It's added an interesting and certainly enjoyable twist to my groups game. Thank you very much.

Talon Dunning, Ravenloft artist extraordinaire, has released a pdf with a cool new class: The Sensitive.

Rules are provided for 3.5, Pathfinder, and d20 Modern. You can buy them separately, but I recommend getting the "bundle" with all of them in it, since each one contains a different NPC example, and all three are excellent characters.

Perfect for a Ravenloft game, the "seance" power especially fills a niche that's been missing in game terms.

And I may use all three of the NPCs in my campaign. (even the Modern guy. shouldn't be too hard to retrofit. I like that he's "Tough" but "Sensitive". makes me giggle.)

Anyway, everyone go buy these!

• Gonzoron of the Fraternity of Shadows

The Sensitive: a ghostly prestige class for your gothic horror fantasy game -Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Edition- is a 7-page PDF (four pages if you remove the cover, credits and OGL page) for the Pathfinder RPG written by Talon Dunning and published by Fantastic Gallery.

The layout is a standard two-column with clear charts. The art is public domain 19th century black and white illustrations and the layout is attractive and though the background -while fitting the mood- makes it less easy to read. However, a clean text only file is also provided.

The Sensitive’s powers are triggered by a traumatic encounter with a ghost or similar spectral being. The Sensitive gains the ability to sense emotional echoes and spirits and later to disrupt and control spirits. It is a beautifully thematic set of powers and very focused on dealing with ghosts and spirits.

An example Sensitive, Madame Dumont, is included and she a good character with several potential plot hooks (though it would have been helpful to have had her husband Lord Jacob Dumont statted out as well).

While the concept of the class and its powers are superb, they are very narrow. My concern in a campaign would be that the Sensitive prestige class is too much about their interaction with the spirit world. It seems they should have access to a slightly broad set of additional skills, perhaps some increase to caster level (as spellcasters seem most likely to take this path). A few supporting feats, magic items and plot hooks would all have been welcome.

The Sensitive prestige class is very well written and it is perfect for a gothic horror campaign but may prove difficult to fit into other sorts of game.

Disclosure: As a featured reviewer for RPGNow/DriveThroughRPG, I received my copy of this product for free from the publisher for the purpose of this review.

I will admit, I had been hoping for something a little less ... fanservicey ... and more a straight-up treatment of an alternative cleric class dedicated to a more generalized idea of pleasure and love as opposed to just orgasm.

That said ... I'm a pretty rabid feminist. It's not all that hard to offend me. But the only things in this book that made me raise an annoyed eyebrow were a single class ability's "you must be naked or scantily clad to use this power" and the Pleasure Ooze monster. The rest was ... tasteful. I was shocked.

While this material wasn't what I was looking for, it's a well-illustrated, high production value, high quality book for those looking to add a very explicit choice to their class selection.

An... unusually tasteful product that, in my opinion, works rather well with the system. Certainly not the sort of thing to bring to a game session with the folks, but certainly a viable option for groups mature enough to respond with something other than "giggle boobies..."

Sisters of Rapture is a 76-page PDF (71 pages if you remove the covers/OGL page) for the OGL Fantasy written by T. Catt and published by Fantastic Games. This product is for mature audiences -with a ‘Not for Sale to Persons under the age of 18' on the cover- due to its focus on matters involving sex and the erotic art (much of it also by T. Catt) used as illustrations.

The layout is 2-column on a nice watermark that does not distract and there is considerable full-color artwork much of it showing considerable bare skin of artistically drawn women, so you are warned. Fortunately, there is also a printer friendly version (51 pages) without art or watermark.

Following a short introduction it moves directly into the Sister of Rapture class, a full 20-level base class. Combining focused spontaneous divine spell casting, mid-range combat ability and a variety of minor love and romance-based class abilities. Differing ability paths are available based on their patron goddess allowing for greater diversity of character types.

Four prestige classes that build on the Sister of Rapture are included: Inamorare, who seek to inspire artists and others. Patron Mother, who guide the next generation. Spellswinger, who mix arcane and divine magic. Stormsister, who bring down justice on those who abuse women. The prestige classes look balanced but are also even more focused than the basic Sister of Rapture on particular aspects of the class.

New skills sub skill of knowledge and perform, new feats (eight of them, one being metamagic), a new clerical domain (carnal) with a new spell for each level. While some of the new spells suffer from ‘cute name syndrome’ they all look balanced. Eight new magic items of a variety of power levels, including one cursed item, round out this section. This section provides a good number of additional options to round out the Sister of Rapture class.

The next section is one of my favorites. It discusses the relationship between the Sisters and their divine patrons. It highlights how the different goddesses interact with the Sisters and suggestions for incorporating other goddess into the Sisters’ faith. Following is a section on how the Sisters organize their faith.

The main section ends with a variety of monsters, creatures and enemies. Ranging from potential allies such as the Passion Archon to various races such as half nymph and the fey Huldra and enemies such as the Congress of the Wolf, a male supremacist group, and the Succubus Queens. An interesting selection of beings, several of which can be used in just about any campaign.

Two appendices cover: Notable characters from the Sisterhood, providing a wealth of NPCs. And rules for the Sisters in D20 Modern. Lastly, a multi-page colorful character sheet for the Sisters of Rapture ends the product.

As long as you know what you are buying, you should not be disappointed in this product. It contains exactly what is promises and more.

Disclosure: As a featured reviewer for RPGNow/DriveThroughRPG, I received my copy of this product for free from the publisher for the purpose of this review.

This is what a d20 splatbook should be - focused on one aspect of roleplaying and weaving the rules around it.

You get your standard prestige classes, feats, et all. But rather than just a list of these, which are a dime a dozen in d20 books, the twist is that it is all built around a well-thought out organization.

The art is a unique in its style and fantastic. The pdf itself is laid out that it looks like it went through a few professional editors.

I really appreciate the author including the "stripped version," the bookmarks, and the errata notes. You can really tell the author cares about his creation.

My only peeve is a good one, I want more! I'm sure the author researched a lot, especially on the three real world goddesses. More on their clergies, churches, clerics, and differenfes would be awesome!

Sisters of Rapture gets many things right that other similar products have gotten wrong. Sisters of Rapture focuses upon the roleplaying aspect of the game, and not upon silliness or upon obscure game stats for things you shouldn't roll dice for.

The writing is excellent, detailed and easily adaptable to any game world, published or home-brew. The sample characters are believable fantastic characters, and not one-dimensional lusty female stereotypes. For added benefit, there is the Congress of the Wolf organization that opposes the Sisters of Rapture.

Then, there is the art. Whereas many other similar products have used second-rate line art or photomanipulations, Sisters of Rapture utilizes beautiful full-color and black-and-white art that adds to the product, not distracts from it. This product is worth the price just for the art alone!

If your game includes scenarios of an adult nature, you absolutely cannot be without this product.

A great book! Containg many beautifully drawn pictures from well known web-and rpg-artists, this e-book is a piece of art all in itself.

Romance. Sex. Love. Call it what you will, it’s a subject that has never really been done well in D&D. Serious attempts to cover it invariably seem to foul it up, while more humorous endeavors lampoon themselves (and their readers) right from the beginning. However, by narrowing their focus and using a more concrete central theme (that of a specific organization) Fantastic Gallery’s debut product, Sisters of Rapture, actually seems to be one of those rare products about sex and love in the d20 System that gets it right.

Or at least, it gets it right in terms of thematic presentation. Looking at Sisters of Rapture from a technical standpoint, Fantastic Gallery has made all of the mistakes you’d expect a new company to make when releasing their first PDF. There are, for example, no tools to facilitate ease of navigation; bookmarks, something that every PDF product should have, are absent here. Likewise, while not necessary, hyperlinks in the table of contents are usually a perk, but there’s also nowhere to be found. The biggest missing thing, however, is a printer-friendly version of the book. Such a thing is absolutely necessary here – not because of the ornate page borders and backgrounds (though that’s also part of it), but because of the artwork. While I greatly enjoyed the art here (more on that below) it’s imperative that customers have the ability to print out a version without it. Many, if not most, gamers would be embarrassed to bring pages of this book to the table if it meant they’d also be showing pictures of naked women. Hopefully, this will be corrected in an update.

Having said that, the artwork here is everything you’d expect (and hope) it to be in this kind of product. In other words, naked women abound! Done in full-color, the quality of the artwork here ranges from pretty good to damn nice (it’s a welcome change from, say, photoshopped images of real people), and almost all of it depicts women in some state of undress. The majority of these are women either topless, or wearing only diaphanous clothing above the waist, though there are also plenty of women showing full-frontal nudity. Interestingly, none of the artwork here is truly salacious; there’s only one picture of a couple actually having sex, and they’re shown from the side, tastefully hiding the naughtier bits.

So, having said all of that, what is this book actually about? Well, it’s right there in the title. Sisters of Rapture is about an all-female religious cult of the same name. Devoted to love in all its forms (as a concept, an act, a force, etc.) the Sisters largely focus on their own holy trinity of deities: Aphrodite, Isis, and Freya, though other love goddesses are not excluded. The first chapter shows us the Sister of Rapture base class, and its here that the book begins to showcase that it can handle d20 mechanics as well as it can artwork and exposition. As a spontaneous divine-spellcasting class, the Sister of Rapture has the finer nuances of good mechanics, making sure to give unique class abilities at every other level, and allow for swapping out spells known periodically as levels are gained. My only complaint was that there’s no listing for an epic progression to this class, something that I consider mandatory when introducing a new base class, but that’s a comparatively small omission.

The second chapter introduces four new prestige classes, all five-level classes and all of which are intended for a Sister of Rapture character. Interestingly, while all of the prestige classes offer some degree of advanced spellcasting ability, all expressly state that they only add to the SoR’s divine spellcasting ability, firmly tying them to that class. The Inamorare uses love to inspire her fellows to greater heights. The Patron Mother takes a younger Sister of Rapture under her wing, guiding and guarding her. The Spellswinger is like the mystic theurge, but can use sex to pay for metamagic. The stormsister is a vigilant protector of women everywhere. These PrCs were all good in design, save for the Spellswinger – she gains Sexual Energy Points which are used to buy-off levels of metamagic. However, it takes a relatively short period of time to gain SEPs, and they can be replenished indefinitely. This makes this class’s main power prone to abuse, as PCs will be prone to taking short stops throughout an adventure to let the Spellswinger “recharge” herself.

The third chapter contains most of the crunch you’d expect to find in a d20 book of any stripe. Here is where we get the new skills, spells, feats, and magic items. The book doesn’t try to give too many new things here, which is good since less is probably more where this subject is concerned. Many of the feats, in particular, are tied to the Sister of Rapture class, and couldn’t be used by other characters. I enjoyed this section for some of its more innovative concepts (Penelope’s Portable Playroom, for example, is a pocket dimension specifically set up to watch over small children, letting Mom go adventuring in the meantime), and it handled the more overtly sexual matters with a deft touch (for example, the sex-based spells are exclusively part of the new Carnal domain). There were a few things that could have been added, however, such as a table summarizing the feats; similarly, the Carnal domain’s domain power didn’t seem to have any game effect.

The fourth chapter of the book covers the religious aspects of the Sisterhood, covering each goddess and what they mean to the Sisters of Rapture, as well as a section discussing other goddesses in the organization. There’s very little game mechanics here, mostly limited to just what classes worshippers of these goddess are inclined to take (though there’s the occasional oddity, such as the mention that Aphrodite – a traditionally chaotic deity – has paladins). The major new crunch here is a sidebar describing the goddess Parvati as an alternate choice for a deity.

Chapter five is devoted to the organizational hierarchy of the Sisters of Rapture. The SoR base class is given a table showing what titles are earned at what levels, and various sections in this chapter describe what rights and responsibilities those titles come with. This part of the book is totally fluff, but it does a good job of better showcasing the group that this book is about.

Chapter six is the ubiquitous “monster chapter” of the book. This section was the one that I had the most problems with. While some of these creatures were great in theory (the Passion Archon – Heaven’s answer to the succubus), I found errors in pretty much every stat block I looked in. Now, there’s never been an RPG book that didn’t need some errata, but it’s still a bit disheartening. Moreover, there were some odd choices for additions to this chapter. For example, the Congress of the Wolf, a brotherhood of evil misogynistic men, is debuted here, with abbreviated stat blocks given for three sample members. Why wasn’t that put in its own chapter on enemies of the Sisters of Rapture? Similarly, Lileetha is a succubus queen, which sounds cool…until you realize she’s just a succubus with class levels (and she’s got a CR in the mid-teens, so how does she have “a large army of fiercely loyal balors”?). This chapter isn’t bad, but could have used some more work.

The book closes out with two appendices. The first covers a half-dozen high-ranking members of the Sisters of Rapture, with abbreviated stat blocks and fluff information on their history and personality. The second appendix is a nice bonus, giving us a Modern d20 version of the Sister of Rapture class, made into an advanced class here. It would have been nice to also have conversions of the prestige classes, but I can’t really complain about that, since a Modern version of even the base class is more than would normally be expected. Finally, there’s a character sheet for a Sister of Rapture class…a long character sheet, as it’s a whopping eight pages in length.

Sisters of Rapture is a good supplement by any standard, and a very good one by the standard set by previous books about sex/romance in d20. Having a good balance of crunch and fluff, great artwork, and good design, it doesn’t try to be everything, and excels in an area where most books fail because it doesn’t try to surpass every limit. It’s not a perfect book by any means, but what it does, it does well, giving an organization that lets you plausibly introduce mature themes into your game to the degree that you’re comfortable with. Check this book out, and put a little Rapture into your game.