Anger of Angels

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant writing, poorly organized
Review: This is one of the better sourcebooks I've come across in the past while.

With the 3.0/3.5 rules, it's so terribly easy to make just about kind of monster, class or race you want to, and many sourcebooks suffer as a result. There's such an abundance of material out there, and it's so easy to make more, and often what ends up in the books is the less daring, less innovative, less useful material.

If I wanted to know how to make every archon or eladrin into a playable race, I know how to do that, thanks to Savage Species. This book doesn't bother telling me how.

If I wanted to know how to use the SRD feats to develop feats appropriate for angels, I know how to do that, thanks to Skip Williams' columns over at wizards.com. This book doesn't bother telling me how.

Instead, this book focuses on the information that's actually useful to me, like what the different kinds of angels are, the names for them, how to make an angel of death or a fallen angel, plus added geography of the celestial and infernal realms. It's all new stuff, for the most part, and it's well-written.

I've heard some complaints that the writing in the book is a little dull and dry. I didn't find that at all, but angelology is a much stuffier and duller subject than most people are prepared for, and that's probably mostly responsible. For me, the writing was a lot more interesting than, say, most of the kabbalic texts on the subject.

There's good, cogent information here, everything you'll need to run a campaign full of angels, or just work up those one or two angelic beings to flesh out a campaign world. The spells and feats are heavily weighed towards the angels, but, hey, look at the title of the book. They're quite useful, too, both for game mechanics (several damage-causing divine spells, and some nice low-level buffs) and flavour (rite of baptism is both useful and adds a nice flavour to heavily divine campaigns).

My one complaint is that the information's scattered throughout the book. It's just not well-organized. The table of contents is relatively helpful, but this is a book in dire need of an index.

If you want to add a real taste of Heaven to your campaign, then this is simply a must-buy book. Combine this book with the Book of Exalted Deeds and you have a killer combo of goodness and light . . . which means that you can make the demons that much stronger.