The Art of Plane Shift: Zendikar

OMG, this is a beautiful book. Today, The Art of Plane Shift: Zendikar came, and I am exploring a world that cannot be easily described. It has to be seen. This is more of a world-of book than an art-of book, and it shines in its presentation and style. If you love magic and want to get lost in this place for a while, this is your book.

This book feels honestly like what World of Warcraft wants to be, minus all the pop-culture jokes and silliness of Blizzard's creation. It is serious, epic, dramatic, torn asunder, lost, populated, mysterious, familiar, current and ancient all in one swipe of the brush, instantly capturing my imagination and excitement with each thrilling image and place. It is epic and deep, with meaning and a gravity of place and sense of importance that words cannot describe.

This is also not D&D, not by a long shot. This is much bigger, and more mature than the normal D&D worlds. Heroic NPCs can exist here, with no immature fear that "the player characters will be unimportant" sort of nonsense we get in the D&D world books. This is also hugely epic, with titanic creations the size of cities walking the fractured land. Turn the 3d up to eleven if they ever make a movie about this place, because you are going to need a bigger computer to render this.

Forget computers, you are going to need a bigger mind to take it all in.

Things exist here which D&D cannot easily describe, nor should it try.

I wouldn't want this to be D&D either, it is Magic: The Gathering, unique with its mana types and lands, and it doesn't feel right to fighter-mage-thief this place and kill goblins in a camp while a titan the size of a mountain walks by. Seriously. These are epic heroes who shatter mountains and conquer cities, not your average street-level rogue counting silver pieces. This is Magic, and this is greatness and power personified. D&D is trivial and minor in scope, worrying about ten-foot poles and what's in the next room. This is epic, Lord of the Rings stuff, cinematic and dramatic from level one, saving the world one adventure at a time.

This needs a completely new roleplaying game to even begin to describe, and not D&D, d20, or something we have seen before.

This is a book which will expand your mind, and open your imaginations up to possibilities great and wondrous. It is one of those which inspires and gives you the itch to adventure. It is also one that makes other fantasy worlds look plain by comparison, for good or bad.

If I can describe it in one thought, it is like the movie Avatar, when that movie first came out and blew people away, but for fantasy gaming. It changes the game. It is less so fiction than it is an experience.

Completely blown away by this. Pick it up and explore.