![]() In canonical lore, it’s because he’s into collecting souls because the Nine Hells, the place he lives, has a complicated economy of soul intake and soldier output that needs to be supported at all times. Then I have to figure out why he’d make this deal. If it’s Asmodeus, I might need to explain that he’s the lord of all of the devils. Devils are bound by contracts, so my players could make a very explicit deal and either fulfill it or try to escape it. First, I might have a plot point about making a deal with a devil. If I wanted to use Asmodeus, that big ole Satan I talked about before, I would have to do an operation like this. The cosmic balance of D&D is so well thought-out and specific that it’s hard to lift one piece out to use by itself. But there’s very little of this book that I can use in my campaign because it’s all so dependent on each other. If you’re curious about how these beings impact the daily lives of mortals, there’s lots of info about that as well. It has deep descriptions of all of these cosmic beings, and there are statistical blocks in case you want to fight them. If you’re interested in that canonical approach, then this book has you covered. Similarly, I’m not using D&D devils and demons, their Blood War, or even their idea of the afterlife. The core assumptions of Dungeons & Dragons make their way into my campaign, but I’m not using the stock Dwarven gods with all of their lore and connections. For example, my campaign setting is a home-rolled fiction partially created by myself and my players. It starts at a very high level of the D&D cosmology, and it feels harder to borrow from or augment than other D&D source books. Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes doesn’t work that way. They are books that are grounded in the dusty roads and dirty swords of fantasy tabletop campaigns, and they slot easily into the workflow that I have to make those kinds of adventures feel good. The former is a rules expansion and clarification that helps to build out the interactions of any campaign, and the latter is a book of monsters that any party could come upon during any given romp through the world. The two previous sourcebooks of its type, Xanathar’s Guide To Everything and Volo’s Guide To Monsters, are both books that I use constantly as a Dungeon Master. Asmodeus, the lead devil of the cosmology, is delightfully Satanic, and even reading through the book I was trying to figure out how to fit him into the campaign that I am currently running without disrupting the flow and feeling of the world that I am working in.Īnd that, for me, is the other hand: Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes feels like a book you need to build your campaign around. If you were, for example, making a game about the destruction of the Elven pantheon by vengeful Orcish gods, this book has all the info you would need to really ground that and make it pop for your players.Įven better, it has explanations of all the major devils and demons of the D&D universe so that you can really sell a story about those entities to players. It has lots of great information about the different playable species of the game, their pantheons of good and evil gods, and solid explanations for how those gods impact the long and short term lives of those species. On one hand, I don’t think that Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes is a bad sourcebook for D&D. How much you enjoy and use the book is going to depend on how important gods and devils are to your D&D experience. Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes, the newest book out of the D&D team that released in game stores May 18 and everywhere else on the 29th, doesn’t necessarily bill itself as being focused on the affairs of those extra-planar gods and devils, and yet the content is almost wholly devoted to them. There’s the Abyss and the Nine Hells, the realms of demons and devils respectively (in D&D those are very different kinds of creatures). There are planes where gods live, and there are planes in which the encapsulations of fire, water, earth and wind just hang out kicking ass all day long. There’s the Material Plane, where normal everyday stuff happens. The fiction of Dungeons & Dragons encompasses a lot of things.
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