So I typically am kind of... unmotivated to look at Greek Mythology fiction as I feel no one making mythology based fiction ever use anything else and feel like people think the only Mythology that exists is Greek... But I'm honestly stoked to read (not bought it yet) Theros it looks cool with Piety system and supernatural gifts. What are your thoughts on it?
I like the new monsters and subclasses, and the races are solid. I'm interested in working with the mythical monster rules, although the vast majority of games will never use them by nature of their power level. I probably won't use piety, but the slow adoption of scalable magic weapons is a nice touch. I agree with you about the lack of setting diversity. I'm a bit exhausted with new campaign settings, but Al Qadim and the Calimshan and Maztica regions of the FR are some settings that incorporate Arabian and Mesoamerican mythology. You may want to check those out from earlier editions.
My first thoughts are that Satyr are overpowered. That magic resistance is a bit too much.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
Satyr like the centaur is also creature type: fey, which makes it the target of a whole slew of things. It is also far less powerful than playable creatures like Purebloods.
Leonin have a roar, but that's not as impressive as tabaxi mobility.
Supernatural gifts are ubercool but there's currently no way to put it in your character sheet short of manually customizing each little thing it does. The Devs say this is being addressed and will be available at some future unspecified date.
Tritons are changed a little. This erata has caused some confusion with league play, but it is WotC approved.
A few of the monsters in the book are pretty cool.
I'm happy with my purchase &am looking for a theros campaign in my area. (I could run one but I really want to be a player in this one.)
I came to the forums just to find out how to add a Supernatural Gift to a character. Thanks for the answer Dwarfonaf!
"Supernatural gifts are ubercool but there's currently no way to put it in your character sheet short of manually customizing each little thing it does. The Devs say this is being addressed and will be available at some future unspecified date."
Did the devs give any time frame for the fix? It seems that should have been addressed before they made the book available.
I'm a little disappointed in the lack of "conventional" character options beyond the 2 subclasses, 2 races, and 1 background. Supernatural gifts and piety are cool, but they require a decent amount of work to fit them into another setting and the way they just add power on top of the existing system has me expecting that it's not going to be used in a lot of games.
Also not super crazy about the Leonin (not just another animal-person, but another cat-animal person?) or the very limited scope of races intended for Theros campaigns, which is heavily skewed towards STR and CON. I mean we all love the Spartan types, but where are the Greek philosophers and scientists? Even just one more race focused around INT would have made it feel much more rounded out - and would have likely been a more interesting inclusion to the available 5e races as a whole instead of yet another STR/CON race.
As a DM though there's lots of stuff to work with here, and the pantheon is probably the best, most interesting one published for 5e so far
I came to the forums just to find out how to add a Supernatural Gift to a character. Thanks for the answer Dwarfonaf!
"Supernatural gifts are ubercool but there's currently no way to put it in your character sheet short of manually customizing each little thing it does. The Devs say this is being addressed and will be available at some future unspecified date."
Did the devs give any time frame for the fix? It seems that should have been addressed before they made the book available.
No, the devs generally don't give timelines on when projects are expected to be completed. Don't know why, they just don't.
I came to the forums just to find out how to add a Supernatural Gift to a character. Thanks for the answer Dwarfonaf!
"Supernatural gifts are ubercool but there's currently no way to put it in your character sheet short of manually customizing each little thing it does. The Devs say this is being addressed and will be available at some future unspecified date."
Did the devs give any time frame for the fix? It seems that should have been addressed before they made the book available.
No, the devs generally don't give timelines on when projects are expected to be completed. Don't know why, they just don't.
The fallout from a missed milestone to the public is very hard to control. If they say they will deliver on monday and the feature comes out wednesday there is likely to be massive blow back on monday/tuesday from disappointed users. If they say in progress under active development and it comes out wednesday people will complain much less on monday and tuesday.
I came to the forums just to find out how to add a Supernatural Gift to a character. Thanks for the answer Dwarfonaf!
"Supernatural gifts are ubercool but there's currently no way to put it in your character sheet short of manually customizing each little thing it does. The Devs say this is being addressed and will be available at some future unspecified date."
Did the devs give any time frame for the fix? It seems that should have been addressed before they made the book available.
No, the devs generally don't give timelines on when projects are expected to be completed. Don't know why, they just don't.
The fallout from a missed milestone to the public is very hard to control. If they say they will deliver on monday and the feature comes out wednesday there is likely to be massive blow back on monday/tuesday from disappointed users. If they say in progress under active development and it comes out wednesday people will complain much less on monday and tuesday.
After nearly thirty years in software development, everything takes twice as long as it should. Triple your estimates and deliver in 2/3 the time!
Frankly I'm super excited for this supplement I admitted in OP I'm desensitized by Greek but this setting pretty cool. Also I love how each god is actively involved in the setting though surprised Xenagos is a character as he was killed by Elpsthis in MtG so this must be set between Into The Nyx but before Beyond Death
I like what is there, but i think this book fell short. I hate no Gazetteer or any NPC's anywhere pretty lame for a campaign setting. Seems pretty lazy on WOTC's part to leave populating the whole setting up to DM's. I think this book should be $20 max based on what is there.
Considering the book is "Greek Mythology" by way of Magic: the Gathering cash grab, I'm relatively surprised at how light the M:tG bull****ery is. Actual setting information is extremely scant, but that also kinda scans for a Hero Myth campaign where nobody's explored the lands outside the polises, so while regrettable I can understand the decision. Especially with two thirds of the book taken up by godnanigans.
The piety system is an interesting tool that perhaps see use even outside Theros, though it would need adjustment. The gods themselves are all busybody meddlesome ******** more concerned with fluffing their own egos and putting one over on their rivals than with doing their jobs...which is absolutely correct for Greek Hero Myth. A regular person reading the book, with no M:tG contamination, would largely want to slap the shit out of every last one of them, which is as it should be.
The new character options are...okay, on the whole. Very mixed bag. Oath of Heroism/Glory made it through more or less intact and even improved, which is awesome. It fulfills a niche a lot of paladin players go to the class specifically to make. College of Eloquence is as thematically "Ehhhh......" as it was in UA, but at least the mechanics are all right. Leonin are annoying but otherwise inoffensive, but I take serious umbrage with magic resistance on satyrs. People say the Fey creature type is a huge disadvantage for satyr characters. I heartily disagree - the number of times not being classed as humanoid will save you from a Hold or Dominate person, a Charm Person, or any other spell that targets specifically humanoids far outweighs the number of times you'll be bothered by Prot G&E. Fey as your creature type is an advantage, not a drawback. Satyrs are super overloaded, which moderately sucks because 5e has a severe hateboner for trickster races/archetypes/characters and these things aren't going to help that in the slightest.
Overall, the book is not a flaming disaster-wagon the way Ravnica was. Ravnica is a crime against tabletop gaming; Theros is just a weirdly mutated but generally serviceable stab at a Greek Hero Myth supplement. If you've never been exposed to M:tG, or if you can ignore the Magic-y weirdness going on in the background, it'll serve as a decent basis for a GHM game.
Overall, the book is not a flaming disaster-wagon the way Ravnica was. Ravnica is a crime against tabletop gaming; Theros is just a weirdly mutated but generally serviceable stab at a Greek Hero Myth supplement. If you've never been exposed to M:tG, or if you can ignore the Magic-y weirdness going on in the background, it'll serve as a decent basis for a GHM game.
I'm curious as to what your beef is with Ravnica. I adore the book, so I'd love to read some counter thoughts. Maybe I missed or overlooked something. I'm genuinely curious.
Ravnica is the bad Saturday morning cartoon version of a 'warring factions' setting. All of the "Guilds" in Ravnica have one, UND PRECISELY VUN, schtick, to which each and every single member of the guild is fanatically devoted without the slightest question or hesitation no matter how baffling and/or counterproductive that schtick is.
Take the Izzet League, for example. They spend every day inventing newer, more intricate and resource-intensive ways to blow themselves up. Their cause is supposed to be the advancement of science and magitech, but their "DAMN THE CONSEQUENCES!" Zany Inventor Schtick is working against them at every single turn. They're so dedicated to ignoring anything that gets in the way of SCIENCE(!!!) that millions of Izzet engineers throughout history have never realized that enacting even the most basic safety protocols, containment policies, or any other means of avoiding the giant setback that is their latest experiment spectacularly exploding and destroying their expensive, difficult to build research labs would mean a much faster rate of overall advancement.
All the damn factions are like this. They're so one-note and lacking in anything like real depth or verisimilitude that it drives me nuts. Each and every faction in Ravnica is a cardboard cutout caricature of the most extreme end of a given trope, and eighty percent of the book is its guilds. The other twenty percent are wildly overpowered backgrounds that DMs have to shoot down every single time they start a new campaign on DDB, even though it makes absolutely no bloody sense for any of them to ever see use outside Ravnica-the-setting. Every DM has had that conversation.
Player: "Man, this is gonna be so cool! Look at all these extra spells I get!" DM: "Wait, what? Where the hell did those come from? Goddamnit, didn't I tell you to turn M:tG content off?" Player: "WHY?! It's so cool! I get to try all these crazy spells my class doesn't ever get to use and make super sick combos, why you gotta shut me down like that?" DM: "Because we're in Exandria, not Ravnica, and Guild Agents from Ravnica don't exist in Exandria?" Player: "Well *duh*, I'm not actually gonna play an Izzet engineer! I just want those sweet juicy spells for my cleric so I don't have to suck at blowing things up!" DM: "And that's why those backgrounds are banned." Player: "Man, why you gotta be such a tyrant about it?! I'm just trying to Have Fun(TM)!"
So on and so forth.
**** the Ravnica book. Or rather, **** the fact that it's never held up as a special-game book that isn't applicable to D&D at large. I'm never going to tell a M:tG fan not to play a Ravnica campaign with the book where they can be planeswalkers doing whatever it is planeswalkers actually do while adventuring in their favorite megacity, but every time I have to take a hose to Exandria or Eberron games to wash off all the Ravnica stink players keep trying to bamboozle DMs on, it makes me hate that book a little bit more.
Ravnica is the bad Saturday morning cartoon version of a 'warring factions' setting. All of the "Guilds" in Ravnica have one, UND PRECISELY VUN, schtick, to which each and every single member of the guild is fanatically devoted without the slightest question or hesitation no matter how baffling and/or counterproductive that schtick is.
Take the Izzet League, for example. They spend every day inventing newer, more intricate and resource-intensive ways to blow themselves up. Their cause is supposed to be the advancement of science and magitech, but their "DAMN THE CONSEQUENCES!" Zany Inventor Schtick is working against them at every single turn. They're so dedicated to ignoring anything that gets in the way of SCIENCE(!!!) that millions of Izzet engineers throughout history have never realized that enacting even the most basic safety protocols, containment policies, or any other means of avoiding the giant setback that is their latest experiment spectacularly exploding and destroying their expensive, difficult to build research labs would mean a much faster rate of overall advancement.
All the damn factions are like this. They're so one-note and lacking in anything like real depth or verisimilitude that it drives me nuts. Each and every faction in Ravnica is a cardboard cutout caricature of the most extreme end of a given trope, and eighty percent of the book is its guilds. The other twenty percent are wildly overpowered backgrounds that DMs have to shoot down every single time they start a new campaign on DDB, even though it makes absolutely no bloody sense for any of them to ever see use outside Ravnica-the-setting. Every DM has had that conversation.
Player: "Man, this is gonna be so cool! Look at all these extra spells I get!" DM: "Wait, what? Where the hell did those come from? Goddamnit, didn't I tell you to turn M:tG content off?" Player: "WHY?! It's so cool! I get to try all these crazy spells my class doesn't ever get to use and make super sick combos, why you gotta shut me down like that?" DM: "Because we're in Exandria, not Ravnica, and Guild Agents from Ravnica don't exist in Exandria?" Player: "Well *duh*, I'm not actually gonna play an Izzet engineer! I just want those sweet juicy spells for my cleric so I don't have to suck at blowing things up!" DM: "And that's why those backgrounds are banned." Player: "Man, why you gotta be such a tyrant about it?! I'm just trying to Have Fun(TM)!"
So on and so forth.
**** the Ravnica book. Or rather, **** the fact that it's never held up as a special-game book that isn't applicable to D&D at large. I'm never going to tell a M:tG fan not to play a Ravnica campaign with the book where they can be planeswalkers doing whatever it is planeswalkers actually do while adventuring in their favorite megacity, but every time I have to take a hose to Exandria or Eberron games to wash off all the Ravnica stink players keep trying to bamboozle DMs on, it makes me hate that book a little bit more.
In defense of Ravnica, it did have a couple cool things. Circle of Spores was cool. The monsters were okay. That's about it.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
A fool pulls the leaves. A brute chops the trunk. A sage digs the roots.
I'm a little disappointed in the lack of "conventional" character options beyond the 2 subclasses, 2 races, and 1 background.
Yeah, this is my largest issue with the setting so far (altho technically if you don't have Ravnica it's 4 new races). Subclasses are my jam, and while I don't expect a new subclass for every class in all campaign settings, having just two is weak imo.
So I typically am kind of... unmotivated to look at Greek Mythology fiction as I feel no one making mythology based fiction ever use anything else and feel like people think the only Mythology that exists is Greek... But I'm honestly stoked to read (not bought it yet) Theros it looks cool with Piety system and supernatural gifts. What are your thoughts on it?
I like the new monsters and subclasses, and the races are solid. I'm interested in working with the mythical monster rules, although the vast majority of games will never use them by nature of their power level. I probably won't use piety, but the slow adoption of scalable magic weapons is a nice touch. I agree with you about the lack of setting diversity. I'm a bit exhausted with new campaign settings, but Al Qadim and the Calimshan and Maztica regions of the FR are some settings that incorporate Arabian and Mesoamerican mythology. You may want to check those out from earlier editions.
My first thoughts are that Satyr are overpowered. That magic resistance is a bit too much.
Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
Tasha
Magic Resistance is a powerful ability, but it's not like the satyr is the only PC that has it.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Satyr like the centaur is also creature type: fey, which makes it the target of a whole slew of things. It is also far less powerful than playable creatures like Purebloods.
Leonin have a roar, but that's not as impressive as tabaxi mobility.
Supernatural gifts are ubercool but there's currently no way to put it in your character sheet short of manually customizing each little thing it does. The Devs say this is being addressed and will be available at some future unspecified date.
Tritons are changed a little. This erata has caused some confusion with league play, but it is WotC approved.
A few of the monsters in the book are pretty cool.
I'm happy with my purchase &am looking for a theros campaign in my area. (I could run one but I really want to be a player in this one.)
I came to the forums just to find out how to add a Supernatural Gift to a character. Thanks for the answer Dwarfonaf!
"Supernatural gifts are ubercool but there's currently no way to put it in your character sheet short of manually customizing each little thing it does. The Devs say this is being addressed and will be available at some future unspecified date."
Did the devs give any time frame for the fix? It seems that should have been addressed before they made the book available.
I'm a little disappointed in the lack of "conventional" character options beyond the 2 subclasses, 2 races, and 1 background. Supernatural gifts and piety are cool, but they require a decent amount of work to fit them into another setting and the way they just add power on top of the existing system has me expecting that it's not going to be used in a lot of games.
Also not super crazy about the Leonin (not just another animal-person, but another cat-animal person?) or the very limited scope of races intended for Theros campaigns, which is heavily skewed towards STR and CON. I mean we all love the Spartan types, but where are the Greek philosophers and scientists? Even just one more race focused around INT would have made it feel much more rounded out - and would have likely been a more interesting inclusion to the available 5e races as a whole instead of yet another STR/CON race.
As a DM though there's lots of stuff to work with here, and the pantheon is probably the best, most interesting one published for 5e so far
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
No, the devs generally don't give timelines on when projects are expected to be completed. Don't know why, they just don't.
The fallout from a missed milestone to the public is very hard to control. If they say they will deliver on monday and the feature comes out wednesday there is likely to be massive blow back on monday/tuesday from disappointed users. If they say in progress under active development and it comes out wednesday people will complain much less on monday and tuesday.
After nearly thirty years in software development, everything takes twice as long as it should. Triple your estimates and deliver in 2/3 the time!
Frankly I'm super excited for this supplement I admitted in OP I'm desensitized by Greek but this setting pretty cool. Also I love how each god is actively involved in the setting though surprised Xenagos is a character as he was killed by Elpsthis in MtG so this must be set between Into The Nyx but before Beyond Death
I like what is there, but i think this book fell short. I hate no Gazetteer or any NPC's anywhere pretty lame for a campaign setting. Seems pretty lazy on WOTC's part to leave populating the whole setting up to DM's. I think this book should be $20 max based on what is there.
thoughts on the gods?
Considering the book is "Greek Mythology" by way of Magic: the Gathering cash grab, I'm relatively surprised at how light the M:tG bull****ery is. Actual setting information is extremely scant, but that also kinda scans for a Hero Myth campaign where nobody's explored the lands outside the polises, so while regrettable I can understand the decision. Especially with two thirds of the book taken up by godnanigans.
The piety system is an interesting tool that perhaps see use even outside Theros, though it would need adjustment. The gods themselves are all busybody meddlesome ******** more concerned with fluffing their own egos and putting one over on their rivals than with doing their jobs...which is absolutely correct for Greek Hero Myth. A regular person reading the book, with no M:tG contamination, would largely want to slap the shit out of every last one of them, which is as it should be.
The new character options are...okay, on the whole. Very mixed bag. Oath of Heroism/Glory made it through more or less intact and even improved, which is awesome. It fulfills a niche a lot of paladin players go to the class specifically to make. College of Eloquence is as thematically "Ehhhh......" as it was in UA, but at least the mechanics are all right. Leonin are annoying but otherwise inoffensive, but I take serious umbrage with magic resistance on satyrs. People say the Fey creature type is a huge disadvantage for satyr characters. I heartily disagree - the number of times not being classed as humanoid will save you from a Hold or Dominate person, a Charm Person, or any other spell that targets specifically humanoids far outweighs the number of times you'll be bothered by Prot G&E. Fey as your creature type is an advantage, not a drawback. Satyrs are super overloaded, which moderately sucks because 5e has a severe hateboner for trickster races/archetypes/characters and these things aren't going to help that in the slightest.
Overall, the book is not a flaming disaster-wagon the way Ravnica was. Ravnica is a crime against tabletop gaming; Theros is just a weirdly mutated but generally serviceable stab at a Greek Hero Myth supplement. If you've never been exposed to M:tG, or if you can ignore the Magic-y weirdness going on in the background, it'll serve as a decent basis for a GHM game.
Please do not contact or message me.
I'm curious as to what your beef is with Ravnica. I adore the book, so I'd love to read some counter thoughts. Maybe I missed or overlooked something. I'm genuinely curious.
All things Lich - DM tips, tricks, and other creative shenanigans
Ravnica is the bad Saturday morning cartoon version of a 'warring factions' setting. All of the "Guilds" in Ravnica have one, UND PRECISELY VUN, schtick, to which each and every single member of the guild is fanatically devoted without the slightest question or hesitation no matter how baffling and/or counterproductive that schtick is.
Take the Izzet League, for example. They spend every day inventing newer, more intricate and resource-intensive ways to blow themselves up. Their cause is supposed to be the advancement of science and magitech, but their "DAMN THE CONSEQUENCES!" Zany Inventor Schtick is working against them at every single turn. They're so dedicated to ignoring anything that gets in the way of SCIENCE(!!!) that millions of Izzet engineers throughout history have never realized that enacting even the most basic safety protocols, containment policies, or any other means of avoiding the giant setback that is their latest experiment spectacularly exploding and destroying their expensive, difficult to build research labs would mean a much faster rate of overall advancement.
All the damn factions are like this. They're so one-note and lacking in anything like real depth or verisimilitude that it drives me nuts. Each and every faction in Ravnica is a cardboard cutout caricature of the most extreme end of a given trope, and eighty percent of the book is its guilds. The other twenty percent are wildly overpowered backgrounds that DMs have to shoot down every single time they start a new campaign on DDB, even though it makes absolutely no bloody sense for any of them to ever see use outside Ravnica-the-setting. Every DM has had that conversation.
Player: "Man, this is gonna be so cool! Look at all these extra spells I get!"
DM: "Wait, what? Where the hell did those come from? Goddamnit, didn't I tell you to turn M:tG content off?"
Player: "WHY?! It's so cool! I get to try all these crazy spells my class doesn't ever get to use and make super sick combos, why you gotta shut me down like that?"
DM: "Because we're in Exandria, not Ravnica, and Guild Agents from Ravnica don't exist in Exandria?"
Player: "Well *duh*, I'm not actually gonna play an Izzet engineer! I just want those sweet juicy spells for my cleric so I don't have to suck at blowing things up!"
DM: "And that's why those backgrounds are banned."
Player: "Man, why you gotta be such a tyrant about it?! I'm just trying to Have Fun(TM)!"
So on and so forth.
**** the Ravnica book. Or rather, **** the fact that it's never held up as a special-game book that isn't applicable to D&D at large. I'm never going to tell a M:tG fan not to play a Ravnica campaign with the book where they can be planeswalkers doing whatever it is planeswalkers actually do while adventuring in their favorite megacity, but every time I have to take a hose to Exandria or Eberron games to wash off all the Ravnica stink players keep trying to bamboozle DMs on, it makes me hate that book a little bit more.
Please do not contact or message me.
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Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
In defense of Ravnica, it did have a couple cool things. Circle of Spores was cool. The monsters were okay. That's about it.
A fool pulls the leaves. A brute chops the trunk. A sage digs the roots.
My Improved Lineage System
Yeah, this is my largest issue with the setting so far (altho technically if you don't have Ravnica it's 4 new races). Subclasses are my jam, and while I don't expect a new subclass for every class in all campaign settings, having just two is weak imo.
More headaches for the DM to deal with as far as extra races go. Also I am not a huge fan of the Greek mythos, so the book is a non starter for me.