Explorer's Guide to Wildemount (D&D Campaign Setting and Adventure Book) (Dungeons & Dragons)

First, like others here, my book arrived damaged. This review is for the book, not Amazon's piss poor ability to deliver undamaged books.As the title of this review indicates, this book should be of great interest to both players and DMs. I provide a few general thoughts and then break down details for each of these target audiences.This book is a tome, with a little bit of everything. It has the history and gazetteer one expects to find in a setting book, but written in a way that is more useful than most. There is also extensive information with players, including the most complete compilation of previously released races yet. New subclasses and spells. Several adventures to help launch your campaign. It even has new and unique magic items and a bestiary of unique BBEGs.All of this content is wonderfully creative. The writing, clear and concise. The illustrations are absolutely gorgeous. Buy this book, you will not be disappointed. Mercer and collaborators have outdone themselves with this one. Players and DMs interested in a detailed rationale for this recommendation, read further.For Players:Most players don’t purchase setting books, but you may want to make this an exception. The character options (pp. 161-203) is extensive. It includes all of the “exotic” race options that were previously spread over many different books, complicating the character creation process. In addition to the standard PHB races, this book includes racial traits for: Arakora, Aasimar, Firbolgs, Genasi, Goblinkin, Goliaths, Kenku, Orcs, Tabaxi, and Tortles.The fighter subclass, Echo Knight, sounds like a lot of fun to play. Tons of room for creative play when there are tow of you on the battle map, and your double gets better and better as you level up.The two wizard subclasses provide unique magic schools, with spells that sound both fun in the sense that I can foresee some pretty hilarious narratives when they are used, but also useful. Powerful, but not OP.Most players love reading through the Monster Manual and the bestiary in this book will not disappoint those of you who are among them.If your DM sets a game in Wildemount, there are unique tools presented to assist you in the creation of a backstory tied to this setting. Who hasn't thought to themselves, "How in the hell should I know where I was born and what it was like to live there?" The tools presented in the Heroic Chronicle solve this problem. They also include fun details that could be really fun to role play such as your favorite food.With respect to character generation, all of these things essentially mean that this can serve as PHB 2.0. In fact, I intend to use the book for this purpose in my games, whether or not they occur in this setting.For DMs:Because this is a setting book, I’ll start with that material. The history and lore of Wildemount, and by extension Exandria, is well developed. Logical explanations are provided to explain the existence of nasty beasts, artifacts, ancient ruins, etc. More importantly, much of this history is presented in a way that is sure to get you creative, storytelling juices flowing.The geography is expansive, covering just about every biome one can imagine. Lots of unique location ideas that could be borrowed by world builders. One of the cool aspects of the gazetteer are DM plot hooks inserted throughout location descriptions. Essentially one sentence seeds for adventures that could occur in the area, categorized for low-, mid-, and upper-level characters.The character creation section includes some great nuggets as well. For starters, we finally have all of the exotic races in one location! This should be useful for those of you creating characters in your homes because you will no longer have to flip through a pile of books to get to this information. For those of you creating characters online, you can finally get the content for all races through the purchase of a single book. Pretty cool subclasses too that don’t seem OP (WotC has stated they were extensively play tested), but do seem to have a lot of flavor with respect to action descriptions.For those of you who have struggled to get backstories for their characters, there is a section call the Heroic Chronicle that helps accomplish this task. Essentially, this is a series of tables that helps ground the characters to the setting in a more extensive way than previously published examples. Most importantly, this includes details such as key enemies and allies that should make it easy to work into story arcs. For world builders, there could easily be tweaked for your own settings.There is so much work when starting a new campaign and this book makes this a little easier too. There are short adventures presented for different regions of Wildemount with plenty of potential hooks to continue your adventure. This will allow you to more easily dive in, while developing the rest of your campaign materials.The magic items presented in the book include vestiges, and eveil--sometimes sentient--artifacts. For those that don’t know, vestiges have increasingly magical powers that “awaken” when players complete an epic part of their journey. This provides good storytelling opportunities and allows the item to remain useful as the your players enter higher levels of play. With respect to the evil artifacts, what DM doesn’t like the idea of playing the PCs desire for power against potentially dangerous and deleterious side effects?Finally, the bestiary presents loads of nasty BBEGs sure to strike terror in your players. We’re always looking for these, right?I’ve seen some DMs express concern that players will expect a retelling of the setting as presented in Critical Role. Personally, I think most players would actually want the opposite, or at least something that is strange yet familiar. There is also an upside to the popularity of the show, you know that there will be tons of great maps created by the community that you can easily “borrow” for your games.

This is a very dense campaign setting, filled with a lot of lore, history, new creatures, classes and spells.Critical Role fans will be pleased, the setting takes place around Episode 50 of the Mighty Nein, leaving all kinds of open threads as to the fate of the world during a tumultuous, bloody war.There is a lot of care to ensure new DMs can get up to speed and start running adventures immediately. Out of the box adventures are completed and there's enough detail across massive amounts of regions/cities to provide all types of adventures (varied in theme and style) A large, full color map is included with purchase, it's superbly drawn.Some of the art lacks. Wizards went to standard artists they've used before rather than attempt to acquire some of the AMAZING fan art surrounding critical role. As a result the art style is much more generic D&D / Forgotten Realms in flavor, rather than then vibrant, colorful art the fans of Critical Role has created.The strength of the book however lies in its content. Matt writes well (better than other writers Wizards employs) and someone did a superb job of editing the book, so far, I've found very few errors in type or grammar or spelling.The new classes probably were not as well tested as the base PHB stuff, but no expansion book ever was. There's far less broken variants in this book (that I can see) compared to some of the broken stuff in both Volo's or Xanthar's guides. That said, power gamers looking to exploit the math in the game will still find devilish combinations of race/class/feats that should make them happy. Role players will be delighted, as Wildemount and Critical Role is really a celebration of role play. And the potential for great RP here is abundant and should make any RP-focused group extremely happy.All in all a superb product, vastly superior to Eberron in style, substance and delivery in my opinion.

Explorer's Guide to Wildemount is the 2nd campaign guide release for the world of Exandria based on the 2nd season of Critical Role. Unlike Tal'Dorei, Mercer's first campaign guide in this world, Wildemount is an official WotC release for 5E. No doubt WotC saw how wildly popular Tal'Dorei became and decided they needed to be involved for this publication.As a setting guide it seems to have what you would need such as setting descriptions which include races, geography, history, lore, etc. A few small starter campaigns are included to get you started. They seem fine as either stand alone sessions or inserted into a larger campaign. There is even a pullout map for some visual context.To compliment the setting there are a few new character races and sub-classes with backgrounds, abilities, and pantheons along with a few new spells and magic items. There are also descriptions of how some of the typical 5E races fit into the setting.As a setting it feels every bit as rich as Greyhawk and Faerun. Initially it may feel better but I believe that's just because it's a new and exciting playable setting. If more and more background and lore is added for this setting perhaps it will stand the test of longevity of the older settings.Looking back it's kind of amazing how wildly popular Critical Role became. Really nothing but a bunch of nerds getting together on a live stream to play Dungeons & Dragons. What made this game live stream different was not only that the players were all actors in some capacity but also the creativity that they all brought to the game setting conceived by Mercer. What's cool about it all is that it has been put into this guide so we can all create our own adventures in the same setting.

Critical Role is awesome and so is this campaign setting. Took a lot of the home brew work out of running my own campaigns out of Exandria! Amazing artwork and well thought out! CRITTER FOR LIFE!!!!