Just curious if (when?) this may be coming to POD, as Weird Ancestries already is? Cheers.

Great bones to a game with tons of possibilities. Lots of options and a streamlined system.

Awesome! A large and distinctive number of races / ancestries. Cool mechanics.

Excellent starting adventure for SotWW Perfect for introducing a new group to the game and world Highest possible recommendation!

Decently written dungeon crawler. It could be plugged into any campaign in any world with easy. Won't play/lead game with this one, as I am not a fan of DC.

Great investigation adventure with premise: be afraid of friendzoned men and betrayed women. A handful of memorable NPCs included. Buy it, I believe it is great! (I will spare no time to convert this one into PF2e too).

Very nice investigation adventure. It is based on simple premise and has memorable NPCs with clearly understandable motives. As kickstarter backer I can tell it is one of the best ones, created till now. Buy it! I can't sell my group on playing Shadow of the Weird Wizard, but I surely will spare no time for converting this one to PF2e.

I admire the bravery of making a fantasy game and only including humans in the core rulebook. I imagine there's a number of people annoyed that ancestries that are standard in other games, like dwarves and elves, are functionally paywalled. I personally don't mind, especially since as mentioned in the intro to this book, Schwalb wanted Weird Wizard to be the story of "...humanity's struggle to escape its own downfall and rebuild in a new place..." and that he "...wanted humans to save themselves and not have to rely on elves or woodwoses to pull them out of trouble. At least to start."

So with that bit of context out of the way, Weird Ancestries. It's a good book. I'll admit I had my misgivings, and not purely mechanical ones. I'm not too proud to admit that I skipped the introduction and got right into looking at the ancestries, so I got worried when I noticed that each one had its own novice path. Uh oh, is this the return of race as class from the old days? That's its own mechanical and sociological bag of worms. Thankfully, I was wrong. For those of you who care about things like fighting against bioessentialism in gaming and growing from our roots, you'll be satisfied to see (or at least I was) that those worries have been heard and kept in mind during design. As far as I can tell, ancestry traits are all purely biology based and not cultural, and the ancestry paths are all additional themed novice paths designed to give examples of the baseline and archtypical version of the ancestry or just expand on those aforementioned biological traits. There's no expectation or requirement to take the ancestral novice path, and in fact each ancestry comes with baked-in rationale for taking any of the four default novice paths (or in the case of certain deity-averse ancestries, why you probably don't take priest). Take the dwarf. Its traits are all about being relatively small, with the benefits of a low center of gravity and detriment of short legs, and your natural hardiness and resistance to poison. The path then deals with fighting with traditionally-dwarven weapons and being a stubborn and tough-as-nails fighter. As a further example, wargs are people that shapeshift into wolves, and their novice path is all about improving that wolf form and expressing animalistic fury.

For those of you who don't care about this stuff, you're getting 30 well-made ancestries, each of which has its own well-made novice path, AND those novice paths are available to any ancestry that wants them, within reason. Hard to play a path that improves your wolf form when you don't got one, eh?

As for the ancestries themselves, there's a nice mix. You have your standard ancestries, dwarf, elf, halfling; you then have your standard Schwalb Entertainment fare with clockwork, dhampir, goblin; you also get some out there ancestries added to the mix, like the miniature dragons, dragonets, or the haunted pile of clothes, tatterdemalions; and then you, of course, have your furry bait and furry bait-adjecent options with fauns, haren (rabbit-folk), and sphinxes (winged lion-folk). I'm most happy about the return of the ferren, first seen in Demon Lord's Companion 2. They're humans that shapeshift into cats... or was it the other way around? Nobody's quite sure. They're very cat-minded, being lazy, prone to wandering and adopting new families, and thoroughly tsundere. Some of the minor jank of the ferren's feline form from their Shadow of the Demon Lord incarnation has been hammered out, and between that and the ferren novice path it's easier than ever to focus on spending all your time in cat form.

Overall, I think Weird Ancestries is a very good book, and well worth the money. The ancestries are varied in tone, lore, and mechanics. There's a nice mix between classic ancestries and creatures, traditional Schwalb Entertainment returnees, and left-field newcomers that's sure to fit any character concept you might have, or at the very least inspire around 30 new concepts. I don't think it's absoultely needed for the Weird Wizard experience; I do think it falls firmly into the category of "supplemental materials" here. If you're on the fence about Weird Wizard, or looking to give it a try and wondering if you should grab Weird Ancestries, I suggest playing without the additional material in this book at first. Once you know whether you'll like the game, or if you're REALLY hankering to play one of the included ancestries and can't wait, I can safely say this isn't going to disappoint.

Another Schwalb Entertainment banger, folks. Up front, I've managed to get only one adventure under my belt at time of review, but I have played the system, and thank god I did because I had some ultimately unfounded misgivings about parts of the design, particularly where they diverged from Schwalb Entertainment's first system and the base upon which Weird Wizard was built: Shadow of the Demon Lord.

My main point of comparison is Shadow of the Demon Lord, unsurprisingly. If you've played SotDL, you've played a lot of what Weird Wizard has to offer, but that's not a bad thing. It's a refinement of the template put forth by Demon Lord, and its less grimdark presentation means it's going to appeal to a much larger audience than its predecessor. Given that my main lens for thinking about Weird Wizard is through SotDL, expect most of this review to be using it as a comparison.

There were a couple rule changes that I expected to hate, but I ended up being quite wrong on that front. The main one being the change to initiative away from the frankly brilliant fast and slow turn system of SotDL, which I could only imagine would be worse than, and swiftly replaced with, fast and slow initiative, but boy howdy was I wrong. This game puts more emphasis on reactions, and provides a number of useful reactions that are basically guaranteed to be triggerable in any given round, then makes going before the NPCs cost a reaction. You never end up in a situation where you don't give something up to go fast like you occasionally did in SotDL. In the previous game, going fast cost you your movement for the round, meaning if you weren't going to move anyway there was no reason to NOT go fast. In Weird Wizard, every player has to gauge the battlefield and everyone's capabilities in order to decide whether anyone's going to use their reaction to go fast, making the start of every round so much more interesting than I feared it might be. This is why you never houserule a new game before playing it as intended, folks, you might miss a brilliant and important part of the game design.

Paths have been slightly tweaked. For those unfamiliar, instead of choosing a class, you gain paths. You get a novice path at level 1, an expert path at level 3, and a master path at level 7 (with max level being 10). Each tier up gets slightly more specific. There's four novice paths: fighter, mage, priest, and rogue. This is followed by 42 expert paths, such as swashbuckler, oracle, artificer, and assassin. Then followed by a whopping 121 master paths that are all focused on very specific parts of the game, such as a weapon type, deity, or tradition of magic. Some master paths are less specific than that, but they're still more focused than expert paths with similar themes. There's no prerequisites for any paths, meaning that you're just as able to go mage/wizard/archmage just as easily as fighter/bard/technomancer or a priest/jester/barbarian. Some paths might have better synergy, and some might clash against each other, but theoretically nothing is stopping you from making the most outlandish choices for your character if you want, and I love that. There's three major changes to the path system, meaning if you want to bring over a SotDL path it's gonna take a bit of work. Level 4 got taken from your ancestry and given to your expert path, while level 8 was taken from your novice path and granted to your master path. I think the reason your level 4 benefit got shifted away from your ancestry is a de-emphsization on constantly playing strange and fantastical creatures (in fact any non-human character has to be made with a separate book, a decision which I both admire the bravery of and grumble about), and the reason your level 8 got shifted from your novice path is due to the third and final major change. Expert paths give you more HP for their type ("type" here being which novice path they're roughly in line with), and master paths give you even more HP. As an example, fighter gives you 6 HP/level, expert paths in the general fighter vein give you 12 HP/level, and in-theme master paths give you 18 HP/level. By shifting your level 8 benefit from novice path to master path, not only does that allow Schwalb to create more interesting master paths by giving them 50% more stuff, but it greatly increases the HP you gain at that level.

The magic changes are also brilliant. Weird Wizard keeps the tradition system for learning magic from SotDL, where you learn a tradition of magic (such as alchemy, pyromancy, or technomancy), and then learn spells from within those traditions. There's two major changes to this system, and I love them both. There is no longer a power stat that determines how powerful the spells you learn can be AND determines how often you can cast those spells; instead spells are split into novice, expert, and master (and granted by paths of their respective tier) and have a flat number of castings. If you pick up a spell that can be cast three times a day at level 1, then it gives you three castings a day at level 10. This is where the second casting comes in: you can learn a spell more than once, and each time you learn that spell you gain its castings. So learn that three-casting spell twice, and you can cast it six times. Three times, you can cast it nine times. It's simple, but very effective. I have my grumbles about some of the changes, but they're grognard-y grumbles about how things have changed. Chaos no doesn't use chaos dice but instead revolves around a wild magic table. Grumble. Destruction spells don't harm you to cast them. Grumble grumble. Nothing major, and I'm sure in like, a year I'll lose those complaints because everything I've looked at has been perfectly cromulent and my only complaints is that the new thing isn't like the thing I already have.

Overall, I highly recommend Shadow of the Weird Wizard. It takes the framework of a game I already liked, tweaks and refines it, and comes out the other end with a wholly unique and in many ways improved whole. I think you really only need Shadow of the Weird Wizard and Secrets of the Weird Wizard in order to get the most out of this game, with any existing or future supplements (such as Weird Ancestries and Glory to the High One) being nice but ultimately supplemental. I also suggest picking up a couple adventures. I haven't read all of them yet, but the ones I've looked at and the one I've ran have all been quite good and worth the money.

Schwalb kinda made a more versatile version of Shadow of the demon lord with this project, we love it!

"Shadow of the Weird Wizard" is full of ideas and possibilities. Over 100 classes and 30 magic traditions allow for a practically infinite number of combinations. The game master's book "Secrets of the Weird Wizard" introduces non-human races, which are now being expanded even further with the supplementary volume "Weird Ancestries" and whose list is being supplemented by entirely new races. The most exciting thing about this is that if you are allowed to choose a novice class when you advance, you can also decide to advance within your race. As a reminder: In "Wizard" you choose from any three classes (a novice, expert and master class) during your hero's journey. If you choose your ancestry as a novice class, you will receive new, exciting racial characteristics when you level up: an archon, for example, is surrounded by a divine aura, as a centaur you trample your opponents, a changeling can not only take on the form of others but also learn to steal their memories, and a ferren can turn a failed lucky roll into a success nine times in both human and cat form over the course of his life.

"Weird Ancestries" is a really excellent book. A wonderful addition with 30 well-known, unusual and sometimes strange ancestries. So if you want even more character options or have always wanted to play a "living" pile of clothesl, this book is highly recommended.

Amazing book. Took the strong points of Demon Lord and polished it to a high sheen, and attached it to a trope-y, highly usable setting. Just what I wanted.

Amazing game, realy fun, i like The approach to high fantasy

I bought this to run as a Halloween one shot for my group. The tarot card randomisation is a stroke of genius, and makes for good replayability. The document could do with a second pass for editing to catch misspellings and weird formatting, as well as a few clarifications on rules like: if the tarot spread counts for determining which rooms connect to each other or simply the order and the party has to go through all of them; How the tower determines which of the four rooms it links to; and if the cards are meant to be flipped before the party enter the mansion, or as they enter each room. I'll keep an eye on this, if the document gets updated I'll happily update my review to 5 stars! Regardless, reading through this is a great starter adventure and I'm excited to run it for my group.

Edit: Thank you for the clarification on the paths through the tarot spread! Might want to double check the formatting of the unicorn's paragraph for empty parentheses, as well as the stat block for The Hermit. Otherwise, great and definitely worth the buy! 5 Stars!

An awesome collection of flavourful ancestry paths, that really helps flesh out the novice path options. I also appreciate the mix of standard ancestries and really weird ones.