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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Very different, but useless in an existing game, 23 April 2005
I bought this book after Monte's visit to Denmark last fall, hoping that the variant rules, ideas and material might inspire my future scenario-writing and gaming. However, most of the book is so different from the basic setting, that unless you chose to play in the gazeteer (game-world) "The Diamond Throne" provided by "Arcana Evolved", the book will be mostly useless to your game.
If you are just starting out, or want something completely different from a new campaign, this book could be just the thing.Arcana Evolved is a 'variant player's handbook', published by a different company, but with the participation of WoTC under the open gaming lisence, allowing anyone to publish games for D&D. Monte Cook is a time tested games designer, having worked with D&D for a long time, and in this book he adresses changes he himself find interesting to the original Player's Handbook 3.0. The book contains all the basic rules needed to play Dungeons and Dragons. It has a wide range of charecter classes, abilities and races to play, and discription of spells and eqipment, as well as a detailed game setting, are drawn up in detail. None of the original character-classes or races (exept for humans) appear, but instead "Arcana Evolved" presents a wide range of giant, reptilian, farey-like, feline and canine races, native to "The Diamond Throne". Classes mostly include different angles for fighter characters, as well as different archtypes for spell-users than provided in the basic D&D (but no Magic Missiles!). If you are looking for new classes, races, spells or feats, you will find this book is filled in abundance. I had hoped to use this book for a Players Handbook in an existing campaign, but, for instance, many of the original spells from the "Players Handbook" have been removed and replaced with ones more appropriate for the "Diaomnd Throne" setting, which makes the book rather useless as reference. On the plus side the rules are explained more straightforward than in the original "Dungeons & Dragons", making this a great tool for learning the basics, and everything seems to work for Monte Cook's setting.
On the other hand, some of the artwork is horribly amateurish, and after flipping through the quite expensive book (49.99 usd), I realised that I will probably never use the new rules provided (at least as a whole) - they simply differ too much from the rest of the material published for Dungeons & Dragons. The ideas are good, but the book just is not worth its price unless you are a fan of the setting .
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by Monte Cook
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