Review:
D&D 4th ed: Underdark

If you are looking for a must buy source book for Dungeons and Dragons 4th ed, then go buy Underdark.

I have several criteria for the perfect role playing game supplement, such as a comprehensive index (check) and really useful content (check) along with some inspirational artwork (check) and new things to throw at your players (check), but some things I just don't know I am looking for until I have found them, and Underdark has a few such gems.

At 159 pages, the book is packed, cover to cover, with very well planned and executed content. This is a major source book for the game, master crafted by Rob Heinsoo and Andy Collins with a small army of additional designers, which has all been put under the precision microscope of lead editor Michele Carter before being released into the wild. The layout of the book follows the same layout as the Underdark itself, from the surface to the very depths of the world, with each new section starting with an overview of main points of interest. From the very little that surface races know of the world beneath their feet, then into the shallows, and further into the Deep Underdark, and even forays into the otherworldly Feydark and Shadowdark, this book takes the reader to places which are so much more than a series of caves and dungeons.

The basic story of the Underdark begins with Primordials, who crafted the world below at the same time as the world above; nobody is sure why they made such a huge and fairly unstable world below.

Due to the chaotic nature of Primordial power, the Deep places of the Underdark actually fray the boundaries of reality, and the further down you go, the more the Far Realm presses close, sometimes breaking through completely. If it were not for the horrid fate of Torog, the King who Crawls, a god who is still manifest in the world below the Astral sea, then it is certain that the world would have been overrun by slavering nightmares long ago. Ironically, it is the presence of the evil god of torture and imprisonment that keeps everything ticking along relatively quietly, with only the occasional incidence of surface cities being sucked down into hellish oblivion.