I have been backing Studio Agates Fateforge series for a while and this was the first of their 'wave 2' books - a follow-up bestiary exploring the underdark equivalent of their setting Eana - 180 creatures, playable species and game options. I backed the kickstarter a while back and the book turned up a while ago.
Cover art by Yvan 'Gawain' Villeneuve
Lots of interesting creatures - low CR curiousities for pets and companions - good for flavour. Comes across as targetted at an explorers game where people will be doing a lot more interacting with the environment than simply killing anything that moves. Gorgeous art, as ever from Studio Agate, kudos to the artists and art direction. This is a chunky book, easier to read than your standard 5e due to larger text size, done in the same Studio Agate house style.
So what is all this stuff you get in the book?
Foreword, introduction to Fateforged - 4 pages
Part One - Encounters in the Netherworld - 223 pages
Part Two - Canker on the Material Plane - 159 pages
Appendix - Perils and Conditions - 18 pages
Going through this block by block we start with the Foreword which introduces Fateforged over a few pages - the key ones covering the building blocks the book gives you - Lands of Legends, Wondrous Intrigue, Dangerous Discoveries, Dark Battles and Extraordinary Sciencraft - and the tags from the modular Fateforge system. Here there are ten symbols that appear throughout the book which flag which elements to foreground for a particular style of campaign - Action, Intrigue, Corruption, Dark, Gritty and Mystery are self explanatory, Awakening and Magic Lock tie to how high-magic a campaign is - Awakening flagging things magically aware characters can interacti with and Magic Lock indicating beasts that require magical nourishment and should be rarer in low magic worlds. Sublimation is a roughly 'fey corruption' - collect 20 points of this from hits or effects and 'foop' you turn into one of them. The last tag is Dragon and indicates pieces of important lore for the setting Eana. I like the approach where these GM assists clearly laid out to help you do the kind of campaign you want.
Part One - Encounters in the Netherworld - breaks down into five sections Peoples of the Netherworld (38 pages), Tunnel Fighters (36 pages), In The Caverns (44 pages), Underground Rituals (62 pages), From Blackwater (43 pages). Here we get a view of the underdark that is very much 'play as an inhabitant' with all the species and cultures laid out from their perspective. We open with guidance on potential campaign types to run in this setting and on the languages of the place. Each of Drow, Duergar, Sidhe of the dpeth, Grimlocks, and Svirfneblin get six to eight pages with a bit on culture and lots of background, feats, traits and disadvantages - very much 'all you need to build a character from X' while giving insight into that group.
Tunnel Fighters gives us typical groups from each of those culture, adversaries or NPC parties, along with gear they might have and interesting mounts. Here we come to something that one will either love or hate - the grouping of stuff by theme as opposed to category - everything you need to know about setting up a group from one of those cultures is in this section - but there is no general mounts section, no general magic items table nor an index collection all the magical items scattered through the book. The next section, In The Caverns, is all the creatures, from big to small, you may run into on your travels. Many of these will be familiar names and shapes but reimagined as part of an extended underdark ecology with many non-monster creatures expanded.
Underground Rituals covers the strange magic of this realm below, including summonable creatures and powerful NPC magic users. There is lots about soul traffic and how various critters participate in that - Silvery dancers for message transmission, Imagos as guardians. I think much of this is deep lore that players will have to be very invested in to discern the difference between these critters and just wandering monsters but for a 'natives of the underdark' campaign there are lots of memorable hooks in here.
Closing out this section is From Blackwater - the aboleths place of origin. This is something like the more mainstream 'far realm source of the Mindflayers' - a deeply strange place where aberations come from - where lots of odd things originate in fact. We get a lot on the things that come from there but it could have done with dash more on how it appears in case adventurers manage to get there - whether willingly or not. Maybe this will be described in Encyclopedia 2? I shall report back once that arrives. Certainly we get enough on the Aboleths catspaws and servitors to make them fearsome foes if you so wish.
Part Two - Canker on the Material Plane - opens with an introduction to Canker (9 pages) then has two main sections Hideous Scourge (64 pages) and Dislocating Sublime (70 pages). The introduction covers how to bring canker into campaign - good ideas for themes to use and your options for the campaign. Canker being part life-form, part plane it is a classic corrupting, undefeatable foe, one that can only be knocked back. The suggested campaign uses then are as sword-fodder - the bad-guys you can kill without compunction, play up the corrupting horror aspect of it in a social milieu, focus on the zombie-horror overwhelming aspect or lean into the 'find the key to stopping it' aspect.
In Hideous Scourge we get Nature-phantasm nests along with tactics for both sides - showcasing benefit of the irregular lay out. This level of detail would never be present in your typical monster manual - only done in detail in something like Volos or Draconomicon. Enough here to make tough foes for even experienced parties. We also get a theme of complex monsters and twin abominations - Canker blending things together to make a new tool.
Dislocating Sublime portrays a corrupt feywild - the type of alien landscape that is alive and vibrant, just not supporting *your* survival requirements. We get a number of familiar faces in here - centaurs, driders among others - who are reimagined within the context of the setting to make something new and interesting. I think this is an interesting approach, refreshing for experiences players in that they'll still recognise the challenge of 'we're facing one of those' but still have a lot to explore in that appearance of one of these things does not mean the involvement of faction such and such.
In both sections we get a focus on named foes - including motivations, adventure hooks and lairs - which again serve as plug-and-play campaign adversaries.
The Appendix contains Perils of the Underground (16 pages) and Conditions and Tactical situations (2 pages). The perils include some great hazards and natural traps I liked these a lot, a good addition to any cavern-delving. The conditions I did not love so much, maybe they might have their use but the capped bonus seems overly complex and I did not quite understand the problem that was being solved by including this.
Overall I think this is a book folk will find either very useful or will bounce off depending on whether or not you like the setting. There are a lot of familiar faces here - so perhaps half of the monsters in here are things you have not seen before - but those you have seen before are relocated within the setting / ecology of Eana underground. The hooks, the NPCs, the monsters, everything supports playing in the setting - as it should be - and whether or not that is what you are looking for will inform picking this up. The setting they are pitching is a solidly different take to the classic D&D underdark with less focus on evil factions preying upon one another and more focus on the hostile environment. It is a particular view of such an environment and it gives you the tools to play that view.
For another views see No Dice Unrolled.
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