Red Wizard Handbook Review
I originally posted this article on A Pawn's Perspective on March 10, 2020.
There are very places more reviled in the Forgotten Realms than Thay, home of the Red Wizards. Once a powerful source of evil in the world, Thay is still a place of misery and mystery. The Red Wizard Handbook provides not only a brief history of Thay, but rules for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition players to create a Red Wizard or one of their agents. While you won’t get much info about running an adventure in Thay, you’ll get everything you need to know to infiltrate the Forgotten Realms with new backgrounds, subclasses, magic items, spells, and more.
Coming in at 40 pages, the Red Wizard Handbook is packed full of information on the people of Thay, their religion, and their history. The real meat of the book, however, is the content mentioned above. The Red Wizard arcane tradition, the Black Flame Zealot and Thayan Agent rogue archetypes, and the Thayan Gladiator fighter archetype each are well thought out and thematically sound. The new spells look like they’re a blast (some pun intended), while the magic items vary from the mundane to wonderous.
A bit of a content warning. This book does deal a bit with slavery, as much of Thay’s history was built off the practice. The author is very careful to mention that the information provided information is only included because of the sordid history of Thay, and that the book doesn’t not condone or seek approval of the practice.
There hasn’t been much said about Thay for 5th Edition, so this book is a very welcome addition for those playing in the Forgotten Realms. It’s compact, to the point, and very well written. The only real downside is that there is no print version available. As someone who has a hard time reading RPG materials in PDF form, that’s a bit of a bummer. Still, this is a book that’s well worth its price for any D&D player out there looking for more options
A PDF of the Red Wizard Handbook was provided free for review by Kabouter Games