMAKUP (Yet another supplemental book by wizards to make money and keep us paying) from Wizards.  You can save a few bucks by ordering from Amazon but as always I recommend hitting up your Friendly Local Gaming Store.  That way you can see the copy you’re going to get and avoid any creased pages or ink smears etc and you support your local community of gamers as typically the FLGS is a hot bed of MtG (bleh) tournaments with the occasional RPG group also using it for gaming sessions.

You’ll pay about a dime a page give or take a few cents so it seems a bargain in that respect.

It starts off with telling us how undead are ‘born’, their origins and what makes them up, their physiology and all that.  Very similar to the Draconomicon in that respect.

Then we have some information on undead drives and ambitions, their un-life’s plan so to speak. Â  Some vaguely interesting stuff here, I found it less interesting than the dragons by a lot as well, they’re undead, who cares how and why they are?  They’re sword fodder as far as I’m concerned.

Some sample adventures left me a a little meh, and they turned an attack of the Zombie Horde into a skill challenge.  Uh what?   Some campaign story arcs examples are handed out but nothing we haven’t seen before.

Then we have some phat undead lewt.  I didn’t pay much attention to it to be honest, hey I don’t get paid to review stuff, just offering my thoughts on it.  The warforged-esque undead bits and bobs that can be grafted onto people were more interesting.  These are aimed at NPC’s much more than PC’s but I could see some possibilities there.  I had an Iron Lord LONG before Eberron’s Warforged were even a thought in someone’s head much less a published world setting so grafts, especially unasked for ones are something I’m familiar with.

Again very much like the Draconomicon we have some sample lairs, encounters and such with a handful of new monsters and traps and rituals.

You get more new undead monsters in this one than new stuff in other books in my opinion. Â  While some may not be ‘new’ per se but rather variants of existing creatures it’s still worth the price of admission for that alone I think.

Anyway the outline and layout is VERY much like the dragon book as are the contents.  Fortunately for Wizards I love undead so this was almost a mandatory buy for me. Â  If you don’t like undead or are just neutral on them then this is more of an iffy purchase.

Overall I’d give it a 8 out of 10. Â  Mainly for the loads of new undead it adds so I don’t have to make them.  I’ve done the “Boneland” wars in the past and I’ll do it again in the future.  The site of a massive ancient war the Bonelands as they’re now known was the mass grave and burial mounds and tombs of 100′s of thousands of warriors, spell casters and support people over a bloody and massive 3 year war.  The ground is permanently rusted from the iron in the blood spilled there by the lake full.  Nothing grows but stunted twisted plant life that seems to harbor a malevolent hatred of life full of thorns and poisons. Â  Dark things creep out of the Bonelands when the sun hides its face and people who dare to live close to it vanish leaving nothing but blood spatters and the echos of screams.