Unearthed Arcana: by Kyle

After reading the Unearthed Arcana, I've decided that it's a lot like Saturday Night Live: while I highly enjoyed it and strongly recommend it for every avid D&D player, there are sections of it that… well… suck. But, just like SNL, the good portions (which greatly outnumber the bad portions) are so good that you tend to forget the sections you didn't like. Just like how you'd sit through those bad Horatio Sanz and Jimmy Fallon skits, just so you could see Will Ferrell strut his stuff in an American-flag thong.

The Unearthed Arcana is a supplement for Dungeons and Dragons v. 3.5 which offers a plethora of "alternative" rules that can be incorporated into your existing D&D world. Although broken up into chapters varying from Classes, Races, Magic, etc., the entire sourcebook is a hodge-podge of different house rules that players have developed over the years. And as any player worth their salt knows, some of these rules are freaking great, while others suck donkeys.

Some of the good parts:

Bloodlines: To borrow a colloquialism from my childhood in New England-wicked awesome. These rules allow players to create characters that, at some point in their family line, were infused with DNA from some weird creature. By taking a "bloodline level", which is done to the exclusion of your "character level", the player will have certain special abilities that corresponds with the bloodline. Thus, a minotaur-touched character will get bonuses to search and alertness checks as well as strength bonuses, and a lycanthrope bloodline offers bonus feats (power attack or dodge) and constitution bonuses, among other things. But the coolest part is your character has slight physical characteristics related to the bloodline: minotaurs have horns, frost giants have a bluish tint, and efreets have bronze eyes and tiny horns. Again, wicked awesome.

Magic Recharge: Ever been frustrated by the fact that you could cast all your spells at 11:30 pm, pray for a bit, then wake up and cast them all again? That doesn't seem to make much sense. Under these alternate rules, spells are not limited to uses per day, but can be recast after the sufficient amount of time has passed to recharge. Depending on your level, class and the spell you are casting, you can cast the same spell again in so many rounds after it was first cast. Using this rule finally brings spellcasting in the D&D world consistent with how we always envisioned wizards and sorcerers operating.

And finally the coolest: the Urban Ranger. Unearthed Arcana has plenty of cool player variants, but this one beats the damn band. This Ranger-variant operates in the large, developed cities. He's at home walking the seedy streets and alleys of any large populated area. He abandons his wilderness tracking skill for a gather information skill. Instead of a hated enemy race, he can have a hated enemy organization. He still has an animal companion, but it has to be something appropriate to an urban area (rat, dog, pigeon). I can't even do it justice-you should buy this book just for the urban ranger.

Some of the bad parts:

Anything having to do with the elemental planes. What is the fascination with the elemental planes? There are plenty of rules in here for making fire goblins, water elves, and air gnomes-that's right, I said air gnomes. Look, if you're running out of stuff to put in a book, don't give me air gnomes as filler.

Sanity Points: Yeah. Uh, I don't know how to put it to the WoTC people, but this is just stupid. It's not like I don't have enough to keep track of on my character sheet, but now I have to keep sanity points. And when the points get down to a certain level, my character goes temporarily insane. But worse is that, apparently, when anyone goes temporarily insane, it manifests with the same symptoms and reaction (with a handy d100 insanity effects chart). So if I'm clinically depressed, bipolar, or a necrophiliac, I still have a 4% chance of being inflicted with a "strange or deviant eating behavior." No, I'm being serious. It actually says that. You know what, I'll leave this section for the rules-lawyers that like playing with psionics.

And then there are sections that could have been good, but the authors just didn't seem interested enough. For example, a section which had great promise gives players the option of assigning character attributes (which have certain benefits and drawbacks) or character flaws (in return for taking a flaw, you get an extra feat). As a player who can't create a character without having a crippling flaw, I thought this was brilliant. That is, until I read it. The book gives a grand total of one-half of a page to flaws. And of these, they only give you the barest description possible: "Murky-Eyed. Your vision is obscured." and "Shaky. You are relatively poor at ranged combat." Hey, I could have written that. I didn't pay thirty bucks for my own crap. If they had just spent an hour or so adding adjectives into this section, I would be much happier.

There are dozens more rules and variants to incorporate into your own campaign, most of which I would use myself. Others unquestionably suck (that's right, I'm looking at you, Air Gnome), and I'll just ignore them. Disagree with my assessment? Sure you do-- and that means you're stupid. But that's also just the nature of a compendium of house rules: they are completely subjective and you either love them or hate them. But there is so much to love in the Unearthed Arcana that you can't go wrong buying this book.

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Click here if you like Air Gnomes.