Game: Death: Guardian at the Gate
Publisher: Natural 20 Press
Series: d20
Reviewer: Wyrdmaster
Review Dated: 3rd, October 2002
Reviewer’s Rating: 9/10 [ Something special ]
Total Score: 10
Average Score: 5.00
Death: The Guardian of the Gate does very well. It shows that the Dark Quest and Natural 20 Press has been a win-win deal; it means that the rich flavour style of Dark Quest’s fantasy line benefits from the wider audience that the name Natural 20 Press is likely to attract and Natural 20 Press benefits from Dark Quest’s writing style. I don’t think I need to offer the caveat that my preference is for flavour over crunch and that this supplement caters to that particularly well. I don’t have to offer that as a disclaimer because Death: The Guardian of the Gate offers up a healthy dose of both. The new spells, items and prestige classes introduced by the supplement are all firmly rooted in the church of the Pale Lady and so you really need to soak up the flavour from the text in order to get the most out of the mechanics. Having said that there is an even balance between crunch and flavour I’ll also bet that if you’re more of a mechanically minded roleplayer that you’ll see the weaker aspects of the prestige classes and spells before you see their strengths.
The PDF is a colourful one but not annoyingly so. In fact given the favourite colours of the Pale Lady and her religion it would have been rather strange to have a bright and breezy colour scheme. The sidebars, which appear on alternate sides of the screen, are an inspirational in their elegance and utilise embossed purple icons of the Pale Lady’s religion on a purple background. Dark Quest have improved this PDF’s usability from their earlier works and the detailed contents page is presented as a page of links. You can click on an entry in the contents page and Acrobat Reader will take you directly to the corresponding chapter in the supplement. The traditional bookmarks for PDFs are present too, they’re correctly branched and thoroughly detailed but in a few cases the use of capital letters is a little off, for example, “LADy PALE” and “oBjects”. Finally, this electronic product has found a way to present bordered and coloured tables of numbers and mechanics (like the level advancement tables for prestige classes) without cluttering up the page. Game system tables and much of the flavour text appear on illustrated parchment. The texture and shading of the parchment provides a counter to the sharp edges and angles of the tables and adds appropriate atmosphere for the flavour text. It works very well. All the illustrations with the exception of the beautiful front cover and the adverts at the back are in black and white. The two tones suits the Pale Lady and her followers very well. Raven haired, gothic beauties dominate the artwork with tiny waists. It’s eye candy but it’s also appropriate to a religion in a fantasy world where the devout can actually see images of what their goddess looks like and will naturally all try and look similar. The Goddess of Death, the Pale Lady, the ultimate trend-setter.
The downside to all this is that the supplement is a nightmare to print. There’s an easy solution though. Death: Guardian of the Gate comes in to forms; the “LadyPale” PDF of which I’ve just been describing and then the “LadyDark” PDF which is black and white, without sidebars and parchment backgrounds and is easy to print. The LadyDark PDF does have a colour cover but doesn’t have the colour adverts at the end.
The first chapter of the supplement is devoted to the Goddess of Death herself. It’s presented by two people; the Pale Lady herself and more often by an important member of her religion, a man called Lucien whom she picked to spread her teachings. You discover later than Lucien didn’t found the religion of the Pale Lady when one of the narrators describe how he rose quickly through the ranks of the priests. There are a number of narrators throughout the supplement and the general rule is one narrator per chapter. This general rule does not apply to chapter one and if you’re just skimming quickly down the text then it’s easy to get confused as to whether the first person references are for Lucien or Death. Death was once a namby-pamby village girl who’s tender kindness and horrible life so impressed the previous God of Death that he decided to end his own “life” and appoint her as his successor. I quite like the idea of there being more than on God of Death, it’s especially helpful if you’re running with competing pantheons. The fact that the previous Death God was morbidly self-destructive is just terribly ironic and the image of some put on village girl as his replacement is probably the weakest link in the supplement. It’s not all that much of a weak link though. The Pale Lady believes in life and protection and is really the sort of Goddess you’d want with the Death portfolio. In fact the other two domains her portfolio are Good and Protection.
Don’t be fooled by supplement’s title and chapter one. This isn’t a product all about the Goddess of Death; it’s really more about her religion. Aside from her portfolio and that she’s a Greater Goddess you’re not given her stats and if you’re buying god books to see who’d win a divine mud wrestling match between the Pale Lady and Aphrodite then you’ll be disappointed. After chapter one the rest of the supplement moves on to look at the people in the religion and the ways and means that they use to worship and battle the enemy. The enemy? Undead.
Chapter two presents the meat of the religion. It covers the daily worship of the Pale Lady in minute detail. Her followers do not worship death; they worship the Lady Pale and her own beliefs. Everything from at what age people can be admitted into the church, through dress code, physical appearance, the role of the family, what food can be eaten, popular names, marriage, houses and gender equality. There is a lot of time spent on the various titles within the Church; the “Breath of the Pale” is head of the church and below her (currently female but not necessarily so) are “Shadows of Pale”, “Sorrows”, “Ravens”, “Hands of Pale” and the “Eyes of Pale”. They’re all rather more evocative names than just “Chief Cleric”. These positions are well written and they make sense, you wont have players asking you just what the Eyes of Pale do. Better still, these roles are entirely independent of d20 mechanics. You don’t need to be a level X cleric to fulfil any given position, the ability of any character to act in the role is left entirely to roleplaying decisions and not rollplaying ones. There are also two prestige classes tucked away in here. The Lady’s Chosen and Shade Wardens. Shade Wardens are the exception to the prestige class rule in that they’re not part of the Church of the Pale Lady and are prestigious form a death obsessed baddie instead.
If you thought chapter two presented a complete list of every aspect of the Church then you’d be wrong. The third chapter is given over to looking at the mental attributes and decisions that play a part in Church life. This boils down to issues such as whether drugs and alcohol are accepted, the role of art, language and music, communication and even education. There are three locations important to the Church as centres of education are briefly listed too.
Then the prestige classes begin. The prestige classes here are a little different in that they don’t seem particularly hard to qualify for except, of course, you have to be a member of the Pale Lady’s church. There’s just shy of ten in total and they’re all detailed through ten full levels of advancement; none of these half-attempts five (or sometimes less) level classes. The prestige classes serve as specific orders within the Church and again this is a roleplaying issue not a number balancing one. If you keep this mind then those prestige classes with easy requirements make sense, well, they make common sense perhaps more than they make game mechanics sense. Half of these prestige classes are described as Martial Orders and probably bring in the familiar feel of new game rules for doing battle in different ways. All the orders have similar style names to the previously described roles; they include the like of “the Harrowed”, “the Accounters” and “the Shields”. Some of the prestige classes overlap but again this isn’t a result of poor game mechanics, it seems to be a result of letting the religion develop as it might and then providing the game mechanics to make the Order playable.
The chapter after the prestige classes will be a familiar one to many as well; it’s the list of interesting objects, some of which are magical and other among the ranks of lost relics. Lost relics are a great idea; each one is a campaign in the waiting. These are powerful relics though, high fantasy stuff but perhaps therefore also worthy items to survive in the tomes of the Church even after they’re lost. If you tour the Dark Quest website you’ll find a whole lot of custom built Celtic jewellery for sale. The Church of the Pale Lady has similar tastes and the chapter’s narrator names the Celtic style as an important influence. A particularly nice touch, I thought, was the significant section on the religion’s holy symbol. Another touch that particularly appealed to me was the communication pendants that are handed out to certain Church members. The pendants are appealing not because they’re a particularly original idea (because they’re not) but because their inclusion in black, white and electronic print saves the GM the embarrassment of inventing them as the deux ex machina required to keep Clerics in touch with the Church. On the other hand all these powerful magic items do seem to imply vast resources and very many busy wizards crafting these wondrous items.
“Rituals, Myths and Legends” is the title of chapter six and it pretty much lives up to that while offering a lot more. There’s a calendar for example and I think every religion in a fantasy world where their god turns back undead and heals wounds for them should have their own calendar that is based on that deity too. The followers of the Pale Lady have thirteen months of twenty-eight days. The calendar doesn’t really move forward to tie rituals into important events like the beginning of winter and instead the rituals covered are for time independent events like deaths and marriages. There’s even a sample exchange of marriage vows. The myths and legends provide both flavour and meat for the religion. If these legends were composed of stories where Death turned up and saves people’s lives then I’d tear strips off the author. Fortunately nothing so silly happens.
Following this there are new spells. Many of the spells are labelled in the style of “Level: Clr 3 (Pale Lady)” and the implication is (rather than by explicit statement) the spells are only available to clerics of the Pale Lady. I think deciding whether some gods keep back spells just for their own clerics is an issue for Games Masters. I may have the implication wrong. Either way, the inclusion of the Pale Lady in the spell’s title serves as a reminder and a mild suggestion. There’s about a dozen spells; nothing compared to a supplement specialising in new magic but enough to give the clerics of the Pale Lady something of a unique feel.
One of the best features of this supplement is that spells, blessing and all sorts of magical effects that originate from the Pale Lady have suitable visual and audio reminders of this. For example, characters benefiting from a Bless spell might shine with a pale light while the sound of one of the Pale Lady’s hymns can just be heard on the wind. Some of the Undead Turning abilities suggest that the visage of the Pale Lady herself superimposes itself over the cleric and frankly that sort of cinematic effect can save the dice bouncing of combat from the depths of drudgery.
After this there are several more chapters of stories and even a hymn. It’s flavour text, yes and no. At this point there’s room in the inexpensive electronic format to include stories about the Pale Lady. It’s more valuable than just inspiration for the GM since these might well be stories that followers of the Pale Lady’s religion know themselves and share with the player characters. I couldn’t but help notice that very many of the unlucky people whom actually meet the Pale Lady out on business find her slightly irritating and that this Goddess of Death seems to laugh a lot. Don’t get me wrong, the stories and flavour text aren’t badly written there just seem to be reoccurring themes some of which make more immediate sense than others. The writing style is a bit purple at times (eyes dancing like twin moons) but since that suits the general ambience of the supplement it does no harm.
I really rather enjoyed Death: Guardian of the Gate. The supplement gives you a living and breathing religion and not just some new prestige classes for a goth-babe Death. This is actually a Death religion that probably would flourish in a high fantasy setting. The religion (which like most D&D style religions has no name) is applicable to both high and low fantasy settings and low, medium and high powered characters. It’s not perfect; some of the nuts and bolts of mechanics could do with a check or two but really that’s such a tiny concern over all that it almost seems a shame to mention it.
