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

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.

Not only did this book arrive in excellent condition (seemingly a rarity with ordering books on amazon), but it's an excellent book. My map, unlike others, came out quite easily. I had no printing issues in my book either. This book is packed with tons of details about the world, but still leaves enough open-ends for a DM to incorporate their own ideas into the world. My one minor complaint so far is that the large map includes some things I don't want my players to see yet. I wish there were a player map with less details, or that the map was perhaps double-sided. I've read some of the complaints by other people about things like the races section being redundant. I don't agree. This book's coverage of races that also appear in other books is about discussing how these races exist and behave within the various regions of this particular setting, which I find to be very useful information in a setting book. I found the new subraces for elves, halflings, and dragonborn to be welcome additions that are also regionally specific concepts within this setting. Additionally, if you use things like DnDBeyond or FantasyGrounds, where you buy digital copies of books to unlock their content for use, including all of these races in one book is tremendously valuable for those with limited budgets. Many of the locations in the wonderfully detailed gazetteer section include brief ideas for quests, which is very helpful for me as a DM. Many other reviewers have gone into plenty of detail, so I'll keep this short and simply say that I found this to be an excellent and well organized setting book.

I am a fan of Critical Role, but I'm a bigger fan of D&D. This book has a wonderful new campaign setting, fantastic new subclasses (seriously, the Echo Knight is the best Fighter subclass that has been created), some awesome new spells, a few new races and a reprint/publication of lots of other races in one spot (which cuts down on the need to go through a ton of other sourcebooks). I also love that they have starter adventures in the back of the book to get you going in this Critical Role setting. Add it to your homebrew campaign or just say Wildemount is across the vast ocean from Faerun. Lots of great lore and new gods and magical artifacts. As a DM, it gives me so much material to work with. The only thing I wish that Wizards of the Coast did was give a digital code with the book purchase for DNDBeyond. Nevertheless, this is everything you want from a sourcebook, and well worth the money.

I love how this book reads. It sets up so many potential plot hooks for DMs to use, which makes it a really valuable resource for anyone wanting to run games in WIldmount that aren't just a long series of combats with not much in the way of story or plot. At the same time, it offers some really cool new classes and content for players, which makes it a great resource for anyone who is looking to move beyond the PHB as a player. Finally, it is just interesting and well written. I really enjoy reading about Wildmount and its lore as much as I enjoy playing in it, so if you're into exploring a place that is as colorful and wonderful as Mercer's Wildmount this book is again of great value. I cannot wait to dig through it with a fine-tooth comb and really absorb the sense of Wildmount, especially now that Critical Role is on a Corona Hiatus and I need to get my fix.

I may have gotten lucky, or perhaps others are unlucky, but the printing quality and binding integrity of my copy is excellent. It took me a little doing to find the perforations and remove the large, quality map from the back of the book without damaging anything. I'm a fan of the Twitch/YouTube series, and consider the Critical Role squad to be one of the finest, warmest collection of fantasy entertainers out there. Mercer's vision for Wildemount is fleshed out richly in this colorful, extensive, heavily-illustrated text which make for just good reading. It is obviously not a replacement for the Role Player rule book, nor is it offered as such. But for those who want to know more about Wildemount, or who love fantasy and D&D and want to see a creative exercise that sets a high bar, this is a great . . . resource is too dry a word. It's a great monument to the love of the genre, and the craft.

First and foremost, I know some reviews indicated print quality issues. I have had my copy for about two weeks and I have not seen any misprints or doubling of text yet. Granted, I have not had a chance to go through the whole thing yet. There is a lot of great artwork and maps included as well. I stumbled on Wildemount and Critical 20 while looking for a D&D campaign to run with my 11 year old and his buddies on Roll20.net. Though still active player and GM of other systems, I had not dabbled with D&D since the late 90's. All that to say, I am digging back in, and this seems to be a very well thought out world for the D&D system full of rich history and places to explore. It is an interesting twist that the party members could be enlisted in one of the armies. It reminds some of the world/realm books from 2E on Dragon Lance and Forgotten Realms, and as the GM, I really appreciate that there are some starter adventures baked into the book. I will try to update again once I have spent some time in this realm and really get a good feel for it.

It's a nice book for dnd

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.

El libro es de un excelente material. y el contenido pues seguramente ya sabes de que trata si te interesa comprarlo. mi unica observacion negativa es con la paquetería de amazon. enviaron el libro en una caja que es justo del tamaño necesario. me costó incluso un poco de trabajo sacar el libro de la caja, lo negativo de esto es que cualquier golpe que recibió la caja durante el envío, también lo recibió el libro. entonces viene con las esquinas ligeramente dobladas. es lamentable, y pues no afecta la lectura del libro, pero si hace que no este igual de contento al recibirlo, en fin. ten en cuenta eso si lo piensas pedir por Amazon. lo positivo es que el libro si viene con los mapas, entonces pues es nuevo.

Veio certinho

This is a fantastic book and it came in perfect condition.

Manuale eccellente, sia per contenuti sia per impaginazione.

À avoir car il permet d’apporter grand nombre de savoir dans cette région.