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Intrepid Expeditions: The Island of Life
by Thilo G. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 01/18/2012 09:38:37

This pdf is 51 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 1 page SRD and 1 page back cover, leaving 47 pages of content.

So what exactly do we get here? We are introduced to the fabled island of Kawa'lea. On the mundane side, we start our exploration of the island with a discussion of the climate and the peculiarities of the monsoon weather there. The interesting component about Kawa'lea, though, is the non-mundane aspect of the island - due to the abundance of life-energy on the island, death is far from final on Kawa'lea - if you die, you make a will-save depending on your level. If you succeed, you are reincarnated and get mutations that might be benevolent or unpleasant. There are 3 basic categories of mutations, ranging from hump backs to backwards bent knees. You might even get tentacles, reflective spells etc. Polymorph also tends to result in mutations on Kawa'lea.

That's not all, though: The very vegetation on the island of life is infused with magic and life and might reproduce a wide variety of magical effects. The waters of the island offer enough adventuring as well - underwater politics, a graveyard of ships wasted upon the dread reefs surrounding the island. There is a secret war being waged beneath the waves - the sea serpent wizard, the self-styled serpent king has problems with revolutionaries and the magical pearls make for powerful incentives to join either side.

The plains of Kawa'lea contain the only true speck of civilization left - after a settlement of people mysteriously disappeared and left their home Roanoke-style: Pennar, a wizard is studying the strange effects of the island and has a (very unreliable) teleportation circle. The herd of horses, unicorns and pegasi as well as awakened horses make for another rather interesting faction on the island.

The Western Forest of the Island has more in store for you - a village of awakened animals where rabbits live in harmony with carnivores. Hidden in this forest, we also find Nathrigaeus, the immortal tree that guards the orchard of enlightenment and seeks to expand his influence via his dryad slaves. The primitive gorilla-like humanoid uktans make for another potential threat in this part of the island. In the eastern forest, which is more swampy, the PCs can find an abandoned temple, which alongside the Uktan-base contains the puzzle-pieces for one of the island's greatest mysteries. Oh, there also are demons here, mysterious standing stones....and the fountain of youth.

Finally, mount Kawa'lea features deadly foes, even more iconic locations and potentially even the secret behind the island's mysterious properties, which I'll exclude from this review.

A unique island like Kawa'lea also spawns unique critters - from arcanum birds with magical plumes to mutated island behemoths, deadly fish, crab jellies etc., the critters uniformly come with unique signature abilities. Have I mentioned Forgebelly Fishes and Megastirges?

The product also comes with a 15-page player's guide, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 1 page SRD and 1 page back cover, leaving 11 pages of content. The player's guide comes with a wide array of rumors to lead the PCs there. There's also the Devotee of the Sacred Isle-10-lvl PrC that comes with d10, 4+Int skills per level, full BAB and medium fort-saves. The PrC focuses on rejuvenations, special mutations like gaze attacks etc. and, of course, the power to transcend death even easier.

Conclusion: Editing and formatting are top-notch, I didn't notice any glitches. Layout adheres to the 2-column standard and artwork is stock, which, while not great, makes for the only gripe I have with this pdf. Both the regular guide and the player's guide come with printer-friendly b/w-versions and are bookmarked. The island is iconic in mechanics, ideas and content, there is a lot of content for the moderate asking price and in the end, just have to applaud the creative guys over at Necromancers of the Northwest. The exploration is by far the best pdf they released since Advanced Arcana. Fluff, writing, crunch - everything is stellar. my only gripe is that I would have enjoyed stats for the NPCs, but i guess that's ok - we already get more than 60 pages of content. Seeing that I don't have any true gripes apart from minor nitpicks, my final verdict will be a hearty recommendation alongside 5 stars and the Endzeitgeist seal of approval.

Endzeitgeist out.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Intrepid Expeditions: The Island of Life
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Ancient Warriors: Sons of Sparta
by Derek B. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 10/30/2011 01:27:43

Admittedly I skipped through most of the write-up about the spartan past, but that doesn't mean I didn't read it. Truthfully I would have preferred that the meat of it was AFTER the class, but that's mostly hearsay.

I liked reading about the hoplite. It's built like a fighter, like a lot of melee classes are, but its got its own special little specialties that put it above the rest, and works well without the necessity of making everyone in the party also be hoplites. However, as great as the class is before it reaches 20th level, once it hits the final level of class and earns its final ability, this class looks very broken to a lot of people. Spartan Unity allows the entire party to do melee attacks as an immediate action, should the hoplite strike his opponent, and should they be adjacent to him. If you have a well rounded team with only a couple of melee people, and the rest ranged, and there's a lot of flanking, this ability isn't that bad. Especially against a medium size creature. Once they're larger to colossal sized, however, you've got at least two people who are getting free attacks. It should be noted that RAW, it allows everyone adjacent to you to hit up to four times around. RAI, I would think it would only be one free action. This ability should be broken down a little better, and explained in greater detail. It'll likely be up to the DM of the game to do the limitations if the class isn't changed in the final release.

What I really enjoyed about this was the archetypes. I love archetypes so much more than the classes themselves. My favourites were the Fighter and the Sorcerer's new bloodline, Warrior's Blood. I see absolute no drawbacks to taking that bloodline. You gain d8 HD, and have 3/4 BAB, and you don't seem to lose any of your spells. It's like previous battle sorcerers from other sources, but way better.

All-in-all, it's a product, but don't expect your DM to allow it into your game any time soon. Especially the Warrior's Blood sorcerer bloodline.



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
Ancient Warriors: Sons of Sparta
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A Necromancer's Grimoire: Marchen der Daemonwulf II
by Thilo G. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 10/27/2011 08:11:53

This pdf is 39 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 1 page final artwork, 1 page SRD, 1 page advertisement, 1 page back cover, leaving 33 pages of content, so let's check out this supplemental material for the lycaonite base-class from this pdf's predecessor.

After a nice 2-page short story that serves as an introduction to the subject matter at hand, we get an array of 50 werewolf feats. A new chain of feats details with Alpha Gazes - essentially, you can intimidate foes a limited amount of times per day to assert your dominance. The chain expands upon this mechanic, adding blindness, Wis-damage etc. to the palate, while balancing the significant benefits with penalties when you fail to cow your foe into obedience. Deadly Gaze, though, is utterly op and violates PFRPG design - on a failed save, the recipient falls to -1 Hp. Regardless of the hit points. Dragonslayers like Harm have been nerfed/eliminated for a good reason.

I have no such complain with regards to the plethora of "Howl"-feats, which expand upon the Howl of the Night Hunter-feat and expands the howls to do damage, shatter objects, deafen, demoralize, etc. Nice feat-chain! It's interesting to note that Deadly Howl, the culmination of the chain, adheres to PFRPG-design standard by dealing 10 damage per HD on a failed save instead of a insta-death attack.

I did like the "Feral X"-feats, which grant bonuses when in hybrid form, ranging from being able to squeeze through tight spots to being tougher than usual. Hunter's Stealth for example, is overpowered, though: The feat makes it possible to use stealth while running and adds +20 to Perception and Survival checks to track you. that's not a feat, that's a game-breaking disaster that should not be in the hands of PCs. Unfortunately, this feat does not remain the only one any sane DM cannot help but consider broken - hybrid fury for example has the potential to add ridiculous amounts of attacks to your roster and, combined with other ones, can utterly BREAK any resemblance of balance and crush it into tiny bits. Add to that the expanded options available to improve your natural attacks and we're in for an engine of destruction that should really have seen some playtesting in non-optimized groups.

Several of the feats from the original "Märchen der Daemonwulf" have been updated with clearer wordings, which I consider good service, though I think that they would have been better suited for an update of the original file. Oh well, including them in the sequel works as well, I guess.

Next up is a Lycaonite-10-level-PrC, the Pack Master. The PrC gets full BAB, medium fort and ref saves, 2+ Int skills per level and d10. The Class focuses on, grab your seats, gather a pack of wolves. However, no HD-limitations are given for the followers, making it possible to gather dire-wolves, werewolves etc. While the idea of the PrC is cool, the mechanic to establish a pack is raw at best and just sloppily slapped into the pdf at best. Without any guidelines to determine the strength of the followers, it falls to the DM to balance this class, which due to its other class features, should prove to be a precarious endeavor - after all, the pack master can inspire his pack via a plethora of ways and later even simultaneously dual inspire his pack members or drain the strength to fuel his own. Great concept, bad execution.

Finally, we get some new werewolves. The Lok'Wa are nomadic wolflike humanoids and come with racial traits and probably are supposed to be a player race. I somewhat had the impression that their write-up is supposed to cater to the Furry-crowd, as the one-with-nature-noble-savage-fluff somewhat felt like "Let's play a werwolf sans the curse or other lycanthropic features". While not bad per se, I feel like this caters to said audience and I for one don't enjoy being catered to. Worse, as a valid race write up it fails due to space restrictions, lacking sections of interactions with other races, a racial paragon class, traits, feats, magic etc. - all the staples that have become standard. They would have better fitted into a separate pdf. Next is the Rager-template, which is a form of lycanthropy that does not transform the person physically and is thus suited for almost all settings and emphasizes the psychological side of the lycanthropic lore. Two sample-statblocks are provided as well.

The Vurdulak (CR 8) are corpses possessed by a wolf-demon with some neat abilities and potential plot-complications. The Wolf-Were makes a triumphant return as well, coming with a template, a new spell and a sample statblock using a winter wolf as the base creature.

Finally, the Wulver (CR 3), a mindless form of were-wolf, is introduced - just think of them as the animalistic, cunning predators and rank and file were-wolves you slay by the dozens to get to the master.

Conclusion: Editing and formatting could have been better, I noticed some glitches that could have been avoided. Layout adheres to the two-column standard and artwork is mostly stock and CGI at that. Part I had better art-choices than this one. The pdf comes with a printer-friendly version and is fully bookmarked. This pdf is hard for me to rate for several reasons - I like werewolves. I really do. I liked some of the concepts from the original. This one, when it hits, hits hard and offers us cool options for the Werewolves. However, remembering the wildly fluctuating power-levels of the Lycaonite and the balance concerns I had then, this gross imbalance is only amplified by this pdf. While most of the content oozes style and several of the feats are plain awesome, the amount of terribly broken feats serves to negate the overall usability of this pdf. Add to that the shoddily put-together PrC (that had such a promising concept) and I can only wonder how this got past editing/playtesting. While the monsters are mostly ok to good and definitely serve a niche, I'm hard-pressed to recommend this pdf to any PLAYERS. Why? Because it breaks the game if not monitored with the utmost caution. In fact, I'd flat-out disallow this pdf for use by PCs and would only make a select few feats available. I'd usually go for a 1-star rating at this point. However, the ideas per se are good and if you as a DM want to build terrifying were-wolf battle molochs that mow through PCs like the reaper's scythe, this pdf might interest you. Add to that the low price and I'll settle for a final verdict of 1.5 stars, rounded up to 2, as this pdf fails what it sets out to do, but could be of use to some people.

Endzeitgeist out.



Rating:
[2 of 5 Stars!]
A Necromancer's Grimoire: Marchen der Daemonwulf II
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A Necromancer's Grimoire: Paths of the Druid
by Thilo G. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 10/20/2011 09:43:46

This pdf is 25 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 1 page advertisement, 1 page SRD, 1 page back cover, leaving 20 pages of support for the druid. What do we get, you ask?

After an aptly-written, 3-page short story, we are introduced to new options for the druid, to be precise 10 animal companion alternate abilities that essentially replace other qualities the companions would get.

After these qualities, we are introduced to the first PrC, the Beast Master. The PrC gets medium BAB, good will-saves, full spellcasting, 4+Int skills per level and d8. The beast master allows a druid to forge a telepathic bond with her animal companion, enabling her to directly play the critter and enhancing its capabilities by offering a selection of 11 special tricks including hamstringing foes and causing bleeding attacks, culminating in a selection of 3 capstone abilities for the animal companion - nice to have a choice even at this high level. The class-write up comes with notes on their role in the world, lore-sections etc. and feels like a nice, valid option for druids.

The next class is the mystic shapeshifter, who gets a good BAB, medium fort and ref-saves, half spellcasting progression, 2+Int skills per level and d10. The mystic shapeshifter focuses on the wildshape ability of the druid, learning to keep keen senses like lowlight vision, the ability to speak etc. in all forms and, more importantly, to keep aspects of creatures when transforming into other foes: 10 aspects ranging from claws over fangs, wings and gills are provided to choose from and while from then on be featured by all the shifter's forms. The shifter's abilities culminate in the abilities to negate critical hits, sneak attacks etc. once per day and finally even include an armor's bonus and full protection when being shifted. While this capstone is ok, it felt a bit bland for a culmination of a PrC that had at 9th level the transformation to the shapeshifter subtype.

The final PrC of the pdf is the Totemic Spiritualist, who gets medium BAB, medium fort and will saves, full spellcasting progression, 2+Int skills per level and d8. The totemic spiritualist does not do something we haven't seen before, granting bonuses/abilities depending on the totem chosen. Bear, boar, eagle, fox and wolf are available, each offering 5 abilities over the course of the 10 levels. While there is nothing wrong with these, they also are nothing to truly write home about and some more far out totems would have been nice. They can, depending on their totem, modify their spells cast with some aspect of their totem, making for the most interesting abilities of this class, e.g. subtly casting spells or rerolling spell attacks. The capstone ability lets the spiritualist cast like this for a whole minute in addition to the regular, limited amount of times per day.

Conclusion: Editing and formatting are good, I only noticed some minor glitches. Layout adheres to the two-column standard and the pdf comes with a printer-friendly version. Artworks are nothing to write home about, which is ok at this price-point, though. The pdf comes with extensive bookmarks. This is an interesting file to rate: On the one hand, we have a distinct lack of PrCs out there after the dread 3.5-glut and the PrCs herein are neither broken, nor badly designed. In fact, especially the beast master felt like a nice class to me that ought to work as intended in most campaigns. On the other hand, though, I felt that all 3 PrCs would have benefited from more options to choose from. PFRPG has moved away from the linear class-progressions and while the classes offer options, the don't necessarily offer as many options as I would have liked them to. More totems, perhaps a synergy with spirit warriors, more special animal tricks (though granted, animal companions benefit the most from this book) and a more exciting shaper-class would have been awesome. Remember those Wildshape-feats from 3.5? Updating and fixing them and putting them into a PrC would have made for a far more compelling and unique class than this shifter. Thus, once again, this is one of the books, that, while not doing anything particularly wrong, also fails to excel at its given field. Seeing the low price and the fact that animal companions get quite a bit of additional oomph from these pages, my final verdict will be 3.5 stars, rounded down to 3.

Endzeitgeist out.



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
A Necromancer's Grimoire: Paths of the Druid
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Ancient Warriors: Sons of Sparta
by Will M. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 10/16/2011 11:22:25

I downloaded this PDF on suggestion from the publisher. Honestly, I skipped the 'story' bit at the beginning. I just didn't find it interesting.

I found the Introduction to Spartan society to be decently written, but more importantly, to the point. Yes, it was kind of fluff text, but it was fluff text that had a purpose. If you're a more immersive roleplayer, than having that background information is important.

Now we get to the crunch. I'm not sure if Necromancers of the Northwest changed the PDF after the first review, but my PDF quite clearly states that the Skill points are 2+Intelligence modifier. However, even if it didn't say that, as a variant fighter class, Fighters receive 2+Intelligence modifier, so that seems easy enough to port over from the Core Rulebook.

I like the use of tower shields and also Spear Combat as a...well, I'm not sure if it's a class feature or a bonus feat, but either way, I think it works well for the Hoplite because it makes sense historically.

Looking over the list of Disciplines, I don't see anything that stands out as being too powerful or not powerful enough, when taken in the context of taking multiple disciplines over the course of your adventuring career. You get 10 Disciplines with 14 'lesser' Disciplines and 8 Greater Disciplines (which you gain at 10th level) to choose from.

As far as the standard class abilities, though, I was thrown off by the flavor text of the Shield Wall and Phalanx abilities. At 3rd level, you gain Shield Wall, which states "Beginning at 3rd level, the hoplite becomes a expert in fighting in a shield wall formation." At 5th level, you gain Phalanx, which states "Beginning at 5th level, the hoplite learns the skill of fighting in a shield wall." I have nothing against the abilities themselves. They make sense, especially in terms of their power level, but apparently you get to be an expert before learning the skill! That's awesome! Okay, seriously, that's just a proofreading error I think and not that big of a deal.

Following the hoplite class are two pages on how to play the hoplite. Again, decently written and to the point. Between the introduction of the Spartan society and these two pages, I think the player is given ample ideas on how to play the class. The only thing I disliked about the hoplite class is that a lot of the abilities given to the hoplite work best if you have multiple hoplites or multiple shield wearing characters. I think this class would work best if you could have an entire group of hoplites so that you could use the phalanx, but if you have a party that has several different classes, the hoplite may not be able to use its abilities to their best advantage.

Alternate class features. One thing about the barbarian stuck out to me: one argument I've seen against barbarians is their loss of hit points when they are done raging to potentially kill the barbarian due to low hit points. The Withstand Death ability seems to push that more to the forefront, but the higher level version of this ability seems to help with that.

The Bard. Giving up a save-or-die ability for the ability to grant a +4 bonus to attacks, damage, Armor Class, and saving throws really comes down to how the player is playing the Bard. If you're in a large group or a phalanx, with a number of shield users, the armor class of the group is already high, so giving them another +4 is a good thing, as well as the +4 to attack. Who can't use a +4 to damage, as well? As a group, the phalanx might be target by area effect spells, so the +4 to saving throws is important. The Deadly Performance ability that you give up is Will save dependent (10+1/2 the bard's level+the bard's Charisma modifier), and at 20th/epic levels, you're probably going to be running into enemies that beat that saving through or have an ability of their own which prevents death. Ultimately, this comes down to how you play.

The criticism of the Cavalier's Take the Hit ability is unwarranted. Yes, starting at 8th level, the Cavalier can take a blow that would reduce him to 1 hit point instead of knowing him unconscious or killing him. It isn't like this ability completely takes the cavalier out of harm. Multiple foes? Multiple attacks? This ability can be used once a day until 12th level (and ever four levels after gives you another use). So, at 12th level, he can use this ability twice a day, but has to wait one minute between uses.

The Cleric's Battle Blessing ability, at my first glance, is undesirable due to the loss of the Channel Energy ability. However, giving it some thought, the cleric still retains the ability to drop spells for healing and if you have a party with more than one cleric, you could use both of these. Giving your allies a bonus to AC, attack rolls, CMB, and CMD or cursing your enemies for penalties to their AC, attack rolls, CMB, and CMD is a nice ability that scales with level. Very useful if you have one cleric to use this ability and one (or more) to channel energy.

The Druid's abilities, I don't even think I need to talk about because these also come down to how you play the character.

Fighter Exploits. Personally, I probably would not give up the numerous bonus feats for these exploits, but I can see how some players would. At least you can take an exploit to replace one feat but still keep the other feats. One exploit that was written kind of strangely was Sacrificing Strike. I allow an opponent to attack me, automatically dealing damage. However, I also immediately attack automatically "dealing twice his normal Strength damage." As written, that sounds like whatever your Strength modifier, you do twice that in damage, as opposed to what I think it was supposed to be, which was double the strength damage with your weapon.

Monk Durability. This ability is exactly the same as the Evasion ability it replaces, except that it deals with Fortitude saves instead of Reflex saves. At 9th level, instead of gaining Improved Evasion, you receive Evasion instead. If you were playing a game where you were dealing with a lot of poisons or diseases, this might be a worthwhile replacement.

I love the alternate Oracle. It feels like it's the oracle directly out of Greek legend.

Paladin and Rogue alternates give a good feel of the Spartan changes, I think.

I think the Sorcerer got the biggest boost from alternate abilities with the Warrior's Blood bloodline. An increase to d8 instead of d6 for hit dice and proficiency with one martial weapon of the player's choosing, which gives the Sorcerer a much better battlefield presence, especially at lower levels, when spells are a premium. I think that the alternate Sorcerer is much more dangerous than a regular Sorcerer due to increased combat ability.

The traits all make sense and none of them would seem to cause any problems.

Overall, I like this book. Were there some typos or things that could have been written better? Sure, but nothing that took me 'out' of the book. I'm looking forward to using some of the alternate class features when it's time to roll up new characters.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
Ancient Warriors: Sons of Sparta
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Ancient Warriors: Sons of Sparta
by Shane O. [Featured Reviewer] Date Added: 10/15/2011 13:20:45

Spartans have been in vogue around the game table ever since a certain movie gave us tailor-made gamer quotes like “Tonight we dine in Hell!” and “Spartans! Prepare for glory!” The archetypal real-world warrior culture, the warriors of Sparta are icons for those who want to play a martial class in their Pathfinder game. Canny players and GMs know, however, that there’s more to playing a Spartan warrior than the occasional tagline. That’s where Necromancers of the Northwest’s book, Ancient Warriors: Sons of Sparta, comes in.

Sons of Sparta comes in two PDFs, one being the main file and the other being the printer-friendly version thereof. The printer-friendly version is notable in that it removes the parchment-colored background that’s in the main file, and does away with a one-page advertisement for other Necromancers of the Northwest products. Otherwise, the two are identical.

The main file is twenty-eight pages long, though there’s one page each for the front and back covers, the OGL, and a page of ads. Full, nested bookmarks are present, so props are due there. However, for whatever reason the copy-and-paste function still returns a lot of gibberish in with the text, making it nigh-unusable. This is slightly better if you copy-and-paste from the printer-friendly version, but it’s still somewhat annoying if you want to copy a lot of what’s here (such as, say, for a character sheet). The few pieces of artwork in the book are public-domain images of Spartan warriors or other pieces that evoke a similar theme.

But enough with the technical overview, let’s review of the meat of the book itself. Onward, to glory!

After the introduction, the book opens with a transcription of a historical conversation between the Persian god-king Xerxes and a deposed Spartan king at the beginning of the Battle of Thermopylae. It’s an evocative story that sets the tone for most of the book.

Subsequent to this, we’re given an overview of historical Sparta itself, outlining things like the social classes of the people who lived there, their religious attitudes, how their economic and political systems worked, etc. Following this, some discussion is given to what Sparta would be like in a fantasy game world, with discussion given to questions of magic, demihumans, and monsters.

If these sound boring, or like wasted space, rest assured that they aren’t. What’s interesting about these is that the “fantasy Sparta” section flows smoothly after the “historical Sparta” one. In other words, both sections work together to present how Sparta would appear in your Pathfinder game, with the two overviews divided but clearly working together to paint a single picture. (And if the idea of putting Sparta in your Pathfinder game seems awkward, it shouldn’t; taking real-world cultures and putting an analogue of them – perhaps with a different name – into a campaign world has a very long tradition in tabletop RPGs.)

Following this, the book presents us with a base class for the archetypal Spartan warrior: the hoplite. It should be pointed out that the base class has all of the necessary information to make it playable (skill points, etc.) but also includes notations for things like their starting gold and usual starting age, which all too often are overlooked when new classes are introduced.

A full-BAB class, the hoplite’s main class feature is the Spartan Discipline ability that functions much like rogue talents in that, at every even level, the hoplite can choose from a list of abilities (with some advanced abilities being selectable at 10th level and above). Having looked closely at these abilities, none of them are particularly over- or underpowered. In fact, a great deal seem to be inspired by existing abilities in other classes, such as being able to re-roll a failed Will save, a +10 increase to base speed, immunity to fear, etc. Admittedly, there were one or two powers that seemed on the high end of the power scale, but only relatively so – yes, a +1 to all attack rolls is generous, but not game-breaking.

The other class features of the hoplite are similarly balanced and colorful. I found it exceptionally appropriate, for example, that hoplites can use the spear and longspear one-handed at 1st level, for instance, since that’s how those spears are handled in real life. Likewise, there are a number of shield-based abilities here as well, mostly gained by being adjacent to an ally – helpfully, these allies do not need to be hoplites themselves (something I was worried would be required). It was also nice to see abilities to make the tower shield more viable in combat (because, in all my years of play, I’ve seen the tower shield used exactly once, by a guy who was all defense and no offense).

I personally would have preferred to see some APG-style follow-up to this class, such as alternate favored class abilities, or some archetypes for this class, but those are extras whose lack of inclusion doesn’t detract from the class. Likewise, the book does provide some extras in terms of looking at what it means to play a hoplite in the game, including how they tend to relate to other classes and races, how NPCs view them, notable (fantasy) hoplites, and even a table of what you know about them on a Knowledge check.

Alternate class featured are provided in the following section, covering twelve classes (all but two of which, the cavalier and the oracle, are Core Rulebook classes). Interestingly, these aren’t presented as archetypes, but rather are collections of alternate class features, something I was slightly disappointed over – I’m of the opinion that alternate class features work better in packages than they do by letting players cherry-pick the best materials. But again, that’s a small complaint.

It’s in the favored class abilities that we see things swing a little wider on the balance scale. Again, I have to stress that none of these are broken nor unplayable – just that there are a relatively scant handful of options that are notably better or worse than existing options. For example, the bard can swap out their 20th-level power, deadly performance, for an ability to grant all allies +4 to their AC, attack and damage rolls, and saves. That’s great for everybody else in the party, but I doubt that the bard would want to give up a save-or-die effect for buffing everybody else, particularly when they already have (less powerful but still not-inconsiderable) buffing abilities. On the other side of the scale, the new sorcerer bloodline has, for its bloodline arcane, the sorcerer using a d8 Hit Die and a ¾ BAB, without having to give anything up. I haven’t playtested that, but it seems too good compared to other bloodlines (in 3.5, when Unearthed Arcana introduced that option, it lowered the sorcerer’s spells per day and spells known by 1 each, for example; though to be fair, 3.5 had a lower power level than Pathfinder does).

Having said that, most of what’s here is great material. The cavalier, for example, has a new order introduced, which among other powers lets them – just a few times per day – survive an otherwise-fatal blow, which instead reduces them to 1 hit point (and can’t be used for 1 minute after it’s been used). Balanced and effective. The cleric can lose channeling healing or harming energy to channel buffs or penalties instead (to their allies or enemies, respectively). The monk can swap out evasion for a power that’s identical but applies to Fort saves instead, etc.

To summarize all of the above, these alternate class abilities allow for a character to be much more martial than they’d otherwise be; in accordance with a character from Sparta.

The book’s last section covers new traits, which was fun to see as traits are one of the new parts of the game that I enjoy the most. Three general traits are presented, along with traits for each of the three social castes in Spartan society.

Again, there are good and bad points to these. Most traits (like feats) that I’ve seen usually provide a small bonus – having them provide too large of a bonus is too generous, while having them provide a bonus and a penalty is flavorful, but not beneficial enough. Again, those are the upper and lower ends of the zeitgeist of trait design, so breaking it may not result in a weaker character, but it makes some of these traits seem, on their face, sub-optimal.

And again, that doesn’t apply to most of these traits, either. Of the eleven traits here, having one that grants proficiency in leather armor, the buckler, and the longspear, for example, is perfectly in line with what traits should do, as is one that gives you a +1 Fort bonus to resist fatigue and a Strength 5 points higher for encumbrance purposes. It’s when a trait has you losing skill points to gain increasing weapon and armor proficiencies that these become sticky.

The traits, it should be noted, are the last section of the book, which is odd because the introduction says there’s also a new prestige class. Perhaps it’s dining in Hell?

Overall, Ancient Warriors: Sons of Sparta presents a good sourcebook for ideas on having Sparta – or some version thereof – in your game. More than just a new class, its holistic presentation encourages having an entire region like the historical warrior city-state in your campaign world, and does a good job presenting how it’d function in a high-fantasy setting. The new base class is a solid presentation that stands alongside the fighter, paladin, barbarian, and other martial classes in terms of how viable it functions. The alternate class features and traits may require some oversight, but for the most part are great new additions that helps to present how everyone would be in a military nation. If you want a martial character that will fight in the shade, make him one of the Sons of Sparta.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
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Codex Mechanica: On the Creation of Fabricants
by Thilo G. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 10/09/2011 04:17:32

This pdf is 44 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 1 page advertisement, 1 page SRD and 1 page back cover, leaving 39 pages of content for the Fabricants.

Following the format of NNW's pdfs, the book kicks off with a mood-setting piece of fluff, in this instance actually a quite well-written one and then goes on to introduce the basic premise that led to the creation of this pdf, which, in this case, is the desire to create a golem-template book that has evolved into a construct-player-race book. People who've been following my reviews for a long time might remember me ranting about my hatred for the mechanical execution of Eberron's Warforged as well as my review of Rite Publishing's Ironborn, which will serve as my benchmark for this review. It won't take you long, though, to realize the fundamental differences between Rite's Ironborn and the Fabricants, the latter being much more construct-like. Not necessarily in fluff, but in crunch. What I mean with this is, that the Ironborn still feel like a construct-like race that adheres to similar mechanics like beings of flesh and blood. That cannot be said of the fabricants.

NNW'S construct player race lacks a con-score, to begin with and is, for all intents and purposes, a construct with ALL the immunities against drain, poison etc. that entails. Even more striking, when brought to 0 HP, they just turn off and have to be crafted back together - yes, crafted. No healing spells or effects whatsoever for the fabricants and even the cheap-shop mending gambit DOES NOT work on them. They are essentially reduced to healing points "naturally" via repair by others or himself. They get a set of attributes according to the base-race after which they're modeled and darkvision as well as low-light vision. The huge plethora of immunities and the lack of available fast healing make for an interesting playing experience, yes, but I'm not entirely sure whether the skill-based repair-mechanic might not be exploited. That being said, they can still be hit by death attacks, though there don't seem to be any repercussions for dropping to 0 HP - no XP-loss, nothing. I'm not comfortable with that. While I realize the potential challenges of repairing the fabricant in field and carry them around, unfortunately said information on the weight of them is absent from the race's write-up. While I get the replicant-angle with regards to height, I still think that a weight-table would be immensely useful. After all, sooner or later, they'll be disabled in the field and then it's up to their friends to carry them to safety. The fact that a cleric (or other character among the PCs) might have to learn a craft-skill to repair a defunct fabricant is another drain on the party's resources that should be mentioned prior to allowing them into your game.

As befitting of the new construct race(s), they get a kind of racial paragon class, the Iron Warrior, which gets d10, 2+INT skills per level, proficiency with only their armor and weapon upgrades, no good saves and full BAB. The class is centered on the new upgrade mechanic for fabricants, which enables them to gain weapon and body upgrades to further refine their bodies and modify themselves. The lack of skills as well as the bad saves keep the class from being too versatile, though.

23 new feats are up next and they should be given more than a cursory glance, as they once again have quite interesting rules-repercussions: The feats are quite far out and further serve to underline the alien feel of the fabricants: From recharging wands and even installing them within your body, additional ring-slots, the ability to transfer magic weapon and armor qualities to your own upgrades to being able to store elemental energy you usually would resist on a point-to-point basis and transfer this damage via 5-point increments into elemental blasts to some rather regular feats that help against some of the drawbacks of the class (e.g. improving saves against particular effects), a whole slew of very unique feats are presented herein. For the crafters endeavoring to create their own fabricants, rules for their creation and even the ability to mass-produce masterwork (read: intelligent) fabricants and fabricant drones are given for the warlord presiding over his very own crafted army - gold for NPCs, though I'd personally limit the PC's access to the mass production feat. Positive and negative energy adaption first had me scratching my hand, fearing a feat that cancles out the one signature drawback of the race. Instead, they are useful, but very limited in the amount of healing a fabricant may receive via these sources. Finally, there are two feats that deal with the final death of a fabricant: A devastating self-destruct-blast that lets them go down in a blaze of glory and the ability to temporarily transfer the sentience into unattended objects. I gather the ability works if your body is destroyed, but I'm not entirely sure with regards to the latter, as the feat does not mention the specific situation.

The section that truly makes the fabricants stand out, though, would be the section on their upgrades, which range in complexity from level 1 to 5 - depending on the level of the character, he will have a certain threshold that limits the amount of modifications and their complexity that can be installed into a given fabricant. Generally, they can be divided up into 5 categories: Armor, weapon, miscellaneous, movement-based and sensory upgrades. From the obvious weapon-arms to tremorsense, blindsense and even the ability to see through walls as well as using some spells as spell-like abilities (e.g. Arcane Sight), the upgrades offer a lot of different options to customize your fabricant without being unbalancing due to the limit of modifications available for installation at any given time. Where applicable, save-DCs scale with the modification threshold of the fabricants.

Finally, if you want to go for more of a cyborg-like approach, there's the Iron Magus PrC, which offers d8, 2+Int skills, 3/4 BAB, medium will save and 7 levels of spell progression over 10 levels. Iron Magi can choose from a limited array of upgrades that are determined more by level than in the case of a true fabricant. They also come with their own lore-section, but unfortunately not with information on how the upgrades modify the Magi's weight.

Conclusion: Editing and formatting are top-notch, I didn't notice any glitches. The pdf comes as both a screen and a printer-friendly version. It should be noted that this pdf does not feature NNW's usual used-parchment-layout: While still adhering to the two-column standard, it is a beautiful bronze-like style. The artworks of the fabricants are rather bad and detract from the overall impression of the book and contrast starkly with the otherwise beautiful layout. The screen-version is extensively bookmarked. So...how do the fabricants compare to the Ironborn? To cut a long matter short, they don't. While Ironborn feel rather like artificially-enhanced people (and in my campaign, I substituted clockworks for Iron, making them rather steam-punkish), the Fabricants are ALIEN. While the fluff-text unfortunately does not represent this sense of otherness, the rules actually do a great job of covering all the aspects of being a construct you'd look for: From the strangeness of the repairing mechanics to the upgrades and feats, Fabricants feel strikingly different from any organic race you might have played. More impressively, the designers over at NNW have managed what I until now considered to be almost impossible, i.e. creating a race of playable constructs that is not essentially unbalancing.

However, the drain on skills on their fellow adventurers as well as this strength, said alienness with regards to both rules and look, also mean that they are harder to implement into your campaign or modify to fit a niche than the Ironborn. While the focus of the book is definitely on the new Iron Warrior class, I would have loved to see a section on how fabricants e.g. interact with other class-abilities, like the druid's wild-shape and at least some guidelines for fabricants of other classes to help ease the transition. The fact that no weight for them is given, is a grievous glitch, though, as I can picture a plethora of situations in which the PCs might be hard-pressed to carry a defunct fabricant to safety. The lack of penalty for being incapacitated is a rather severe design-decision that can easily be remedied, though. All in all, I'm rather impressed - once in a while NNW releases a pdf that is just elegant, concise and cool in design and I was truly impressed by the way in which they handled the crunch in this one. Unfortunately, the minor glitches like the missing weight and others I mentioned as well as the rather sci-fi style, subpar artwork and much too flesh-and-blood-style fluff make it rather hard for me to rate this 5 stars - the relatively high impact the implementation of fabricants might have on your group being another limiting factor. In the end, my final verdict will reflect the excellent quality of the crunch and take the difficulties into account, clocking in at a solid 4 stars - not for everyone, but if you're interested or need some inspiration to modify constructs, go for it.

Endzeitgeist out.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
Codex Mechanica: On the Creation of Fabricants
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Ancient Warriors: Sons of Sparta
by Jim C. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 10/03/2011 02:00:44

I have received a copy of this product as a free download and reviewed it at the publisher's suggestion.

I'd like to see a hoplite class done well, as I've mentioned in regard to another attempt. I'm curious how class features for the barbarian, cavalier, monk, rogue and sorcerer fit into the subject of the work. I won't comment on everything, but just pick up a few points.

The introduction seems a little overstated. The Spartans didn't fight for nor favour democracy, as they were a monarchy supported by an unfree majority (as the section immediately afterwards describes). The classical world raised many famous warriors, not least the Immortals on the opposing side at Thermopylae.

The Hoplite: It might seem appropriate to make this an alternate class to the fighter. Generally, I can see players of other classes being tempted to dip into this for a couple of levels to pick up some of the abilities that perhaps break a few too many assumptions of the game and could have been more limited or deferred to higher levels. I do think it's an advance on Blackdirge's already interesting treatment, earlier mentioned.

Traits: These will need a little work to fit into the Pathfinder framework, which (without presupposing a solution) the author could potentially have covered in only a sentence or two. A lot of them are interesting, though.

This brings together a lot of good information for the gamer who's not an expert in the field (in a similar sense to the various reprints of public-domain works on this site, perhaps) and I certainly wouldn't describe its game content as unplayable, with a little judgement.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
Ancient Warriors: Sons of Sparta
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Ancient Warriors: Sons of Sparta
by Nick H. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 10/02/2011 17:35:09

Son's of Sparta is a nice 28 page book that focuses on giving players more combat options. The book is themed toward ancient Greece's Spartans but still has a fairly universal appeal. The first few pages of this book are dedicated to glossing over some historical context and incorporating Sparta in to a campaign world. The next section offers a new class, the hoplite. The hoplite is a melee fighter that does well in the support area and functioning as part of a unit. As opposed to contrary belief the class is indeed playable and includes both a skill list and a skills points per day below it (located in the top right hand corner of page 6). The next section features alternate class features. Admittedly the first few options, namely the ones for the bard and cavalier, are fairly overpowered, though the barbarian ability withstand death far more so than the far more spoken of cavalier ability, but as the section goes on the abilities become more balanced. Overall the section provides a few interesting options that are fairly nice barring the rather overpowered abilities early in the section, though there are some rather boring options too. The traits section follows and adds a little flavor to the characters if nothing else, but that's all traits are really supposed to do is add some flavor to a character. Over all the book is nice and adds some interesting new options, i personally prefer the oracle archetype and the hoplite class and would call those the highlights but it is fairly polished with only a few balancing issues occurring in some abilities. but these are easily fixed or omitted (the cavalier order seriously becomes balanced if you just flip the 8th and 15th levels abilities to being gained at the others level).I give this 3.5-4 stars. Some options are dull others are intriguing, while others are just too powerful but it is better than a mediocre product and depending on how you use it it can be quite good.(the rating is rounded up)



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
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Ancient Warriors: Sons of Sparta
by Thilo G. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 09/25/2011 14:11:25

This pdf is 28 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 1 page advertisement, 1 page SRD and 1 page back cover, leaving 23 pages of content for the Spartans.

After a short introduction as well as a short historical story, we are introduced to culture, religion and lifestyle of the Spartans and the peculiarities. This not being an historical exercise, the information is rather sketchy, elaborations are expanded to transform Sparta as a nation into a fantasy realm before introducing the spear-wielding Hoplite class. The class gets d10, a good fort-save, full BAB and no spellcasting. No information on how many skill-points per level the hoplite gets, though, essentially being a MAJOR glitch that makes the class, as written unusable.

Which is a pity, as the class uses the disciple/major disciple mechanic you'll know from e.g. SGG's different genius guide classes. We get 14 disciplines to choose from as well as 8 major disciplines. The class focuses, not surprisingly, on cooperative phalanx-formation, spears and tower shields. Unfortunately, though, neither the capstone ability, nor the rather bland disciplines really caught my interest. Even worse, they are not balanced among themselves: Would you rather take a bonus feat or rerolls for ALL diseases and poison-saves? Thought so. The information on playing the hoplites and their lore-sections are ok pieces, but nothing to truly write home about.

The next section deals with alternate lass features. We get 2 Barbarian ones centering on being tough as nails, a level 20 bard performance that grants +4 morale bonus to atk, damage, AC and saves. I may be biased but I consider my Northlands-skald capstone much cooler - the Spartan bard's performance feels like a high-level buff and not like a true level 20-capstone. The new Cavalier order, the order of Lycurgus, is unbalanced to the extreme, gaining an ability at 8th level that prevents the cavalier from being slain and instead drop to 1 HP, regardless of the damage. To add insult to injury, he can use this more often at higher levels.

The cleric's alternate battle blessings feel rather like bardic performances than cleric abilities to me, buffing fighting prowess via a burst of energy. Druids can get a rather bland bonus to survival for resist nature's lure. Fighters can specialize in a particular armor or give up one their bonus feats (one of their defining characteristics) for exploits that are generally a) more powerful (i.e. immunity to charm and compulsion) and b) should have been rather hoplite exclusives, as they detract from the unique feeling of being a Spartan warrior when made available to just about any fighter. Monks (and Rangers) can change evasion for durability, which does essentially the same for fort-based spells and effects and a lame 2 bonus against being nauseated and sickened.

Oracles gets the new mystery of Delphi - which actually is once again an example of the good design NNW is capable of: The oracle is very iconic and the abilities are all recognizable from Greek mythology -nice! Paladins can exchange smite for defensive abilities. The new rogue talents are nothing to write home about and enable the rogues to scavenge from the fighter exploits, further underlining characteristic abilities that enhance the iconicity of classes. Not my cup of tea. Sorcerors get a new bloodline ("Warrior's Blood") that makes you tougher. I'm not sure why a sorceror would take the bloodline, though: It had no truly outstanding power or spell. Finally, the pdf provides 11 new traits, 3 general ones and 3 per upper and middle social class, while the lower class gets 2 traits. The 2 pages of traits are among the best content in this file.

Conclusion: Editing is ok, I only noticed a minor glitch. Formatting, though has us without skills for the central base-class of the product, a devastating error that just should not happen. The pdf is bookmarked and comes with a printer-friendly version. Oh boy. If you're even remotely familiar with Spartan culture and mentality, you won't have too much going for the first couple of pages. The Hoplite base-class unfortunately is unusable as written thanks to the lack of skill points per level in both pdfs and the disciplines feel unbalanced among themselves, offering very weak and very powerful choices. I won't start with the balancing with other classes. The alternate class-features left me cold due to being either unbalanced or bland with the sole exception of the extremely iconic Mystery of Delphi, which will remain the only piece I'll salvage from this pdf. The traits are nice, but geared toward Sparta's class-system and thus only useful if you plan to implement the whole nation. As a historical perspective, the pdf falls short and does not offer any facts apart from the class-system you could not glean from "accurate" sources like 300. As a pure gaming supplement, I can't recommend it either, as both the spear-feats from KQ and 4WFG's strategists & tacticians offer better and more fulfilling takes on the spear-wielding warrior trope, which is a pity as personally I like them. I wanted this to be good, the hoplite be a winner. Unfortunately, I pronounce a final verdict of FAIL and award 1.5 stars, the 0.5 coming from the mystery, the low price and the traits. Nevertheless, I'll round down to one.

Endzeitgeist out.



Rating:
[1 of 5 Stars!]
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A Necromancer's Grimoire: Marchen der Daemonwulf
by Dark M. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 09/16/2011 17:39:24

A Necromancer's Grimoire: Marchen der Daemonwulf by Necromancers of the Northwest

This product is 28 pages long. It starts with a cover, ToC, forward, and credits. (4 pages)

Introduction (22 pages) This introduces the racial class Lycaonite. It is a melee combatant based werewolf class. D12, high BaB, 2 skills, simple weapons, light armor and they get natural weapons. They are effected by the moon, the closer to full the bigger bonuses to to-hit, dmg, skills, saves, etc. but on the flip side new moons and close to that gives minus. Plus some bonus feats and special abilities with their natural weapons.

It gives information about them, a lore table, daily life etc. There is 55 new feat's most of them require you to be cursed of the werewolf. Most of them are pretty neat and make sense. It ends with 4 new magic items.

It ends with a OGL and back cover. (2 pages)

Closing thoughts. The art work is color and is mostly pretty good. Editing and layout was ok. I noticed a couple of errors and in one spot I thought the layout should have been done differently. While it is a pretty book it would be brutal on a printer as there is no print friendly version. The feats alone are almost worth getting the book if nothing else to use for NPC werewolves. The class while a neat idea I am not sold on. It is a great deal of major book keeping, that I am just not sure I think the payoff of playing it is worth the pain in the ass of the book keeping required. Not to mention at some times of the month depending on the moon the class will be pretty strong while at other times it will honestly be pretty weak. So all and all I am going with, nice idea, but needs work to make it work. So what's my rating? I am going with a 3 star review. If you don't mind the book keeping it isn't to bad and the feats alone are worth a look for the price.

Trust me, I'm a Succubus.



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
A Necromancer's Grimoire: Marchen der Daemonwulf
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A Necromancer's Grimoire: Spirit Warriors
by Thilo G. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 09/05/2011 03:24:24

This pdf is 27 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 1 page advertisement, 1 page SRD and 1 page back cover, leaving 22 pages for the new Spirit Warrior base-class, so what's this warrior all about?

Basically, Spirit Warriors can channel semi-ascended, legendary heroes and utilize their power, somewhat similar to a martial take on the binder-class. The class gets d10, 2+Int skills per level, proficiency with martial weapons, light armor and associated armors of exemplars, full BAB and good fort saves. Spirit Warriors can choose 3 exemplars, but some exemplars are opposed to one another, making it impossible to channel both, thus limiting the possibilities to choose from. When manifesting his exemplar (a rather unsubtle halo of power, complete with ghostly armor and weapons), the Spirit Warrior gains an armor bonuses, weapon enhancements, weapon qualities, access to infusions (the abilities of the respective exemplars) as well as a significant boost to attributes.

However, channeling these paragons is taxing, requiring a steep will-save each round (which is not too easy regarding the bad will-save of the class!) to prevent the premature end of the channelization. Furthermore, this exhausts/fatigues the Spirit Warrior and until he has recovered, no further attempts to manifest exemplars can be made. Infusions have 6 levels that become available over the levels of the class. The capstone ability depends on the exemplar and is, for every exemplar, iconic enough for me to like it.

The pdf offers 6 sample exemplars: Gilgamesh, master of whirling, flaming blades, he can manifest additional deadly arms. The dark legend of Arthurian myths, Mordred, is another exemplar available and can cleave devastating, infernal wounds and summon diabolic minions. Legendary hunter Orion is the ranged fighter of the lot, offering some nice devastating special tricks with his arrows. Solomon, wise and kind opposite of Mordred, can summon angels and has divine and light-related abilities. Sun Wukong, the legendary monkey king of Asian myth offers mobility and fast attacks to his Spirit Warriors, while Suanoo offers a plethora of storm-related and water-based abilities, offering a calculated and intelligent counterpart to Gilgamesh's wild mood swings and fiery rages.

The pdf concludes with a section on Spirit Warriors in the world and advice for both players and DMs to use the new class.

Conclusion: Editing and formatting are top-notch, I didn't notice any glitches. The pdf comes as both a printer-friendly and a screen version. Layout adheres to NNW-standard with its two columns and used-parchment look. This review is hard for me. Really hard. One the one hand I love the ancient, mystic, creepy feel of the class - its crunch and fluff are formidable. On the other hand, though, I have some problems with this book as well, namely its limiting factor: In order to balance the significant benefits, the will-save mechanic is used and much of the enjoyment of playing a Spirit Warrior hinges upon succeeding at these saves, potentially meaning the difference between being a powerful and valuable addition to the party and being a rather subpar fighter substitute. The Spirit Warrior is powerful, but only in short bursts - while this is a conscious design decision, it also somewhat dictates how the class has to used by the player and limits the appeal of the class a bit. I would have loved for some exemplars to rather wait and see, offering easier saves, while the saves of others quickly escalate in blazes of power. While I get the reasoning behind this general approach to the mechanic, a more complex mechanic with scaling circumstance modifiers and at least some rounds of guaranteed power would have been nice.

Furthermore, this pdf is simply too short to make the class wholly appealing: Offering a scant group of 6 exemplars is not much and while their write-ups are nice, their abilities great, the lack of options to choose from means that the novelty of the class can quickly wear off. If there were, I don't know, 12 to 20 exemplars, this class would rock so incredibly hard I'd start drooling. Unfortunately, not even guidelines to develop new exemplars are given to the DM, something sorely needed with regards to such a limited selection. The tie-ins to earth-mythology could be problematic as well, as the DM as to somehow fit the exemplars into her campaign, but quite frankly, I think any DM should be up to this particular task. If only there was more material for the spirit warrior out there, I'd immediately rate this among my most favorite class-books. As written, though, it's briefness makes it fall short of its excellent potential. If you as a DM are willing to invest time in figuring out how to implement them and want to expand upon the idea, this pdf will be somewhere between 4.5 and 5 stars. For the general public, though, I'll settle for a final verdict of 3.5 stars, rounded down to 3 - a good book with some unfortunate limitations that could have easily been a stellar book.

Endzeitgeist out.



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
A Necromancer's Grimoire: Spirit Warriors
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A Necromancer's Grimoire: Faces of the Rakshasa
by Paco G. J. [Featured Reviewer] Date Added: 09/03/2011 10:23:27

This review was first published in GMS Magazine and was written by Thilo Graf.

This pdf is 37 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 1 page advertisement, 1 page SRD and 1 page back cover, leaving 32 pages of content for your perusal, so let's check it out!

As has become tradition with NNW-books, the latest addition to their roster begins with a short story after which we'll get the new 20-level racial rakshasa-class. I'm an avid fan of the animal-headed, shapeshifting manipulators and this is the class for all the people who ever wanted to play one as a PC. Wait, what? Yep, you heard me. The class gets d10, 6+Int skills per level, good ref and will saves, sorcerer casting at half class level, scaling natural armor bonus and 4 levels sans HD. It's the Green Hag from Secrets of the Witch all over again. The native outsiders do get DR, spellcasting, ability bonuses etc, improving detect thoughts/telepathic abilities, Spell Resistance and finally can even kill others with their latent mental powers at 20th level. We also get a section on their height & weight, how they interact with the world and a lore section. The pdf also offers advice on how to handle the at-will-detect-thoughts ability, which unfortunately, boils down to a gentleman's agreement with the DM and the assumption to tell the player when something important comes up. That does not solve the problem. To keep the class balanced, HD-less levels are included and furthermore, playing a rakshasa means no multiclassing until 14th level. When compared to Rite Publishing's racial classes, that just feels inferior design - necessitated due to the power of the rakshasa, granted, but inelegant and inflexible nevertheless. The small niche of people who want a rakshasa-PC might like this class, but everyone else, even those remotely intrigued, however, should not be too excited to play this class. If the DM is willing to put up with the unresolved and potentially annoying/unbalancing detect thoughts-issue, that is. As you might have gathered, I'm not too excited about either the mechanics or the premise of a rakshasa-PC, but, oh well.

The next section elaborates the new caste-system of the rakshasas and offers a plethora of new kinds of rakshasa with different animal heads. Bandara (Monkey-headed, CR 5) rakshasas for example are associated with lust with all the dark tones the affections of the creatures could entail. Siyara (Jackal, CR 7) rakshasas, embodiments of treachery can alter themselves to take the appearance of any individual. The boar-headed rakshasa (CR 9) are covetous creatures of gluttony and can steal items and draw strength from their gluttonous escapades, even when consuming only mundane goods. The elephant-headed rakshasa (CR 10) are the scholars of the race, brilliant analysts who can find weaknesses in individual combat styles. The murderous crocodile-headed Bajul (CR 11) can instill his dread lusts for death in mortals via his whispers. The Rhino rakshasa, personifications of aggression and rage can also inflict their fury in others - why they don't get barbarian-like abilities, though, is beyond me. The delightfully creepy spider-headed Makari rakshasas live to inflict pain and sadistically disable and then dismantle their foes. The vulture-headed (CR 15) variant of the race embodies cannibalsim and death and thus can consume the dead to ensure that bringing them back is a harder task - even worse, they draw strength from it. The most powerful form of rakshasa in this mini-bestiary section remains the Ular at CR 17, though, getting poisonous breath, paralyzing gazes etc. and symbolize the cardinal sin of pride while abhorring deities. Snake-men that hate deities. sigh Where all the other rakshasas felt like they had something going for them, this one rather elicited a yawn, at least with regards to this motivation. When all's said and done, I was pleasantly surprised by this mini-bestiary - the rakshasas all had at least something going for them, a nice ability or two and come with a lot of fluff text, information on their caste etc., helping you present them.

Conclusion:

Editing is top-notch, I didn't notice any glitches, though one of the bookmarks is called "Untitled" when it should read Ular (Serpent) . The used-parchment-look-layout adheres to NNW's two-column standard and is functional. The pdf comes in two versions, a printer-friendly one and the screen-version with the parchment-look and both are extensively bookmarked. The artwork is stock and rather cheesy and unfortunately we don't get artworks for the respective kinds of rakshasa, which usually helps immensely with monsters. Due to the very low price, that is kind of understandable. What is not understandable, at least to me, is the mess of a class the rakshasa is: No multiclassing is a bummer, but as mentioned, I understand that as a design-decision (though not one I'm fond of). What I don't get is how the plethora of mind-reading abilities are presented, but without a viable solution but a gentlemen's agreement - otherwise, the game will GRIND to a painful halt. Often. Designing adventures for mind-readers can be fun, after all my own group has had a telepath for the last 7 years, but only if he cannot perceive thoughts constantly. Any artificial restriction, any way at all to limit the classes ability to x/day would have been a vast improvement. As written, I do not see a well-crafted class, but a detriment to fun for all participants waiting to happen, even more so than with the Green Hag-class.

The bestiary, though, is something: The monsters are well-crafted and their fluff actually makes them sufficiently sinister, devious and even downright creepy - here we can see what the guys at NNW can do.

How, then, do I rate this? The rakshasa base-class fails in all regards but the 1:1-simulation of playing a monster from the bestiary and thus I'd give it 1 star. The bestiary, though, is actually quite well-made and would usually receive a score of 4 stars from yours truly. The bookmark glitch is detrimental, as is the lack of pictures for the monsters, though. My final verdict will be 2.5 stars, rounded down to 2. If you're in this for the monsters and don't care about artwork, go for it. Otherwise steer clear.

Endzeitgeist out.



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
A Necromancer's Grimoire: Faces of the Rakshasa
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A Necromancer's Grimoire: The Book of Faith
by Thilo G. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 09/02/2011 07:36:14

This pdf is 37 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 1 page advertisement, 1 page SRD and 1 page back cover, leaving 32 pages of content.

This pdf kicks off with an aptly-written short narrative and an introduction to the task at hand, i.e. making divine casters feel more different from arcane casters by providing a new complementary mechanic to cleric along a new base-class, the Priest.

The Priest is a divine vessel of its deity, determining his spell's DCs via Wis, but calculating the bonus spells not via by an attribute, but via his piety, but more on his peculiarities later. The class gets d6, 1/2 BAB, 4+ Int skills, a good will save, full spellcasting and a point-based amount of favors per day. He can ready a very limited array of clerical magic every day, but casts them via said favors. All in all an interesting, point-based casting system. Additionally, he gets miracles, but more on that later. The ability to offer absolutions and care for their flock via confessions , a varaint of the atonement, offers a nice additional roleplaying incentive to care for others.

Roleplaying is, much to my pleasant surprise, one of the central mechanics of determining the excess power of a priest - as they are dependent on the piety for their powers, a slacking priest of one level might actually fall back in power-level behind his zealous compadre, offering an extremely powerful and rewarding tool for the DM to reward the player all while the player is encouraged to adhere to the tenets of his faith. Favor can also be rewarded thusly and a lot of coverage is given to help the DM balance these gains and offer necessary guidance. Nice!

Additionally, miracles offer a new way for Priest to channel the favor of their deity: The can be used only a limited amount of times per day/week etc. and are very powerful, depending again on the priest's piety - for the severity of the respective miracle's effects. From blessing the harvest to anointing ground, constructing and creating objects and structures from thin air, curing diseases, etc. Symbolizing major favors from the Priest's deity, these should not be used frivolously and draw heavily center on major ramifications and iconic things. Being similar to ritual magic, they usually feel powerful and cool. However, only 17 miracles are presented and I would have loved to see more. A lot more.

Finally, the devoted apostle, a prestige class for especially devout characters and priests in general is presented - many abilities working only if the characters has enough piety. The apostle gets d8, 1/2 BAB, good will saves and 8 levels of spellcasting over 10 levels.

Unfortunately, the PrC offers just about the only major blemish I could find in this product - the class lacks information on how many skill points per level they get, rendering using them as written impossible.

Conclusion: Editing is good, I noticed some minor punctuation errors. Formatting is fine as well, with the notable exception of said skill points missing, which costs the pdf 1 star. The pdf comes as a printer-friendly and a screen version and is bookmarked. The artwork are stock-photos of beautiful church windows. Nice idea!

Mechanically, I loved this pdf - the new class is neat, very distinct and divine in feeling - The mechanics are sound and when all's said and done, I absolutely loved the concept of the Priest and his roleplaying-dependant abilities. If you're rather a roll-player, this book might not be for you, but if you ever thought that rules-wise the cleric did not feel too divine, this is gold for you. Unfortunately, the blemish of the PrC makes it impossible for me to rate this pdf the full 5 stars. If there were more miracles to choose this would have been almost perfect and due to this limited selection and the major formatting glitch, I'll settle for a final verdict to 4 stars. If you don't mind the glitch, this is 5 stars for you.

Endzeitgeist out.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
A Necromancer's Grimoire: The Book of Faith
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A Necromancer's Grimoire: Faces of the Rakshasa
by Shane O. [Featured Reviewer] Date Added: 08/21/2011 16:39:26

Rakshasas are one of those foes that work much better outside of a purely combat-focused scenario, I always thought. More than anything, they seem like scheming manipulators, being more inclined to extort, blackmail, and otherwise make others do their bidding without ever having to spill any blood. Despite their monstrous nature, that level of subterfuge can be tempting to a PC who wants to run the same sort of character. With the release of A Necromancer’s Grimoire: Faces of the Rakshasa, that path is now open to PCs everywhere.

Faces of the Rakshasa comes in two PDFs. The first is the full book itself, and the second is its printer-friendly counterpart. While I applaud the Necromancers of the Northwest for including a printer-friendly version at all – something that gets ignored all too often – its implementation here is imperfect. For one thing, the color cover is kept, as are all of the interior illustrations. What’s changed here is that the full version sets the background to a cream-colored parchment look, whereas the printer-friendly version is set on a while background.

Both files include full nested bookmarks, which is handy. However, the Necromancers still don’t seem to have licked that problem with copy-and-paste. The printer-friendly file doesn’t have it at all, whereas the main file does, but the pasted result has weird symbols and characters, resulting in a copy whose usefulness is limited at best.

After an opening piece of fiction that does an adequate job displaying the evil narcissism of a rakshasa, the book can be largely divided into three sections. The first deals with the rakshasa PC class.

A sidebar covers the basics of how this works, but what’s basically here is a 20-level base class designed to emulate the powers of a standard rakshasa from the Bestiary. Note that it achieves this in about fourteen levels; the remaining six levels add new powers to better make your rakshasa a paragon among its kind.

The second portion of the book is devoted to dealing with rakshasas in society, which spends a good deal of time talking about how to play a rakshasa PC. There’s some good advice here, talking about what to do with a PC that has mad powers to read minds, and also how rakshasas are typically evil creatures. However, I wish at least some time had been devoted to talking about how to play a creature that clearly looks inhuman (with their animal head and all). The rakshasa PC does get some disguise-based ability, but not right from the get-go, and it takes several levels before they can permanently disguised. This is something that should have been dealt with more.

The final part of the book is a bestiary of nine new rakshasas. Ranked in ascending CR, each is given an impressive amount of discussion for their tactics and their caste – this latter idea is one that’s explored more heavily in the book’s previous section, discussing how each rakshasa reflects a various form of sin among mortals, whether lust, greed, sadism, etc.

My major complaint with this section wasn’t about anything that was here, but because it makes the rakshasa PC racial class seem somewhat rigid in comparison. That class will let you advance as a standard Bestiary rakshasa, but what if you want to play as a sadistic makari rakshasa instead? There’s no support for that, and it’s disappointing – this would have been a good place for archetypes to come into play. Hopefully a further supplement will expand on this.

Overall, Faces of the Rakshasa does a lot for these classic foes. It gives depth and coverage to how they function in the game world that you won’t find anywhere else. The nine new rakshasa do an excellent job of fleshing out the myriad forms that these creatures can manifest in, and the addition of a rakshasa PC racial class is excellent for those who want to take a walk on the dark side. It’s unfortunate that the lack of expanded materials, and a few technical failings, hold this product back from being a five-star book, because the potential is clearly there. Hopefully we’ll see another face to these rakshasas to round things out.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
A Necromancer's Grimoire: Faces of the Rakshasa
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