This is just a summary of a longer review originally posted on The Alfred Effect: http://www.thealfredeffect.com/?p=437

Overall this is a very solid product that is especially useful for any character with religious inclinations, but would make a great read even if you have not thought of this. I am personally using some of the great ideas here for an inquisitor that I am playing in a homebrew campaign. A great read for both players and gamemasters, check it out.

Review of Book of the Faithful 1 – Power of Prayer

Disclaimer: This is an honest review of a material that was provided to me free of charge for the purpose of said honest review. I am in no way affiliated with the company in question.

First Impressions: After a quick perusal of the material, I was definitely interested as any new mechanics get me excited.

What you get: You get 5 pages of material, excluding trade dress.

Art: Good quality black & white hand artwork.

Fluff: Nice Fluff, I enjoy the background prayer info.

Crunch: What you get. There is 1 magic item; three prayer books in the equipment section. The best part is the mechanics for the (prayers), a quick, once daily effect based upon which deity you call upon, minor effects, but really well thought out. I’ll have to see them in action with play testing to see if any are over-powered, but minor tweaks would be all that is needed.

Grammar & Editing: Minor, nothing to really be concerned about.

Value: Excellent value for the 99 cent price tag. As there are new mechanics, players would need their GM Approval to use the mechanics. I would want it in my library and would consider it a good purchase for me.

All too often, religion is relegated to being the province of divine spellcasting characters only, with everyone else usually not even bothering to scribble down the name of a patron deity on their character sheet. Naturally, this eschews quite a few avenues for truly role-playing the character, as one needn’t be a cleric (or ranger, druid, or what-have-you) to be religious. It’s this point that Jon Brazer Enterprises’ Pathfinder supplement, Book of the Faithful: Power of Prayer, focuses on.

A short book, Power of Prayer is only seven pages long, including the cover and credits/legal page. Despite that, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the product had extensive bookmarks to every heading, with some even being nested – nice bit of extra service there in such a brief PDF. The book also has more artwork than I would have thought; besides the full color cover, there are two interior black and white illustrations, and each page has a large (perhaps slightly too large) border on the bottom. Still, I enjoyed the manner in which the book displayed itself – it could have gotten away with no interior artwork simply due to its brevity, but held itself to a higher standard.

The book opens with examples of prayers from different people, illustrating the point of the ubiquity of faith (at least in a fantasy world). This opens section on religion and role-playing, talking about how and why a non-clerical character would have a religious bent, followed by several archetypes that such a character could follow (e.g. a convert, an evangelist, etc).

It’s only after this that the book moves on to new mechanics. It introduces the idea of prayer feats – prayer feats are, from an in-game standpoint, feats that are given by a god to a faithful follower as a reward for their devotion. Each of the seventeen feats here thusly has a requirement that you worship a god with a particular domain, and grants a bonus thematically related to that domain. What I enjoyed most about this section was how it noted that a prayer feat’s effect is activated by the PLAYER just like any other feat, but the CHARACTER isn’t the one manifesting that power – it’s being activated by the whim of the deity directly. Very cool.

The book closes with a single magic item, an enchanted holy symbol that grants a small bonus to saving throws for a brief time, and three non-magical books that discuss a given religion. The inclusion of these latter items may seem slightly odd, given that they have no particular mechanical impact of any kind, but I think they add a nice (albeit minor) bit of dressing to the campaign world, and I suspect that was the intent in adding them.

Overall, Book of the Faithful: Power of Prayer does a fair job in pushing non-clerical characters to adopt a more religious tone. Taking the dual-pronged approach of highlighting it as good role-playing, and offering new mechanics to make it more appealing in terms of crunch, it offers some nice ideas and incentives for characters to be a little more pious, no matter what their class is. Pick this book up and put a little more power in your character’s prayers next game.