Champions of Ruin Review

This is a book that has been out for about 7-8 months. Here is the blurb from WotC.

"Every corner of Faerûn harbors its own sinister element. When opportunities arise, malevolent groups and nefarious individuals emerge from the shadows to make their infamous marks on the Realms. Within these pages, you will discover everything players and Dungeon Masters need to create the most evil organizations, treacherous villains, and morally ambiguous antiheroes to ever afflict the Forgotten Realms game setting."


The Good:
The Champions of Ruin takes some of the really bad, evil, nasty and down right sinister groups from Forgotten Realms and details how to fit them into a campaign. Some of the spells and feats in here are very nice. This is a great book for GM's to use to torment players. Taking groups or individuals out of here it put into non-Realms campaigns is fairly easy. There is also a nice section on evil locations that could easily be adapted to most any campaign.


The Bad:
It's WotC, so of course they had to add new races (because we all know there aren't enough to pick from as it is) in this book. The only one that I didn't mind was the Draegloth write up. Purely as an NPC race it has some merit. It would have been nice if they would have gone a little more indepth on some of the areas they covered but there is only so much room and they generaly try to leave something for the individual campaigns to fill in for themselves.


The Unsure:
You really need Lords of Darkness to get the most out of this book.


Overall, IMHO, this is a good product for GM's (more then for PC's) which can allow them to introduce new evil groups or sites quickly. I like the cover art quite a lot. I welcome your comments on this book.