The Good

The Beginning:

Scoundrel starts off really well. They have a lot of good insight in what makes a scoundrel and how to create them. They describe how to apply the scoundrel concept to some of the non traditional classes and alignments. They use a lot of pop culture references for examples to help keep things clear.

The Feats:

There are a lot of new and interesting feats. Smite was correct that they are coming up with new types of feats and he does a good job of going over those. I agree with his assessment that they might or might not be a good idea, but I like seeing what they come up with next. I thought it was kind of cool that they did include a few psionic feats as well. I enjoyed the concept of psionics in D&D from the beginning but only got groans from most of my players whenever I tried to incorporate them into a campaign. Since they are treated by most folks that way WotC has a tendency to not push them much.

Which leads me to my next point:

This is also the first Complete book that takes into account all the other ones. Most of the other D&D books seem to be written in a vacuum. They do a good job of coming up with new ideas but they rarely incorporate the other books into their concepts. Scoundrel is different. From citing references to classes introduced in Adventurer or Warrior to reprinting feats from Warrior or Races of Destiny in sidebars, Scoundrel takes these older works into account. It does it in a way that, for the most part, doesn’t require you to own the other books, but if you happen to, you might enjoy seeing that they are not completely forgotten.

New Items:

Scoundrel contains a good selection of new Alchemical and mundane gear as well as a few new interesting magic items.

Item spotlight: Rod of Ropes

“Crafted from the darkest teak and repeatedly stained until it holds a lustrous black shine, this rod is a sculpted 18 inch baton. Closer inspection (Search DC15) reveals three barely perceptible concave indentations in the middle third of the rod.” Complete Scoundrel (Page 116)

This rod is one of the coolest low end magic items. With a Market Price of 4000gp it is almost the cheapest rod on the market. It has 3 functions: The first is to spool out up to 300 feet of rope, the second is to turn one end into a grappling hook and can fire it up to 300’, and the third is to have grappling hooks shoot out from both ends and the tube can slide along the up to 600 ft of rope extended that way. When the rope is retracted it can pull up to 1000lbs. After all those times they tried to make a grappling hook that you could fire from a bow or crossbow they finally gave up and made a magic item that did it better.

The Bad

The Prestige Classes:

The Prestige Classes are not quite as interesting as I’d hoped. Most of them are less than 10 levels; some are only 3. I don’t know if they are implying that it’s not worth abandoning Rogue levels for any PrC (which I might agree with) or whether they are hoping to encourage multi-classing PrCs. 13 new PrCs and only 83 levels amongst them. They even included one that fits a character concept I am currently working on, and still I find myself disappointed with the PrCs as a whole.

Other New Items:

They included a bunch of new poisons. I don’t see the point. The majority of the PCs don’t use poison so any new poisons are just more toys for the DM. It seems kinda stupid. Speaking of silly things; they also added a bunch of ‘living’ items. From baby rust monsters in a tube to friggin vine you can carry as an air freshener. Bleh!

The Spells:

Not that I was expecting much, but I was still severely disappointed. The one thing I wanted was more lorecalls. They didn’t even make 1 new one.

The ‘Meh’

The Usual Suspects:

Scoundrel contains the regular examples of organizations and campaign ideas that they include in all these books. The ‘locations as treasure’ concept is still new to me and I’m not quite sold on it yet. They include a page on Contacts with a few examples.

The Skill Tricks:

In past books they made a point to include new uses for skills. These would either be a new use for an existing skill, like standing as a free action with a tumble check, or a way to do the old skill in an unusual situation, like opening a lock as a move action by increasing the DC by 20. I was hoping for more of this and instead I get these Skill Tricks. Part of me sees it as them adding rules for something that didn’t need it. There was no reason that a DM couldn’t allow a skilled character to try anything listed in the skill tricks section. I think they included it because too many DMs were uncomfortable with giving their players that ability. At least one of them duplicates a feat.

The Fiction:

There are several sidebars throughout Scoundrel that are short pieces on fiction. They are mostly for setting the mood as they don’t appear to have anything much to do with the surrounding rules. Since WotC has never been big on this sort of thing it is nice to see them trying. I really liked the way White Wolf did it back in their World of Darkness rulebooks. They used fiction to explain the rules and then they showed the mechanics. Their examples included the characters in the fiction and they continued the story throughout the book. The Scoundrel’s don’t seem to relate to the rules at all but some are nice in that they remind you of the feel that the rules should encourage. Two of them deal with a conflict between the ‘Slaughterhouse Guild’ and the ‘Dead Rabbit Gang’ which is an obvious tribute to Gangs of New York, a great movie about scoundrels.

Overall

I’ll admit I’m disappointed with Complete Scoundrel. I enjoyed Complete Adventure and I thought this was going to be more of the same. I should have known with how much different Complete Mage was from Arcane. I do think it is worth owning and I don’t regret buying it, but I think I was expecting too much. I’ll use most of it, even if it takes me a while to warm up to it.