Underdark from Wizards of the Coast for 4e D&D is a book that should give a DM everything that they need to run a game in the deadly underground setting below many fantasy realms in the game. And in this book succeeds in doing just that, IF you are willing to accept their story for the Underdark, a story which is vastly different than any previous story of the place.
The Underdark is the deep underground series of tunnels and caverns that breed strange lightless civilizations and horrible monsters. Most D&D players know the Underdark as having been introduced in the campaign setting of the Forgotten Realms and know it best from the stories of Drizzt Do’Urden, famous dark elf ranger of the Realms. That and other versions of the Underdark seldom bothered with the idea of sharing with the audience the creation story. How did these deep dark tunnels infused with strange magical properties and odd connections to alien monsters from beyond the planes come to be? It didn’t matter. They were and that was enough to scare the heck out of most players, as it should be.
Underdark for 4e D&D
The new Underdark book, however, does not adhere to the previous incarnations of the setting area. First, we have a very specific creation story about a god named Torog who never fled to the Astral Sea when all of the other gods did, and so he is still down there, crashing around in the endless tunnels of darkness, having been wounded in a battle with a primordial at the beginning of time and now unable to escape. He has created an odd magical tunnel called the King’s Highway that not only travels all over the Underdark but also breaks the barrier between planes on a regular basis and has magical properties associated with the wounded god.
This tale highlights both the strength and weakness of this book. There is a lot of great story in this book. In fact, most of the book is fluff (story) rather than crunch (mechanics and statistics). Sometimes it is the story of the inhabitants like Torog, the King Who Crawls and god of the Underdark, the mindflayers, drow, beholders, grell, or others. Even more often, however, it is a collection of stories describing locations that you can use in your game in the Shallows (less deep region), Deeps (deep region), Feydark (Feywild version), and Shadowdark (Shadowfell version), often with a small nugget of crunch to go along with it. These descriptions are fantastic, the crunchy bits that go with them are great, and a few really captured my imagination.
Where all of this unravels a bit for me is that I don’t play in a generic, nondescript setting. I play in a world of my devising and imagination that has stories, history, and cultures. And my setting simply doesn’t fit in with the setting assumptions of this book. The story elements of the book are so well designed to fit together that by eliminating a few important elements, like Torog, and much of the book either becomes useless or requires significant DM work to make it fit in, at which point a DM might consider just creating his own locations and inhabitants that are better suited to fit naturally into his story or world.
So if you are playing D&D in a setting where the story of the Underdark fits in well then this book is a really awesome place to look for inspiration for stories and locations you can use in your game. If you are playing in the Forgotten Realms, Eberron, or other setting that has a history with the Underdark, or a divine story that doesn’t leave room for Torog then this book might give you a few pieces of inspiration, but is going to hold significantly less usefulness to you.
Underdark for 4e D&D, a fantastic book for what it is…but what it is very well may not fit into your game, so look close before buying.
If you’d like to hear more about this book and what it has to offer please visit the Tome Show review of Underdark.
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It seems to me that someone who runs their own setting, FR or Eberron would be better off being a D&D Insider for the crunch when it comes to some of these 4e books. The basic installments – PHBs, MMs, DMGs, Adventurer’s Vaults, Power books & Draconomicons – they work pretty well for most campaign settings, but it seems where the books describing the core cosmology or races are concerned, the core fluff comes on so strong that it can be tough to overlook.
All that said, I’m glad the core setting is so well written this time around. Makes me think twice about using Eberron when ‘Points of Light’ is this cool!