Dungeons and Dragons Fantasy Role-Playing Game Set 5: Immortals Rules by Frank Mentzer

Dungeons and Dragons Fantasy Role-Playing Game Set 5: Immortals Rules Reviews

• 
  Juho Pohjalainen

  Here's a fun fact: this book contains, to my knowledge, the only true and final way of winning Dungeons & Dragons. Even fourth edition's Epic Destinies do not go quite as far.
• 
  Max

  I absolutely loved reading the Dungeons and Dragons Rules Cyclopedia, which compiles the first four box sets of this series and boils the game down to the essential and really fun parts. I was thus excited to see what the Immortal rules were like, but sadly I'm somewhat disappointed by them. Immortals are basically gods without actually being called such, largely because TSR began trying to be more family friendly after the early outrage about D&D's supposed demonic nature. The previous rules have a discussion of how powerful characters can quest for Immortality, and these rules mean that the game doesn't have to end when they reach that goal. I just wish the rules were better and more interesting. In a lot of ways, it feels like this box set is taking D&D in the direction of superhero gaming, as all characters can use pretty much all magical powers and other abilities, just varied based on which Sphere of Power they belong to. These are Matter, Energy, Thought, Time, and Entropy. The first four correspond to one of the four main character classes while the last is the NPCs only obligatory evil faction. Which is one of my issues with this book - as with the treatment of chaos in the main rules, I don't much like entropy being automatically evil. In fact, this book introduces demons to this edition in the monsters section and portrays them as one of the main factions of the Sphere of Entropy. The PC rules are generally rather boring, largely involving the ability to use any and all magic powers and other abilities that were previously class exclusive, plus barebones details on advancement, creating physical bodies, and running home planes somewhat like domains. I can't help feel that Immortal play is probably kinda boring, as being able to do anything strikes me as leading to not feeling like doing much of anything. I'd prefer to have rules for epic abilities and power levels that build on what came before rather than swerving into a completely different game.
  
  I will say that there's some cool stuff in the DM's side of things that partially saves the book for me. There are details on the astral plane and other aspects of the multiverse that are fairly different from other versions of D&D and would make for fun play. There's a whole system in which the multiverse has five spatial dimensions, and different characters and creatures can occupy different ones. There's a whole parallel universe of people and worlds that exist in the 3rd, 4th, and 5th dimension that'd be fun to play with. I also like the stuff about Mystara's solar system, even if it's a bit short and doesn't give much of an idea of what's actually on the other planets. There are also some cool concepts in the monsters section since when you're exploring the entire multiverse things are allowed to get pretty weird and trippy. There are sentient planets and concepts, and magical musical notes, as well as powerful tentacled monstrosities and the rulers of dragonkind. I could see using a lot of the stuff here in a high level D&D game, though it'd need a bit of adapting to be suited for non-Immortal play. Still, I'd rather stick to classic style D&D then head into the weird superheroesque stuff that this book seems to propose, especially since a lot of the mechanics are rather barebones and vague. (I don't dislike superheroes, but it seems a weird fit as the epic end of D&D. I prefer 4E's Epic Destinies or even 3rd editions clunky epic level stuff.) Thus if/when I run a Basic D&D game, I'd certainly mine this for cool ideas and monsters, and I'd possibly leave Immortals in place of gods, but I'd ignore the mechanics proposed here and use something else if it ever came up. The Immortals rules are an interesting experiment, but there are definitely better ways of doing powerful D&D stuff and I can't personally view this as more than a curiosity.
• 
  Bradley

  Powergaming at the greatest extreme. Immortality should not have been put into a game. Still fun but things are much better at a mortal level. If you are the most powerful where is the challenge? =)