Are your players bored with your Dungeons and Dragons campaign? How about livening things up by having a meteorite strike your campaign world?

That's the premise behind When The Sky Falls, by Bruce R. Cordell, published by Malhavoc Press. I'm reviewing a free copy of this supplement that was offered to customers at rpg.drivethrustuff.com. The free copy offer expires January 15th, 2008.

When The Sky Falls is an event book, a type of source book that covers all aspects of working a major event into your campaign. In this case, the event is a meteorite strike. Not a tiny, burn up before it hits the ground meteorite, but a huge leave-a-smoking-crater and devastate cities type of meteorite.

One of the things I immediately liked about this book was that one of the options given for introducing the meteorite strike into the campaign was to have it destroy a main city. This is the sort of thing that just isn't done in most campaigns, and would certainly shake up your players. If you're not quite up to that level of destruction, there are also guides for working smaller strikes into the campaign, either in out of the way spots or older strikes that the characters come across while adventuring.

When The Sky Falls offers three styles of meteorite strike for you to use.

Mundane meteorites are just big pieces of rock. They leave a big crater, and possibly open a portal to the elemental planes of earth and fire so that molten elementals can come through, but that's about it. Thaumaturgic meteorites are highly charged with magic, and can open up entirely new branches of magic for characters. Engram arks are the last remnants of an ancient civilization, the collection of all their skills and abilities.

Anything but a mundane meteorite can have a world changing impact on your campaign (no pun intended). With new sorts of magic available, and the possibility of boosting skills and abilities, entirely new groups and guilds will arise. The book goes into detail on several new groups that might form after the strike.

Just like any good d20 supplement, there are new feats, new prestige classes, new spells, new artifacts, and new monsters.

While you could just take this supplement and run with it to put some new life into a flagging campaign, I think it'd be more fun to wait until the characters are on the verge of defeating their arch nemesis, the villain they've been tracking and fighting throughout the entire campaign. They have the villain on the ropes, when BAM!

The meteorite strikes, chaos reigns, and not only does the villain get away, but gains new abilities in the bargain. The characters must master the new magics offered by the strike in order to cope with this new and improved villain.

At least, that's how I'd do it.

What about you? Let us know in the forum how you'd use this supplement.