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My wife was the person who turned me on to how cool fey can be. Before I assumed fey were dainty little creatures that danced and frolicked and through occasional bacchanals. I discovered that a good many are borderline psychotic creatures that should always rival the most devious in the D&D universe.
Alluria Publishing's Clans of the Fey, originally released as a 4th edition supplement, makes its way pathfinder. It is just as amazing, creative and vicious a bestiary as its counterpart. If you like fey or just want a different kind of creature, to mix it up with your PCs, the Fey Folio is hands down the best bestiary out there for the Pathfinder system.
The artwork, ingenuity and writing in the 27 page Fey Folio is top notch. So much so you would assume that Alluria was a big time publisher. Each of the 13 creatures given two to three pages to absolutely shine. I have seen a many fey renditions of creatures, none more explosive as the ones here. The artwork jumps off the pages, escapes the pages and smacks you into appreciation.
The writing is concise and descriptive. It gives a lot of credit to the fables and folklore these creatures are based on. The abilities really play off of the unpredictability that fey are known for.
For the Dungeon Master
My new favorite fey is the Jack-in-Irons. I once saw a rendition of it in another book, and it just felt like a giant with the fey descriptor. Fey Folio turns him into a god and a great antagonist for a campaign.
The Iron Word
If fey are going to make any appearance in your campaign, Fey Folio, Clans of the Fey is a great supplement to help fill in the gaps. More than just creature of the weeks, they can be used to really push a campaign world.
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Watching the movie Inception this weekend, I was given the final nudge to finish my review of Obsidian Twilight Campaign Setting by LPJ Designs.
The premise of Inception has nothing to do with the storyline behind Obsidian Twilight. The correlation comes with their level of innovation when compared to similar products.
Whether you liked it or not, you can certainly agree that Inception is a completely different kind of movie. The same can be said for the Obsidian Twilight Campaign Setting when compared to other campaign settings. Obsidian Twilight creeps off of the scale in terms of pure creativity. It's only drawback is that it should be longer.
For those who have not purchased any of the races or world info about Obsidian Twilight, it is a campaign setting that takes place after the heroes have failed. The world is ended, most if not all humans are dead, and the races that are left behind range from the goo like Khymer to the half-dead Harrowed. Undead rule the world. And the only somewhat good character is an angel that has had part of his face partially burned away.
In other words, this is very dark stuff.
The Obsidian Twilight Campaign setting is a compilation of previously released material with a hundred new spells, a few new monsters and a bit more flavor to flesh out the world. The 168 page PDF fleshes out all of the major eight races in Abaddon, gives tons of customer options with feats designed for the world and comes to life with unique new spells that play around with the post apocalyptic fantasy atmosphere.
As usual with LPJ, you are enchanted in by the amazing artwork and coaxed to stay by the solid writing. The only drawback is that there just feels like it should be more. The three prestige classes are fantastic, but I kept wanting to know how other classes would adapt to these new conditions. In other words, where does the bard fit in when there's nothing chipper to sing about? How do the priests function without gods.
For the Player
Obsidian Twilight is the backdrop for my current campaign, and my players have thoroughly enjoyed the races. But one race has jumped to be the favorite of them all, so much so I had to limit the number of players who could be this race. Since the dawning of RPGs, players have always wanted to play lycanthropes and Lycans give the best opportunity to play it in a balanced game.
For the Dungeon Master
Whereas the PDF is lighter than most campaign books on crunch, it makes up for in inspirational fluff. You will probably want more world design and information, but the plus side is there is nothing stopping you from imagining the world for your own. My Obsidian Twilight world is a mash up of this book and Paizo's Kingmaker campaign.
The Iron Word
Like a medium-rare Kobe Steak Tenderloin, I was left wanting more but thoroughly satisfied at the experience I had, though brief. Obsidian Twilight Campaign Setting is inventive. Possibly one of the most inventive settings you are going to find. You can use it as an entire setting or branch it off as undead territory in your campaign world.
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In the very first campaign I had ever ran, I had a character who begged, and begged, and begged me to let her to play a Centaur. I was a young novice buck of a dungeon master, and greenlit her character. Little did I know she’d bring a self-drawn portrait of the character fully nude and proceed to play the most vulgar PC ever to grace and be removed from my game table. As I flipped through the Genius Guide to Races of Hood and Horn, I was so impressed that I was slightly tempted to remove my ban on fey pcs from my table.
Genius Guide to Races of Hoof and Horn is a 13 page PDF presenting 3 fantastical fey races for your campaign world. Once again the publishers, Other World Creations, gives us a creative project we DMs need to struggle to not include in our current campaign (I have a 4 Rite Publishing PDF limit now). Another disappointment was the artwork this time around. Some of the pics felt chopping and reminiscent of 16-bit Genesis animation.
However, those are miner scratches when considering the publishers best quality, their writers usually think like gamers. Which is why Hoof and Horn does not just include races, but feats for them as well as options to tweak them. I only wish they would have included sample NPCs using the races like so few publishers seem to do when releasing new races.
For the Player
The Lapith are the unclothed centaur race that I think players would enjoy, especially those who like Druids. Lapith’s have a mystical quality about them and the writing really brings out fey more than the other races.
For the Dungeon Master
I like the Lapith because it makes the DM’s job easy. Aside form the obscenity of my friend’s Centaur, there was a major problem fitting it into campaigns where players have to go to “normal” places and can’t explain having a four legged beast with them. The book alleviates that by allowing the Lapith to have a “normal” form that resembles a half elf. For NPCs I like the piper, enchanters who are offspring of Satyrs.
The Iron Word
Those who wanted playable fey races in their pathfinder or 3.5 campaign will find a very user friendly and easy to incorporate product in the Genius Guide to Hoof and Horn. Despite my limit, I would not be surprised if this book found its way into my campaign too, considering my wife loves fey creatures.
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Innovation happens every so often in the RPG world when a publisher takes an existing product and does a few things that everyone wanted to do, but no one figured out how to. Thus is the case for Kenzer and Company’s Trove of Treasure Maps, a remarkably unique product.
Treasure Maps feels like someone took a bowl of liquid creativity, blended it with chunks of detailed artwork and visual writing and baked it on the 44-page PDFs layout. Treasure Maps is sort of a book of short adventures. They are written to be plane enough to fit into any campaign but detailed enough so that the NPCs and locations come to life. It is sort of an adventure book, because, looking at it as simply that, the biggest part of it is lost. These adventures are all manipulated around a PC handouts and treasure maps, all of which are crisp and engaging. In most books, this is usually the other way around, with maps and handouts being an afterthought to the adventure. Each of the seven adventures contains one or two handouts, one of which is a map that drives the adventure. Most of the maps are puzzles, leaving it up to the PC to figure out the clues to reach the next step. These puzzles are give na difficulty and range from straight forward to truly mindboggling.
The good folk at Kenzer were gracious enough to provide both a Hackmaster and a d20 ruleset, making the product multifunctional. The only negative about this book is the font, which feels a bit too small and dotty. But that small tidbit does not take away from the overall solid layout work.
For the Dungeon Master
When you get past the font, the clear writing make each adventure easy to follow. They are also all quite diverse. The City Underground will be a favorite for the DM that likes to test the mental worth of his party.
The Iron Word
Trove of Treasure Maps is such a deceptive name for a remarkable set of adventures presented in a new, innovative way. If you are looking for well-written roleplaying driven adventures with fun, interactive handouts, you have reached the right place.
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The ability to customize your own class is a staple of the Pathfinder game system. Some classes, like the monk, were given a more “rigid” treatment than the bloodline Sorcerer and jack of many tricks Rogue. Rites Publishing obviously noticed this slight and produced the finest monk replacement class in the D20 world with Enlightened Scholar.
I do not like toss around superlatives but I cannot remember feeling so good about a monk class in a long time. It is the same feeling felt when I first read the Pathfinders Sorcerer Class. The Enlightened Scholar feels like a true monk. Sure you still have the physical prowess, but it also contains the wisdom “lore” that monks of fantasy and film are often known to have.
Most single class PDFs come in at 10 to 12 pages, maybe 15 if the publisher gets carried away with the artbook. Enlightened Scholar weighs in at a heavy 26 pages and not a single word of it feels like too much. Most of this is needed to include the customization of the Scholar’s Enlightened Knowledge ability. This ability defines the class and presents a whole new list of options that will give your character the feel of playing a decent melee fighter with wise man abilities.
For the Dungeon Master
There is a new skill called Feng Shui that I see getting a lot of use for the DM controlled Enlightened Scholar. It allows you to bend the rules in that way that we DMs love and yet stay within the confines of the game rules. Thus villains and PC helpers can offer wisdom, recover and get more powerful with a good skill roll.
For the Player
This class rocks. You can play the monk however you want to play. There are options for the old school karate master, options for over-the-top Naruto ninjas, and even options for sit back and let the hitters do all the work cowardly monks. Besides the Enlightened Knowledge ability, which allows you to pick abilities from trees such as Academia, Invention, Medicine and Warfare, there’s a whole set of optional feats that are based on Ch’I and Chakra.
The Iron Word
I would heavily consider replacing the monk class in any campaign with the Enlightened Scholar. It opens the book of customization and allows players to do what they wish to with the monk within the rules. Sure, the power and hard hitting are watered down, but that feels more in line with the traditional monk lore. This book is a must buy for those looking for a very different class.
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How a gem of a series like Evocative City Sites by Rite Publishing went completely unnoticed by me for a year is completely mindboggling. For the Dungeon Master who does not want too much, but wants just enough for inspiration, Evocative City Sites delivers. Each entry is a location with an impressive write-up packed with a lot of detail. A black and white battlemap is included along with several NPCs . A few adventure hooks are sprinkled in to give the Dungeon Master several ways to include the product into their campaign.
Bedlam Asylum, the latest entry, presents a nut house set that fits comfortably in a fantasy world. The 26 page, though short, is well bookmarked allowing you to easily take what you want and what you do not want. Bedlam Asylum does not go too over the top with the craziness of its inmates. More fearful are the individuals who run the asylum.
The adventure hooks as well stray from the traditional D&D fare. It was relieving to see that the publisher did not just toss a bunch of elements together and settle for “that” product, but put a lot of creativity into every element. It makes for a cohesive finished book.
For the Dungeon Master
The NPCs in the Evocative series are impressively statted. There is no exception in Bedlam City. There is a medusa bloodline added to one of the NPCs that could be spun into a product of its own. This is a product for the dungeon master who knows how to wield a tool, just as a hammer, its up to you to figure out how you want to use it in your campaign.
The Iron Word
I could kick myself for not finding this series sooner. Bedlam is the latest, but all of the books in the series share the same level of cohesion and writing. The first person narrative can be cut, pasted and trimmed to form handouts that can increase the experience for the player. You can put the whole thing in, or just take bits and pieces like the adventure hooks or NPCs. Got to love it when the publisher puts the choice in the hands of the Dungeon Master.
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Iron Nugget
Avalon Design Elements Parchment 2 is a decently designed piece of layout art work for background and cover art for an RPG product. You won't find anything better for a buck, though some of the art feels a bit too symmetric. Still, this is the best set that the company has come out with and the parchment works great for handouts.
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Iron Nugget
Presentation is everything, especially in the small PDF product market where you are competing with thousands of individuals. All of them believing their product is the absolute best on the market. If you are laying out the work yourself and need a great background for the master page, I have determined that the artwork and effort by Sade is notch above a lot of the other word you will find out there.
Template: Wyrmskin, like their other skins, is ready for use right form download. This particular set of templates are skins of dragons vividly rendered to jump out at the reader. The skins come in various colors and are fitted to be placed easily on an 8 by 11 page. This is a big bonus if you do not feel like fiddling around with photoshop on deadline. I used a variety of different fantasy fonts and all read very well on the images.
If you are looking for some nice layout art for your next project, check out Wyrmskin or any of Sade's other products.
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Publisher Reply: |
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Thank you for the review, i will work hard for my next product deserve the 5 stars :)
i hope the price is ok as well.
best regards
sade |
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When you have been Dungeon Mastering as long as I have, you can get quite bored with the way most gamers play the game. Roll dice, try to metagame the enemies weaknesses and exploit them with your supped up special attack or magical combo. But I continue Dungeon Mastering because I love finding and playing with the player who thinks outside the box and uses strategy and tactics to play the game.
I do not know what cool group Flynn Dielle first sprouted his creative brain, but it’s the kind of awesome character I love to design adventures for and the voice behind 4 Winds Fantasy Gaming’s Strategists & Tacticians The Definitive Guide to the Clever Warriors.
Strategists & Tacticians is surprisingly mechanic driven in its presentation. The 82 page PDF goes a different route than similar books, avoiding strategies and tactics for current class abilities and feats and instead presenting all new variations of them that support “creative” uses more so than the current batch. In what would first seem like an odd deviation comes across as a great idea. Instead of providing classes, feats and spells that rub the power ceiling, it goes the right of creating flavorful new toys that add diversity on the battle field.
For the Player
There is a little something for every type of gamer in this book. For the most part, by using mechanics instead of flavor, it allows even the hack and slasher to find something he can use to add a bit more variety to his arsenal. Fighters will love the brutal feats that allow you to severe limbs effecting other enemies in several different ways. For those who really want a change, there are 2 new classes and 14 prestige classes that are quite unique. Jinx, a luck manipulating prestige class, is one of my favorites.
For the Dungeon Master
Tactical Maneuvers have been done before, but they have a crisp and easy new presentation that bonds well with Pathfinders Combat Maneuver Bonus system. There is a great table on limb severing that should be used with caution. If your players react extremely negatively to losing items, imagine what they would do if they loose a leg. Thoughtfully, the author has included an appendix that provides some prosthetics.
The Iron word
Strategists & Tacticians is an adventurous endeavor that slides into the strike zone by inches to provide a fun alternative to the power creeping game style.
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Publisher Reply: |
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Thanks so much for the review! |
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This time, Super Genius Games was designed a product a little too creative for their own good. The Genius Guide to the Shaman is a fantastic and diverse presentation of a shaman class for the Pathfinder Game system, but it may be too innovative for some.
Its innovation comes in the form of giving the players the power to pull just about any spell or ability out of the d20 universe and use it for their ability with a few rolls. In a short 13 pages, The Shaman provides a strong 20 level class designed around a character that can summon spirits and use their abilities. The power is checked by its length of time, several ability checks and rules that call for the player to role play out every spirit interaction.
This is a class for a player who believes in role-playing. In the hands of a player who loves to role-play, it can be one of the most entertaining designs that have come around in a time. However, in the hands of a powergamer or munchkin, this class can easily be broken and create a character that is direly unfriendly to play with.
For the Player
If you enjoy combining flavorful mechanics with in character role-playing, The Shaman delivers a fun experience. The class can substitute as a healing class and, played creatively, can become a formidable control and damage caster.
For the Dungeon Master
Keep this class out of the hands of any player who does not absolutely love role-playing. It took me only one week to realize I made a mistake when I allowed a player to play this class. I had a specked out low-level character dreaming of new ways to cast 8th and 9th level spells by altering his abilities.
The Iron Word
The Shaman is one of my favorite classes by Super Genius and yet most frustrating. It is a class you can not introduce into every gaming group. However, if you have a good roleplaying focused group, this class is a great replacement for the mundane cleric healer and melds smoothly with wilderness campaigns.
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Iron Nugget
OtherWorld Creations has avoided traditional feats so far, and their first foray into a traditional feat category has mixed results. Their Spellcaster Feats book did a great job of introducing spell casting feat devoid of metamagic enhancements and for good reason. The Genius Guide to Feats of Metamagic is as good as it gets, and still a few of the feats feel like things we have seen around the block before. For the low price, Metamagic is worth it to incorporate Chain Spell (allows you to target multiple people with the same spell) and Metamagic Focus (allows you to enhance metamagic spells even more), but Metamagic is certainly in the lower end of the feat books produced by OtherWorld.
The Iron Word
Even on the low end of their feat books, Metamagic still provides enough innovation to make the enhancements a slight cut above similar feat books.
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Iron Nugget
36 NPC Secrets morbidly provides some useful secrets that can be used for NPCs, primarily for modern campaigns and, even then, those with serious adult themes. The PDF starts off great, with a decent format explaining the secret and a Suggestion of how it can be used. But a good many of the secrets veer off into adventure hook land and some, such as cannibalism and Pedophile feel incredibly adult to be in a PDF.
The Iron Word
The author has some good ideas, and this book works primarily for modern campaigns with adult themes and more realistically dark characters.
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I am pretty sure hell will freeze into a tropical abyss before Rite Pubishing puts out a bad product. 101 Magical Weapon Properties is another great production by the publisher that enhances the Pathfinder System.
The product contains 101 different special abilities for weapons and armor within its 25 pages. Elegant and very easy to navigate, the PDF shines in producing different takes on abilities we’ve seen before and a few that are just out of the box. Products with this many different products I often treat as if I was watching a spoof movie. If half of the stuff is good its an A, and I’d say more than 75 percent of the abilities in the book are things I would put on my NPCs and special items.
Magical Properties starts off great from the start with a detailed chart giving the costs and random rolls for the items. Taking no time for lengthy forewords, it jumps right into the abilities.
For the Player
Books like this make me want to play, and so my favorite two abilities I recommend for players. Guided is an awesome ability that plays with numbers that rarely are utilized, miss chances. I can not imagine a situation where this on a weapon would not be useful. Another ability I fell in love with was the Spell Echoing ability. It allows the wielder to mirror a spell that was cast. The stipulations to balance the ability insure that it is not misused.
For the Dungeonmaster
Infectious is something I’d sneak onto an NPC’s sword simply for its lasting effect. It allows the weapon to implement a disease without the normal waiting period. I know all you Dungeonmasters are salivating at the idea of instant mummy rot. Not an ability but a nice little bonus spell at the end is Bestow Affliction, which is a deadly little spell for putting some new curses on PCs.
The Iron Word
Balanced and chocked full of creativity, 101 Magical Properties does the impossible by making a book comprised mostly of new abilities.
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I admit it. I had to grab a dictionary and do a tad bit research when I found the Pugilist on my review list. Quite simply, it means fighter and was an exotic way for the publisher to emphasize the new class without putting it in the same mill as fighter variant copies.
And a copy this class is certainly not.
Whereas the name is not one that I would have chosen, The Pugilist Class and NPC, by Wordcasting Entertainment, is a nice addition to the Pathfinder Class line up. It is a little rough around the edges, like a fixer up mustang, but well toned, its a creative break from the norm.
The Pugilist is a streetfighting brawler class. The nice sized for a nice price 25 page PDF comes with the Pugilist class and several NPCs that can be used. The inclusion of an NPC is a great idea that I wish more publishers would adopt. DMs would get so much more use out of the product with them included.
The Pugilist class itself is fairly creative. It is a hand-to-hand combat class, similar to the monk, but takes the sorcerer approach. Players choose a fighting style, from streetfighter, to brawler to grappler. Each subset has their own set of bonus feats, maneuvers and a super 20th level Style Mastery.
For the Player
This is a great class book for the player wanting to play a melee type of a different kind. The various fighting styles allow for a lot of deviation, and though some of the class abilities mimic that of the monk, the flavor sets it apart. I find the Boxer to be one of the better designed subsets, and an interesting idea to implement into a game.
For the Dungeonmaster
This book is very rough around the edges and this class should not be allowed to be combined with the monk. That said the NPCs are the most important part of this book for a DM. Each subset has 3 different statted levels of NPCs. I recommend using bullies as basic guard NPCs. Their abilities to strike true fear into their opponents comes out of left field but works.
The Iron Word
Despite its less than polished production, the content drives this product at least to third place. It is a very innovative brawling melee class and better than most streetfighting classes I have come across.
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Slow releasing a product has its positives and negatives. On one hand, it means that if you want to start a campaign, you may have to wait months to a year to receive all the material necessary. On the other hand, it builds tons of momentum to solidify the foundation for the product.
Very much similar to how their last campaign setting was released, LPJ Designs Races of Obsidian Twilight has finally released the first large page count release in the campaign world. Proceeding this was a series of race previews and two strong NPC write ups. Obsidian Twilight is a very unique setting, a post apocalyptic fantasy world.
If you think that this material is just a collection of the previous races that were released for zilch, think again. Though half the book includes those races, the other half includes satisfying reincarnations of the Pathfinder core races. In material that usually finds the highlights in the new, shiny races, the rebranding of the old, tried and true races steals the show.
In something I hope is not a trend (and a repeat of the previous NeoExodus products, Races jumps right into the material instead of providing us some type of foreword or overview of the world. If you have read the free World of Obsidian Twilight PDF, you will have a somewhat easier time jumping into Races.
Races begins by giving a strong 2 pages to core races. However, you will not find any half-elves, half-orcs or humans here. There is a human type race, but that is apart of the new races from the preview. But more to that in a minute. The old races really come off fresh and playable. More than just creatively written fluff, there are new abilities to emphasize the current plight of each race. For instance, the now cautious dwarves have an ability called Wary Appraisal to distinguish new people and instead of a monster race, Dwarves no hate undead. This is a small adjustment that adds a lot of mileage to the credibility of the world.
After covering dwarves, elves, gnomes and Halflings, Races then goes into the new races of the world. This is primarily where the world leaves out some valuable information. Most of the races are breeds between outsiders and humans, and though there is a human type race, no where in the text does it say what happened to the basic humans. There are four races that are created from non-traditional hybrids. The Exalted are human/angel mixtures, the Genesai are angel/demon mixtures, the Harrowed are human/undead mixtures, the Infernals are human/demon mixtures. The Khymer can best be described as souls that have had their bodies destroyed. The Lykians are a less than normal power werewolf race. I found this inclusion fairly interesting considering one of the authors of Races is also working on a post, post apocolypitic fantasy world with a very similar race. The only thing described as a “humanoid” race are the Osirians, a favored human race of the gods who specialize in hellfire. The final race is the Raijan. The Raijan are ghost like beings whose bodies were destroyed and now wander the world.
For the Player
The harrowed quickly rose to be my favorite race. I have been a long proponent that not all undead are evil.
For the Dungeon Master
When compared with one another, the races all feel equivalent to one another, though some skirt the line of being slightly more powerful than a traditional Pathfinder race. However, given the backstory and the notion that most of these races are blended with outsiders and potent undead, it makes a lot of sense that there’s a half level kick given to them. The 45-page book also includes sheets of counters, character sheets and initiative cards. More useful than counters would have been a few more iterations of the race characters. It was one of the things that made NeoExodus hard to play, there was not too much artwork of the other races, so everyone pretty much looked the same.
The Iron Word
Obsidian Twilights innovative premise displays well in the Races presented. The artwork, as usual, is amazing and really brings out the personalities of those left behind after a cataclysm. It is a good first start to the campaign line.
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![[PFRPG] The Genius Guide to Races of Hoof and Horn](images/97/81773-thumb100.jpg)
![[PFRPG] Strategists & Tacticians](images/2680/80668-thumb100.jpg)
![[PFRPG] The Genius Guide to the Shaman](images/97/64629-thumb100.jpg)
![[PFRPG] The Genius Guide to Feats of Metamagic](images/97/79874-thumb100.jpg)
