Heroes of the Fallen Lands: An Essential Dungeons Dragons Supplement by Mike Mearls

Heroes of the Fallen Lands: An Essential Dungeons Dragons Supplement Reviews

• 
  Nathan Albright

  If you are reading this book, you are almost certainly a dedicated table top gamer [1] looking to imagine the path of a fairly standard track character throughout the entire progress of one's campaign, all the way to the end of the epic level at hundreds of thousands of experience points and likely months or years of playing. It is hard to imagine anyone else getting much out of this book if one was not a role playing gamer, unless it was for someone who was writing about such people or about fantasy characters, and was looking for help in what kind of questions to ask themselves when it came to constructing such characters. Still, it is far more likely they are avid gamers, and there is nothing wrong with that. Although about 350 pages in length, this is not a book that is a daunting read, nor is likely to be read straight through by most people, but rather something kept by an avid gamer as a resource for making certain decisions about their characters or reflecting on their general party balance.
  
  The contents of this book are well-organized, and this is clearly a book that has benefited from a certain polish and expertise on the part of its graphic design and publishing team. It is divided into eight chapters, introducing Dungeons & Dragons, giving a game overview, and giving advice on how to make characters and understand powers. After this the book provides four classes, each with at least one path: Cleric (Warpriest), Fighter (Knight, Slayer), Rogue (Thief), and Wizard (Mage), with various skills to choose from on the heroic, paragon, and epic level. After this the author briefly discusses the races of dwarfs, eladrins, elfs, halflings, and humans. The book then discusses skills, feats, gears and weapons before having a glossary and index. In many ways, this book sacrifices the breath of looking at a wide variety of options for a character in exchange for a great deal of depth in terms of examining how a character moves from humble beginnings to epic power, something gamers may need to be reminded of.
  
  In terms of what a reader gets out of this book, it is the sort of power trip that one can imagine was felt by those who fancied themselves alchemists in days of old. This sort of character creation and shepherding for long periods of time amounts to an extended power fantasy, where humans gain power to the level where their behavior affects the fate of entire planets and planes of existence. This sort of fantasy is certainly a popular one, and it is hard to criticize it without criticizing my own love of role playing games and their epic scope. It is intriguing to see how the designers of a game seek to make it worthwhile to go the extra effort to play a character and to make it stronger and stronger over time, while providing sufficient challenges to test that character and make it of the utmost importance to value the luck of a good role. With great imaginary power comes great imaginary responsibility, after all.
  
  [1] See, for example:
  
  
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
  
  
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
  
  
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
  
  
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
  
  
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
• 
  Garrett Henke

  Oh man, a review of a 4e Essentials product - the “alternate” players handbook no less (one of two anyway). It’s been enough years now that the old controversy that this book (and its companion, Heroes of Forgotten Kingdoms) generated in the D&D community, while not forgotten, is no longer really relevant. After all, pretty much the whole world has moved on to 5e and couldn’t care less about 4e. But it’s because of that lack of emotion over it that it can now be reviewed in a more objective manner.
  
  Overall, I’m not entirely sure who the target audience of this “reboot” really was. Officially, it was for new and returning players to the 4th edition of the D&D game. But Essentials came out at the end of 4e’s lifespan so it couldn’t really achieve this goal. Further, new players would likely be confused as to what books to buy and would likely just go for the traditional Player’s Handbook. As for returning players, WotC was probably talking about Pathfinder players and that ship had already sailed. In the end, Heroes of the Fallen Lands completely failed in its goals. But does that actually mean it’s a bad book?
  
  Well, once you take away its marketing failures, what you’re left with for 4e players and DMs is 5 new classes based on a very different structure than had been utilized at that point, lots of new (and better organized) feats, and a few magic items.
  
  The core of the entire thing is really the five new classes: Two versions of the fighter (knight and slayer), Wizard, Cleric, and Rogue. None of these follow the AEDU structure of the previous PHBs - they resemble more of their historical roots. It’s also clear that a lot of 5e class design came from the Essentials classes. Despite the fact that they are so different structurally, these are good classes. Easier to pick up and play without any level of system mastery, the essentials classes don’t rise to the peaks of power of their PHB counterparts, but they are consistently good with few lows. Most of them probably are not quite as fun to play for 4e veterans, but still interesting enough. The lack of paragon path selection is unfortunate for these classes though and there is only one epic destiny included in the book.
  
  Outside of the classes, the feats in this book are excellent - many of them are almost required for characters (PHB or Essentials) as they are quite powerful. There are not very many of them though meaning that if you are playing a character beyond the heroic tier, you’re going to need at least the PHB to continue.
  
  Overall, despite its failure at all of its marketing goals, D&D Essentials is actually still pretty cool. Humorously, if 4e would have began with the structure as set forth in Essentials, it probably would have been more successful, if not quite as interesting. As a single book, Heroes of the Fallen Lands has lots of cool stuff, but is frustratingly light in places preventing it from reaching greatness.
• 
  Max

  The classes are pretty cool especially because they're kinda old-school in feel. It's also nice to have a lot of information about each race. However, this book does lack more than one Epic Destiny, any details on rituals, has only a handful of magic items, and weirdest of all doesn't detail superior weapons. I'm probably going to introduce some of that material back in when I run my campaign. However, it's still weird to have those things missing, especially magic items, which this version of the game seems to have a dearth of in general.
• 
  Pinkorca

  This provides a good intro to the universe of DnD, and a great intro to the game. It is a little annoying that this book provides only half the character class and race information and that you are directed towards a different book for the remainder, but I found that it explained the game very clearly and definitely spurred on my excitement to create my own character through its colorful explanations of the world.
• 
  Ryan Olson

  A bit underwhelming. I wish it had more details on the classes, and better advice about character creation. It was well laid out, but felt a bit sterile.
• 
  Jason Copenhaver

  Great intro to D&D 4th ed. Somewhere between a reference book and instructional. The first 3 chapters are instructional the 4th and 5th are mostly reference.