Review: Neverwinter Campaign Setting

The Forgotten Realms setting is the darling of D&D. It’s far and away the most popular setting in the game right now, with both a majority of players as well as the developers, and it has been for some time. The majority of D&D novels are set there, most of the D&D video games are set there, and it should be no real surprise that the RPG side of things is now getting even more Forgotten Realms material in the form of the Neverwinter Campaign Setting. The Neverwinter Campaign Setting (NWCS) is just part of a push from WotC to go back to the Realms. The push includes a new board game in the style of Castle Ravenloft called the Legend of Drizzt, new Neverwinter themed Fortune Cards, a Neverwinter video game, a Neverwinter facebook game, several novels set in the area, a season of D&D Encounters and so on. For purposes of this review, I’m just going to stick to the NWCS and not any of the related product. The NWCS is a full-color, 224 page hardbound book with fold-out poster map that sells for $40. In the interests of disclosure, I must say that I recieved a free copy of this book for running an event at GenCon. The NWCS is not an Essentials-style book and will fit in right along with any other 4e campaign setting books that you might have. It’s a good looking book with very nice cover art and a well chosen blue and white color scheme.

Let’s go through the book, section by section. First up is the Introduction, which talks generally about the kind of campaign you’ll get out of the NWCS. Something that struck me was that neither Forgotten Realms setting books were listed as a “needed” book, either for DMs or players. I’m not sure I agree with this. Although a lot of Neverwinter is self-contained, I feel that there’s enough connections to other parts of the setting that really makes at least one of the other books a must have for a Neverwinter campaign. Moving onward, the first real chapter is called Jewel of the North and is just a short overview of the history and geography of the Neverwinter area as well as more about running a Neverwinter campaign.

The second chapter, titled Character Options, is really the only player-oriented section of the book. On the other hand, it’s a pretty beefy section that won’t disappoint in that respect. First up are thirteen Neverwinter-oriented themes. What’s interesting about these is that they’re written very specifically. You aren’t just any Neverwinter Noble, for instance, the theme is written with a background already built in about how you were taken away from Neverwinter and only recently learned your true heritage. Although it’s not required to use that background, I found it a unique choice and I rather like it. It gives people a stronger feel for what a theme really means to their character by providing an example or even a ready-made background. The themes are really good and definitely add some unique flavor to a PC. You can probably scrub some of them of their Realms-specific flavor to use elsewhere, but some of them would be easier to do that with than others. Neverwinter Noble and Uthgardt Barbarian would be fairly simple, for example, but Renegade Red Wizard or Spellscarred Harbringer would need more effort. After themes are some racial variant rules to allow players to play things like Gold Dwarves, Sun Elves, or Wood Elves. The dwarf and eladrin substitutions are flavorful and feel like the mechanics substitutions are good. The ones for the elves I’m not sure are worth the trade off of losing what is arguably the best racial power in the game (Elven Accuracy). That said, if you want to play any of the racial variations you can just use the flavor and ignore the changed mechanics.

Still in the Character Options chapter, we’re onto Warpriest domain options, which are pretty nice. What’s best about them to me though is how easily they can be divorced not only from their Realms-based fluff, but even from their Essential class origins to use with a regular Cleric. There are some nice things here and it’s good to see the Cleric get some love, not needless nerfing. Lastly, we’re on to the Bladesinger. In the context of the NWCS, the Bladesinger is for Eladrin, Elves, and the occasional Half-Elf, but there’s nothing that specifically says that only these races can take the class. In a lot of ways the Bladesinger feels like a Swordmage, rather blatantly done up better. For example, the Bladesinger has a class feature that allows you to use Intelligence instead of Strength for your melee basic attacks (both the attack and the damage roll), something you had to spend a feat with on a Swordmage to only get the bonus for the attack roll. I hate to make the comparison like this, but I’ve long been a fan of the Swordmage despite the flaws and it does kind of feel like instead of revising the Swordmage to fix the flaws, the Bladesinger was pushed out instead. In any case, the Bladesinger is a well done class with oodles of options and flexibility. It’s very much a classic gish class, blending a fighter and a wizard.

On to chapter three, called Factions and Foes. This is one of the best parts of the book and gives the Neverwinter area a unique feel. It gives the area a real sense of depth to have so many different things going on. There are five major factions and at least a dozen minor factions listed and there’s an interesting web of relationships between all of them. There are new monsters, new powers, charts of suggested monsters to represent an encounter with a faction, and so on. How the players interact with these factions greatly determines how a Neverwinter campaign can progress. Players might even find themselves aligned with some more traditionally evil factions like Netheril or Thay in the effort to stop some other faction from completing their goals. There’s great potential for intrigue, double-dealing, multi-faction pile-ups, and other events beyond the scope of your typical D&D adventure. Neverwinter makes me want another Eberron book (Sharn, perhaps, or maybe Stormreach) in the same vein so Eberron can get the same treatment for the current edition. Digression aside, this is really where the NWCS shines. There’s a wealth of stories, plots, complications, allies, and enemies for players to get involved in. To the point where, if I were going to DM a Neverwinter campaign, I would forbid players to read that part of the book. Although there’s a lot of flexibility and instances where it’s explicitly left for the DM to choose the “truth” of a situation, I think that players having too much information would take a lot of the sense of mystery away. I think a lot of the atmosphere from that sort of game would come from not knowing who is involved and why. For a DM though, this is great, the real heart of the NWCS.

The fourth and final chapter is called Gazetteer and it covers just about everything else, primarily the locations that could be important to a Neverwinter campaign. It’s more than a list of the expected areas, such as Neverwinter itself, Helm’s Hold, or Neverwinter Wood. It also includes Evernight, the dark mirror to Neverwinter located in the Shadowfell. Even a part of Thay that might come up in a Neverwinter campaign is detailed for the DM’s benefit. It’s these places outside Neverwinter that make me feel like a DM should have one or both of the broader Forgotten Realms setting books, but as written it’s well done.

What else does NWCS have to offer? Aside from the ability to suck all meaning out of the word “never”, it does have some more magic items, but they’d have to be tweaked to be used outside of Forgotten Realms. Surprisingly, there’s even boons and grandmaster training in the book, two things I’d long criticised WotC for seemingly abandoning after bringing them up in the DMG2. The monsters presented in the book can probably be used elsewhere without too much trouble, though one monster brings up another annoyance. Dire Corbies are talked about very briefly, given one monster statblock, and then the reader is very bluntly told that to learn more they have to read a DDI article about them. Although the monsters listed for faction encounters came from a huge variety of sources and the book on the whole points DMs to different books to get stat blocks for NPCs and monsters, the dire corbies section felt extremely heavy-handed in the way it felt like a product placement. I would have rather not had the book bring them up at all than promote the DDI article in such an obnoxious way.

So what’s the verdict? The NWCS may have some flaws and moments of questionable decision-making, but overall is an extremely well done book that every Forgotten Realms DM or lore fan should look into. It presents a very different sort of campaign than most people are used to seeing in D&D and that makes it useful even for people who aren’t running a game in the Realms. Eberron DMs especially can really benefit from these lessons, given that Eberron has that sort of noir/intrigue/spy fiction built straight into the setting. As for players the options presented to them, such as the Bladesinger, are good, but you won’t get as much out of them unless you’re playing in a Forgotten Realms campaign of some sort But generally speaking, I have to recommend the Neverwinter Campaign Setting. I definitely won’t go so far as some people who have declared it their favorite 4e book, but it’s very good and probably worth your time.