So, as I’ve backed off from Daily Kos due to disasters, I’ve also backed off from getting Dungeons and Dragons products, due to the conflict over Mike Mearls and the Dragonlance reboot. But Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything was advertised as addressing the topics of racism and diversity and deconstructing racial bonuses and penalties for a more heritage-based approach, which interested me.
Then somebody bought access to Tasha’s COE on D&D Beyond for me, and here we are.1
So anyway, book review time.
The book starts right off with Customizing your Origin, the meat of what I was interested in — and let’s just say the meat turned out to be a four-piece Chicken McNuggets value pack order.
One section of one chapter addresses race and heritage and the rules boil down to “put the ability score bonuses where you want and just use different skills and proficiencies from these restrictions with DM approval” which is pretty much what I’d do anyway.
As an aside, for an idea of what I think actually addresses heritage and culture and is more like what I’d do in a campaign, see Arcanist Press and their Ancestries and Cultures supplements, which I can’t do on D&D Beyond because of fucking course I can’t.2
Going past that disappointment, we go into another repeat of the Artificer class from Eberron, this with the additional Armorer subclass from Unearthed Arcana. I am pleased to report since one of the characters I play is a multiclass gunslinger/armorer in a Wild West/post-apocalyptic campaign, that the Armorer did not get nerf-hammered into the ground and Steampunk Iron Man remains a viable character concept.
This section, going into new subclasses and Unearthed Arcana subclasses that are now official RAW, is where this supplement shines. Expanding the base character classes’ spell lists to include new spells from this book and Xanathar’s Guide to Everything is a bonus. Unsure whether my hexblade warlock can cast green-flame-blade and use an eldritch smite on the hit, but if she can that will ruin some undead’s morning let me tell you.
We see some old friends like the soulknife and bladesinger appear here, along with some new ones like a Wild Magic barbarian. No, I did not mistype that. A barbarian with Wild Magic surges. I don’t know whether to laugh or tear my hair out, and that probably depends on whether I play one or run a game with one in it.
Group patrons from Eberron make a showing here, as well as feats because of course there have to be feats, and a few old First Edition artifacts appear in the Magic Items section along with a bunch of new ones.
Going into the Dungeon Master’s Section I was prepared to be disappointed and upset, but I found rules for a Session Zero, how to set and keep guidelines, how to make characters that work together, and how to set up and enforce a social contract — rules that would have made many of the games I ran and played in so much better.
We finish up with rules on parleying, magical and natural phenomena, and puzzles. The puzzles seem simple and easy, but they’re easy-button examples and frameworks for you to build on, customize, and make harder. Good for when you want a challenge that isn’t a fight and you need ideas. I also like the parleying rules, which can turn a fight into a negotiation or a dance-off. While I like blowing holes in things, I also like having encounters where the object isn’t mass murder, and it’s good to see more rules reflecting that.
That was what was in the book, with a few editorial comments because that’s the ride y’all bought the ticket for. What do I think of the supplement?
On the whole, it’s good. It’s not Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, and it doesn’t address racism, colonialism, and diversity near as much as I would like it to, but there’s a lot of good character concepts and rules in here even when you consider that if you’ve bought Eberron: Rising from the Last War you already own a not-insignificant chunk of this book. I wouldn’t have bought it myself, but I’m glad that somebody did.
I’d give it a B minus.
1One thing that is really beginning to piss me off about D&D is that if I want to play D&D online (on, say, Roll20) and have the players import characters from an app that keeps all the character generation rules straight (say, D&D Beyond), I have to buy all the God-damned books three times.
2To be fair, I could use the “Homebrew” sections in D&D Beyond and Roll20 to manually type in the contents of the book and set them up to be able to be used in their systems if I learn their coding/scripting and have the time and energy I had when I was a kid playing AD&D. Yeah, that’s going to happen.