I am on the final stretch of the book and I am still reading the adventure.

The problem I have with the book is that it's the weakest of the series.

I found that the Tome of Fate and Tome of Blood were the strongest. While Tome of Excess suffered from a strong editorial revisionist hand.

Tome of Decay suffers from what I can best describe as being two books mashed together into one - Nurgle and Chaos undivided (with ascension tacked on). Nurgle is described in brief overview. Unaligned powers are described in brief as well. Abaddon the Despoiler is given a text box. Both of which demand the player to go to third party sites to learn more.

The adventure on Mire is a good example of combining a plague world and apotheosis into one. It's a nonsensical adventure to run with a group that are not all Champions of Nurgle. The encounters have no why except to fill time. The construction of the adventure appears to be haphazard as well, the stakes and motivation of the adventure are scattered in the text and not actually covered in the GM overview.

I will finish the book before I give a stronger verdict, but I felt it to be over all a weak yet cramped book.

-C

Could you go a bit more indepth? What do you mean by Fate and Blood being the strongest? Overall best? Best balanced? More thematic?

Excess, same thing, what do you feel suffered from it. If you mean the entire book then at least give a few examples.

I'll agree, decay feels mashed up between unaligned and nurgle.

So it's short on the fluff, how do you feel the new archetypes stack up? The new equipment, powers and so forth.

I'm fairly happy with it, although as with all expansions into this alot of it feels tacked on.

I also felt the same. When our little group first heard of ToD we thought this could be a great chance to go nuts with a lot of the Nurgle content and really expand the current rules. We had aspirations towards tonnes of diverse diseases, toxins and contagions worthy of the Grandfather himself. What we got in return though was only four new ones.

Additionally it seems a better title would have been "Black Crusade: Ascension". The concept of Daemon Princes and Black Crusades were better for a separate book or expansion and not a specific tome dedicated to a god as it seemed somewhat disjointed. Don't get me wrong though, those parts were gorgeous to read and I nearly had a bit of a moment when I read about them requiring me to breath into a paper bag for half an hour after I'd stopped tears of joy. The new archetypes were also a welcome addition to finally have a marine tech based character and some form of character with medical speciality.

Tome of Blood and Fate had much more in terms of Khornate and Tzeentchian content respectively, Fate specifically in relation to dozens of new psychic powers and Khornate for massed battles and combat rules. In terms of new content therefore, ToD was sorely lacking and could have done with a little more. I didn't read the stories much as I seldom use them and prefer to use my own so I cannot judge that.

In the spirit of nurlge being the happiest of the dark lords, lets remember some of the awesome things.

The gear is sweet.

More classes than before

the possesed heretic rules.

And now when your players complain about facing 5 greyknights, you can point to the written adventure and say "see i'm supposed to send 20 at you!"

FFG has a tendency of making combat...rather hard, I'll admit to that. Only War: Face 20 orks! Players: We can hardly kill one! COME ON GM! Or Warhammer Fantasy: Eat this egg, make a VERY hard resistance roll or mutate into a fiend, thus dying as a PC.

I like that there's rules for ascension at least, it was NEEDED. "I won the game! What do I get?! oh, the same I would have gotten if I died....yay"

The Ascension rules should have been in the core book. What irks me to no end about the nurgle book, though, is how little focus on Nurgle there actually is.

The Ascension rules should have been in the core book. What irks me to no end about the nurgle book, though, is how little focus on Nurgle there actually is.

I was always expecting the "Ascended" rules to be in an Unaligned book. As a huge fan of Nurgle, looking back on what Khorne, Slaanesh and Tzeentch got, I feel nothing short of ripped off with Tome of Decay.

You can really feel how they forced two books in there, come hell or high water.

I still ask myself why.

Didn't even get a proper adventure. ;_;

Could you go a bit more indepth? What do you mean by Fate and Blood being the strongest? Overall best? Best balanced? More thematic?

Tome of Blood was the most thematic. It was oozing not only with descriptive language but the writer was allowed full range of expression creating strongly evocative imagery.

Tome of blood also allowed for everything to be laid out/described with enough time spent on each subject.

Tome of Fate did this in equal measure, although perhaps not with the same grippingness of Tome of Blood. Strongly thematic with topics being covered in enough detail to give good ideas on how to proceed and yet enough to keep it vague enough.

Excess, same thing, what do you feel suffered from it. If you mean the entire book then at least give a few examples.

Excess had very little about tempting, about seduction about how to corrupt upstanding moral characters down the path of heretics with system rules to do so.

Their example of concrete excess was limited really to food. Nothing about other kinds of excess, and yes including sexual. I was hoping for something well... dripping... in gold. Instead I get a gastronome who likes the smell of charred servitor flesh.

The other material, equipment, the legions... - that's standard for each book.

Each book covers two legions (one aligned to the power, one unaligned), each book highlights special equipment of their power and other unaligned powers. Each book deals with new rituals aligned with the power of that book. Each book has rules for daemon engines or something equally daemonic. Each book has an adventure that highlights the power in the book.

All of this each book material was probably written in chunks as the gathering together of material to form the books. The equipment, legions, some of the generic rituals, were probably written long before or was written as one block when the decision to make the books came about.

As we come to the Tome of Decay, an editorial decision was made to join together the possible unaligned tome with the tme of decay and there is a bunch of rules and thematic material that has been accordioned together.

Excess had several problems, but what left a bad taste in my mouth especially in light of what Tome of Decay didn't get (yeah, Nurgle minions? Not a thing...) was that the candy blown up a Slaanesh cultist's posterior by the BC line in general got an extra trump card with the pirate prince and a further expansion on minion cheese that gives those who already gratuitously exploit one of the most broken mechanics in the game even more minions with extra special super powers to choose from.

Thanks for replying Chrysalis, I noticed upon rereading my own comment I came out a bit crass, which was not my intent.

I haven't had time to read over it indepth, but I'll get there eventually. I'm just kind of glad we actually got rules to play a daemon prince and launch a black crusade as those were the "end game" mechancis in the core rulebook.

Also, i loved that we got new cybernetics!