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I’ve always been fond of the idea that material for RPGs could be drawn from existing sources. Usually this means from a given movie, book, video game, etc. But more there’s something to be said for caricature as well; where you put in an NPC or monster equivalent of someone your players will recognize. While it can be fun to have this homage be of someone benevolent, there’s a lot more fun to be had in making a mockery of a bad person in this manner.
Enter The Bestiary of GOP, Grand Ol’ Predators, from Misfit Studios.
A short Pathfinder monster book, the Bestiary of GOP presents monsters out of four real-life conservative candidates for the American presidency (some among you may be wondering why I’d even bother saying that, since it seems so obvious. Well, there are more countries than America which have Pathfinder fans, and it won’t be 2012 forever). Each is given write-up that satirizes its inspiration in the form of some sort of awful monster.
The product is ten pages long, and does everything a PDF should do. Copy and paste is enabled, and bookmarks to each of the creatures is present. Moreover, a printer-friendly version is here as well. While it does keep the interior illustrations, it removes all of the coloring, rendering them as line-versions of the finished artwork.
The books four monsters need little introduction if you pay attention to politics. The Ron’Pol devil is an infernal creature able to debate you into confusion (an act which empowers it) and can sell you a wish for your soul. The mitt is actually a new race (with PC stats!) that is obsessed with money and has the ability to adapt itself to any particular social situation. The gingrich newt is a hideous creature that poisons everything around it, and yet has the ability to charm you nonetheless. Finally, the santorum is an undead creature so obsessed with pushing its foul dogma (and misogyny) that it comes back to do its god’s work, regardless of its god’s feelings on the subject. Just watch out for its, er, “santorum” attack.
In terms of mechanical utility, all of these creatures hold up fairly well. None of them are, with their base stats, powerful monsters – the highest is CR 5. I did notice one or two things that were off, however; the sample mitt should be CR 1/3, not ½, since it has one level in an NPC class. Similarly, the santorum’s aura of anachronism (science doesn’t work on it!) is in the wrong place in its stat block. The errors are like this – never anything wrong so much as in need of a slight clean-up. But then, having things be wrong somehow seems appropriate for these evil things.
Overall, minus the potential ramifications from your group, depending on their political beliefs, what’s here is a perfectly viable micro-bestiary of new monsters for your Pathfinder game. Strip out the real-world context (which, in most cases, is as simple as a change of names) and you have monsters that stand alongside any of the others that you’d use at your table. Of course, if you aren’t worried about anyone being offended, then there’s no reason why you can’t leave the subtext in, and let your players really go to town on hack ‘n’ slashing some of the most vile creatures they’re ever likely to encounter.
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Publisher Reply: |
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Glad you liked it, and good eye on the two errors. Now they're fixed!
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Some Game Masters take great pleasure in writing their own adventures; for them, it’s a joy, something they throw themselves into eagerly. Personally, I don’t know how they do it, as I’m always strapped for adventures. Given the sheer amount of work that goes into crafting an adventure, structuring the plot, making maps, constructing stat blocks, it seems like a truckload of work. Hence, I’m always on the lookout for a reliable source of adventures. Sometimes Adventure Paths are good, but other times I want stand-alone adventures that can be used as-is in my game, without worrying about how it plays if removed from a larger context.
Rite Publishing’s new periodical, Adventure Quarterly, seems right up that alley. Let’s take a closer look at the first issue and see what it’s like.
Adventure Quarterly #1 is a weighty affair. Not only is the main magazine just over seventy-five pages in length, but the main PDF file is accompanies by a series of separate map files. These color map files are a combination of JPGs and PNGs of the various maps, in various configurations, such as the maps and keys together, and the maps separately and the keys separately. The quality of these cannot be understated – the files are high resolution, and you can zoom in to a great degree on them. Altogether, the maps are a whopping two hundred megabytes!
The PDF of the magazine is similarly high-quality in its presentation. It has full copy and paste enabled, and full nested bookmarks are to be found. Unfortunately, there’s no printer-friendly version, though there is a printed copy available if you need this on paper. The interior artwork ranges in styles, from detailed black and white to a “washed out”-style full color. None of the pieces were particularly bad, and several of them were quite arresting.
Every publication goes through a few growing pains at first, and right away I noticed one for Adventure Quarterly: the table of contents, while it lists the adventures and their authors, doesn’t list the level it’s intended for. When you look at these adventures, there’s no way to tell whether they’re meant for 1st-level or 20th-level PCs. This alone wouldn’t be so bad, but this information is also not to be found in the adventures themselves. I consider this to be fairly critical information, and so marked off points for this.
The adventures themselves are three in number. The first one, “Too Many Cooks,” appears to be for first-level characters. Set in the city Somnal, for which a full city stat block is helpfully included, this deals with the problem of several chefs suddenly going missing. The author writes that this adventure will likely overwhelm PCs if they go from one encounter to the next in rapid order, and suggests that these scenarios can be broken up across a longer period, and even intermixed with another adventure if you remove the time pressure, something that I felt was good advice.
Structure-wise, Too Many Cooks is something of a mystery adventure, as the PCs are meant to follow a trail of clues from one encounter to the next, until they’re ultimately led to the culprit behind the disappearances. I had some initial misgivings about how this would work, as mysteries have their own problems. The adventure’s answer to this is two-fold – each of the encounters starts with combat, after which there’s a clue that is, in all honesty, too obvious to be missed. That may be a slight overstatement, but the clues are not that difficult to find, and are fairly obvious in where they point. There are still places where things could go off the rails, of course, but the adventure is not so subtle in its workings that getting things back on track would be hard.
I have to mention the final encounter for the adventure, which takes place in a kitchen. Author Adam Diagle did a great job here of playing up the unorthodox nature of how a kitchen can contribute to a battlefield. Between the villain having the feats necessary to use all sorts of improvised weaponry (and a helpful chart of what improvised weapons are available and what their damage is), your PCs will have to deal with everything from being attacked with hot skillets to exploding boilers and vicious meat grinders! I can easily say that this adventure was the highlight of the magazine.
The second adventure, unfortunately, was its polar opposite in terms of quality. “The Book of Promises” is an adventure that wants to be many different things, and in trying to achieve them all ends up completing very few of them.
The premise of the Book of Promises is that a werejackal cult of Asmodeus is trying to make people sign away their souls to the Devil God, which is done in the eponymous Book of Promises. To this end, they’ve created a natural disaster, a flood, in the town of Vestage, so that they can try force people to sign in exchange for being saved from the floodwaters. Rather oddly, the Book is stored in a place in town called the Counter’s Depository, which acts as a private bank – people pay to have them store their valuables. With the Depository also flooded by the town, several of its customers are planning to “steal” back their valuables from the location, and want the PCs to do it for them…which also puts them in position to find the Book of Promises.
The scenario, needless to say, has problems right from the outset. Why would the Asmodean werejackal cult (which sounds like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon) create a flood that would also hit the place where they keep their artifact? Why do the people who have their valuables stored in the Depository feel the need to have them stolen back instead of just going there and retrieving them normally?
It unfortunately doesn’t get any better. The adventure is much too fond of saying that certain effects just happen, giving little specification. When going to the meeting for the thieving job, for example, there’s a magic effect that detects all weapons on the PCs. What is this effect? I don’t know…there’s nothing that says. We don’t know what it is or how to beat it, save for the text saying gloves of storing will work. Similarly, the Depository has magic on it that only allows its customers, or their representatives, inside…something that seems forgotten when we have hags, doppelgangers, and other adventurers in it later. Note that characters that aren’t intended to be fought, such as the PCs competitors for the job and the other adventuring party inside, don’t have a stat block either, which I consider to be somewhat poor, since you never know how your PCs will cause things to go down.
The last adventure, which sadly has its first paragraph as the last paragraph of the previous adventure, is The Soul Siphon. Unlike the previous adventure, The Soul Siphon is fairly well constructed, but comes with some baggage. For one thing, it’s a psionic adventure – now, I personally enjoy psionics quite a bit, but I know there are plenty of Pathfinder gamers for whom that’s a deal-breaker (oddly, the author notes that this uses 3.5 OGL psionics…but from what I saw, the characters seem to use the Psionics Unbound rules). Moreover, the adventure, which is meant for 12th-level characters, comes with four pre-generated characters, and the initial adventure hook is built around those pre-existing ties. That’s just bad design, to me, as it essentially argues that the players shouldn’t have their own characters going into this, which most will. On the other hand, this is perfect if you want to make it as a psionic one-shot.
The Soul Siphon’s premise is that a tyrannical ruler, who lives in a tower that’s slowly sinking into a bog, is terrorizing the local populace, punishing them for a lone dissenter in their ranks. The PCs meet this dissenter (who is connected to one of them via their back-story), and give them the keys to enter a sunken level of the tower, wherein they can fight their way up and confront not only the tyrant, but also locate the artifact that has gifted him with apparent immortality, and put and end to both.
The adventure is fairly well-constructed, and seems to presume that the PCs will level up over the course of it. Two appendices provide both a new monster, and the four pregen PCs.
Following the final adventure, two short articles are given. The first, by Raging Swan Press mastermind Creighton Broadhurst, is a short set of tables to determine the name of a tribe. The article basically uses a series of combinations from different tables to come up with a colorful moniker (though a quick table at the beginning is available if you want to restrict things to one roll). Following this is an overview of the werejackal cult of Asmodeus, giving their structure, base of operations, allies and enemies, and other general information about them. As its own thing, this wasn’t bad, though I do wish that Paizo’s organization rules had been imported here. Still, the group does make a passable, if somewhat odd, villainous organization.
Overall, the first issue of Adventure Quarterly hits a few bumps in the road, but does show promise. The level listing for adventures is something that absolutely has to be fixed for the second issue, as at-a-glance information about what sort of PCs each adventure is intended for is an absolute must. Beyond that, the first adventure is clearly the cream of the crop, providing a fun little “mystery-lite” for low-level PCs. The second adventure, however, is as much a mess as the flooded town it takes place in, and a Game Master will likely need to give it a polish to make it workable as-is. The last adventure is good but carries several caveats for prospective GMs – if you take it as a trial run for psionics, it’s not bad, but if you want it to be more than a one-shot, or hate psionics, be prepared to start changing things.
Given that what’s good here outnumbers that which isn’t, my overall score for the debut issue of Adventure Quarterly is 3.5 stars, but I’m rounding it up to four since even the bad material can be saved or altered with a little elbow grease. What’s here is three-quarters good, and that’s not bad for the first Adventure Quarterly.
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Publisher Reply: |
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First I wanted to thank Shane O' Connor for taking the time to do a review of our product, We have uploaded a new version to deal with a number of the issues pointed out in this review, Steven Russell, Rite Publishing |
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Sometimes the most defining characteristic of a hero, or villain, isn’t their strengths, but their weaknesses. In Pathfinder, however, that’s not something easily modeled under the rules – while there are plenty of ways to showcase a character’s areas of expertise, mainly through feats and class powers, there are few methods for mechanically portraying a character’s poorer abilities.
4 Winds Fantasy Gaming fixes that by making your characters worse with Player’s Option: Flaws.
Flaws is a short book, having less than a dozen pages. Despite this, it has full bookmarks, and the copy-and-paste is enabled. The book’s visual presentation is minimalistic in tone, having no page borders and only two black and white interior illustrations.
Flaws opens with a brief discussion about giving your characters the flaws assigned here. While some of this seems boilerplate, with such caveats as characters normally only being allowed to take two flaws, and only at character creation, there are a few twists here from what you’re expecting. For example, while one flaw can grant a feat, the second one grants exactly three skill points. It’s interesting that this particular route was chosen, in what I can only assume was the idea that granting two feats was too much.
A bigger surprise is the idea that flaws can be bought off – and this doesn’t mean simply giving up a corresponding feat or skill points. Rather, each flaw has a certain, specific manner in which its penalty can be permanently negated, while you get to keep the corresponding feat or skill points. It’s an intriguing idea, and lends much more credence to why the system doesn’t let you get more than one feat, since you can effectively end up with something for nothing once the flaw is bought off. These buy-offs tend to have a minimum level that they can occur at, however, so you do have to spend at least some time dealing with the flaw itself.
Almost fifty flaws are given, each of which is formatted in a manner similar to a feat in terms of presentation style. I do wish that a summary table had been presented so that the flaws could have been looked over at a glance, however. The flaws run the gamut from physical problems with your character (e.g. Flatulent) to mental problems (e.g. Foul-Mouthed) to social issues (e.g. Excommunicated). While some of these present problems as mild as skill penalties, others can have profound role-playing consequences. Similarly, for most of them, lifting the flaw is fairly simple: If you want to stop being Miserly, for example, just spend more than 1,000 gp on a single purchase. Others are harder, however, and being a Wanted Fugitive will require you to find the right person and succeed on a tough skill check and cost you some money.
Overall, I found Player’s Option: Flaws to present a good range of possibilities for what it offers your characters. The selection of flaws is wide, and what you get for them is good without being overpowering. The method of buying the flaws off is also innovative, though I’m slightly wary of how it results in an overall net gain for characters. Between that and the need for a summary table, this is an altogether 4.5-star product, but I’m rounding it up to 5-stars overall. Some minor issues don’t detract from these Flaws.
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There’s an irony in the fact that the cleric, as a class, relies very little on religious devotion. If you’ve ever made a joke about clerics with no ranks in Knowledge (religion), you’re aware of the all-too-appropriate label of them being just another kind of wizard; after all, there’s no way to build faith into the class mechanics, right?
Enter Necromancer Games’ Necromancer’s Grimoire: The Book of Faith.
From a technical perspective, the Book of Faith isn’t bad. Just over three dozen pages long, it has full nested bookmarks, which is a plus. However, there’s no way to copy and paste the file (or the printer-friendly file), which is a bit of a drag. I do give it props for having a printer-friendly file, which eliminates the background and one page of ads at the end, but unfortunately it not only retains all of the interior illustrations, but still has them in color as well – if you have to leave the pictures in a printer-friendly file, you should at least make them grayscale.
It’s worth mentioning that the artwork is all of a single type here, being pictures of stained glass windows. As those are universal symbols of churches, it’s a pretty good fit for the book, though some other kind of imagery would have helped as well. The pages themselves are set on a tan background, so as to look more like actual pages from a tome.
After some opening fiction and a quick foreword, we’re taken straight into the book’s main offering – the priest, a new base class. Initially, the priest looks something like a divine wizard, having the lowest BAB and Hit Die progression, as well as being proficient with very few weapons and no armor. Things get more interesting, however, when you look at the priest’s spellcasting ability.
Unlike normal slot-based spellcasters, the priest has something called favor (points). Each day, they can choose a number of spells from the cleric spell list to ready – the readied list of spells then becomes roughly the equivalent of a sorcerer’s spells known list. A readied spell can be cast over and over…but each casting has a point cost in terms of favor, and once their favor is gone, the priest cannot cast anything else until they rest and regain their favor again.
There’s more to the class than this, of course. As the priest levels up it gains the ability to intrinsically know what will and will not please their god, gains the ability to work miracles, cast spells not readied (for greater favor cost), hold confessions, and more. The class is very tightly focused, and its class features serve to give it a much more religiously-minded bent than the “casting, channeling, and bashing” cleric.
While I think that would have been enough, the class then gets an expansive flavor section of flavor text, talking about things such as what’s known about priests on a knowledge check, how they get along with other classes and organizations, and a lot more. While I thought this was good, I wish at least some portion of this had devoted more space to expanded mechanical options – the lack of any archetypes or favored class options were noticeable in their absence.
It’s after this that we come to a section on measuring favor and piety. Like favor, piety is a new point-based system for the priest. Whereas favor is gained routinely and the amount of it rapidly swells by level, piety is gained much more rarely. The section here discusses how piety points are gained, and doing so is no small feat – basically, you need to make a positive advancement in your religion in order to gain piety. This isn’t something you can write off either, as piety has game mechanical effects; for example, you get bonus favor per day if you have a high piety score. There’s more that it effects, as several of the priest’s class features deal with piety as well.
Favor is also covered. While favor is gained as part of the status quo, a priest can gain (or lose) favor depending on how they act, with the threshold here generally being a bit lower than for piety. This is quite different than for most spellcasting classes, as being devout can have immediate impact (gaining favor) on your combat efficacy (using the gained favor to cast spells). A table summarizes how much favor is what degree of a reward at what level.
The book’s third section covers miracles – miracles are a class ability of the priest (categorized as spell-like, which I think was a mistake; I didn’t see anything about their effective spell level, for instance, and I don’t like the idea of these being subject to dispel magic) that are similar to spellcasting. Only so many miracles can be known at once, and they have some fairly strongest costs to use.
The major difference between miracles and spells is that the former are often very large in their area of effect (though the exact area tends to depend on the priest’s piety). A priest with a high piety score, for example, can use the Affect Crops miracle in a five-mile radius. Most miracles tend to have a correspondingly high duration as well. Of course, with a high casting time and a prohibition on how often they can be used, virtually none of the listed miracles (just under twenty) are useful in combat.
The last part of the book introduces the devoted apostle prestige class, which I found myself not caring for too much. The problem here is that this class has, as part of its prerequisites, that you have some piety already, so on the surface only priests can take this prestige class. At the same time, however, it increases your caster level, but not your favor per level, which means that a priest’s spellcasting ability takes a hit. The prestige class has several functions that are based around piety, both gaining it have having certain thresholds of it activate class abilities, so I’m inclined to think that it’s meant for multiclass priests (as it has a cleric’s BAB and Hit Dice), but I’m less than certain. It does have a nice flavor text section, however.
Overall, the Book of Faith does a fairly good job of presenting a new sort of character that has a closer tie to their religion than the existing divine spellcasting classes. While it requires a greater sense of their in-game religion, and requires the GM to play an active role as their god (in terms of awarding piety and favor), the priest much more easily fills the role of a character with a close relationship with their god, which has a direct impact on how well they can tend to their community. It’s unfortunate that the prestige class doesn’t do quite as good a job at finding its niche, but even then it’s not a total write-off. Altogether, this is a book that provides some concrete facts towards finding faith in your game.
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It’s easy to overlook the importance of money in Pathfinder. While many quests are centered around lofty ideals of saving worlds and defeating evil, the immediate focus of typical sessions tends to revolve around acquisition, usually right after having killed the monstrous former owners. Indeed, some creatures may establish a fortune of wealth so vast that they have other creatures specifically to guard it. In the Tarnished Souk, the Khan of Nightmares has such a creature overlooking his own vast finances: Gobseck Vaultwright, Meister of the Golden Anvil.
A seventeen-page book, this product hits most of the technical benchmarks we’ve come to expect from quality PDFs. Full nested bookmarks are present, and cop-and-paste is enabled. Ornate borders are on all sides of every page, and several black and white illustrations break up the text every few pages or so. I do wonder if there should be a printer-friendly version, as the heavy borders combined with the periodic artwork may be tougher for some printers, but in a PDF this short it’s probably not a huge deal.
Gobseck is, as a character, perhaps best characterized as Ebenezer Scrooge before he met the three ghosts – that is, he’s a cold and heartless money-grubber who has a romantic tragedy in his past. The nature of this tragedy, or more aptly, the identity of the woman in question, is never revealed, though a sidebar on using Gobseck in your campaign does include some pointers on who she should be in a Coliseum Morpheuon campaign. As with other characters from the Faces of the Tarnished Souk, Gobseck’s stat block is an impressive collection of first- and third-party content. While some of his levels use a fighter archetype from Ultimate Combat, the majority of them are magister levels, from the Super Genius Guide of the same name (though take note, those with older files may remember it as the Genius Guide to the Magus instead).
Several of Gobseck’s feats are reprinted here for ease of reference, even those that can be found in the PFSRD already, which I found helpful. A pair of spells from Rite’s own 1001 Spells book are given next before we move into a number of magic weapon and armor abilities – these are quickly put into context as we then get Gobseck’s individual magic items broken down, and I have to say, he’s as equipped as a CR 20 encounter should be! His hammer, in particular, is not something you want to be on the receiving end of.
Gobseck’s vault is statted up next – not just a thing, it’s actually a living vault, albeit a unique one. Not only does it have powers unlike other living vaults, it’s also a monstrously powerful thing, weighing in at CR 33! I actually snickered at the listing for its XP rating, as I strongly suspect very few groups will ever be able to earn experience points for destroying it.
Slightly oddly, two quick variants are then given for Gobseck – specifically, there are two sections listing what changes should be made to his stat block if you add the Divine or Exemplar templates to him. I wish there had been more context to why these were here – are these versions of Gobseck from parallel universes? Things that could happen to him in the future? Just dumping alternate materials on us without talking about what they mean in the game gives us numbers, not a character.
This is a lesson driven home in the two alternate stat blocks for Gobseck that follow, lowering his power down to CR 13, and CR 6. His title changes with each stat block, which I take to mean that these represent Gobseck at earlier stages in his life (ironically, each also has a note on what to change if those templates are used with him).
The book closes with four templates presented – these are the two templates that Gobseck does have (Smoke and Element-Infused, with him having the air version of the latter), and the two that he could potentially have. Oddly, there’s a small section (two or three paragraphs) of “bonus content” that talk about the one sentimental item that Gobseck keeps in his vault. I did like this bonus bit of exposition, but I found that it actually highlighted what would have been a far better bonus – a listing of what’s to be found in the Vault; while this will obviously vary between campaigns, even a guideline of what sort of fortune of treasures and magic is to be found in the vault would have been useful – I consider it a missed opportunity.
Overall, however, the book is still a good one, and like all of the Faces of the Tarnished Souk, it’s a case-study in how to use OGL materials to great effect. While the aspect of character development is somewhat overshadowed by the game mechanics here, that’s the natural consequence of (rightly) including the reused material for reference purposes. The result is that you have a very strong character with an understated but potentially engaging backstory, to say nothing of his massively-powerful living vault. Use Gobseck in your game, and see why money is the root of all evil.
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There’s just something about evil outsiders that makes them perfect for an individual spotlight. As the strongest among them have not only a unique form and powers, but also influence on the mortal world, makes them easy to customize in terms of what they can do and what influence they have on your campaign. Hence, it’s no surprise that Super Genius Games has started a new series of products based around them: the Annals of the Archfiends.
The opening product in this line gives us Phosonith the Cruel Charmer, a devil prince.
A relatively short product at just under ten pages, the book opens with a quick overview of Phosonith’s personality – beneficent in public and wrathful in private – before delving into his history. This was somewhat more expansive than I’d expected, as it took two pages to describe Phosonith’s genesis and rise to power to rule the Stygian city of Ess, along with his current sketch. I suspect I’m in the minority in thinking that what was here was a bit much; while I appreciate back-story as much as anyone, this felt somewhat excessive in how much of Phosonith’s history we’re given. This is particularly true as there were other sections I wish were expanded.
Speaking of which, the next section covers some of the influence that Phosonith has. This opens with a section regarding Phosonith in the real world, which cogently notes that he has no real-world equivalent, but rather was inspired by several duplicitous men in real life (though I confess I was rather irked by its noting of Machiavelli’s The Prince as a source – apparently the author, like most people, didn’t realize that that entire work was sarcastic on Machiavelli’s part, and not meant to be taken quite so literally).
Ahem. The book then covers Phosonith’s cult, including the new Duplicity domain, and is a good example of where the book doesn’t nearly go far enough in what it offers. Let’s leave aside the fact that at no point are we told what other domains (or holy symbol, favored weapon, etc.) you receive for worshipping Phosonith, the information on his cult is quite sparse. We’re given a quick overview of the sorts of people who make up his cult, and paragraph of what they do and don’t do, and that’s it. There’s nothing about their tactics, their current plots, not even an abbreviated stat block for a single example cultist that your PCs can interact with. There’s just very little here, and it’s disappointing.
A page is given to how to portray Phosonith personally, and it does a good job in outlining his appearance and methodology, except in combat. True, a character that focuses on a benign façade shouldn’t get into combat very much, but throw the PCs into the mix and it’s likely to happen, so it would have been nice if the author had talked about how to run Phosonith in the event of a fight. As it is, his stat block is fairly impressive (though his SR should be a few points higher), but I was disappointed that the deception-based powers of the Duplicity domain, which help you negate truth- and alignment-based effects, weren’t mirrored in his stat block. It’s hard to believe the flavor text about how Phosonith goes to great lengths to hide that he’s evil when he can’t even defeat a simple detect evil spell.
The book closes out with an overview of the city of Ess, describing twelve locations within its locale. The locations are fairly interesting, but that they’re numbered is a reminder of the fact that there’s no map of the city itself, which is a shame. I can see the practical reason for this, as a custom map costs money, but it’s still a shame. Equally so is the lack of a city stat block (a la the Pathfinder GameMastery Guide) which would be very helpful here as Ess is supposed to be a planar trade town where all sorts of creatures of all alignments are welcome in Hell. There really should be some city stats here, and the lack of them is a weakness in the product.
Overall, the first book in the Annals of the Archfiends line makes some stumbles out of the gate. Having too much material in some areas and not enough in others, this first book shows that it has potential but needs to realign its focus somewhat. There’s some good material here, which makes it easy to see how it could have been great with a bit more tweaking in some areas. Phosonith the Cruel Charmer presents a nice façade, but an ultimately imperfect one.
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One of the ways in which Pathfinder (nee Third Edition) is different from previous editions of the world’s most popular fantasy role-playing game is in the proliferation of mechanical character abilities. Whereas before your PC had comparatively little stats, nowadays they have many different mechanics that serve to define what they can and cannot do, from skills to feats to class abilities and more. However, most of these exist largely in a vacuum – while some may be prerequisites to others, few actually build off of each other, and they can form a collection that’s quite disparate in what they offer (particularly for multiclass characters).
It’s in that spirit of tying a character’s abilities more closely together that Misfit Studios has released Superior Synergy: Fantasy for the Pathfinder RPG. Let’s examine it and see how well it ties things together.
Superior Synergy comes as three PDFs, those being the main file, a printer-friendly version thereof, and a short checklist file for the various synergies. Ostensibly, this checklist (which uses a very handy alternating grey-and-white set of rows for each item, making them easily distinguishable) is used to chart which synergies your character qualifies for. However, it should be noted that GMs can make good use of this as a tool for denoting which synergies he allows in his campaign to begin with.
The main file is just over seventy pages in length, and has the technical aspects that a good PDF product should – it comes with full, nested bookmarks, a hyperlinked table of contents, and has the copy-and-paste enabled. These go for the printer-friendly version also, which eliminates the cover, the page backgrounds and borders (those being an off-white and a muddy brownish, respectively), and turns the few interior illustrations from being full color to black and white. I’m personally of the opinion that printer-friendly file should eliminate the illustrations altogether, though that’d usually require a new layout.
So what exactly does Superior Synergy present for your Pathfinder game? Simply put, this book posits that if you have certain prerequisites – be they of skills, feats, class abilities or whatnot – then you can gain an extra benefit. This is usually automatic, but some times will require a check.
The book’s first chapter deals with skill synergies. I need to take a moment to state, in the plainest terms possible, that these are NOT the same as the skill synergies from 3.5. For that matter, these are not even the same as the material from the 3.5 version of Superior Synergy. Rather, these skill synergies function off of making a check with a certain skill, and the check result modifying another skill check.
There’s no ambiguity here regarding what skills affect what, or how long the synergy check takes, etc. as the book goes into very specific detail on the mechanics (as well as the flavor of exactly how) these synergies use. For example, you can make an Acrobatics check which modifies (depending on the check result) a subsequent Climb check made to catch yourself or someone else on a fall, as you’re good at twisting and teetering enough to give yourself a bit of an edge…if you’re lucky. If you’re not, you’ve actually made things worse.
Feat synergy is, perhaps ironically, very similar to a section of new feats (and indeed, the book notes that if you think giving these synergy effects out automatically once the prerequisites are met, you can turn these into new feats). As a Pathfinder aficionado, I was quite happy to note that these prerequisites took into account the materials from the Advanced Player’s Guide, Ultimate Magic, and Ultimate Combat. So for example, if you have Bludgeoner (UC), Dazing Assault (APG), and Weapon Focus, you qualify for the Staggering Blow synergy, which lets you attempt to attempt to stagger a foe for a round. There’s a lot of great material here that lets you put forward a lot of feats that might otherwise be totally ignored (such as some skill-boosters).
For all of that, though, it was the next chapter that was my favorite: class synergies. Simply put, this section is (as I read it) one big love-letter to multiclassing, as it grants synergy abilities from having different class features. If you have the track class ability from being a ranger or inquisitor, and the detect evil power of a paladin, you gain the Track Evil synergy, which grants a bonus to tracking evil creatures. I really enjoyed this section, as it did a lot to make multiclassing sexy again.
The spell synergy section is the only part of the book that doesn’t offer several dozen synergies. Having only a half-dozen synergies, these are the result of using certain types of spells within one round of each other. Perhaps surprisingly, these are written with a more generic stroke, mostly combining types of spells that mostly lend themselves to fairly obvious combinations – here you’ll find rules for using fire and ice to weaken items, electricity conducted by metal or water, and similar things, though at least one (several mental effects at once can confuse a creature) takes a more innovative leap.
The last section of the book is crafting synergy, and basically allows for characters with a nuanced background to craft weapons with built-in non-magical abilities. If you can rage and have Skill Focus for Craft (armor) for example, you can build armor that’s painful to wear but as a result increases how long you can rage (slightly)...but only on a successful Craft check, otherwise you’ve essentially created an item with a slight (non-magical) curse.
The book ends with several pages of the checklist I mentioned at the beginning, something that seems redundant, as the file is already included separately.
Overall, I found Superior Synergy: Fantasy PFRPG Edition to be an expansive book of great options for your characters. Having said that, there are some concerns that I’d want to thoroughly weigh before I used it in my game. For one thing, the synergies that require an extra roll can slow down game-play, though I do appreciate that these are the synergies that aren’t guaranteed to be an extra boost for characters. By contrast, the always-active synergies are faster, but mean that PCs will automatically receive a power bump…though even that’s controllable if you decide to make some of these into feats, or just disallow certain synergies altogether.
It’s that modularity that, I think, really puts this book over the top. There are so many options here, which can be easily added, tweaked, or disallowed, that there’s really no way you can’t find a happy medium in terms of figuring out what parts of this book to allow and what not to. Taking that into account, there are still a few minor problems (a synergy for a paladin’s smite evil and a barbarian’s rage…alignment compatibility issues there), and the occasional spelling and grammar error, but nothing that’s a deal-breaker. I say, start using Superior Synergy, and make your characters more than just the sum of their parts.
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Publisher Reply: |
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To address the rage/smite contradiction, note that this is a matter of forward compatibility with future Misfit Studios products. Without going into greater detail, some character options in future products will make the Synergy Effect possible. I threw it in here to keep it in context, as putting a single Synergy Effect in a later book that has no other synergy info in it would seem too out of place. |
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One of the most critical, and most accurate, critiques of the standard races in Pathfinder is that they’re prosaic. They have little identity to them, and what identity they do have is so broad and shallow as to be little more than caricature. One of the worst offenders in this regard are the halflings, which with the revisions of the last few editions of the game, tend to lack any real racial definition whatsoever.
That’s what John Wick sets out to change in Wicked Fantasy: Haffuns: Seeming Servants.
Haffuns: Seeming Servants is twenty-eight pages long, and hits most of the high-water marks for a PDF product. Copy and paste is enabled, and the file is quite easy to navigate having full, nested bookmarks and a hyperlinked table of contents. I did frown slightly, however, at the file having no printer-friendly version (or, for those that prefer it, an epublishing version).
The lack of a printer-friendly file isn’t too big a deal given the book’s size, but it’s not something I can write off, either. The entire book is set against a cream-colored background, as though the text were written on parchment. Moreover, this background has some very lightly-drawn designs on it; in some places these designs actually fade the text laid over them, causing the lettering to appear to change its shading, which is slightly bothersome to the eye. There are only two illustrations in the book, both full-page color pieces (though one is done in a very muted style). I quite enjoyed the artwork here, and do wish that there’d been more of it, but what’s here is quite impressive given the space of each picture.
Haffuns: Seeming Servants gives us a very different version of halflings than has been seen before. While halflings in contemporary RPGs seem to be something of an adjunct to human culture, Seeming Servants takes this to a more literal degree. Haffuns, a name the race adopted from the humans, appeared two centuries ago, fleeing an unknown terror from below the earth. Since then, they’ve ingratiated themselves into human society as a servitor race; they’re the “support staff” to affluent human households, serving as the porters, maids, cooks, and other servants of humans. This, however, is more than it seems…
The book can be roughly divided into two parts. The first half of the book focuses entirely on establishing the flavor of haffuns. While I was expecting this to focus on fairly broad overviews of their psychology and physique, I was pleasantly surprised that instead, there are several smaller sections that discuss particular aspects of what make haffuns unique. We’re told about things like taunken, their secret language that can be used in front of others without anyone knowing it’s being used at all, or tatura, the agenda and motivation of those haffuns that serve human families.
It’s only in the second half of the book that these concepts are finally put into Pathfinder mechanics. Following an initial overview of haffun racial traits, we’re then given an overview of a haffun family (though oddly, a few paragraphs of text seem to repeat themselves here). Not just a designation of relatives, a haffun family affects their stats, as does the number of family members present. For all this, I do wish that there had been more of the recent “Pathfinder-isms” regarding new races here; alternate racial traits and favored class abilities would have been a nice extra.
Several new haffun feats are present which help to flesh out their previously-described abilities, along with a final mechanic that helps to quantify what it is that haffuns are hiding from humans, before we move into classes.
The first part of this section is a new cleric archetype, the jorsha, which has a close affinity with the dead. This is not your classical necromancer, as a jorsha’s powers are largely focused around detection and expulsion. Interestingly, a jorsha’s focus of worship is not a deity, but their ancestors – given that this affects their domain choices, I wish that we’d gotten some sample ancestors, as it seems like this is a large enough thematic change to the cleric that some additional material would have been helpful.
The final part of the book deals with the new haffun base class: the butler. While I can imagine some jokes being made at the class name, the concept that it provides is quite interesting in its execution. While this is obviously a “support” class, it goes about it in ways that are, for the most part, unique. I say “for the most part” because it does include an unavoidable nod towards combat utility in that it can sneak attack. But the rest of its abilities are quite innovative (though some of them are essentially some of the feats presented earlier); while it can (like a rogue) pick from a list of abilities every few levels – a list that expands as it gains levels – these are not rogue talents. The number of abilities here is quite interesting in what it offers, such as marking a person to know when they’re in danger, even if the person doesn’t know it herself; or being able to make an item hidden on someone’s person completely undetectable. This is a class whose utility extends further than just combat.
Overall, Haffuns: Seeming Servants is a product that does a great job giving a fairly uninspired race a new identity. Rather than try to radically reinvent halflings, this book plays up their post-modern identity, and in the process makes them something that looks familiar, but becomes more and more new as you peel back the surface. If not for a few minor technical issues, and that certain areas could have been fleshed out more, this book would be perfect. As it is, the book’s problem areas are deficiencies more than errors, don’t detract from what is here. Double your halflings’ utility in your game with Wicked Fantasy: Haffuns: Seeming Servants.
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I’ve always been on the proverbial fence about “set pieces” – small locations that are written apart from any greater context, allowing them to be dropped into a campaign as a sort of mini-adventure location. In some instances they’re a lot of fun; a quick little adventure that’s easy for the GM and fun for the players. That can be difficult to pull off, however, as they need to have enough context to make sense unto themselves but not so much that they feel too “heavy” to be dropped into an ongoing game. Likewise, they need to have enough of a challenge to be worthwhile, but not so much that they become a killer encounter.
Happily, as far as set pieces go, Headless Hydra Games’s Storage Vaults of Alantes is one of the better ones.
The book’s technical presentation is strong. Having only ten pages (really just over seven, given the cover, credits page, and OGL), you’d think the book wouldn’t be too concerned with how it’s put together – not so. Full nested bookmarks are here, a pleasant surprise, and copy and paste is enabled.
The book has borders along the top and bottom, along with alternating sides, of each page. There’s only a single interior illustration, a black and white image of the new monster found here. The preceding statement is notwithstanding the map, which was actually quite a treat, visually. Done in full color, it’s presented in an unusual, but not unpleasant, isometric style. I’m quite surprised by how well it makes this sort of map work – for a larger area, this perspective would quickly become cumbersome, but here it’s actually very nice to look at. I should also mention that it takes the details of the area descriptions into account; images described as being on the walls can be seen here, which only contribute to the map’s charm.
For a dungeon with only three rooms (more like two, in all honesty), there’s a surprising amount of flavor text here. There’s a background given for why this particular vault was constructed and why it holds the treasures it does. There’s also a motivation given for the PCs to go looking for it (although I found it slightly silly, as well as a bit too vague for my tastes – if the Sultan’s son has been cursed by a witch, why aren’t normal magical remedies working? Perhaps I’m over-thinking such a minor background detail, however), and a sidebar covers what the PCs know about this vault’s particular treasure. The sidebar struck me as slightly odd, as it segues into why the treasure is here in the first place – given that there’s nothing to lead the PCs to this being the treasure’s location in the first place (the scenario makes a lot more sense, I think, if it’s something you have the PCs just happen to stumble onto), this seems somewhat unnecessary.
For a location that has only three rooms – or, more specifically, one hidden entrance and two underground chambers – the more specificity each location has, the better. For the most part, this book does a good job of presenting a large number of details for each location, particularly as the two doors between the three rooms are each set with a puzzle-lock and trap combination.
It’s in regards to these traps where I felt that the book fell down the most. The issue isn’t that the traps are bad; quite the contrary, they’re quite good. The problem is that this is really the same trap, done twice. In the first case, there’s really no good way besides guessing to solve it, which strikes me as slightly unfair. The second iteration of the trap is somewhat less punishing, as there’s a clue given.
There were also some additional details that I felt could have been provided. For example, the last door notes its break DC, but what about simple hardness and hit points? There’s no description of light sources in the main underground chamber, so is it pitch black? A lot was done here to approach these challenges in multiple ways, but while it covered a lot of ground, it could have provided us with more.
My last complaint about the book is with the new monster found at the dungeon’s end. The author made the critical mistake of giving it a movement rate of 0 feet, something that insofar as I’m aware most plant monsters don’t have in the Pathfinder RPG – this is because it encourages the PCs to (once they realize the nature of the threat) back up and pepper it with ranged weapons and spells until it dies. It’s a critical flaw in an otherwise excellently-designed monster.
Of course, there are a few other surprises to be found in the vault, as it houses more than just one treasure. There’s also a suggestion for what to do if you want to have this be the first part of a larger series of adventures, but that, to paraphrase an old axiom, is a tale for another product…
Overall, I thought that this was a very well-done set piece. It had its flaws, both in design (a knock spell can bypass a significant portion of the challenges here) and in presentation (the same trap twice), but it hits far more often than it misses. The traps are designed to be more than just stat blocks, and the manner of overcoming them requires intuitive thinking by the players, and not just their PCs. Likewise, the creature encounters look like a lot of fun (just give the last monster a movement rate), and nicely counterbalance the use of traps. And of course, the treasure at the end makes it all worthwhile. Whether you want to start a new chapter in your campaign, or just want to take a side trek for an evening, you’ll have fun looting the Storage Vault of Alantes.
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One of the defining characteristics of PCs in most role-playing games is that they’re proactive rather than reactive. It’s what comes from being the one raiding dungeons, while the denizens are dealing with your raid. But what would it be like if that paradigm was turned on its head, and you were the one trying to defend your lair from some do-gooders that had suddenly kicked in the door? That’s the primary question your group faces in the second book of the Way of the Wicked campaign: Call Forth Darkness.
Continuing this adventure path for evil characters, Call Forth Darkness is aptly named. Tasked to summon back a banished daemon lord and have him give you a powerful item, your group must first find, conquer, and hold the fortress that the fiendish cult used to inhabit while attempting to stop the forces of good – as well as meddlesome adventurers – from putting the kibosh on your plans.
From a technical standpoint, Call Forth Darkness is a good product, but could have used a few more tweaks. Weighing in at one-hundred-six pages altogether, it has bookmarks to each of the book’s major sections, but I had hoped there would be nested bookmarks to the various sub-sections as well. It does have copy-and-pasted enabled, which is always a good thing.
The book’s graphical presentation is quite strong. The pages are set on a dark tan background, as though the file were an old tome, with black borders along three sides. Michael Clarke continues to impress with his full-color interior illustrations, largely of various personages that your group will encounter throughout the adventure.
I did have a few problems with the pictorial aspects of the book, however. First, I can’t really hold this against the artist, but the maps continue to be done as one square equaling ten feet. This makes it difficult to reproduce these in battle-mat size, but as I said, this isn’t really Fire Mountain Games’ fault – there’s only so much you can tweak the scale you want to set things at. Secondly, it should be noted that the book comes with three files – the main PDF, a printer-friendly version, and a book of players’ handouts.
The printer-friendly version was something of a disappointment. It’s only changes were to remove the tan background and set the page borders to being line-scaling rather than a full color border. That’s good, but it’s not enough – not when the full-color cover and interior illustrations remain. These should have been removed entirely (requiring an adjusted layout) or at least set to grayscale. That they weren’t makes this not nearly as printer-friendly as it should have been.
Similarly, the players’ handouts consist of four pages. One is a wilderness map, two are the two pages of maps of the Horn of Abaddon (the evil fortress), and the final one is an illustration of one of the dungeon denizens.
But enough about that, let’s look at the meat of the adventure and see what new evil your group is doing!
After the ubiquitous introduction and adventure background, things are broken up into four “acts” each of which is sub-divided into various “events.”
The first act covers everything prior to the arrival at the dungeon. Herein, the PCs receive their next assignment, taking them to the frontier town of Farholde and meeting with their support (a local baron, as well as another of the nine groups helping to overthrow the current order), before setting out to locate the Horn of Abaddon.
Taking up less than ten percent of the book’s total page-count, this section of the adventure wasn’t bad, but was clearly the book’s weak point. I say that not because there’s a dearth of action here (though there is), but rather than there’s not enough exposition on what can really be done at this stage. For example, it’s helpful (though not necessarily expected) that the PCs start to develop a minion organization during the adventure, with the unspoken assumption that some part of it will be set up in Farholde; however, there’s little here that really helps to put that part of the adventure forward.
Now, to be fair, there is some support for this part of the adventure at this stage – just not enough. Meeting with the local baron and securing his aid is helpful, and having another “knot” of evil-doers backing you up from the town is a mixed blessing, but notwithstanding the gazetteer of Farholde itself, that’s really all that there is. While the section on running an evil organization does talk a little about finding minions in Farholde, I’d have preferred that there were a few events placed here to let the PCs work their way into the town’s seedy underbelly and set up the beginnings of a network before they went into the wild.
Speaking of the wild, the book somewhat glosses over the task of finding the Horn. Even presuming that they find the map to it, the book rather oddly sets finding the location as a Perception, rather than Survival skill. Moreover, it seems like there’s some wasted potential for further encounters here – the few spots that are marked on the GMs map receive extremely little coverage (said coverage is given in their events later in the book, rather than having an overview in act one). There could have been a lot more here to help round out the environment – at the very least it would have been nice to have had a table of random encounters!
It’s at the second act, however, that the book really begins to shine. Here, the PCs discover the Horn, and at first it’s not too dissimilar from any other dungeon crawl, as the PCs have to explore the place, deal with some of the creatures that have already moved in, and figure out their next move. While the adventure doesn’t expressly spell out that they need to try and dominate, rather than eradicate, most of the local monsters, the encounters are somewhat slanted in that direction – a smart group will quickly figure it out. This is particularly true since, if the PCs root out all of the Horn’s secrets (and the adventure assumes they do, to the point of having a sidebar saying what to do if some critical information slips by them), they’ll realize that they’ll need to conduct a ritual that takes months to complete in order to complete their mission.
As I mentioned, this is where the adventure really takes off. The PCs start to interact with various creatures that require longer-term thinking on their part. What monsters should be slain, and which should be subjugated? Can the first line of good-aligned defenders be manipulated, or should you destroy them on sight? The adventure sometimes tilts things subtly in one direction, but by and large it’s refreshing how it lets the party make their own decisions, and reap the rewards or consequences therein. The author makes sure to say what various creatures do over time.
The book also notes certain things that can increase the local security, earning “Security Points.” Oddly, the points have no particular effect save to earn bonus XP for the party – while the individual defenses do make a difference in and of themselves, I’d have thought that there’d be more of an effect in terms of what the Security Points do to potential invaders – a missed opportunity there, albeit a slight one.
The book’s third act is where the PCs need to shift from offense to defense. Because the ritual they’re performing takes months, the book outlines things week by week, and various interlopers start in from the very beginning. The book does a truly remarkable job of blending in layers of plot here, as the PCs’ “allies” will send them varying degrees of advanced notice (though how these notices are sent is left frustratingly vague), all in accordance with their own plans, as they learn about adventurers and crusaders heading towards the Horn.
This is where the book also starts to introduce monsters from beyond the first Pathfinder Bestiary. It’s a small but refreshing change to see creatures from the Bestiary 2 or Tome of Horrors being used here, and helps to keep the PCs on their toes. This is also when the PCs are most likely to have their own group of minions that they can command, both in terms of the subjugated monsters and in their organization in Farholde.
I also really have to compliment the author on the structure of the various groups the PCs face. The composition of enemies here is something that only a gamer would think of. You have groups ranging from uber-good crusaders who strike hard and fast, to the all-neutral party who isn’t vulnerable to anti-good measures. Some groups come with plenty of advanced warning and just walk in the front door; some do their homework beforehand and (likely) get the drop on the PCs. All are written with a battle strategy (as part of their stat block), and many discuss what they do if they manage to flee. Several even have some ties to the previous adventure, building a strong sense of continuity beyond the usual “sequence of events” that most adventure paths have.
The book’s final act takes place during the last five days of the months-long ritual, and its here that the heat is really turned up on the PCs. With their summoning almost done, there’s a lot of attention focused on them, and the adversaries come hard and fast. From other evils that want to hijack the ritual to desperate defenders of goodness, and more, the PCs are effectively under siege, both from without and from within. The denouement of the adventure is exceptional in its crafting, so much so that I honestly think your players will likely remember this as one of the best adventures they’ve ever played.
Following this, the book still has more in store. Several pages are dedicated to the running of an evil organization. Surprisingly, this is fairly simple in terms of mechanics. While I was initially suspicious of it being based around the Leadership feat, I did like that it makes it so that Leadership gives you the usual cohort, but the followers are instead set up as an organization. The organization is treated as a single entity, and can perform so many actions per week (more if multiple PCs throw in as co-leaders), presuming a successful check. A list of about two dozen actions is given, followed by a series of possible events that can happen, and some further discussion.
The town of Farholde is given roughly a half-dozen pages of examination, including a map of the town. There’s quite a lot here, and an enterprising GM will use the information to help personalize the townsfolk while the PCs are here – the information here seems almost excessive given how the PCs will likely spend most of the their time holed up in the Horn.
The book’s final section talks about modifying the campaign depending on the composition of the party. To be more clear, it discusses running the campaign if you have party members that are of the same type of class (e.g. all clerics), or of the same race (e.g. all goblins). In practice, this section mostly lays down background for why such a group would have existed in the first place. There is some discussion regarding modifying the feel of the campaign, but nothing too specific is given for even major game-changers (e.g. if your entire party lacks spellcasters). There is, however, a single new feat given for creatures that are sensitive to light.
I was personally hoping for a section on what to do for replacement PCs should some die over the course of the campaign. Given the importance of the back-story, and the group’s secretive nature (plus how they’re operating under the oversight of their master), it seems like new characters would be very hard to come by. Hopefully a future book will address this.
Overall, this is a book that starts slowly and builds its way up to a truly epic crescendo. While there are some parts that could have been fleshed out better, what’s here is massive in scale and breathtaking in scope. From the all-too-short sections that deal with Farholde (a much more interesting town that it had a right to be) to clearing and refurbishing the dungeon to the incredible dungeon-defense sections to the harrowing conclusion, this is an adventure of grandeur. Throw in the formation of your own evil organization to lord over, and I have to wonder if this campaign hasn’t already hit its high point; certainly this will be a hard act to follow.
If you haven’t already started to walk the Way of the Wicked, then let this be the reason to begin doing so – you’ll never have so much fun as when you Call Forth Darkness.
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I’ve long been of the opinion that one of the strengths of the d20 system, of which Pathfinder is the primary inheritor, is its unified mechanics. Few are the places I appreciate this more than the transparency between PC and NPC rules, particularly for monsters and races. True, they don’t always match up 100% perfectly, but as someone who remembers what a headache it was trying to add class levels to monsters in previous editions, what we have now is by far better.
Purple Duck Games supplement Legendary Races: The Cyclops is a testament to this facet of game design. Because while I’ve never personally had a player ask to play a cyclops, I’ve now got that angle covered should it ever come up (plus some cool options in the meanwhile).
The book is a short one, being a sixteen-page PDF. Pleasantly, there’s also a second PDF of counters; small squares with images of various creatures from the book that can be easily placed on your battlemat. Several different sizes are available here, reflecting the various sizes of the cyclopes and cyclopes-kin that the book presents. Likewise, the primary PDF has full nested bookmarks and has copy and pasting enabled.
Several black and white illustrations break up the book, roughly a half-dozen all told. There is no printer-friendly version of the book available, but in all honesty your printer should be able to handle what’s here anyway. There’s also no epublishing file, so if you don’t like how PDFs display on an ereader or tablet, you’re going to be out of luck.
I usually talk about my overall impression of a book at the end of my review, saving it for after I’ve discussed all of the different sections, but in this case it seems more apropos to mention up front how much I enjoyed this book. I really feel like a standard was set here in terms of presenting a truly holistic amount of information regarding presenting a race for use in the Pathfinder RPG.
For example, the book opens with a few pages talking about the cyclopes’ racial history, society, and physiology before moving into game stats. From there we get a new weapon (a shuriken-like throwing weapon called the gieve), before moving into how to play a cyclops PC. This is handled by breaking the Bestiary cyclops down into a racial class. This harkens back slightly to Third Edition, being a class that essentially must be taken, and cannot be multiclassed out of until it’s complete, but the class is only six levels long, so it doesn’t seem particularly cumbersome.
If you can’t stand racial levels, however, the book has you covered with its new half-cyclops race. A human-cyclops mix, this race is equivalent to the standard races in power. It’s not simply tossed out without any support either – the book presents a good deal of flavor information before presenting the racial mechanics. Moreover, it then gives expanded descriptions for how half-cyclops do in each PC class (not including the UM and UC classes, as this book predates them), and has both alternate racial traits and several new favored class options. More than anything else, these extras helped give the entire book a very comprehensive scope.
A single new legendary weapon is presented next, a shout-out to those using Purple Duck Games’s Legendary Weapon supplements. If you don’t have those, it may be of more limited use. Interestingly, one of the weapon’s powers is a psionic one, with the particular power reprinted here in its entirety. A sidebar converts the power into a divine spell for those who hate psionics.
A couple new feats are presented next, and this is one of the areas where I felt the book could have been tightened up a little more. For example, Intimidating Orb gives a cyclops (of half-cyclops) a +4 to Intimidate checks. Fair enough, but with ten or more ranks in the skill, the Persuasive feat in the Core Rulebook will give you that, and a +4 bonus to Diplomacy to boot (and you don’t need to be a cyclops to take it). Likewise, the Otherworldly Gaze feat lets you gain a +2 to gaze and blindness attacks…but feats like Great Fortitude add a +2 save bonus to a much wider set of saves.
A new oracle mystery comes next, along with a sample 1st-level NPC. After this, we receive two new templates, the man-eater and the god-scored (which, oddly, do not have sample NPCs of their own). I quite enjoyed these templates, as they both play into the theme of degenerate cyclopes, but remain broad enough that they can be applied to most creatures (there were a few nitpicks that I had, like the man-eaters bite being a secondary natural attack, or the god-scorned’s punish the prideful attack deal a whopping 4 points of ability drain on a failed strike – ouch!).
The book ends with a new monster, the chthonic cyclops, a huge creature weighing in at a hefty CR 16! Presumably these are meant to represent the cyclopes as they once were.
Overall, I quite enjoyed this book. While it had a few rough patches (where are the half-cyclops’ height/weight and age tables? And does the gieve count for the half-cyclops’ weapon familiarity, since “cyclops throwing star” is a parenthetical name for the weapon?), it seriously went the extra mile in rounding out what could have been a very terse racial presentation, while still keeping a very tight focus. Small errors notwithstanding, this is a great resource for those who want to show that a one-eyed character can be king even beyond the land of the blind.
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Supplements that add new spells are, more than anything else in Pathfinder, risky for a GM. While feats are fairly tame in how powerful they are, and magic items can be destroyed or stolen in-game, a new spell that wreaks havoc tends to be difficult to extract. So adding even a few new spells to your campaign can be a cautious exercise.
Taking a look at Rite Publishing’s 1001 Spells, however, will make you want to throw caution to the wind.
A compilation of Rite Publishing’s series of 101 X-Level Spells, this puts all of the previous material in one place (strictly speaking, it also means that there should be 1,010 spells here; I confess that I haven’t counted). I haven’t confirmed that any previous errata or fixes are present here, but given that my PDF copy has “v4” at the end of its file-name, there are likely some changes that have been made.
In terms of the books technical presentation, I was actually a little surprised by how minimalist its approach was. To be fair, it does have full bookmarks to each section and the beginning of each alphabetical listing of spells (e.g. you can click to go to the beginning of all the spells that start with “B”), and copy-and-pasting is enabled. No printer-friendly version (or epublishing version) is present, however.
Moreover, there’s no introduction or discussion of what’s here. The book goes straight from the credits page to the spell lists. These lists are initially only given for the Core Rulebook spellcasting classes. The APG and Ultimate Magic class spell lists are presented as appendices at the end of the book, something that found to be an oddly artificial distinction; why not just list them in the beginning with all of the other classes?
I suspect that the answer to this one may be in how none of the original spells were written with these additional classes in mind. Each spell’s listing, for example, deals only with the Core classes; if you want to know if a given spells can be cast by an alchemist or an inquisitor, you won’t be able to tell just by reading its entry – you’ll have to go check its spell list.
If it sounds like I have only bad things to say about this book, rest assured that these are merely footnotes. I’d much prefer that these issues were tended to, but it doesn’t change the fact that what’s here are over a thousand spells which are as innovative as they are imaginative. It’s unfortunate that I can’t go into any significant detail in this review, simply because there are so many spells of such a diverse nature, but when you have spells like Minor Miracle (a cleric’s Limited Wish), Steal the Painful Memory (remove the memory of an event from a large group of people), Counter Silence (a somatic-only spell that dispels magical silence), or Giant Boulder (guess what you’re throwing now), how can you not want to see more?
I should note that I’ve personally used some of these spells (albeit not a lot) in my game, so I speak from experience when I say that the book’s tagline is true – this really will make it more agonizing to pick what spells you learn throughout the campaign, simply because there are so many great ones here that you won’t be able to easily pick.
I also have to commend the book for coming with a dataset for Hero Lab. I don’t use the program myself, but I know a lot of people who do, and I suspect that this will make the book into a “must have” for them.
Overall, I’d give this book four and a half stars were I able, due to the class listing thing; as it is, I’m rounding this up to a full five stars simply because what’s here is so plentiful that I can’t really hold such a comparatively minor problem against it. 1001 Spells will give you more new magic than you could possibly use in a campaign, but you’ll have a lot of fun trying.
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I generally don’t agree with the sentiment that spellcasters, particularly wizards, are overpowered. To me, that’s something that’s true more on paper than in actual game-play. However, it’s undeniable that contemporary spell-design does think this way. Simply put, spells are designed to have one specific effect and no other; indeed, many spells will devote considerable space to telling you what they can’t do. That’s understandable, but ironically it takes some of the magic away from spellcasting. What’s happened to spells that have wide and creative applications?
The answer is simple: they’ve all migrated to Advanced Arcana II, by Necromancers of the Northwest.
Okay, the above sentiment is an exaggeration, but only slightly. Whereas most supplements that introduce new spells are just a hodge-podge collection of spells thrown together, Advanced Arcana II, like its predecessor volume, has several new themes to what it presents. We’ll go over these, but first let’s take a look at the book’s technical construction.
Weighing in at just over a hundred pages in length, Advanced Arcana II hits all of the checkboxes that a PDF should. It contains full, nested bookmarks. It allows for copying and pasting (I’m pleased to say that there are virtually no errors with pasting copied text here). Moreover, there’s a printer-friendly version of the book, which is always a plus. That said, the printer-friendly version eliminates the page backgrounds, removes one page of ads near the end of the book, and sets the remaining colors to grey – however, it does keep the interior illustrations, simply graying them. I’d have preferred removing the artwork altogether, something I’m presuming they didn’t do because it’d require a ne layout.
In terms of artwork, the book makes a fairly good showing for itself. All of the pages are set on a cream-colored “parchment” background, which makes it look as though the book is an actual tome. Periodic full-color illustrations break up the text, all of which are CG stock art pieces (oddly, each piece is captioned with a copyright notice for the original creator – I’d have thought it’d be enough to note them in the credits page).
The book opens with a one-page in-character introduction, and then a four-page opening (which is also in-character). It’s after this that we’re given an introduction by the actual game designers. Advanced Arcana II, they tell us, is different from its predecessor volume in that it wants to deal with the mutable nature of spells. To this end, its largely concerning itself with three “types” of spells – the first of these are “modal” spells, which allow for spells to have different effects, but you can only choose one when you cast it (a la fire shield). The second are conditional spells, where the local conditions determine how effective a spell is (e.g. a spell that causes fear is more effective in dim light). Finally, we see the return of segmented spells here; spells that have to be cast multiple times in rapid succession to have their effect take place.
This is last idea is turned on its head, however, as it puts two new variations on that theme: the first are segmented spells that can be cast a differing (instead of a set) number of times, with the number of casting affecting the spell’s efficacy. The variation allows for layering effects to manifest with each casting of a segmented spell, allowing for stacking effects per casting.
Interestingly, the book then goes on to detail another theme that many of its spells deal with: age. Specifically, there are a number of spells here that deal with adding or draining age from a creature – it should be noted though that none of these spells have aging as a “cost” of casting the spell (something from older editions of the game, which I sort of miss). I have to commend the designers here, as they delve into the mechanics of aging in Pathfinder and make sure no aspect of this is overlooked. They deal with questions of aging modifiers to mental ability scores and physical ones, with how different sorts of creatures age (e.g. what to do if you’re uncertain of how a monster lives).
While it doesn’t call it out as its own section, per se, the book then delves into a series of optional rules, mostly in regards to adding new spells to your game. The book cogently notes that it can be awkward to have new spells just suddenly appear in your campaign, particularly for divine spellcasters who have access to the whole of their spell lists. To that end, the book presents several ideas, such as having rare spells costing more or being harder to scribe, to having a “spells known” like ability for divine spellcasters using non-Core spells, to just having an in-game Advanced Arcana II be available to peruse. There are a lot of good ideas here that are worth exploring.
Full spell lists are presented next, which make sure to cover all of the spellcasting classes in the Core Rulebook, APG, and Ultimate Magic, before we finally move on to the spells themselves. I should mention here that while most of the spells fall under the themes described above, there are still a handful that are presented that don’t match with any of them, something I thought was great for rounding out the material in the book.
If Advanced Arcana II had ended there, that would still have been a lot. Instead, however, the book has several appendices where we’re actually given even more material to work with. The book’s first appendix is another in-game treatise describing several of the spellcasters whose names appear the spells given earlier. It’s a slight shame that this section is entirely in-character, as I would have preferred a stat block, or at the very least an abbreviated line detailing their race, class, and levels.
The second appendix, however, was much more fun. Here we’re given a truly expansive section on customized spellbook designs. These allow for three basic parts: customized binding (the hardness), customized paper (the hit points), and customized inks. Customized ink represents changing the spells scribed in the spellbook, so that there are altered effects whenever such a spell is prepared. For example, if you scribe a spell in alchemical mercury, when you cast that specific spell after preparing it from that spellbook, you get a +2 bonus to beating spell resistance. I should also note that the sections on binding and pages also have several special abilities depending on the material used, in addition to altering hardness and hit points. The balancing mechanism here, of course, is that these are all expensive, all the moreso if you use multiple options.
The book’s third appendix presents a half-dozen new familiars. I have to admit that I really enjoy new familiars, so I was tickled by what was here. Some of these were mundane animals that were rather oddly overlooked until now (a dog, for example), while others were creatures you wouldn’t ordinarily think of (a goldfish), and others were outlandish (a swarm of magical flies). Each has a full stat block, an expansive description, and a notation on what their familiar benefit is (as these are all standard familiars, and not improved familiars).
Appendix four presents four new arcane bonds for wizards. These are an elemental bond (sub-typed by what element is chosen), a bond to a location (which can be changed, though not quickly), a bond with a particular spirit, and a bond to your spellbook. This last one, in particular, seemed apropos – I’m amazed it wasn’t offered in the Core Rulebook.
The book closes out with a final appendix of thirty optional material components that can be added to a spell to lend it some extra power. Most of these come from specific creatures, and likewise only affect certain groups of spells. For example, a kraken’s eye allows for any conjuration spell, affecting it as per the Widen Spell metamagic feat. A handy chart lists how much these can be purchased for.
Overall, Advanced Arcana II actually managed to top the high bar set by its predecessor, something I didn’t think was possible. While the book presents so many new spells, its innovations come from the fact that it stretches the boundaries of what its spells can do, from being augmented by local conditions to packing variable options into its effects to the sheer brilliance that are segmented spells. Add in things like the variant spellbook construction rules and the new familiars and arcane bonds, and there’s so much great stuff in here that it’s hard to justify not using this book in your game. I say, five stars to this book – it deserves every one of them. Pick it up and advance your game’s spellcasters!
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I’ve always been a fan of cheesecake fantasy artwork. Of course, that’s to be expected, as I’m pretty well the target demographic for such material. For better or for worse, images of scantily-clad sex-fantasies go hand in hand with fantasy (and, to be fair, other genres as well) and I appreciate it when such artwork is released. I suspect that it’s in that spirit that Stainless Steel Dragon released Reflections of Voldaria, a collection of fantasy-themed pictures of sexy women.
Just over a dozen pictures make up Reflections of Voldaria. I was tempted to abbreviate the title as RoV, which is the file name of the PDF of these images; I’m not sure that’s correct, however, as the storefront calls it “AoV,” which was slightly confusing. Which is it?
As I said, the pictures are released as a single PDF, which while not bad is still somewhat inconvenient if you want to manipulate these pictures in any way. Sure, you still can, but it would have been much easier if there had been a collection of individual JPG or PNG files. Still, I have to give the book credit for having full, nested bookmarks so that you can at least easily zip to each page.
The book is surprisingly forthcoming regarding the mechanics of these pictures, telling you the best way to print them out and the dimensions of the images. This is the text that you see on the book’s storefront, but it’s actually the bulk of the introduction.
The bulk of the twenty-five photos here have some sort of photo-manipulation, usually of the background. In this area, there is some slight room for improvement; while the artist clearly tried to minimize a sense of disconnect between the foreground and background images, it still comes through. The scenes feel flat in most cases, as small things that you couldn’t name but still register reinforce a sense of disconnectedness…I imagine this is due to an intrinsic understanding that we all have about how lighting and shadows should look were people actually in the areas depicted.
Each picture has a full-page lead-in, which is an entire page that gives the picture’s title and a two-stanza rhyme describing the picture. This was my biggest complaint about the book – not that the rhymes weren’t very good (though there were some real groaners), but that so much space was wasted with these intro pages. What’s here could easily have been tacked on as a caption to each image, rather than being set in the middle of a huge expanse of white space. There’s just so much more that could have been done to fill it. Personally, I would have loved to have gotten game stats in these pages, as this would have (more than) doubled the book’s practical usefulness; now you have fully-illustrated NPCs!
In regards to the subjects of the photographs, virtually all of them are beautiful women. The rare male does show up, but it’s always in conjunction with a girl, and the guy is always dressed in practical outfits. By contrast, most of the women are nearly-naked, save for the occasional girl in a chain shirt. Personally, I had no problem with this whatsoever, not only because I like sexy women, but also because I find it impossible to complain about “realism” and “verisimilitude” when most fantasy has magic and other perfectly viable explanations for why an adventurer could go around wearing almost nothing and still have a high degree of bodily protection. If you could have a magic spell that protects you as well as a full suit of armor, without the weight or maintenance that the latter requires, then why not?
Having said all of that, there are still some legitimate critiques to be made here. For one, all of the characters are clearly posing for the camera; there are no “action shots” of people engaged in adventuring. A few of these take this to an extreme example, as there’s a close-up of one woman’s face, while a different picture offers us a close-up of a girl’s thong-clad ass. Again, not a big deal, but there’s not even a pretense of this being anything other than blatant sexiness.
Overall, I enjoyed Reflections of Voldaria, but that’s because, as I noted at the beginning, I’m the sort of person who’ll forgive a lot if it means I get to look at sexy, scantily-clad girls. If examined in a technical sense, there is a lot of merit here – the photographs are fairly professional in the sense of the shots conveying what they’re meant to. It’s when you move beyond the technical aspects of the actual photographs of the girls that we see the need for improvement. From the photoshopping to the lack of image files to the huge tracts of white space, there’s more that could have been done in how these images were packaged.
Still, if you’d like to reflect on some lovely ladies, you could do much worse than to check out the Reflections of Voldaria.
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Publisher Reply: |
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Thank you for you feedback. I appreciate any constructive thoughts that might help me produce a better fantasy photo ebook, I am new at this, and totally open to constructive criticism. You know, for a 4 star review, you seemed to have lot more negative things to say about this ebook then positive, so I am guessing it had some redeeming value, that some how got left out of your review.
Just a few quick notes to address your concerns.
First, I think this book is exactly as described. I should not that 11 of the 25 pics presented here are “pure” photos. No photoshopped backgrounds, thus any flatness/wrongness you see or think you see, is what you would actually see if you actually took a picture of woman on rock with her reflection and the sky behind her in the water. (As I did, with the Lady of the Lake picture and ten others pictures.) Also, most of other shots have clouds or mist for their backgrounds, which by their very nature seem impossible to make flat. However in future works, perhaps I can try to bleed the fog into the foreground more, but then it looks more like smoke then fog. (This is something most other photographers don’t do, but I will consider it, if it makes my work better then theirs.)
Second, yes, as describe, there are lots of woman who are scantly clad, and yes, it may mean they are wearing magical armor as you suggest, (My thought sometimes.) or it could mean you are seeing them, as if across a campfire or in a leisure moment. (Perhaps pausing to make a decision which in many cases was my intent.) Anyone, who has worn real armor, even just chainmail, knows it is heavy and uncomfortable, and generally only those people engaged in actual combat would be caught wearing it for more than hour. Please note, action shots may come when I release a book called the fighting women/men of Voldaria.) This book, was about “reflections,” and thought, hence its name. “Reflections of Voldaria,” or moments of introspection - if you will. I am sorry if you didn’t get it. After your insightful review of my 2012 Calendar, I would have guessed you would have seen it. (It is about art, not action, not sex nor about adventuring,) But your not alone, the first reviewer of this work didn’t get it either. Which saddens me, because that was my primary objective when creating this work, and it seems like everybody missed it. FYI, AoV stands for Age of Volondor, of which RoV, Reflections of Voldaria is the world that surrounds Volondor, and is a much overdue visual supplement. Hence, the 2 names depending upon where you see them, those familiar with AoV would not be confused.
Third, in regards too white-space, this is, after all an ebook, thus no trees were killed in its creation, and the white space can easily be skipped by anyone who wants to see just pictures. It should be noted some photographers, consider the use of white space as a way to understate their work in an artistic way. (There is a big difference in fluffing up a page count in a game book by adding too much white space, and showing artwork with no distractions on the opposing page. Modeled somewhat after a Boris Vallejo coffee table book I once bought.) FYI, I did consider labeling each title on or under the work, but thought that it distracts from the quality and feeling of the picture, and I am somewhat sure some other critics would find fault with that.) Yes, the poetry was as campy as anything Stan Lee might say to introduce people to his Marvel universe, and I am sorry for that. (And it was described as such.) I meant simply to put each picture in the context of Voldaria. (My world and game system, and these are just the first of many images I am offering to give my gamers their first look upon the terrain and denizens of my world.) Still, I appreciate the thought, and in my next book, (Which will have 100+Pics) I will probably just cram the pictures in back to back, and leave the title of pictures to those who seek to find them in the index, Easter egg fashion.
Finally, I do think providing these images in JPG format as opposed to PDF format is a great idea. (I was recently thinking that myself, for my CD releases.) The one problem I have is that I am not sure if RPGnow can support that, except maybe as zip file or a bundle of separated jpg images. Hmmm, maybe I should do that? Offer Poster sized JPGs individually for .50 cent each? What do you think? Then I can bundle them for those who want a volume discount? I guess I should ask them if that okay, It seems like spamming to me, but I am game, if they are. It would mean bigger and better pictures for those people who like my work, and they could buy only what they like. So dear critic, thanks for keeping me honest with this review, hopefully someday my work will evolve into something more praise worthy, or at least without enough fault as to merit such a critical review.
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It’s been said that “simple is best.” This is a fairly universal axiom that can apply to almost anything, including games. Of course, it can also be fairly ironic in that it’s also easy to take too far, in which case the simplicity is no longer what’s best. It’s in this vein that Postmortem Studios has released their game – I’m not sure if I should call it a role-playing game or not – The Little Grey Book.
The Little Grey Book is a two-page PDF file. Each page is divided into three columns, with the first column of the first page being the cover image, and the last column of the second page being a “character sheet,” as it were.
I keep equivocating about whether or not this is a role-playing game because, as a game, it lacks a lot of the traditional trappings of most RPGs. There is no randomizer, for instance (e.g. dice, drawing cards, etc.) nor is there any sort of referee or Game Master. The Little Grey Book is more of a storytelling game than anything else, and the quality of the stories are…well, read below for more on that.
The premise of The Little Grey Book is that it takes place in a utopian society. Everyone is equal in every way, and society is run by the Consensus. All permutations of sex and sexual identity are accepted, all ages are accepted, and even names have not only had surnames removed entirely, but the remaining personal names are all gender-neutral.
The game-play here involves each player (of which there need to be at least three) creating a character based on choosing a name, age, and gender/sex. Each player then describes one typical day in their character’s life, from waking up until going to bed. The remaining players collectively play the role of the Consensus; each Consensus member can describe a troubled situation that happens during the day (e.g. someone flirts with you), and the player needs to describe how they resolve it before continuing on with their day.
The rub here is that the (non-Consensus) player gets a black mark from the other members of the Consensus each time he does anything that violates the equality of someone else. This is incredibly easy to do. Frowning at someone is passing judgment on them, for instance. Using a gender-specific pronoun is making an assumption on their sexual identity. Offering a tip to a waiter is a comparative insult to other waiters. In other words, differences (both real and perceived) still exist between people, but every time you fail to pretend that such differences don’t exist, you get a black mark. Hence, virtually every time a Consensus member introduces a troubled situation into your day, you’re going to screw up somehow; it’s a given.
Each player takes a turn as the person describing their day, and all of the other players operate as members of the Consensus, until everyone has had a turn. Consensus members tell the player why they got the black marks they did, but there’s no arguing these judgments. The explanations are final. The game ends when the person with the most black marks is taken away for “adjustment” (which isn’t defined, though you can probably guess) and the person with the least black marks gets off with a warning…making them the de facto winner.
That’s literally the entire game.
It’s clear that The Little Grey Book is presenting us with a minimalist critique of political correctness. However, how much of fun you’ll get out of playing this game is debatable – like all instances of minimal presentation, what’s here is so little that it invites you to fill it in with your own interpretations; you can’t help but imbue this game with your own thoughts and prejudices on the exaggerated premise that it lays down. Likewise, the real fun also comes from just how bastard-ly your friends feel like being when they come up with troubles for you, and how try to wriggle out of the situations they invent.
I do think that there could have been some greater emphasis on some of the unique aspects of the setting, such as noting how the Consensus seems to be a borg-like collective governance, or that the troubles that arise during your day are caused deliberately by the Consensus as a test of a random citizen’s perception of social equality (though how they caused such issues to happen would be a bit tricky to answer).
Ultimately, there’s little to do here, which is sort of the point. Nobody will get through a day without a black mark, but the real fun is in trying. The game here is a very basic framework, and the play style is similarly basic. It’s a simple game, but as they say, sometimes simple is best.
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