The Complete Guide to TreantsBy Joe Crow
Goodman Games product number GMG3002
48 pages, $13.00
The Complete Guide to Treants is an earlier release in Goodman Games' "Complete Guide" series (in fact, it dates back to the 3.0 days), but I've only recently taken a look at them. (This is my second, after the recently-released Complete Guide to Rakshasas.) This book does a great job at examining the treant race, something that hasn't, to the best of my knowledge, ever really been done before. (I recall an "Ecology of the Treant" back in the AD&D 1st Edition days of Dragon Magazine, but I recall it as being rather unsatisfying and illogical - since when do treants lair in caves?)
Fortunately, The Complete Guide to Treants takes a hard look at these ambulatory plant creatures, and does so in a manner demonstrating quite a bit of thought behind them and a firm understanding of the d20 system.
The cover, by Thomas Denmark, is a dark piece (literally: it takes place at dusk) featuring a rampaging treant attacking a small farm. The color scheme is excellent, with muted browns lit by the burning fires in the treant's eyes and mouth, the fire it's started on the ground, and by the last remnants of daylight fading just over the tree line. Detail is pretty good - I like the treant's rough bark, and you can see the individual logs on the farmer's thatched roof dwelling - but Thomas seems to have a bit of trouble with his proportions. Now, I can hardly criticize the body proportions on a treant, whose build only approximates that of a human in the most general way, but when I can't tell which limbs are arms and which are legs, then there's a problem. (I think the biggest problem is that this treant seems to have five limbs, three of which look to be legs.) Also, the helpless woman gripped in its left hand has a torso that's way too long for the rest of her body (and the "hand" gripping her doesn't bend right, now that I look at it). All in all, this isn't a terrible piece, but it could have been much better. Again, though, bonus points for the artist using a concept from the book's interior: the flaming treant is a firesworn, a treant that survived the burning of its forest and now seeks vengeance on the race that destroyed its grove.
The interior art consists of 12 black-and-white illustrations by Thomas Denmark and Tom Galambos, plus a leaf-patterned border strip on the bottom of each page. The majority of these look to be pencil drawings (as opposed to inked works), and this allows for a much greater range of shading, a look that meshes very well with the mobile tree-men of the book. (One illustration, though, the subterranean "deep treant" on page 33, is perhaps a little too well shaded, as I can't tell what's what in the picture - it looks like a bunch of blobs of darkness, some rocks, some fungus-covered treant.) I really like the overall "look" of the treants in this book, though: they're a bit "stumpier" than I normally see treants depicted, with shorter legs and squatter bodies.
Sadly, both inside covers are blank, somewhat of a wasted opportunity in my mind.
The Complete Guide to Treants is laid out as follows:
- Introduction: a brief explanation of what this book is about, with the game stats for a treant from the 3.0 Monster Manual for reference
- Physiology: a discussion of the treant's physical makeup, and a brief description of the three types of treant (the standard one is oaklike, while there are also pine tree and willow tree variants)
- Social Structure: examining the treant's mostly solitary existence and relationships with forest animals in its territory, treant groves, and a unique communication system wherein gossip and discourse is passed on via forest animals bearing specialized pollens
- Cultural Habits: the fact that treants consider themselves the oldest of all sentient races (which makes sense), a treant's daily cycle and life cycle, relationships with other intelligent races, treant cosmology and philosophy, and a one-page boxed text on shadowed treants, those who slowly turn to evil ways
- Combat Strategies: sections on general tactics, terrain, threats and responses, and fighting against treants
- Characters: treant PCs (at 2 different age levels: the standard adult treant and the "sapling," with racial traits of each of the three racial variants), the firesworn, leafsinger, treeherd, and woodwarden treant classes, and 7 new feats
- Treant Magic: magic seeds, living magic items, and five new spells
- Campaigns: treants as NPCs and as PCs, 13 adventure hooks, and a sample treant NPC, "Thornleaf"
- Appendix 1 - New Templates: the blasted treant (undead, slain by fire), deep treant (underground treant with symbiotic fungus coating its bark), forsaken treant (those driven insane by the destruction of their forest), and hollow treant (undead treants who turned to evil while still living), each with a sample NPC, plus two new non-treant templates: the brambleshadow (a plant creature of roughly the same size and shape of the original animal from whose corpse it sprung) and the withered creature (an undead plant)
- Appendix 2 - New Monsters: monster, really, as there's only one - the eater-of-souls, a mobile tree that drains life energy from intelligent beings
- Appendix 3 - Sample NPCs: Longbranch's Grove and the Curse of Bonewood, each with a fully-statted treant with class levels, a description of the treant's grove, and several adventure hooks
So much of The Complete Guide to Treants makes perfect sense: that the three main treant classes (leafsinger, treeherd, and woodwarden) were the progenitors of the bard, druid, and ranger classes that were originally taught to the elves (and who, in turn, passed them on to the other humanoid races); that the simple, two-deity treant cosmology, consisting of Fireheart (the Sun) and Worldtree (the Earth), is all the treants need to explain their beliefs; even the sole new monster (as opposed to template) appearing in this book is perfectly explained as a by-product of the treant's animate trees ability, and in turn explains why treants don't go animating trees just on a whim. Joe has certainly done a lot of thinking about these tree-men, and the result is a load of treant lore that all fits together very nicely.
On the down side, there was quite a bit of wasted space in this book. While I was glad to see that whoever was in charge of the book's layout didn't feel constrained to make each new chapter start on a new page (instead putting the new chapter heading horizontally across both columns of the page, wherever it happened to fall), there were quite a few pages - seven, actually - where there was a significant amount of white space. This is apparently an accepted practice in PDFs (from what I've seen), but in a printed product it's much less forgivable.
If I could have made one change to the book, I would have liked to have learned more about the "pine" and "willow" treant subraces; while they're mentioned briefly on page 3, and the game stats for PCs of these subraces are provided on page 15, not much else is really said about them, and the core of the book is devoted to the "standard" treant, those predominantly oak-based.
Still, that's really the worst that can be said about this book, and for all of the great stuff you get - classes, variant races, templates for treants and other creatures, spells, feats, logical justification for all of the above, and more treant NPCs than you can shake a stick at - The Complete Guide to Treants is really the ultimate work on the subject of treants. If I can be excused for using the oft-hated "crunch" and "fluff" terms, while The Complete Guide to Treants has some excellent "crunch" - quite a bit of it, in fact, more than you'll find in most similarly-sized books on a specific monster race - it's the "fluff" that helps make the "crunch" so good. Despite it being a 3.0 book, I can highly recommend it for anyone seeking to use treants in their 3.0 or 3.5 D&D campaigns. For that matter, I'm sure the backgrounds and campaign material on the treant race could easily be used in just about any fantasy campaign, no matter what rules set you're using.
The Complete Guide to Treants rates a "5 (Superb)" from me. I'll definitely be checking out others in the "Complete Guide" series.
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