Faiths and Avatars from Eric L Boyd to this day remains my favorite FR product because of two reasons.
The sheer amount of detail and secondly because intrinsically I love the concept of a Pantheon of Deities and their alignment to certain portfolios.
Faiths of the Forgotten Realms while not as exhaustive as that and related products, does a very good job of detailing the core Faerunian Pantheon which is itself one of the biggest numbers of any published setting. Of course this is a double edged sword. A large number means any product detailing them is also going to have a significant page counnt. Faiths of the Forgotten Realms however also needs to dedicate some of its hefty page count to 'crunch' or the mechanical aspect... a thing that I was not really truly interested in.
What this means is that in the initial section where the God is discussed we get mostly a paragraph and a half initially dedicated to talking about the gods. Each God's followers get a background table which is an incredibly useful source for background information. Information on holy days and centres of faith (ie temples) in the Realms is also provided. There is some information here which is useful but I would of like to have seen more. Straight up practical stuff like 'The Clerics and Paladins of the Faith wear colour x and colour Y, and the priests are given titles such as T.
All of this minute information goes towards making a fully rounded story and character. Still the information we get provided is still very useful.
In the second section comes the mechanics of the book (or essentially from here on), each faith listed in the previous sections gets something. Whether that be a new domain, A new Warlock path, a subclass for Paladins. On top of this new spells. It would take al ong time to go through and use them all to get a good idea of how well they worked or dont work, but some look very interesting. I think many campaigns would benefit from this section more than mine.
At this point I should also say these are were the 'current' holy Symbols are depicted. If you are unaware, more than a few gods DO change their holy symbol from time to time, reflecting often a change in the Gods outlook or a change in the 'mortal' faith. Its a good resource to have when you are trying to explain what your holy symbol actually looks like (although it would of been nice also to have it spelled out in words too.. trying to describe Asmodeus symbol might be a bit hard)
Chapter 3 or Holy Texts is probably my favorite chapter. It goes into some detail on the Holy Texts of most of the Gods found in this product. This is GREAT!. Obviously its not going to come up much in game but a Cleric that goes around proletysing their faith might get to scream out ' And now a reading from the Black Book of Beshaba!'. There is a lot of good information here and it is clear to read.
I should also point out that not every God seems to have a holy text listed.
Chapter 4 is a collection of Magical items , thematically tied to the Gods in this product going all the way up to Holy Artifacts that could be the focus of a campaign. Some look very Interesting
My Final Thoughts:
This book is nearly everything I want for a FR Product. It's an incredibly difficult book to write in my opinion because of how aligned to FR it is. FR is a dynamic setting (one of very few FR settings that are) and as such religous events happen and , Temples and cities are destroyed, new Gods appear then go and come back. 5e pressed a reset back to 3e in many ways, but time has still passed. Finding current information of where each gods temples are has to be an issue because its just not information that has been released by Wizards yet.
I would of prefferred the God Information from Chapter 1 and 2 to be put together. I do not see any reason to split the lore from the mechanics. You are simply making the user look up two different page numbers. It would have the secondary effect of making each God section appear larger.
One final point:
One of my greatest loves of Faiths and Avatars was actually SEEING what a Priest of a God looked like. TSR decided to get art done of the 'dress' of each priest and they were beautiful pictures. While very hard for a book like this to do, perhaps one day this might be possible.
All in all a Great buy.
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