As I read through Lost Empires of Faerun I'm struck, as I often am while reading 3rd Edition (3.0 or 3.5) Forgotten Realms books at the thoughtfulness and creativity that the authors put into the book. It contains cool new prestige classes, cool new feats, cool new spells and cool new fictional history. Even though I run a homebrew campaign world, I incorporate items from Forgotten Realms books, and I can see that Lost Empires of Faerun will not prove an exception. Such items as the Wounding Spell feat, the sunmaster prestige class (a rival within the Church of Lathander to the morninglord prestige class), and the Sakkratar's triple strike spell serve as exemplars of the great new material in the book. In addition to the new material, Lost of Empires of Faerun provides a 3.5 update for quite a few 3.0 creatures, including a series of lycanthropes which needed the update to conform to the 3.5 lycanthrope template rules. In a couple of cases Lost Empires not only updates a creature, but also provides a brand new variation, as with the battle horror variation of the helmed horror. The creature section of Lost Empires even provides some cool new monsters, like a three-headed dragon known as a gorynych, and a new edition to the nightshade familiar of creepy undead, the nighthaunt. The nighthaunt looks like what might have happened if Jeff Goldblum had tested a gargoyle in his teleporter in The Fly (a cross between a gargoyle and a fly).

  -- By David B Levenstam from Centreville, VA USA on January 09, 2011