Some elder evils, some merely middle aged.

Honestly several parts of this book should merit a four, unfortunately they're dragged down by other chapters and given how poor some of those feel for a title called Elder Evils while even the good chapter aren't too long and I really can't justify giving this title over a three.

Each chapter of this book (post the intro of course) presents a different potentially apocalyptic scenario and some suggestions on how to integrate it into your campaign along with a climatic encounter complete with maps and full info. They also include info on adapting the evils for the Faerun and Eberron settings. The trouble with this approach is that several of these chapters feel disjointed, illogical (and not in a good way) or incomplete. Not to mention that for a title called elder evils some of the presented evils feel pretty lackluster. Some do not, several of the chapters present some pretty good options with a lot of potential that, if they were the quality of every chapter in the book, would have me debating giving this a five star rating. It doesn't help that the first two/three suggested elder evils all felt like a swing and a miss to me. Why does an undead moon suddenly give up and leave the atmosphere if the party defeats it's surprisingly weak (so to speak, still CR18 with some nasty enviromental advatages) avatar? How the hell is a rising mythos monster making each day have two hours less daylight worldwide a subtle sign that only the most dedicated paranoid conspiracy nuts catch? And so on.

Every chapter is a seed, and some of these are really good seeds that gave me what I was looking for. I think for what Elder Evils' sets out to do that 3 stars is a fair rating, some of it really doesn't work and you're probably going to have to put a lot of work even into the ones that do to get what the book's promising out of them. But it can be done, and some of these ideas have some really neat high level implications. I'm not sure I recommend the book at it's current price ($15, and definately not for the $30 mark) but if it's on sale and you're looking for some high level plot seeds it might be worth a look.