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I’m always wary of playing with issues of time in my campaign, largely because when you start messing around with ways to subvert cause-and-effect relationships, things can get messy fast. Ironically, I’m also not sure that my Pathfinder game has clockwork mechanics either, let alone giant clock towers. Nevertheless, I couldn’t resist the urge to take a look at Rite Publishing’s Evocative City Sites: Clockwork Tower. Let’s look behind the face of this clock and see if I was cuckoo to do so.
The book’s sales page says that it has ten pages. This isn’t wrong per se, but it’s more accurate to say that the PDF file is forty-one pages long, with two pages of ads, a page for the OGL, the front cover, the credits page, twelve pages of descriptive text, and twenty-four pages of the maps for the area in large enough pages to be printed off and used directly. It should be noted that there’s also a zipped file with PDFs containing these same enlarged maps suited for printing on A4-size paper (the European standard). Finally, the book hits all of the other technical marks that a professional PDF should, having full nested bookmarks and allowing for copying and pasting.
In terms of artwork, there’s an amount here that might surprise you if you’re not familiar with Rite Publishing’s works. Each page has a full borders of mystic runes (notwithstanding the map pages) and each level of the tower that’s described has a smaller version of the map on that page, showing the level map as a single image. A series of black and white sketches also dot the interior, largely denoting various denizens of the tower.
Of course, like any good clock, a book shouldn’t be judged purely based on its construction and technical details. What sort of place is this Clockwork Tower, and how well is it described?
The book’s text is, for the most part, told in the first-person by recurring Evocative City Sites narrator Owain Northway. While I’ve found some of his previous narratives to be a tad dry or even confusing, the author did a great job here of making the character have a stronger personal voice without making it overbearing. Reading statements like “I am only now beginning to understand what I must will have been thinking,” are a great way to express Owain’s attempts to describe past events that, due to the Tower’s time-magic, haven’t happened for him yet.
The author also wisely juxtaposes this with shaded boxes, written from an omniscient narrator point of view, to discuss things that Owain misses or gets wrong. While Owain himself does occasionally slip into game terms, these boxes are where you’ll get a large part of the “crunch” for how things work inside the Tower. It’s somewhat akin to the structure of the old Van Richten’s Guides back in Second Edition.
The Clockwork Tower itself is an experiment in chronomancy gone wrong. The long story short is that it’s moving backwards through time (notwithstanding the areas where time has slowed down inside it) and is on a collision course with the beginning of time, which will destroy it. This can be fixed, but only by someone else – such as the PCs – righting what’s made wrong and dealing with forces that don’t want the Tower’s self-destructive trip aborted.
Four characters are described, stat blocks and all, after Owain’s descriptive tour comes to a close. While one of these seems to be a generic new creature, others are specific individuals with templates and/or class levels. It’s here that I thought the book was weakest, not because the character write-ups are poor (they’re not), but because these characters seem to draw on existing third-party sources without telling us what they are. Make no mistake, I like seeing Open Game Content reused among publishers, but I like it more when they let us know where it came from so that we can make personal adjustments as necessary. For example, if I wanted to give The Spinning Duchess another level or two of the inspired maker prestige class, where would I look to find the rules on that? It’s a minor thing, so there’s no reason not to have it here.
Beyond that, I found myself liking the Clockwork Tower, as it’s a ready-made adventure site with the plot built right in. From the doomsday nature of the tower’s journey, to its mysterious nature (moving back through time), to the hazards and monsters present inside it, this is an adventure hook in and of itself.
Really, the one flaw I can find with the Clockwork Tower as a whole is that it lacks a clear way of dealing with it after the PCs save the day. I’m not sure, for example, that I’d like the PCs to have control of (or even be allies with an NPC who has control of) a tower that can manipulate the flow of time to their advantage. A way to remove the entire place from being easily accessed/utilized would have been appreciated. That said, what is here is a great place for the PCs to spend some time adventuring, though how much time that is may be hard to judge – pit them against the Clockwork Tower and have them find out.
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Publisher Reply: |
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I wanted to thank Shane for taking the time to do a review of our product, I will point out that the OGL prohibits me from naming what part comes from which book as the title of a product is product identity, and I waive the right of fair use by using the OGL, it was not a matter of not wanting to, it was a matter of not being allowed to. Steve Russell Rite Publishing |
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They say that the worst vice is advice. I don’t think that’s true; it’s more accurate to say that the worst vice is unsolicited advice – after all, when you’re looking for someone to counsel you, advice can be a much-needed boon…depending on the quality of the advice you receive. In regards to Eridanus Books’ Grittier, the advice that it presents is how to make your Pathfinder game feel more “gritty” in feel.
From a technical stance, Grittier is fairly clean in its presentation. Beyond the cover graphic, there are no illustrations or page borders to be found; the entire product is simply black text on a white background (save for the rare grey sidebar). There are no bookmarks, though that’s not so bad in a thirteen-page PDF, and there is a table of contents. Likewise, copy and pasting are enabled.
What was more bothersome, however, was how often grammar errors came up throughout the book. With troubling regularity, sentence after sentence has some error of tense or syntax or conjugation; it’s never anything that inhibits understanding, but it highlights the book’s lack of an editor.
While it doesn’t explicitly use the term, Grittier’s introduction makes it immediately clear that what it’s concerned with doing is providing suggestions and mechanics to allow you to make a Pathfinder game that is – for lack of a better word – Tolkien-esque in feeling. That is, its “gritty” factor is a low-magic world where the PCs might be better than average people, but are far from being the demi-gods they are at higher levels.
This is an impulse I can certainly understand; after all, a more down-to-earth feeling for a game can encourage players to invest more in their characters’ actions (in other words, role-play better), since doing so can help to keep them alive and successful. When hack-and-slashing carries a real risk of getting you killed, particularly since there’s a lack of healing magic to go around, you tend to put a little more thought into what you do.
The first section of the book talks about leveling in a Grittier game, which basically boils down to “use E6.” For those who don’t know, E6 (aka “Epic 6”) is a fan-made document put together several years ago that basically champions a campaign model where no one (including and especially the PCs) can gain more than six character levels. After hitting that sixth level, you only advance by gaining a feat per five thousand experience points. Grittier recaps this information, but directs you to this document to get into further details of this campaign model.
This part of the book made me look askance at Grittier. It’s not because this section is wrong, per se, to adopt this model – quite frankly I agree with the advice here – but rather how it so casually makes such a major change and then directs you elsewhere for more on it. Even leaving aside that I think the E6 document itself could use some tightening up, the relevant sections and materials should have been reprinted here since E6 is Open Game Content. Directing your audience to another book, which they may never have heard of and aren’t sure where to find, is poor design.
Character classes are the subject of the next section, and it’s a pleasant surprise that it covers not only the eleven core classes, but also the six new base classes from the Advanced Player’s Guide as well. Several classes have changes recommended, while others are simply tossed out altogether as being inappropriate for a Grittier campaign (something which I applaud, since sometimes certain classes are just wrong for a campaign, and should be thrown out rather than caving to post-modern ideas of tweaking everything to fit, no matter how inappropriate it is).
Of course, this section had some problems too. Some readers may want more explanation for why certain changes or disallowances were made; you can say that the paladin doesn’t fit a Grittier game “conceptually and mechanically,” but that isn’t self-evident. I wish the book would explain how it reached that conclusion. Is it the divine spellcasting? The class abilities? Something else altogether? I don’t know, because it hasn’t told me.
Likewise, this section can be slightly punishing if you don’t have access to the Advanced Player’s Guide (and even then, certain aspects can be unclear). For example, the bard several levels of class abilities replaced with alternate abilities – at 2nd level it gains Lore Master and “Magic Lore,” which (it doesn’t tell us) is from the Archivist archetype in the APG.
Spells gets a very short section outlining some broad types of spells that you might want to remove from a Grittier game, such as summoning and alignment-based spells. Personally, I would also have put the Rituals section here, but we’ll come to that later.
The Items section is where the most alternate rules are given. The existing idea of “masterwork” weapons and armor is thrown out, and instead there’s a listing of item properties that can be added to items when they’re created (which do things like increase hardness, add +1 to AC, etc.). The more properties an item has, the more it costs, the longer and more difficult it is to make, and the more valuable it is – a table charts gradations of weapon quality by how many of craft points’ worth of properties are added.
That last sentence should have made you perk up; this section measures these item properties in terms of craft points. What exactly craft points are, how they’re used, and other important information isn’t given. It was only with some research that I realized these were alternate crafting rules from Unearthed Arcana (available over at the Hypertext SRD). Since the table still indicates the increases to cost and crafting DCs per craft points spent, it’s still possible to use these item special qualities without using craft points in your game…rather, the major problem here is that, once again, the book is referencing external material and not seeing fit to tell us where this material is coming from and how to find it.
Magic items get a page with some fairly solid guidelines for limiting their impact on a Grittier campaign. The book smartly uses GP values of items to judge how rarely they should appear, also noting that magic shops shouldn’t exist at all. It then talks about ways to limit permanent magic items so that they don’t become over-exposed (or over-powering in the campaign) and the use of one-shot magic items to help address problems should you find the lack of magic to be too stark in your game.
This part of the book was exemplary in how to provide guidance for running a low-magic game, giving clear suggestions on multiple aspects of a given topic while making the reasoning clear. There could have been a little polishing here, to be sure, but for the most part this is some great advice on how to handle the presence of magic items in a low-magic campaign.
The Rituals section is one that I had mixed feelings on. Rituals are really incantations (from Unearthed Arcana again) made simple. They’re all high-level spells that require a Spellcraft check to pull off. However, they have lengthy casting times, require hours of preparation before you can even begin casting, and have penalties for failing the Spellcraft check. Really, except possibly lifting the idea for lengthy pre-casting setup, there’s not much here that hasn’t already been done by incantations. The sole exception here is a table with things you can do to earn a bonus to your Spellcraft check, which admittedly provides for some nice ideas – a human sacrifice for a +5 bonus, hm?
The book’s last section talks about changes to combat, and notwithstanding classes gets more discussion than anything else. Several changes are made, with the big one being dealing damage – a minor tweak to the nonlethal damage rules now makes being staggered come into play a lot sooner. I liked this idea, since it is a simple way to have characters lose effectiveness as they grow progressively more injured. Further rules deal with having ambushes be extremely deadly (though this seemed suspiciously similar to the bushwhacking rules in Green Ronin’s Advanced Gamemaster’s Guide), slightly bumping up the effectiveness of the Heal skill, tweaking magic healing for the revised lethal/nonlethal damage rule, making damage reduction slightly less effective (to compensate for the lack of magic weapons), and making resurrections more grim when they’re brought into play.
My one big problem with this section wasn’t with what it did, but rather with what it didn’t do; I was really hoping that it’d have mechanics for combat fatigue. As it stands now, Pathfinder characters in melee combat can effectively fight forever, without ever worrying about growing tired from constant battle. This makes it impossible for characters to ever be overcome by sheer numbers of lower-level enemies, and is a major weakness in Grittier games. Having no mechanics or suggestions for combat fatigue was a missed opportunity here.
Ultimately, Grittier is a book that, while it delivers on its promises, does so in a manner that is, well, gritty. The book does have some good advice, suggestions, and alternate rules for making a grim, low-magic Pathfinder campaign. Unfortunately, that often gets lost between the bad grammar, off-the-cuff references to mechanics from other products, and lack of context for many of the changes it recommends. Add in to that the simplistic layout, lack of artwork, and that much more could have been done in various sections (notice how there’s no advice on monsters, beyond a single change to damage reduction), and you have a book that’s far from perfect.
Still, if you can navigate these flaws, you’ll find a book with some genuinely good ideas for a Pathfinder campaign that won’t star magic-laden superheroes, but rather proficient-but-mortal characters that will find magic to be a mysterious force, and must face it with little more than their wits and mundane weapons. If you want a game where having less to work with evokes more fun from your players, take a look at making your campaign Grittier.
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Publisher Reply: |
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Hello, Shane.
I really appreciate your feedback. Especially since this the first product on Eridanus Books return to RPG publishing.
For this reason, we have just update our product 'Grittier' to answer some of its shortcomings. We have done extra work on explaining design decisions and also expanded on Masterwork Items, Rituals and Combat rules. I believe you will be happy to know we added rules on exhaustion due to long combat. It was a mechanic we ultimatelly decided to leave out of this product believing it was too much. Your review made me see in the end it was best to include it and let game masters decide what to use.
On the subject of grammar, we will work on improving it. Despite its name, Eridanus Books is a brazilian company and, while of course that does not justify the lack of better knowledge on this particular subject, I hope it shows it is not a matter of negligence, but a reflection of an erroneous decision to reduce production cost and time. We will look into it so that this does not affect our future products.
Thank you for your review!
- JMBeraldo
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When I first started trick-or-treating, I enjoyed reaching into my bag to draw out random pieces of candy. It was fun not knowing what I’d get, so much so that I think I enjoyed the surprise almost as much as the candy itself. As I got older, however, I came to enjoy this game less and less – I knew what specific candy I wanted, and so picking out whatever I happened to close my hand around wasn’t as appealing; ultimately, I dumped out my candy bag at home to sort out what was what. Reading through Horrors of the GOW, by Purple Duck Games, I’m reminded of why I stopped caring for randomly fishing for candy.
A full twenty-eight page PDF, I found myself wondering how many people were scratching their heads at the “GOW” in the title. While I suspect that it’s meant to have an in-game meaning also, it really stands for Grand OGL Wiki, the project from which Purple Duck Games sprung from. The artwork here is entirely credited to Sade, and consists of several full-color pieces, a number of which are photographed images that have a sort of dark, gothic bent to them.
Unfortunately, the book’s construction falls down when it comes to the bookmarks. Clearly, the publisher was trying to make them work, since there’s a number that go to various places in the book. However, their success is limited, in that a number of sections are skipped, and several of the nested bookmarks oddly have full paragraphs of text from the section they lead to.
As the title suggests, the book is dedicated to material of a dark, spooky nature for your Pathfinder game. What the title doesn’t tell you is just how much of a grab-bag this book is. While everything in here falls under the same theme of being Halloween-y, it bounces back and forth from one topic to another. For example, it opens with several monsters inspired from the Phantasm series of movies, and then later on comes back to several monsters from older 3.X companies that are updated to Pathfinder. Still later it deals with several specific creatures and NPCs.
The kicker here is that the book’s contents are quite good. From an intriguing new patron and new hexes for the (Advanced Player’s Guide) witch class, to fair selection of new monsters, to several magic items, and more, the book presents a rather nice grouping of new materials to use when you want to darken the atmosphere. The problem is how they’re presented; this book really feels like the author just took a random collection of material he’d written – checking only to make sure they felt appropriately “spooky” – and then dumped them all here in the order he thought of them.
Ultimately, Horrors of the GOW is an object lesson in that, while it may seem like quality writing is the most important thing for a book, layout is king. I’d have rated this book a full star higher had it organized itself better and fixed its bookmarks. Thank heavens it at least had a table of contents. Otherwise, you’d be rooting around in this file, trying to stumble onto that one specific item you want…just like a piece of candy at the bottom of your Halloween bag.
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Publisher Reply: |
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Thank you for the review. I did not realize that the bookmarks were messed up and the are a couple of other layout pieces I need to fix. I hope to update this release this weekend (Nov 13-14) and reload it then. |
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You know, I’m surprised that it took them as long as it did to get here. In a game called “Hot Chicks” that also features space aliens, you’d think that it’d be natural to assume that there’s some sort of race out there that fills the “alien girlfriend” niche. After all, that idea has been around since the era of pulp novels; it’s been showcased in songs, movies, anime, and more. And now, we finally have that idea in the Hot Chicks RPG in the form of Alien Files #2: The Fema Su.
A thirty-page PDF, the second Alien Files product is fairly light fare from the guys at Dakkar. There’s no bookmarks, which I frown on in anything but the very shortest of PDF files, but copy and pasting is still enabled. The artwork is mostly in Dakkar’s signature style of 3D computer graphics, though a few pencil drawings and a traditional illustration do show up. There’s really no nudity here, per se; we do see the Fema Su naked plenty of times, but while they have a humanoid shape, it’s not really the same as seeing a naked human woman.
The Fema Su are a race of aliens who, realizing they’ve hit an “evolutionary dead end” have come to Earth to mingle human DNA into their gene pool to revitalize their race. It’s comic book science to be sure, but who really cares? Almost all female, they pick a man to breed with, shapeshift into whatever form will best get him into bed, and hopefully get pregnant, retreating to their hidden bases to carry the baby to term, and the process starts all over again. There’s no malice involved regarding the humans they pick – they don’t kidnap, force, or otherwise try to do anything harmful to the people they breed with – but they maintain their deception fiercely, since their survival as a race is at stake.
The book spends a fair amount of pages telling us the Fema Su’s history in greater detail, and their current sketch and personal traits, before talking about what this really means for a Hot Chicks game. Basically, while the Fema Su aren’t antagonists (which seems rare in a world where most of the aliens are evil, alongside demons and corrupt humans, among other malign entities), they’re walking adventure hooks. Most of them, for example, know that adventurers are not only great breeding stock, but also a convenient source of help if they need it. One of the pieces of framing fiction deals with a hero who finds the girl he slept with six months ago on his doorstep, needing shelter from the alien hunters chasing her. Add in other possibilities, like finding out the girl you had a fling with had your baby and never told you about it, and the Fema Su can actually lead to some fairly interesting scenarios.
On a more mechanical side of things, the book showcases a few new pieces of Fema Su “technology” – I include the quotes since these aliens are life-shapers, and all of their inventions are biological in nature. We get sample characters sheets for a few Fema Su (and one of their living spaceships), before moving into the GM section. This largely consists of telling us how various groups and organizations think of the Fema Su, and a bunch of adventure hooks.
Alien Files #2: The Fema Su is a surprisingly hands-off supplement for the Hot Chicks RPG, overall. The book gives you a very good idea of who these aliens are, but largely leaves what to do with them in your hands. The adventure possibilities present a good sampling of ways to use them in your game, but beyond that the book really is more concerned with retrofitting them into the game world than how you’ll fit them into your campaign. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but if you’re a GM who prefers pre-made encounters and scenarios, you’re out of luck here. Still, if you prefer to make your own adventures, and they involve some shades of gray (without any actual Greys), these might be just what you’re looking for. Whether as damsels to be defended, or deceivers to be defeated, take a look and see what the Fema Su can do for your Hot Chicks game.
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Riddle me this, dear reader: what’s the difference between something old, and something classic? I can’t quite describe it, but I suspect it’s one of those things where you know it when you see it. It’s that principle that makes Forgotten Foes, from Tricky Owlbear Publishing, such a great monster book – it’s a book of classic monsters brought up-to-date for the Pathfinder Role-Playing Game.
Of course, looking at the book’s pedigree, it’s kind of hard to imagine this book not being totally awesome. Written by Mark Gedak and Stefen Styrsky of the Grand OGL Wiki, with a stable of artists from Headless Hydra Games, and of course published through Tricky Owlbear, this book is at the center of a perfect storm of talent. It quite literally had to be just this good.
Just shy of two hundred pages long, Forgotten Foes brings over a hundred monsters to your Pathfinder game. I can’t quite say “new” monsters, because a significant majority of these creatures are ones who were mainstays of 3.5 who were subsequently abandoned during the Pathfinder changeover. Not all of these fall under that category, however, as there’s a handful that are from third-party 3.5 sources, also updated here. And I’m sure that a few totally new monsters are in here as well, though it’s difficult to be totally sure.
The book’s technical aspects do what they’re supposed to do. Full bookmarks are here, and the text allows for copying and pasting. Besides the front and back covers (which display some truly stunning pieces. I don’t know what that monster is on the front cover, but he’s one intimidating bastard), each monster has a black and white illustration (though shading is used far more often than not), something I was grateful for, since illustrations are very important for showcasing monsters. There’s also an alternating border on the side of the pages.
Most of the monsters in the book are given a single page all to themselves, though sometimes this rule is broken. Each has the usual combination of stat block and descriptive text, but as an added bonus there’s also a box showing what you learn about the creature on a specific Knowledge check; it’s one of those little extras that really make a difference. I should mention that the flavor text for the monsters is original, since in most cases the original source didn’t make that part Open Game Content to begin with.
One of the things that might not be obvious on the first read-through, it should be noted, is that the authors sometimes slipped in new additions or other changes to some monsters during the update to Pathfinder. The ravid, for example, now has some variants listed, in case you want a ravid that is more in tune with the life of nature and animates plants, for instance. Titans are mostly the same, but have the ability to assume the form of an elemental; an aspect of how, as near-divine beings, they’re connected to the primal elements of the universe. Little things like that are all over the place.
Of course, some things didn’t make the transition. The tojanida, for example, only has a single stat block, rather than three for younger and older incarnations of the creature. Similarly, it would have been nice to have seen variants on the half-dragon template for the sin dragons.
The book has several appendices, and while these cover the usual ways of breaking down the monsters (by type, by CR, etc.) there’s also a bit of new rules here as well. A new planar trait is given, in reference to a particular monster’s entry. Several new spells are presented, mostly because some monsters use them as spell-like abilities. Interestingly, ten pages are given reprinting the universal monster rules from the Pathfinder Bestiary. Presumably this was done for ease of reference.
Forgotten Foes is one of those books where, having read it, I’m honestly not sure how I was running a Pathfinder game without it. There’s so many monsters in here that were staples of 3.5, it’s shocking they haven’t been brought to Pathfinder before now – the bodak, the hellcat, the formians; it’s past due for them to make a comeback. Pick up Forgotten Foes and let your PCs know that the monsters that they once feared have followed them to Pathfinder.
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One of the most disappointing things has to be retiring a character that you’re not done with yet. I don’t mean because they died or were affected by some condition that made them unplayable – those at least have some hope of being rectified. I mean what a letdown it is when the GM announces that the campaign has reached its conclusion, and there’s no more adventuring in your character’s future.
In fact, its quite likely a letdown for the GM too – after all, the odds are good that, if you’ve reached the mid-teens or so, then there just aren’t any adventures of the appropriate level he can run for you anymore. It’s fairly common knowledge, after all, that Pathfinder campaigns rarely go the entire distance, leaving those last few levels untouched just as that sweet capstone power, or those potent 9th-level spells, seem within reach.
I like to think that it was for those disappointed players, and GMs, that Rite Publishing created Coliseum Morpheuon, a mini-campaign and setting designed specifically for taking characters from 16th to 20th level. Let’s look at what’s to be found inside.
The first thing that should be noted is that Coliseum Morpheuon is actually a bundle of seven specific products. Five of these are Rite Publishing’s Fantastic Maps – more specifically, the Clockwork Maze, the Arena of Fire, the Ruined Library, the Glass Ships, and the Stepped Pyramid. There are also two PDFs – the first being a copy of the Paper Minis Coliseum Morpheuon product, and the final one being the actual Coliseum Morpheuon book itself (which will be the primary focus of this review).
For those who aren’t familiar with the Fantastic Maps format, I’ll recap what’s to be found in those. Each map is presented with as many tools as possible to facilitate ease of use. There are two JPEGs, each showing the map at a small enough size to fit onto a single page – one with the grid map and one without. There are also two PDF files; each one shows the entire map, and then has it broken down into a series of pages appropriately sized so that each grid is one square inch; easy printing at its finest. Moreover, these map pages are presented in color and then black and white. The reason there are two is that one is meant for US-letter size, whereas the second is meant for A4 paper (a European standard). The entire thing also has Mac-accessible files as well, plus files to import the maps into Maptools.
And you get five of those with this product – something that should start make clear just how much value this package really offers.
The paper minis PDF is something of a misnomer, because it features a lot more than just paper minis. Specifically, it features the entirety of the first two appendices from the Coliseum Morpheuon PDF; the ones dedicated to the two opposing adventuring parties that your characters face during their challenges, the Dirges and the Grey Feathers. This section is word-for-word the same, so I won’t go over it here – just skip down to where I go over those in more detail if you want to know more about the content found there. It’s after this that we get the actual paper minis. These cover both adventuring teams, as well as presenting a number of minis for the guards of the Coliseum, known as the Hounds of Ill-Prophecy. I wish there’d been a recap of the instructions regarding how you properly construct the paper minis once you print them out, but maybe that’s intuitive for people who’re more used to using paper minis than I am.
Having covered all of that (and to be fair, that was light coverage – I’m not giving Ashton Sperry and James Hazelett (of the Paper Minis) nor Jonathan Roberts (of the Fantastic Maps) enough credit for the level of talent they’re bringing here. Alas, doing so with such a massive series would mean that this review would be significantly longer) let’s move on to the main Coliseum Morpheuon book.
Weighing in at ten chapters and three appendices, Coliseum Morpheuon is well over a hundred pages long. The cover makes it very clear that this book is meant for the big boys of Pathfinder – not only does it boldly announce that it’s for characters of 16th-20th level, but the artwork displays a gargantuan winged woman with clawed digitigrade feet about to spear a similarly-sized fellow in classical gladiator garb as he swings a mace at her head. The rest of the picture sets the scope for these figures, as we can see a broken moon in the background and, in the foreground, a series of tiny figures standing along the top of the Coliseum, cheering at the spectacle.
Epic.
The book has full, nested bookmarks (which are necessary given its size) and is quite rich in artwork. Indeed, full-color art appears with regularity, showcasing locations, monsters, and people of all sorts. Rite Publishing assembled quite a talented team for this, and I was quite impressed at the visuals they consistently released.
But enough technical materials, what’s Coliseum Morpheuon actually about?
The entire adventure takes place on the Plane of Dreams. Here, an enigmatic being known only as the Khan of Nightmares has raised a great coliseum (the eponymous Coliseum Morpheoun) and raised a city around it. Matches and contests of all sorts constantly take place at the Coliseum, but the greatest of these is held just once every century: the Damnation Epoch. Only the mightiest of teams (including your high-level characters) are invited to participate in the Epoch, and they compete for a grand prize that even 20th-level characters would salivate over – I won’t spoil the surprise for what this mysterious prize is, but trust me; it’s something your character would want. Badly.
Of course, that just scratches the surface, as there’s much else to do in the City of the Coliseum. In fact, there’s a number of potential sub-plots that can be used to take the adventure in different directions, depending on which one your GM uses.
Let’s go over the book chapter by chapter.
The first chapter covers the Plane of Dreams. Going over its planar traits, it then talks about some of the regions found in this mutable realm, going over them in broad strokes. There’s little specificity given to the areas described, largely giving them as backdrop to the locality where the adventure largely takes place. Hence, there’s no maps here (a commonality throughout the book – the only maps found herein are small reproductions of the smaller maps from the Fantastic Maps).
Initially, I was somewhat skeptical of setting things in the Plane of Dreams, largely because dreams seem too ephemeral for high-level characters, who are forces to be reckoned with on a regional, if not global, scale. However, as the book went on, I realized that setting the adventure here serves a twofold purpose: it allows for the GM to have relative freedom in designing the finer details of the City and the surrounding areas (since dreams are so mutable and ever-changing), and it allows for the adventure to easily pickup where a terrestrial campaign leaves off, since the PCs are unlikely to have had much adventuring in dreams before this arc starts.
The second chapter gets into the finer details of what it means to actually be physically present on the Plane of Dreams. Specifically, this chapter deals with the rules for “dreamburning.”
Dreamburning is based around the ideas that your dreams aren’t just things you see when you’re asleep. They’re also the culmination of your most personal hopes, goals, and aspirations. In fact, each player must write down a hope, a goal, and an aspiration for their PC while on the plane, since these take on physical substance there. A character is able to “burn” these substances for power, but doing so erodes their dreams. Worse, these dreams can be bought or stolen by those who’d rather burn the dreams of others than their own. There are even dreamburning-specific traits and alternate rules to let you customize how to implement this facet of the setting in your game.
Needless to say, after a first chapter that (initially) left me somewhat cold, this chapter really did it for me. The new mechanics here are, I think, an example of rules at their best: helping to role-play who your character actually is. Having a set of mechanics based around things that are intensely personal to your characters is a great opportunity to make things very character-based, something that’s very helpful at the higher levels, where what a character can do often overshadows who they are.
The third chapter is a short monster listing, giving four dream creatures. This section wasn’t bad, but could have done more. For all the art in the book, only one of these creatures has an illustration, something that’s very important for new monsters. Also, the oneirobound, the dreamers who’ve become trapped in the dream realm and are usually taken as slaves, should have been presented as a template rather than a singular type of creature with a short “creating” section that just listed their traits.
The fourth chapter covers the environment of the island where the City of the Coliseum stands. The history of the place is given (the propaganda and the real version) as well as overviews of the surrounding lands, how the society functions (which is largely a town of very few laws, mostly surviving by its trading and entertainment industries, with the Coliseum at the center of it all), and a very large table of rumors, plus potential adventure seeds.
Given that the nature of dream realms is their level of mutability, the lack of a hard map for this area is somewhat excusable – the City can look like whatever the GM wants it to look like. What’s more noteworthy here is that, by this chapter, you start to get a sense of how the entire product is structured. Settings, backgrounds, and descriptions are given in very broad strokes, often without many details – almost like you’re being given a series of outlines.
My natural inclination would be to deduct points for a book formatted that way. I much prefer that things be excessively detailed; after all, it’s far easier to ignore and change existing details that I don’t like than to need to flesh out the specifics of the details that I do. However, that philosophy breaks down at higher levels; there are just too many possibilities with characters that have such great abilities and resources. Far better to present the basics, giving the GM ideas and information that can be tailored to a given group. I was surprised to find myself thinking that way, but it became more and more clear as I read through the book – Coliseum Morpheuon gives you as much as it can for such a high-level setting; filling in the details is up to you.
Of course, for all my talk about a lack of details, chapter five is overflowing with them. Perhaps the most important chapter in the book (notwithstanding the actual adventures), this covers over a dozen influential figures of the City. While some of these are for types of people (such as the aforementioned Hounds of Ill-Prophecy), most are specific characters. All have no only full stats, but artwork as well as a discussion of who they are as characters, complete with a listing of their own dreams, aspirations, and goals (with the potential to be stolen or dreamburned). Plenty of sidebars cover some new crunch that several of these characters have, which is as it should be – a series of high-level characters should bring new powers to the table.
I should stress that this rogues’ gallery is one of the best parts of the book, showcasing NPCs who could easily become major staples of any campaign. From Auberyon the Solstice King, to the Dragon of the Ghostdance, to the Jack of Diamonds, these characters are fully-formed NPCs, with stats that often dip into other d20 materials to lend them a truly alien feel. This chapter is the book at its best.
It’s only at chapter six that the book starts to focus on the actual adventure that your PCs will be running through, a tournament called the Damnation Epoch. An overview of the adventures, this chapter summarizes what the PCs will be facing, who their possible patrons (since competing teams need benefactors) are, possible sub-plots that can be set as a backdrop to the events of the tournament, and a quick overview of the major possible patrons for the PCs and who some of the noteworthy opposing teams are.
And lest I forget, it’s here that the prize of the tournament is discussed in all its glory also. I’m still not going to tell you what it is, though…but trust me, it’s EPIC.
Chapter seven begins the actual adventure itself. It’s here that the PCs receive their actual invitation to the Damnation Epoch, and face several qualifying rounds to actually gain admittance to the tournament. I was quite happy to note that this section had advice for what to do with groups that are larger than just four PCs; having a group of six PCs myself, I was glad for it.
Chapter eight seems like something of an odd duck at first glance. It’s roughly three dozen short descriptions of possible encounters throughout the City. Note that these aren’t combat encounters – rather, they’re various things going on with various people. Much like adventure seeds, these are obviously meant to be fleshed out by the GM, and quite often involve more character-building and role-playing than combat. The presentation, however, seems almost random until you get to chapter ten.
Finally, in the book’s ninth chapter, we come to the ten tests of the Damnation Epoch. Each one increasingly difficult, I was pleasantly surprised to find that, in true gladiatorial fashion, not all of the tests are combat-focused. In fact, many of them involve competing by accomplishing a given task before another team does, to earn the most points. Of course, combat is usually an acceptable method for competing as well, but as an auxiliary way to compete – rarely will the singular goal be to simply kill things.
The tests themselves are grand in scope; as appropriate for a planar series of games. From raiding a ruined library on a dying world as it falls toward the sun, to navigating atop positive energy “icebergs” as they float on a sea of negative energy, these are contests appropriate to your high-level characters. Through in opposing teams of comparable power, as well as insidiously deadly traps and ferocious monsters, and the competitions will be something your group will talk about for a long time to come.
The tenth and final chapter is dedicated to the half-dozen possible subplots that can be run against the backdrop of the Damnation Epoch. From trying to free the oneirobound slaves to playing matchmaker for an exotic planar dragon, this section describes how to get each subplot rolling, what specific events from chapter eight it utilizes and when, and how it turns out.
The first two of the book’s three appendices cover two of the opposing teams in specific detail. The first is an evil team known as the Dirges, while the second is a team of former villains-turned-heroes called the Grey Feathers. Each has full stats, a discussion of who they are as people, their battle tactics, and what their dreams are, as well as full-color illustration. The final appendix includes pre-gen characters, all given just a quick description of their looks and personality before we get to their stats – the rest of these characters are up to the GM to decide.
Overall, Coliseum Morpheuon is not only one of the few options for GM’s who want a pre-made adventure for high-level characters, it’s also one of the best. Presenting not only a series of adventures that offer exciting and dangerous challenges for your PCs, it also covers a new setting with interesting new rules, variable backdrops for the adventure, and a diverse cast of characters to interact with. The details are enough to provide you with all of the salient material for running a game set around the Coliseum, while still being hands-off enough that you can make it what you need for your high-level PCs.
If you’re not ready to retire your campaign when your adventure path ends, and want to give them a chance to try and make it all the way to 20th level and claim the power, prestige, and fabulous prize that comes with doing so, then send them to Coliseum Morpheuon.
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They say that variety is the spice of life, and indeed it is. For the PCs in a Pathfinder game, however, the variety that spices their lives is the myriad enemies they face as they conquer evil. But while vicious monsters and ferocious creatures can be new and terrifying, how much more frightening is it to determine that the enemy you’re facing is of a kind you’re familiar with…only to find that it’s not. That’s the nature of a spice, after all; to change the flavor of something, making the familiar different.
Enter the Book of Monster Templates, by Rite Publishing.
Boasting over thirty new templates, this book had me at the introduction, wherein the author outlined the format for how these templates are presented. While it’s standard for most templates to also include an example creature, the Book of Monster Templates goes three steps beyond. All of the example creatures, for example, are from another third-party monster book (just to be extra alien for your PCs, if you decide to use the example creature in your game). They also include “lore” DCs that allow you to learn something of the creature on a Knowledge check, sample encounter ideas, and almost all of them include a new feat or two designed to enhance some aspect of the example creature (either one of its innate powers, or a power from the template it showcases). That’s without even mentioning the in-character descriptive text given by the monster itself.
That alone should be impressive. But what really sold me was how, right in the introduction, the author talks about wanting to go beyond the sorts of templates we’ve seen before – he outright references certain other template-specific monster books, which I thought was very cool – and he backs it up with what’s in here.
Each template has a theme that isn’t the prosaic sort of idea you so often see in a book like this. There’s no template to make something aquatic, or be a fire elemental version of itself. How about, instead, a template for a creature that slays dragons and makes their souls into a ghostly choir that encircle their slayer, providing offensive and defensive powers? Or a template for a creature that can bite the limbs off of a creature, and use the powers of any magic items it subsequently swallows? Or a template for an implacable creature that will unstoppably, inexorably, follow you wherever you go, breaking through everything that gets in its way? All of that and more are here.
The book makes an excellent showing of itself technically as well. It has full nested bookmarks, and allows for copy-and-pasting. Runic borders surround every page, but best of all is that every example creature has an illustration – a must-have for a monster book. Likewise, the end of the book presents an index of all of the templates presented here, along with their increase to Challenge Ratings, as well as an index of all the example creatures by their CR. All the bases are covered.
It should be obvious, if you’ve read this far, that this book is a must-have if you like templates for your monsters. The ideas here are innovative and well-executed, giving you sample creatures, new feats, ecologies and encounter ideas to work with. Whether you want an intelligent magic item to also be a creature in its own right, or a ghostly tax collector that can collect the weapons of its enemies, none of these templates could ever be called “simple.” Spice up your monsters with the Book of Monster Templates.
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Publisher Reply: |
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I wanted to thank Shane O' Conner for taking the time to do a review of our product, 5/5 stars snoopy happy dance of joy. Steve Russell Rite Publishing |
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I find that, in most instances, books of new spells are among the hardest things to review. That’s because there’s no cohesive theme for the book (save for the obvious) – it’s a collection of individual components, and so you’re forced to review in broad strokes since you can’t go over every individual spell. With Necromancers of the Northwest’s new book, Advanced Arcana, I was fortunate not to have that problem, for reasons that I’ll outline below.
For the record though, if I’d had to review this book in sweeping generalizations, I’d probably have gone with something along the lines of “made of win.”
Advanced Arcana is a fifty-nine page PDF for the Pathfinder RPG. Ostensibly a book of new spells for the game, it also contains related elements such as new domains, bloodlines, and familiars. As the name hints, it takes into account the recently-released Advanced Player’s Guide, as it has spells and spell lists for the new classes from that guide as well as the more traditional spellcasting classes.
From a technical standpoint, the book hits most of the marks that I’ve come to expect from quality PDFs. Nested bookmarks are there, for instance. However, I ran into some trouble when to word search – which often skipped over words – and trying to copy-and-paste from the book. For some reason, when highlighting large sections of text (e.g. paragraphs) portions of the selected text would be missing, and trying to copy and paste the text that was selected produced weird (and I do mean truly cryptic) results – obviously, this is a flaw in the book’s production, but the sheer weirdness of the copy-and-pasting results almost make it seem like I’m trying to copy the Necronomicon or something. It’s perhaps the coolest error I’ve ever seen in a PDF.
The cover image is a variant of the Necromancers of the Northwest logo, a recurring motif in their books. Beyond that, the pages are all set on a cream-colored background, as though written on parchment. Just over a half-dozen illustrations are sprinkled through the book, each by a different artist but all of them quite good. I was very impressed with the props that the Necromancers gave to their illustrators. Each is mentioned in conjunction with their piece of art on the credits page, and hyperlinks go both to the artwork in the book and to the artist’s deviantart page. Way to recognize the talented people who contributed to the book!
I confess that I was surprised at the book’s three-page opening. Beyond a one-page letter from a father sending this book to his son, there’s then a fairly hefty in-character foreword talking about what drives a wizard to seek out and create new magic. It’s certainly an interesting read, and does a great job laying the foundations for what to expect from the book, but it’s almost bizarre that so much emphasis was given to this opening flavor text. I suppose I’m not used to that much intro; I’m certainly not used to it being presented in-character.
But enough about that, what was I saying before about the spells in this book being themed? Well, I’m glad you asked.
There are slightly over five dozen new spells here, a considerable amount. What makes Advanced Arcana interesting though, is that it doesn’t just throw a collection of new spells at you and be satisfied with that. Rather, there are three different types of new spells here.
The first are the “quick” spells. These are spells that give you the option of casting them as an immediate action, but if you cast them as a standard action, usually last longer or have greater power. It’s a great way to build in variability without having to resort to multiple spells that are almost identical, or utilize metamagic. I personally love having mutability and multiple options built into an individual spell, so these immediately went to the top of my “must use!” list.
The second type of new spells are “fountain” spells. These are relatively high-level spells that, in addition to their basic spell effect, also restore a low-level spell. Cast rejuvenate on someone, for instance, and they’ll not only recover hit points, but also several spell levels’ worth of spells, for instance. Now, most of the people I know would read the previous sentence and already be screaming “unbalanced!” However, there’s inherent balancing factors in these spells – the base effects are weaker than expected for their level, the spells that are restored in this way must be used relatively quickly, and you can only gain back a spell you’ve used in the last day. These are multi-effect spells that don’t tip the balance of power for spellcasters in the game (any more than they’re already tipped, I mean).
The third type of spells here are “segmented” spells. Thematically the opposite of fountain spells, segmented spells are high-level spells that require multiple castings to take effect. That is, simply casting these spells once won’t do it – you need to cast the spell multiple times over, either preparing it more than once or spontaneously casting it more than once, for it to take effect.
The trade-off here is that these effects are more powerful than spells of their level usually would be. You may need to spend three of your ninth-level spells casting create replicant over and over, but doing so will grow a clone that has its own soul, for instance. Segmented spells seemed slightly too close to incantations for my liking, but still present an innovative new option for stronger-but-balanced spells.
Of course, none of these spells dominate the book. Each is roughly a handful of the new spells presented here, with there being plenty of “typical” new spells for characters to use. And even here, the Necromancers did a great job of presenting new materials. A spell that creates dozens of magic missiles to orbit you as a defense, but also lets you erode that defense by firing some of them at your enemies? Genius!
After this are a series of appendices, the first of which is a second in-character discussion of the book. Weighing in at a whopping eight pages, this discusses the lengths the author went to to create Advanced Arcana, complete with footnotes. It primarily concerns his tracking down other mages (the ones who’re the names in the named spells) to solicit their creations. Again, it’s impressive, but between the foreword and this, almost a fifth of the book is dedicated to the in-character narrative. It’s very interesting, but I have to wonder if it would have made a better web enhancement, or if there could at least have been some accompanying new stats (for the eponymous wizards, perhaps).
The next appendix details eight new clerical domains. These are good, covering staples that the guys at Paizo somehow overlooked thus far, such as Shadow or Vermin. However, while I feel a bit greedy saying how I wish there was more, I do – specifically, I wish there’d been subdomains here. Subdomains, from the Advanced Player’s Guide, swap out a domain power or two for one with a more specific theme. That could have been here, but wasn’t. Perhaps in a future article in the Necromancers’ website?
New sorcerer bloodlines follow in the third appendix. There are four here, one for each kind of genie. There’s little further exposition I can give, save to note with some wry amusement that they kept “dao” for the earth-based genies, despite that slot being given to the new “shaitan” genie in the Pathfinder RPG.
The fourth appendix covers “focused” wizard schools, and it was this chapter that eliminated most of my guilt over asking for new subdomains for the clerical domains presented earlier. Why? Because these are wizard subdomains. That is, these are eight alternate wizard school abilities, one for each school, that follows a narrower theme within that school. For example, if you chose the conjuration school of magic, you can take the summoning focused school, which trades away two of the non-summoning powers of that school for two new powers related to summoning creatures. It’s actually a nifty idea, and again I wish there were more of them, since there’s plenty of untapped potential here.
The last appendix in the book presents eight new arcane familiars, and its here where the Necromancers really show off how they’re crazy geniuses. Most of these familiars are fairly standard in that they’re new animals (e.g. a bunny rabbit, a turtle, etc.) but there’s a few that are just off the wall, such as the animated object, the human skeleton, or my personal favorite, the bonsai tree. None of these familiars have stat blocks, instead referencing existing stat blocks and noting the appropriate changes to make. Interestingly, each has a paragraph of expository text describing them, which generate some interesting ideas. Maybe that skeleton familiar is your ancestor ceding you their body to watch over you, for example. Good ideas really make this last section come alive.
Overall, I really got a kick out of this book. While it did have length narrative fiction, the occasional error (I’m looking at you, quickshade), and sometimes lacked something I wish had been included, these small problems were utterly drowned beneath the weight of the gold mine of new ideas this book presents. New spells, new types of spells, new familiars, focused schools of magic, new familiars – and all of such great innovation that I can’t wait to start adding what’s here into my game, and you won’t be able to either. Advance your arcana with Advanced Arcana!
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Sometimes the hardest part of a role-playing game is simply playing a role. PCs, at least, have the entire campaign to work on who their character is and why he does what he does. The GM, on the other hand, usually doesn’t have quite so much to work with in their NPCs; all too often they’re little more than components of an adventure that fade into the background after the scenario ends (if they survive). This can make it awkward when a PC shows interest in the NPC – they haven’t been developed enough to make it clear what a relationship with them would be like.
Even beyond that, relationships are a tricky needle to thread. Should they be purely role-played, with no game rules used? It may seem that way, but dice checks can better simulate how someone would respond to an unknown factor (when even they’re not sure how they feel about something). It’s very tricky to design a system for this, and it’s not something that you’ll find for Pathfinder…until now, with AGES Gaming’s supplement, For Love or Power. Let’s take a look.
For Love or Power is a very short PDF supplement. Consisting of only seven pages, two of these are the covers, one is the OGL, and one is the credits and table of contents, leaving only three for actual game material. It’s actually slightly less than three, since a fraction of that third page is dedicated to “sponsors” – actually short blurbs advertizing two other AGES Gaming Pathfinder products.
There’s virtually no artwork here to speak of. The front and back covers do use some artwork templates to appear like stylized book covers, and the front does have a historical-looking picture of some sort of medieval get-together. That’s it as far as artwork goes; there’s nothing else pictorial in the book’s interior. Likewise, there are no bookmarks to be found either, though that’d be rather pointless in this book anyway.
For Love or Power (the title obviously referring to relationships/marriage) opens by talking about its basic assumptions for how relationships are handled in the game. This is a fairly standard list, noting things like “make sure everyone’s comfortable with the concept in game,” “keep the physical parts of the relationship off-screen,” and “this is for PC-to-NPC romance, not PC-to-PC.”
The next section of the book deals with how to introduce romance into the game. Like the preceding section, it’s fairly boilerplate in what it discusses, e.g. phasing important NPCs in so the PCs have opportunities to meet new romantic interests, keep in-game reminders that the PCs loved ones are also dynamic parts of their characters and the game world, etc. While there isn’t anything here that a good GM won’t have already taken into account if they’re trying to play up relationships in the game, I can’t condemn this section simply because it serves as a good reminder of the basics.
Following a brief notation on developing romance as part of the game world (e.g. romantic customs differ in different cultures), we finally come to the rules-based section of the product, cleverly titled “rules of engagement.”
The main thrust of these rules is a Diplomacy check, made monthly to advance the relationship. The base DC for this check is a static number, set by the NPC’s social level; it’s easier to woo a peasant than a duchess, for example. This isn’t a bad system, but it doesn’t seem to take into account the PC’s own social standing – shouldn’t a character that has been declared a knight of the realm have an easier time pursuing a relationship with a noblewoman than some commoner? I also thought that some of these terms could have used greater definition – what’s the difference between minor, medium, and major nobility, for example? Is a princess major nobility, or does this chart not take royalty into account? More could have been done here.
This mechanic is the core of the system, but there’s more to it than that. A table is given that allows a PC to research a character – this takes time, and gold (the higher the NPC’s station, the more gold), but on a successful research check, you get a free re-roll on your match check.
The match check is the subsequent table in the book, rolled on when you want to begin a relationship with someone, to see how compatible you are. A flat roll, it doesn’t have any modifiers to it (save for the aforementioned possible re-roll), and how good of a match you are is important, as it determines the duration of the relationship and a possible bonus or penalty to the Diplomacy DC.
It’s after this point that we’re told how that core Diplomacy check works. The PC makes the roll once per game month (they can choose not to roll, maintaining an equilibrium, but that increases the next month’s DC slightly), with each successful check counting off from the duration established by the match check. A failed check here can increase this duration, or even result in the NPC breaking things off, embarrassing the character.
Once the PC runs out the duration on the relationship, the NPC make it known that they want to be married; following this is a period of betrothal – this basically extends the relationship window further, and the PC makes more Diplomacy checks until this new duration expires, at which point the two characters are wed and this system concludes.
Following this is a final table that includes numerous modifiers to these monthly Diplomacy rolls. Some of these are permanent modifiers (e.g. a character has a high dowry, and so is more inclined to be distrustful of potential suitors), while others are one-time bonuses (e.g. you buy her a really expensive gift). Some of these are slightly odd…for example, if you two have the same alignment, there’s no modifier. If you’re one step apart in alignment, you get a bonus, as you’re similar but just different enough to be interesting to each other. If your alignments are further apart than that, there’s a penalty. It’s quirky, but not necessarily wrong.
Looking over this book, I’m of the impression that it’s a diamond in the rough. The low production values, and fairly standard set of assumptions and advice, mask a system that’s actually quite elegant, even if it could use some expansion. The relationship mechanics here present a stable framework for a much-needed set of mechanics in Pathfinder; this is a system that has great potential. It’s not without flaws – the social status-based Diplomacy check needs to take the PCs’ status into account, and the match check (and research check) could use an overhaul…but the ideas and rules work.
Whether you’re adding them for love of the game or to assert your power as the Game Master, For Love or Power brings a working set of relationship rules into your Pathfinder game.
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I remember how, back in the day, Dragon magazine used to have monster ecology articles that were written as short stories involving a group of monster hunters in search of a particular creature. The ecological section came from footnotes and some expository text after the story ended. And then, for some reason, the format changed; there weren’t anymore short stories, but rather the ecologies were written in a style reminiscent of scholarly papers, directly outlining the monster’s physiology, psychology, society, etc. It was an abrupt shift, and I wondered for quite a while why it was done.
Reading Tricky Owlbear Publishing’s Behind the Monsters: Roper, I think I’m starting to understand why.
A ten-page PDF, Behind the Monsters: Roper is part of Tricky Owlbear’s Behind the Monsters series of products, explaining the history of various monstrosities in the game world. With only a single illustration as part of the product title (and the company logo at the end), the book looks fairly spartan. However, I was quite pleased that it included full bookmarks, despite its brevity.
Told from an in-character standpoint, the book presents a character’s recollection of how he stumbled on some ropers opening a gateway, and accidentally fell through himself. There on another world, he came upon a group of humans enslaved to ropers and helped lead an uprising. This led to him falling through another portal – where he had a psychedelic experience of seeing the roper home-world (home dimension?) and had a vision of an alien god who pressed them into service, making them spread to other worlds like a plague – before finally returning to his native land.
The book then reprints stats for a roper (though interestingly, rebuilt as an aberration rather than a magical beast) along with notes for variant types of ropers, and even a few items made from/by ropers.
Looking back over the work, I’m not quite sure that I’m taking the book in the manner intended. While I can appreciate the desire for an origin story, treating ropers as Lovecraftian aliens from beyond space and time, possibly in service to an unfathomable god (which didn’t get deity information here, unfortunately), seems rather ho-hum now. Most of D&D’s classic aberrations came about this way, and it’s become, if not cliché, then at least understood that all aberrations have some variation on this particular tale.
Unfortunately, while the above isn’t an ecology article for this monster, I can’t help but look at it that way; I say “unfortunately” because it doesn’t do a good job in that regard. Compared to, say, the ecology Paizo wrote for the roper in one of their Revisited books (which gave the chilling summary of their philosophy towards other creatures as, “You do not truly know someone until you have eaten them – slowly”), this just doesn’t hold up. We’re given a story about where ropers come from, but not what they really are – there’s no information here on what makes ropers different from other powerful monsters of their ilk; you could have substituted any given aberration in (such as cloakers, for example) and this story would have worked just as well.
As it is, I’m giving this book a four-star rating because it presents workable new crunch, and because I suspect my disappointment is more in regards to this not being what I expected rather than it failing in its goals.
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Paizo’s Advanced Player’s Guide put a lot of new options on the table for Pathfinder players. Among these were the new racial traits that the core races could select in lieu of their default traits, as well as new favored class options for certain race/class combinations. It was a nice new set of choices for the basic races, but it almost felt as though something were overlooked in all the fuss…
…oh that’s right; all of the non-standard PC races – they got ignored utterly.
You might remember them from the Bestiary; races like the tiefling, the kobold, or the drow. These are the races that, for the most part, don’t work quite as well as the standard races, but can still be made to fit the mold. These races didn’t get any of the cool new racial options that the core races did. Luckily, Purple Duck Games is here to correct that oversight with their book, Monstrous Races.
Twenty-five pages long, the book covers eight races in total: the aasimar, drow, duergar, goblin, hobgoblin, kobold, tengu, and tiefling. A table of contents lists what’s found where, but I was slightly surprised that there were no bookmarks also included for ease of navigation. There are several pieces of art sparsely scattered throughout the book, though only the cover has color.
I was pleasantly surprised with how forthcoming the book was regarding flavor text with class information for each race. That is, each section gives us a sentence of two of what each race is like as a member of each class (both core and APG). While these paint in broad strokes, it was almost amusing to see some class concepts rules right out (“Drow do not become paladins.”) which is sure to ruffle the feathers of the lone person out there who is undoubtedly playing such a character. It’s only then that it talks about alternate racial traits, and subsequently alternate favored class options.
The book closes out with a page of additional information of a few items referenced among the racial traits and favored class options. Specifically, a new spell (instant armor) is given, along with a new (and delightfully Open Content) drow goddess; she even has subdomains!
Overall, Monstrous Races is one of those products that occupies such a niche that you’ll likely either fall upon it gratefully, or have no use for it whatsoever. While you could conceivably use it for some NPC members of one of these races, the benefits will likely be too small to make any measurable impact. No, this book is targeted towards players who are running one of the aforementioned races and wish they had the same Advanced options that the core races did. If you play such a character, this book has what you need to stand on equal footing with the humans and demi-humans in your game; you won’t be disappointed with the options you’re given here.
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I’m always leery of reading comic books in an electronic format. While novels can make the transition because they only need to focus on their text, comics need to display pictures and narrative flow between panels that don’t always fit on a screen. Hence, I usually just buy paper copies of the comics I think I’d like.
When I saw this particular comic go on sale, however, I made an exception.
Now, I’m not too much of a fan of Judge Dredd overall. It’s not that I dislike it, but rather never really had a chance to let it grow on me – but I did pick up some things here and there. One of which was the awesome villain that is Judge Death. An undead, unkillable monster who believes that life is inherently criminal and must be eradicated (hence his kickass catch-phrase “The crime is life! The sentence is death!”). So yeah, when I saw that there was an origin-story for this badass, I was hooked.
Judge Death: Young Death – Boyhood of a Superfiend is a ninety-eight page PDF file of the comic. I usually cringe at comics as PDFs, and this was the case here. The front and back covers are placed side-by-side as the opening page, making it twice as wide as all of the other singular pages; this means that when you try to use the “fit to screen” option, it fits it so that that double-page fills the screen, and the others are still filling half of it. You can still resize them up more, but it’s a bit awkward and unwieldy. There weren’t any bookmarks either, but I’m letting that slide because they’d be an awkward fit for a comic with no narrative breakups in the story.
The comic itself is full color, and done in a muted “portrait” style – rather than cartoonish heavy borders and bright colors, the entire comic has a more shaded feel to it. It works quite well, lending a very gothic feel to an already gothic story.
In terms of continuity, this story takes place after the Necropolis story arc, and before Judge Death sets out into the Cursed Earth. The story itself is actually told in two (or, depending on how you look at it, three) separate parts. The first is Judge Death giving his life story to a reporter in hopes that the people of Mega-City One will come to understand what he’s offering them – the innocence of death – which is juxtaposed with the flashbacks of his time among the living. Across from this is a separate story of the Judges investigating a murder. The connection between these two is made early on, and creates a nice point-counterpoint to the story; the end results of both Judge Death’s narrative and the murder investigation are known to us – we’re being taken along parallel journeys to see how things got there.
Judge Death’s story is a fairly depraved one from the outset. His home dimension (before he turned it into Deadworld) is shown as a place where life was always regarded as cheap. We see the young Death is shown to be sadistic and sociopathic from a young age, and at first we’re given to believe this is because of his father (who is shown to be completely off-the-wall psychotic), and initially think that he’s a bad seed from a bad tree. All too soon, however, we quickly come to realize that he’s as much the product of his environment as he is just born evil. When he murders twenty-seven people who appear in his court on his first day as a probationary judge, and the head judge expresses only a mild exasperation at this, it’s clear that it was only a matter of time before someone like him came along.
In a way, I found this aspect of his origin to somewhat lessen the character. I can understand why the writers did it, since it’s a new spin on the old “natural-born psycho” that a lot of villains start as. But even so, showing him as being only slightly beyond the norm for his bloodstained society makes him seem less monstrous – he’s simply the natural conclusion of his cultural values.
Ultimately, like a lot of origin stories, the ending feels inconclusive, if only because it ends where the character’s “on-screen” history begins. When he reaches the point where he transitions to becoming Judge Death, the story is pretty much over. There’s the story that takes place in the present, the one dealing with the murder case, but it also lacks a real climax due to the fact that, once the origin tale is over, it exists only to showcase how the meta-plot for the book concludes. This isn’t something I can really hold against the book – it did what it promised to do, after all, which was tell us how Judge Death became who he is – but its still a weakness of the story.
Of course, one weakness doesn’t undercut the book’s overall strengths. The tale is a long and gruesome one, and whether it’s by nature or nurture it still highlights what a monstrous figure Judge Death has always been, even as a little boy. Filling in the gaps of his history gives us a more thorough understanding of his character, and makes him all the more enjoyable. This graphic novel brings Judge Death to life (crime as that may be).
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Track 01 Transylvania Overture is the first piece of music from the album “Transylvania,” by Nox Arcana and published through Monolith Graphics. Just under two megabytes in size, the sound file is 2:01 long and downloads as an MP3 file.
The Transylvania Overture opens with some very gothic organ music, to which violins act as a softer accompaniment. Roughly the first half of the piece contains an ominous message from a sepulchral-voiced narrator talking about how the dead are restless and those who heed the dark call of the night are damned. After that, the second half of the track is then filled with a choir of people with similarly-deep voices echoing, like a gothic Gregorian chant.
My major problem with this track is that, while the music is done well, the tone of the whole thing feels too overt in nature. I was expecting this to take a more background flavor, in that this would be mood music to set a creepy atmosphere – the sort of thing you wouldn’t consciously pay attention to, but rather let it set a spooky air.
However, the speaking narrator demands your attention, which undercuts using this as atmospheric music. Moreover, his message is fairly nonspecific in nature – yes, the dead are rising and those with dark hearts might be swayed, but presented by itself the lack of context makes the message lose a lot of its impact. This is mitigated somewhat if you take the title (and the theme of the album) more literally – that this is a night in Transylvania – but even that only helps a little.
The chanting in the second half of the track suffers from the same problem, though not quite as bad. Rather than being a soft, wicked humming that makes the hairs on the back of your neck rise, the visceral nature of the chanting is so in-your-face that it makes you want to look around for where the monks in black robes are. Once again, it’s so overt that it bypasses the understated nature of being merely spooky, forcing closer examination that doesn’t lend itself well to an eerie atmosphere.
Ultimately, I can’t help but wonder if this track is meant to act as a prelude; that its short nature and opening narration are meant to introduce the rest of the CD to us. If so, then this would be forgivable in the context of the CD itself – but standing on its own, this single track fails to impress very much. This is what you’d play for someone when you want it to be made as plain as possible that “this is a haunted house” or “here come the supernatural monsters” with no chance of misunderstanding. It gets the job done, but there’s no finesse to it, and that’s a shame since the potential is quite clearly here.
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Pathfinder’s new alchemist class, published in the recently-released Advanced Player’s Guide, is something of an odd duck. It’s part spellcaster, part bombardier, and part Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde. That’s not necessarily a bad combination, but there’s still quite a few hats for it to wear. Inevitably, some of them don’t quite seem to fit as well as they could.
It’s with that thought in mind, I’m guessing, that Advanced Feats: Secrets of the Alchemist was written.
Published by Open Design, Secrets of the Alchemist is a short PDF, being only a dozen pages long. It’s fairly light on some of the more technical aspects of a PDF release as well; there are no bookmarks, and notwithstanding the cover, there are no illustrations here either – though, to be entirely accurate, the pages are all given a parchment-style background.
So what does such a short, spartan PDF really bring to your game table? Well, as it turns out, quite a lot. The author of the book, Sigfriend Trent, is the driving force behind the Netbook of Feats, which gives him a lot of insight into feat design and development, and he brings that out in full force here. In fact, the real secret of Secrets of the Alchemist is that a lot of these feats aren’t really alchemist-specific, but can be used by almost anyone. In my Pathfinder group, the alchemist is using this book (having taken the Craft Anywhere feat) and so it the barbarian (taking Lighten Weapon). Don’t misunderstand, a number of these feats can only be used by your alchemist, but far more are fit for several different character archetypes.
Perhaps the best part of this book, however, is the way in which the author invites you behind the proverbial curtain to explain why he made the decisions he did. Almost all of the feats here have a commentary section, usually no more than two or three sentences, explaining the feat’s significance. Being told how Organized Inventory works in conjunction with Quick Draw to let you draw any stored items as a free action is good, but noting how well it works with drinking potions really drives the point home.
The book ends with three specific builds for your alchemist. These are basically optimized character progressions explaining what race you should be and what feats, class abilities, ability scores, (and even a suggested list of formulae) etc. you should take to maximize the effectiveness of that particular build. These builds basically specialize in using your bombs, using mutagens, and crafting. As with the feats, there’s some explanation given for the why’s and how’s of these builds, which is all but essential when you’re giving advice for building a character out to 20th level.
Ultimately, Secrets of the Alchemist is an excellent book whose only real problem is that its name may make people think that its applicability is narrower than it actually is. Presuming you don’t want to play an alchemist, you can still put 75% or so of this book to good use – ignoring the builds and alchemist-specific feats still leaves a goodly chunk of excellent feats on the table, whether you’re a melee fighter, spellcaster, or skill monkey. This book’s advanced feats have the formula for success no matter what your class is.
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The fire-and-forget style of spellcasting is one of the hallmarks of the Pathfinder role-playing game (spontaneous spellcasters being a minor variation of this same formula). It’s also one of the biggest points of divergence from most fantasy fiction – unless you’re a fan of the works of Jack Vance – wherein wizards are generally able to toss around magic with no appreciable limit. Now, while we have been seeing some attempts to recapture this in Pathfinder, such as the unlimited nature of cantrips now or warlock-style classes who can toss around a very small set of effects without limit, but none of those really call to mind the wizards from our favorite novels.
And then Glen Taylor Games published DragonCyclopedia: The Mage, and much to my surprised created a class that allowed for an unlimited number of arcane spells to be known, and let you cast them on the fly without preparation…or at least, without much preparation. Let’s take a look at the book and see how it does this, and if it’s balanced.
A twenty-one page PDF, The Mage is nothing spectacular from a technical standpoint. There are no bookmarks, something I feel every PDF should have. Beyond its front and back covers – which contain wavy full-color images that seem almost like watercolors – there are two interior illustrations in the same style. While the cover illustration is credited, there’s no mention of who did the other pictures, though I presume it was the same person. Moreover, while the book does declare Open Game Content, it fails to reproduce the proper citations under the Section 15 of its Open Game License, both for Pathfinder and for itself.
Graphically, the book is fairly spartan. The aforementioned illustrations notwithstanding, every page is given a tan background that has a sort of crumpled look to it, like parchment that’s been in the bottom of a cramped sack before being retrieved. This doesn’t distract from the text, but said text frequently left large open spaces on pages when it didn’t want to break up sections of the book. More illustrations, or perhaps some sidebars expounding on some aspect of the class, would have helped make the book seem less empty in those cases.
But enough about how it’s presented, you want to hear about the class itself! The book opens with a one-page introduction that takes the form of FAQ which covers why this class was designed, how it’s balanced, and how to use it. It’s after this that we dive into the new class itself.
The mage is like a wizard in many regards. It has the same Hit Dice, BAB, and save progressions. It has the same skill points per level and class skills (save for adding Use Magic Device). It suffers arcane spell failure chances in armor. There are some minor differences (weapon proficiencies being one of them), but the big one is the “how” of the mage’s method of spellcasting.
The mage has no spellbook that it records spells in, nor does it have a spells known list. When a mage learns a spell, it’s learned forever, without external record. Casting a spell, however, requires that the mage do something that I like to call “preparing on the fly.” If a mage wants to cast a spell, it must first spend an action preparing it – this will be a full-round action for its highest-level spells, but as the mage gains levels its lower-level spells can be prepared faster. Once prepared, the spell can then be cast normally at any time. But the mage can only have a single spell prepared at a time.
In other words, the mage needs to keep spending an action preparing a spell before it can cast it. So in a fight, he’ll spend a round preparing a spell, and cast it on the next round, then prepare another spell on the following round, and cast it on the round after that, then prepare a spell on the next round, etc. It’s this limit which acts as the major balancing factor to the class. It’s not the only one though, as the mage gains less spells at both character creation and leveling up than the wizard – it can learn new spells from spellbooks and scrolls, but this comes with a significant cost in both time and gold pieces, which also act as limits. In theory, it all balances out.
In practice, however, I’m less certain. I haven’t had a chance to play-test this class at all, so I couldn’t tell you if it was overpowered, or if the increased casting time (which is really what the preparation time is) and drain on gold to learn new spells really balances the class or not. As the mage levels up, it takes less and less time to prepare spells of lower level – as early as thirteenth level, a mage can prepare a 1st-level spell as a swift action, a 3rd-level spell as a move action, and a 5th-level spell as a standard action, all in a single round. Of course, it can still only cast one at a time.
Beyond that, the class gains a mage talent at every even-numbered level. These are special class features that expand on the mage’s capability in some regard. It’s here that I thought there needed to be some serious double-checking on balance concerns, since some of these were far-and-away too strong. A mage talent that lets the mage substitute half his class level instead of spell level for calculating a save DC is much too powerful, for example. Still, there’s some good versatility here. The best of which is that some talents belong to mage colleges – themed collections of mage talents that you can access only if you take a mage talent to join the relevant association (of which there are seven).
The book then discusses various flavors of mages (e.g. explorer, war mage), and how various player races tend to approach being mages, but each of these gets only a paragraph of exposition, so there’s little here that goes beyond common sense and stereotypes. Two new magic items round out the book, a wand and a staff that seem to do almost the exact same thing, save that the wand is slightly more limited than the staff.
Dishearteningly, there were some grammatical and typographical errors in the book. For example, the standard mage way to determine the save DC for a mage’s spells is the same way every other spellcasting class determines them (10 + spell level + key ability modifier). However, the text from the mage talent that lets you use half your class level instead of the spell level had been erroneously cut-and-pasted into the class’s main listing for spells, which made me cringe. Things like that gave me some serious pause about this class.
Ultimately, I came away from the mage with some real concerns about its balance. A mage with the right combination of mage talents can prepare multiple spells, boost the save DCs, and even gain not-insignificant bonuses to spells that require attack rolls. I don’t know if that’d make it more powerful than a wizard or sorcerer, but I’m betting it would. Between that and the technical shortcomings of the book, I seriously considered giving this product a lower rating.
However, when push came to shove, I found that I couldn’t do so, simply because of how intriguing the core mechanic for this book was. The basic spellcasting for the mage is brilliant, and on the surface doesn’t seem overpowered (at least when coupled with the reduced spells gain from leveling, and increased cost of learning new spells). It’s the auxiliary aspects of the book – the mage talents and the PDF’s own technical details – that soured my appetite for what was here. Fix those, and you’ve got something (even more) wondrous and new for your Pathfinder game.
I don’t know if the mage is a class that’s balanced compared to the standard Pathfinder wizard…but I really want to play one and find out.
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Publisher Reply: |
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Shane,
Thank you so much for your review! You are very thorough, and it shows. I fixed some of the typos you mentioned (and some you didn't) and updated the file. As for the play balance problem, I'm concerned as well, but haven't run into any problems. One particular area of interest includes the two mage talents that provide bonuses to attacks with ray spells. The bonuses are significant, but since they only affect ray spells, and require talents to be selected that could be used for something else, and are typed (competence and insight) bonuses, are less of a problem than they might seem. They are intended to bring the mage's accuracy with rays up to a fighter's accuracy, but only in a limited scope. The same goes for the two included new magic items; they're a mage's equivalent of magic weapons.
I hope I get more reviews that are as helpful as yours for the editing and design process.
Glen Taylor |
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