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So now we have it, the TARDIS-equivalent for the Pathfinder RPG!
Take some small innocuous object, open or activate it and hey! You have a vast expanse, somewhere to hide or study or store stuff or shelter from bad weather.
All dressed up as an academic treatise that you might find in a local wizard's library, there is a wealth of different, unusual and exciting rooms to play with.
My husband says I have to acquire the Book of Books forthwith, as my RPG collection sneaks into every corner of the house! It's really neat, a book that when activated grants access to an otherspace cozy little library, complete with a comfortable chair and LOADS of books.
That's just one. There's the Bladed Quill, a brass pendant of a crossed dagger and feather, which gives access to another otherworld space, this time an armoury lined with empty weapon racks and armour stands. You can put all your spare gear in here, and provided you secure it neatly in the racks rather than leave it lying around, it will be there for you next time you activate the pendant.
And it goes on and on, a whole collection of different 'rooms' accessed from distinctive individual items. Whole adventures could be built around them, the simplest being finding the item in a treasure hoard or, well, anywhere, and finding out what it does. Or seeking out one you've read about...
(TARDIS, by the way, is the famous 'bigger on the inside than the outside' police box-cum-time/space machine Dr Who travels around in, the letters stand for Time And Relative Dimensions In Space... so there's a 31st portable room for you!)
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It had to happen.
We have groups of superheroes working as part of legitimate law enforcement or as vigilantes. We have groups of supervillians busy about their schemes for world domination... and so now we have a bunch operating as a private military company available for hire to, well, anyone who can pay their fee.
They are a fascinating bunch, these heroes-for-hire. There's plenty of background for the GM to take aboard and use to weave SixGun into the plot. Allies or enemies? That's up to you. You could even decide that they are your party of characters - they are well-developed enough to make fascinating pre-gens, and indeed the background suggests a campaign-full of plot ideas even as you read through it. Group dynamics, in particular, are detailed comprehensively and should prove entertaining in play.
There are several adventure ideas supplied, as well as complete individual backgrounds and character sheets for each member of the group as well as a comprehensive overview of the group itself and how it came to be. There are also some 'supporting cast' characters - a pilot, a cyber-doctor who runs their maintenance and even a potential client - each with their own plot hooks and tie-ins to SixGun themselves.
For those who like to lay it all out on the table there are paper 'standee' miniatures for all characters (and a neat stealth aircraft); and there's enough details about Private Miliary Companies to enable you to use them effectively in your game even if you haven't been tracking their rise in real life. Overall an excellent resource with loads of potential!
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This is a beautifully-rendered plan of an old gaol, a simple hexagonal walled courtyard with a grate over whatever horrors you decide are to be found below! The cover illustration and 360° view show a guard tower, barred openings and a walkway for warders to patrol, plus an open field around with a path leading up to the front gate.
The accompanying notes suggest that maybe the place was abandoned after some dread creature got loose in the dungeons beneath, the last guards to flee fastening the grate securely. Pity the convicts left trapped below... and pity those who to this day hear their shades wailing. Brave adventurers may be tasked with allowing the dead finally to rest in peace.
Or maybe it's still in use. I don't know about your players, but some of mine need locking up! This might be a suitable facility... or maybe some evil overlord uses it and the characters want to rescue someone.
Plenty of scope for what on the surface seems to be a simple old gaol. Enjoy...
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If you are passionate about creating and refining your personal unarmed combat style until even Shaolin monks want to take classes with you, this collection of ten 'style' feats will be of interest.
Most require you to have access to ki power, all assume that you have unarmed combat skills above and beyond brandshing your fists in a brawl (as opposed to proper pugilism: the 'sweet science' is a bit more than brawling if you ask any boxer...).
These additional styles are many and varied. There's a Basilisk Style that lets you use anatomical knowledge to enhance the effects of a Stunning Fist attack, whilst once you have mastered Basilisk Style, the Basilisk Blink feat grants you a supernatural gaze attack, and you can then build on it to add Basilisk Stare - a literal death look that overwhealms your opponent's nervous system causing him to drop dead! Talk about spectacular!
Another stack is based on Phoenix Style, a very mobile fighting style combining Elemental Fist strikes with acrobatics. Once you have the hang of that, you can learn Phoenix Feathers (which confers fire resistance as well as letting you use Elemental Fist more often) and then Phoenix Fire which increases your fire resistance and even grants access to personal healing.
If you want to be fast and unpredictable, look at Shifting Style Defence, where you can flip between any two styles and dodge into the bargain; or you may prefer Uncanny Style - even as you check for initiative you already are in your opening stance - and develop your speed further with Improved Uncanny Style. Finally, if you have really been working hard down the dojo, take Toughened By Training and gain 2 hit points for every style feat you've mastered!
One of the best bits of playing a 'martial artist' character is developing your fighting style into something distinctive and spectacular, and these feats, judiciously chosen, should aid you in the quest for perfection.
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Herein are eight feats, mainly directed at Alchemist characters although a few are more widely accessible. Depending on the style you wish your character to develop, you might find some of these to be of interest... whilst GMs may find them useful in tailoring NPCs to meet their needs.
To start with, anyone who likes messing around might be interested in the Alchemical Cocktail feat. You need the Brew Potion feat and six or more ranks in Craft (Alchemy) to take it, but once you do you are able to mix potions with alchemical items and quaff them to get the effects of both. It's not quite clear, but I think you can give your mixture to someone else... but quickly, once mixed they must be drunk within one round!
Another nice one is Scientific Curiousity, which can be taken by any character who wishes to have a natural aptitude for all things scientific, mechanical and alchemical and confers bonuses to a whole bunch of appropriate skills.
If you like traps, try Devious Trapsmith which allows the addition of alchemical elements to mechanical traps. Interestingly, the prerequisite is either Craft (Traps) or the ability to craft ranger traps wich opens out some unusual possibilities... there's no requirement to know any alchemy before you start down this route so a particularly devious ranger might learn how to handle some alchemical reagents just for trap-building purposes!
For the alchemists amongst you, there's Cerebral Surge (gaining psychic powers), Gruesome Transformation (for a really hideous mutagenic transformation), Mad Bomber (multiple delayed bombs), Mutagenic Alchemy (augmenting a mutagen with alchemical reagents) and Weird Science (which makes your creations very, very hard to identify).
Have fun, you mad scientist types...
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Herein are ten feats for witches, all based around whoever the witch has selected as her patron. Some are quite narrow in application, but all help develop a witch character into a distinctive if not unique individual rather than merely yet another witch. Power levels are a bit variable as well, which may disturb those who pay attention to game balance.
Some take 'traditional' things that witches are said to be able to do and codify them. For example, Pierce the Veil allows a witch with an ancestors, spirits, time or portents patron to both see and identify ethereal undead creatures; whilst Nightshade Brew enables the witch to create particularly potent poisons - yet as the prerequisites for this feat include the Brew Potion feat and six ranks of Craft (Alchemy) you might think she's pretty good at them already without using up another feat slot.
One delight is Forked Tongue, which not only empowers the witch to be very good at bluffing but also actually gives her a forked tongue... something that might draw unwelcome attention, particularly in a society that's wary of witches and their powers already! Consider developing disguise skills and keeping your mouth closed...
Patron's Promise is perhaps a bit too powerful as it confers advantages to both attack rolls and against disease. Wise Words, on the other hand, doesn't do much - it just reduces the spell resistance of someone on whom you're casting a healing spell.
Witch of the Wilds gives you some really sharp fingernails, claws really, to enhance your unarmed combat. Terrible Transformation is quite scary, if you cast a transmutation (polymorph) spell on someone and it is ended prematurely by countermagic or a save, there's a chance the poor victim may gain an insanity and end up not in their right mind even once they've been restored to the right body! Heart of Ice makes enemies you demoralise suffer further disadvantage...
There is no overlap of patrons here, whatever patron you have chosen there will be but one feat in this collection available to you. The effects may be quite cool, but I recommend thinking seriously about whether they benefit you sufficiently to be worth a feat slot. Interesting but perhaps a little limited.
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If you have a need for a good quality spaceship with detailed background and excellent plans (including battlemaps for miniature use), take a look at this. The Renegade class of starships, we are told, was designed as a multipurpose vessel capable of hauling cargo, moving passengers, exploration, reconnaissance, and light combat duty... just the sort of thing the average party of star-faring adventures would love to get their hands on, whatever ruleset you are using.
The background information is copious, written in a 'future history' style that brings the whole vessel alive within the context of the alternate reality your characters inhabit. There are detailed views from different angles, pictures of the ship in use (on orbit and landed), detailed deck plans with descriptive notes... and includes a dedicated kitchen, something often left out of starship designs but something that would delight one of my Traveller characters who doubles as chef and jump-drive technician! Even the couple of vehicles - a shuttle/life boat and a wheeled rover - are treated with the same level of detail, the same care and attention (and lots of pictures).
And that's just the main booklet you get in your download. There are two further books, one being a set of 'map pages' that can be printed, trimmed and used whenever you need a large scale map of the habitable portions of the ship - combat, especially if you use miniatures, springs to mind. The other has the same floorplan in one massive image - if you want to use a virtual tabletop program to show your players where they are, or have access to a commercial print facility it may be of use.
Just lovely. Just the sort of ship in which to travel the galaxy, getting into all kinds of adventure...
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If you have need of Highland (that is, kilted) soldiers from the late-19th-early-20th century, this is an excellent product to acquire.
The 'Devils in Skirts' are crisp and well-drawn, with a variety of poses suitable for any combat scene. It might be a miniatures skirmish, or perhaps a 'pulp' or Victorian-era adventure in which the military are involved.
PDF technology is used extensively. Of particular note is the use of layers to enable you to pick one of several tartans for your soldiers' kilts. The only downside is if you happen to know your tartans the designs bear no relation to the names given... and there is no 'Ancient Hunting Robertson' (I am a Robertson and that's the tartan my husband and I wear when dressed formally!).
Full instructions for printing and assembly are given, and overall it's a neat product with a novel contribution to your tabletop armies.
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This is a beautifully-detailed village that fair springs to life off the page. Set in the Lonely Coast campaign world produced by Raging Swan Press, it could equally well be placed in a suitable location in your own campaign world as it is fairly self-contained.
On the face of it, Bossin ought to be a nice place. It has potential for prosperity, with good natural resources both above and below ground, even if some of the lower areas are a bit prone to flooding. However, somewhere that sounds nice to live is probably not suited to adventure... so enter the local bane, a retired adventurer called Jacca Lander who sees easy pickings providing 'protection' for the inhabitants. He ran the previous reeve out of town and imported a few thugs to aid him in oppressing the locals: a situation ripe for the intervention of more right-minded adventurers to rectify.
There is a nice annotated sketch of the village with wide-ranging descriptive accompaniments - everything from the background situation to notes on interesting features, rumours to be picked up and a list of notable individuals to be met in the settlement. The population is predominantly human, with a handful of dwarves and halflings, a few half-elves and a single solitary half-orc - who combines being one of Lander's enforcers with a surprising good singing voice, with which he performs quite often in the village inn. It's these touches that raise the village above the ordinary and makes it come alive as you read,
Whether passing through or arriving on purpose, characters will find a living vibrant village that has a real sense of being there, going about its own business, whether they are there or not; a place that will enhance the alternate reality that you are trying to create... and a place in which there is adventure to be had, whether you want to interact with the locals or merely brawl with Jacca Lander and his thugs.
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This is a selection of atmospheric music which makes good 'background': it is unobtrusive enough that it does not intrude, yet creates an ambience suitable for the Deadlands Noir setting... easy listening, yet suggesting the kind of environment that you and your group is trying to create as you play.
I particularly enjoy 'specially written for the game' soundtracks because they do not distract the players when you put them on. It's often quite easy to find existing music that fits the mood and the game that you are planning but when you actually start to play, people get distracted by trying to identify music they've heard before or start to draw their own conclusions based on their past experiences or knowledge of the music. It can be good when planning and writing an adventure, though... but this original themed music is far superior when the dice come out!
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Here's a novel villain to add to your game... and one whose modus operandi will have people puzzled until they figure it out.
You see, she has prehensile hair that is under her complete control. It's strong (capable of lifting up to 10 tons) and extendable at will to a couple of hundred feet or more... it can grab, hit, you name it... Now there's something to contemplate: what clues would be left behind for CSI techs to analyse after she's broken in and robbed somewhere? And does she ever go to the hairdressers? That could prove a whole adventure in itself.
Complete with a detailed background that explains her powers and her decision to lead a life of crime, Strand fits in well with the overarching picture being painted by the 'Acts of Villainy' series. A rather thin adventure idea is included, but there is plenty of potential from the backstory particularly if you enjoy the political aspects of the growing number of super-powered individuals in the alternate reality, be they criminals, vigilantes or operating within conventional law enforcement... or just trying to make a living within normal society.
An unusual and quite intriguing character, possibly a bit silly at first glance but capable of quite a bit of depth when you start thinking about how to use her - but I don't want to meet her on a bad hair day!
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To start with, the design premise is intriguing: an adventure based on random rolls designed pretty much on the fly during the course of a convention. Having actually done this, albeit in a much less structured way, I can tell you it means the game master doesn't get much sleep until the adventure has been run!
Using a loose interpretation of the Æther core ruleset, modified to suit the setting chosen for this adventure, the situation is quite simple. A wild wood in Romania, around 450AD (but in an alternate history that provides for somewhat more advanced technology) is the home of an Eater, a deranged human being whose powers derive from certain unpleasant dietary habits. Naturally locals give his tower a wide berth, but for various reasons - wolves, bandits and lawmen being on their trail - the party find themselves in the area and likely short of resources...
What is provided here is more of a framework than a complete adventure. There are notes on character generation, and how the Æther system is tweaked for this setting. There are some thoughts on what the party is doing there, and how they might interact with each other as well as with other inhabitants of the forest. There are game stats for wolves and bandits, along with suggestions as how to use them. Finally, there's a plan and quite detailed room-by-room descriptions of the tower which, it is assumed, the characters will end up investigating. Now it's over to you, pick up these pieces and run with them.
This is suited to the GM who likes one-off adventures and who is quite comfortable winging it rather than having everything planned in advance; and for a group which enjoys such a session should prove enjoyable - perhaps as a welcome break from a long campaign, or when nobody has time to prepare an adventure. The underlying concept is fun and may well prove an interesting exercise at a convention, something a bit different from merely signing up to play in an adventure that sounds interesting or that is a system you want to try out.
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Continuing the series that aims to ensure that brawling never gets boring, herein is presented a collection of zombie lords to bring undead horror to your table. Each one is fully statted up, complete with an evocative one-sentence description you can read aloud to your players as the zombie lord advances to attack.
The work begins with a table organising all the zombie lords by CR, facilitating making your selection of an appropriate one to bring to the fray. This is followed by a detailed explanation of what precisely a 'zombie lord' might be, presenting it as a template that can be applied to any corporeal creature that isn't yet undead and showing how the CRs are derived, depending on the options chosen. Such a clear explanation of what is going on in the creation of these monsters makes it easy to create your own variants if none of those presented here suits your requirements.
Basically, if you're wondering, a zombie lord is like a zombie only it has retained at least some of its mortal intelligence and capabilities, thus becoming far more than a brains-obsessed shambling corpse that can barely follow orders, never mind think for itself. As well as retaining much of what it knew in its former life, it can even gain levels in undeath, making them potent foes indeed.
Next comes a selection of variant abilities that you can give your new-minted zombie lord. There's all sorts here from an exploding zombie to the classic brain-eating variet. Some, like the alchemical zombie or the cursed zombie, have been made in different ways from the standard necromantic route, and could spawn a whole adventure: perhaps the adventurers, having encountered such abnormal zombies, seek out and eliminate whoever's making them. Depending on their nature, these features may or may not affect the CR of the zombie lord in question.
This is followed by the completely-generated ready-to-use specimens, ranging from a CR2 dwarf one - "This rotting dwarf wears a fine breastplate and wields a battleaxe" - to a CR11 Magus zombie rakshasa - "This rotting humanoid has the head of a tiger, wears a silvered breastplate and carries a wickedly curved falchion." Quite enough to make anyone want to run away!
Altogether this is an excellent antidote to parties who say "Oh no, not zombies again!" with a yawn as they venture into your dungeons.
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Follow the money - sound advice whether you're a vice or fraud cop, a tax man, an investigative reporter... or a Leverage crew!
This product contains a fascinating look at just some of the nefarious methods used by crooks - often the white-collar criminals found in board rooms and legal firms and financial houses - to salt away their ill-gotten gains where the taxman cannot get it and thieves (they hope) cannot break in and steal it. At least, not until a passing Crew does the honours.
Art fraud, art theft, bribery, creative accounting, credit card fraud and identity theft, embezzling, insider trading, insurance fraud, money laundering, Ponzi schemes and pyramids, stock fraud, tax evasion, unethical business practices... it's all here, in sufficient detail to inspire your plots but not, I'm glad to say, in quite enough detail to be a complete primer in how to pull it off yourself!
If you've thought that these sorts of white-collar crimes were a bit too cerebral for you and your Crew to handle convincingly, read this and think again. If you need even more inspiration, read John Grisham's The Firm! Or the newspapers... many of the examples given are real-world crimes, along with neat notes on how you might make use of the concepts, if not the crimes themselves, as you devise the next Job.
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Hero or villain?
Naturally, it's up to you how you choose to use Man Hunter in your game. He's a good mechanic with an understanding of superpowers, and a competent bounty hunter, so your characters may view him as a useful hireling... and it is only once they know him that some of his other baggage comes to light and provides a source of adventure.
In terms of the fully-developed character statistics, Man Hunter is well done. The background write-up contains some good ideas that have been thought through and the actual presentation has been improved from the original presentation of this product, giving us an interesting and complex character who deserves to be viewed as a lot more than the aggressive thug he appears to be at first glance.
Enjoy introducing him to your player-characters, watch the fur fly... or perhaps a friendship being forged. He's the sort of guy most other guys will love or hate at first sight, or maybe both.
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