Depending on which side of the fence you DM on, Book of the River Nations may be a pleasant treat or a dismal disappointment.

Book of the River Nations is a supplement that allows you to install a kingdom building mini-game into your Pathfinder campaign world. Your game world is first divided into hexes. You provide resources to hexes and populate in other features like established settlements and locations. Your PCs begin in a hex starting their city, and then acquiring the other hexes through exploration. Each month you receive points for the hexes you have and spend them on kingdom improvements, called buildings. These buildings provide statistical bonuses to your kingdom economy, loyalty and stability. NPCs can be appointed in positions in your kingdom, giving even more bonuses.

If you have ever wanted to establish a city building aspect to your campaign world but did not know how, Book of the River Nations is a must buy. However, for everyone who has played through Paizo’s Kingmaker Adventure Path, there is nothing new under the sun. It is a bit disappointing considering how many fan supplements and suggestions for improvement there are floating around. This is nearly a word for word copy of what is in the Adventure Path sans the Mass Combat rules. Things like new buildings, expanded resources or NPCs would have really made this product original. At the least, a list of possible encounters for hexes should have been provided.

For the Player My players have played with this system for six months. As board gamers, as well as role players, they love the extra aspect of a mini board game they play after every major story arc.

For the Dungeon Master This supplement requires a bit more prep, as you need to set up possible encounters in each of the squares. If you are the kind of DM that hates seeing well written encounters absolutely ignored, you will frequently be disappointed. However, if you enjoy creating a dynamic world that requires you to be on your toes, you will enjoy yourself.

The Iron Word I really hope someone at Paizo is getting residuals for this because this is an unchanged edition of the great kingdom building rules they created. Book of the River Nations allows you access to these rules without shelling out for the Adventure Path. Having tinkered with kingdom building rules for the last five years, this set is one of the best to fit a Pathfinder game.

Halloween 2010

Iron Nugget Haunting Signals expands on Haunts by providing readers with a method to detect them via psychic abilities and signs. The 14-page PDF also includes a ritualist class, a new take on spellcasting where preperformed rituals that grant spells and powers. This PDF feels underfleshed out and is recommended for seasoned Dungeon Masters who know how to expand on material. The Ritualist class is either incomplete or a poor design, as only 2 rituals are included in the game. Also, at higher levels the ritualist has to perform 12 hours of rituals a day to be a participant in combat, where would she find the time to adventure. The nugget in this book are the first few pages which have good, descriptive levels of how “haunted” something is. If you use undead a lot, you can certainly use this information.

2010 Halloween Review I am often critical that LPJ Designs takes way too long to get back to a campaign setting. As a writer, I get it. You get so many ideas sometimes you stray away from others a bit longer than you want. It is nice to know that despite the rewrite of Neoexodus and the push for the upcoming Pirates of the Bronze Sky that Obsidian Twilight is still getting some love.

A Place Beyond Hell, an adventurous expansion that, instead of expanding on the already deep mythos (it will be nice to know more about the undead kingdoms), expands it with the inclusion of the H’Laqu. The risk certainly pays off, as it adds a eerie alien element to a campaign world filled with werewolves, vampires, blobs and zombies. As usual, LPJ Designs utilizes its amazing fluff writing skills to carefully integrate the H’Laqu into the campaign world. For that matter, the writing is crisps enough where you can easily take the H’Laqu and place them in your campaign.

The entire book revolves around the H’Laqu’s involvement with the apocalypse. However, they are not evil. Instead they are a truly neutral class, whom are only interested in studying this strange dimension. Those who have been touched or manipulated by the H’Laqu are welcome to use a bounty of ritual feats (feats for those who worship the H’Laqu) and taint feats (feats for those who have been experimented on by the H’Laqu).

Other H’Laqu inspired additions like spells and creatures build on the alien’s mythos, setting a theme of emotionless madness that is their essence. At only 32-pages, you can not believe how much information you get.

The only negative is that the PDF does not touch on any of the previous material, nor try to integrate it in any way. This makes it easy to port into another setting, of course, but leaves my players wishing for more things for the characters they already have. Also, call me selfish, but I wanted more of the H’Laqu. More substantial information like habitats and world relations.

For the Player After presenting the material, one player immediately asked implemented the H’Laqu into their character background as the reasons behind his recent illness. This allowed him to build his character with the cool taint feats. Withering Stare is cool, and finally defines “stare” a little more than the normal rules do. Of course, players have the option to go full on “H’Laqu” and replace their character with the Shattered Template, which replaces their race and links them to the hive mind.

For the Dungeon Master The Bestiary shows the negative effects the H’Laqu have on the land. Each creature entry is just plane weird. I have already decided to use the Black Men as foot soldiers for one of my big bad, with their ability to step between the planes. Another creepy baddie is the Abyssal Arm, which are 30-foot long coils of abyssal negativity. LPJ knows that its strength is in writing strong prose, and each entry contains at least one strong adventure hook to use the monster.

The Iron Word A Place Beyond Hell gives readers an alien race to add to Obsidian Twilight or any campaign world. There is a great amount of effort in the writing to display how “different” the H’Laqu are and insure that their motives are truly research motivated. Though it does not do too much with previous Obsidian Twilight material, it creates a strong enough product on its own to satisfy.

Disclaimer – LPJ Designs is a sponsor of the Iron Player Tournament, of which I am the lead organizer.

2010 Halloween Review

Context can be quite critical with roleplaying games’ material. Particularly if you are presenting a themed book of cretins. It is dire for the reader to know what the overall theme is in order to fully utilize the monsters. Context is the major reason why Horrors of GOW just does not become more than just a collection of far out creatures that sound good, but are presented in a fairly uninteresting manner.

Horrors of GOW is 2 PDFs, one of the PDFs is compiled of horror-related rpg material and the other attempts to explain the eerie connection of the monsters. It is a collection of undead creatures for Pathfinder, from a campaign setting called “GOW”. However, reading through the document nothing makes sense about this land. Instead of just going for a simple bestiary, the book is filtered throughout with things like spells, haunts and magic weapons. This makes for a difficult read as you try to navigate. Add to that the fact that GOW is never explained and it makes the material even more frustrating.

Compiling to the poor layout editing the short 28-pages is plainly laid out with photographs instead of artwork, and only a hand full of the entries have these photographs. In most cases, the photographs do little to reflect the creature or page it is presented on. Someone should have told the editor that you just can not present a bestiary without art.

It’s a poor presentation that does injustice to some really cool material and ideas scattered throughout the book.

For the Player I was not impressed with Paizo’s alchemist class. Thankfully, the Master of Life adds some beef to class giving it powers for short term reanimation of the dead. If you like the idea of playing a necromancer, and your DM does not, this is a nice compromise. Another thing you may want to sneak into your game is the Reaper’s Scythe. It is about as find a leveling weapon as you will find.

For the Dungeon Master The black-suited man (such a bad name for a cool character build), is a very gruesome character that looses limbs in the middle of combat. There’s a really haunting idea for how to run Halloween in your games that feels original and fresh. The book also takes modern day on things like scarecrows and ghosts that translate to fresh takes on undead.

The Iron Word If you can set aside layout miscues abound, you find a horror fan’s creation of material for Pathfinder that will add a bit of creep to your campaign.

My players love to fidget with their character classes. I am often asked can I substitute this or substitute that. My sense of maintaining logic always eclipses the need to stay mechanically “correct”.

Genius Guide to Arcane Archetypes by Otherworld Publishing is written for players and DMs who like to create within the character classes.

The system is quite elegant. Each of the base classes, including their own custom classes, is subdivided into archetypes. These archetypes are groups of abilities that make the class what it is. Essentially, each class is dissected into its basic components. This allows you to take out that component and replace it with another component without damaging the power level of that class too much.

As most Genius Guides, the PDF is short and sweet at 16 pages. Everything feels balanced. Unfortunately, there is no way to know for sure until your Fighter with its awesome base class starts teleporting all over the map fireballing on every turn. The writers do a decent job of trying their best to prevent these catastrophes by limiting which classes can take which of the new archetypes. A player can probably break this system but it will be hard to do. Non-spellcasters are given a special designation and receive a weaker spell slot system than their arcane counterparts. There are nine arcane archetypes, which is quite a variety for a magic users. Otherworld shows their expanded talents for diversifying abilities by making each archetype unique.

For the Player Spellblaze feels like the coziest archetype to bundle with a melee fighter. It grants the ability to deal instant damage through lightening bolts.

For the Dungeonmaster The Sigil Mage rocks if you want to add some spice to your spellcasting NPC. The writing seems to indicate this was a favorite of the writers as it feels slightly longer and notched with a little more flavor. Tattoos on the face and body act as spell and skill enhancers. She also has the ability to cast no so prepared spells.

The Iron Word This is another bundle of creativity by Otherworld Creations. Archetypes is not for everyone, but it’s innovation places it in a special category of “new” that other publishers should surely build off. If you have players who are interested in sandbox classes, this is the right step.

Dungeon Masters do not 100% trust players. It is the reason so many of the great DMs call for random character sheet checks and ask for rolls in the open. We were players once. We know that sometimes you get so caught up in the game aspect you forget to subtract that fear penalty or neglect to think about that +13 Wis requirement for that feat.

Achievement Feats is a cool idea that looses its firepower in the hands of the the wrong group. It begins off the back by asking Dungeon Master’s to trust the player. I do not know of a single Dungeon Master who can read that and not think “one or two of players will not be able to use this book”.

Achievement Feats are feats selected by players, but they do not receive the feat until the player performs a specific achievement. The achievements are not all that powered and as is, the system is a little difficult to pull off without some serious manipulation. You can tell that the inspiration for the feats came from the traditional Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game. In those games, there are many quests where players have to kill something a certain number of times or get the same object multiple times. However, they come off as too mechanical. Either the player is going to track these stats and ask the DM after every kill what the general statistics are, or the Dungeon Master is going to have more record keeping to do.

The feats are very creative in their relationship to what triggered them. And there are 50 of them to choose in the 10 page supplement.

For the Dungeon Master This is not a players supplement, despite the advertising. Once I fidgeted with the system a bit, I found it to be a fun little add on for a campaign. Select 5 to 10 of the feats for your current campaign and track those stats for the whole party (you can try to track them for each player but that is more record keeping than I want to add on. When the party hits the number, they each get a use of that feat for that combat. Another way you can do it is to have each player select an achievement feat. This is their “special move” and activates only after they have triggered the number.

The Iron Words Great example of a neat idea hampered by trying to contain it within the current system instead of branching it out into its own system like it deserves. Following the above suggestion, you will get a lot of use out of Feat Achievements as a permanent addon to your campaign.

It is no secret in my gaming group that I am in love with weapons that level. There were a half dozen supplements in the old d20verse that infueled my campaigns by delivering weapons and items that, in themselves, were character enhancing feats and abililties.

As the Pathfinder era dawns on us, Purple Duck Games provides us a 42 page gem with Legendary Blades. When stacked against similar books of legendary weapons that gain abilities as they level, it slices its competition by offering detailed back stories for each item that increases its value in your campaign.

Legendary Blades rides on its strong writing. The abilities of each weapon are colored with flavor and enhancing mechanics. I thought of a few different campaigns I plan on running, and was able to create find an item that suited it. If you are not familiar with leveling weapons the process is quite simple, as the players level the item levels as well.

Outside of a bounty of items, Legendary Blades also presents some new templates and a parry combat maneuver which can be useful.

The PDF also features feats and spells, however, they fill like a needless add on to something that is already a lot for what you pay.

For the Player Players should gift this book to their Dungeon Master and hint at certain items they want to quest for. The Crusader’s Blade is perfect for a Paladin.

For the Dungeon Master In my Obsidian Twilight campaign, I immediately fell in love with the Mitra’s Blade. My favorite weapon though is the Sandman’s Blade which has some fun abilities and a nice story to boot.

The Iron Word Legendary Blades is such a unique supplement in that it offers items that you can not put a price tag on. They are campaign driving items that does a great job of inspiring new quests and adventures.

Iron Nugget I am convinced that the intro sheet in Lamentations of the Flame Princess is a hysterical love letter to yours truly. It speaks

However, like most love letters, it never lives up to its promises. Whereas the writing is witty the actual system is pretty much the same old different take on the OGL with some new saves and a rolling magic system. The presentation is highly visual and eye-catching, but in the end I didn't find anything that made it any more weird than any one else's take.

I do like this book if you are planning on introducing D&D to new gamers.

Arrowflight Second Edition is a good example of starting with the campaign setting and designing the system around it. Systems like this are great for small parties who do not want to delve into the glut of the big system, but instead want something of their own.

This is Deep7s second go around with the Arrowflight game system and it certainly shows a good amount of polish and experience. The highly descriptive narrative input in every chapter of the 207-page PDF makes up for the traditional fantasy tropes. But, what sets Arrowflight apart from a good many of the systems out there is its emphasis on the unique fantasy subgenre of magic science. Magic is something that is researched and built upon in this world and it shows. The magic system is robust and one of the most detailed I have seen. If you have been disappointed in how little influence you have on your spell selection, spell potency and spell pizzazz, you will strongly enough playing around with the spells and arcane theories in this PDF.

Character creation is fairly steamlined but quite expansive. You can make a character is as little as 45 minutes or as much as two hours depending on how much of the story your want to put behind your abilities. If you have played a d6 system before, adapting to your gaming group will come easy.

For the Dungeonmaster Outside of the cool twists on magic, the GM section will really pop out at you. When dealing with an Indie game system, you will not find a lot of ready made adventures. The section walks you through creating your own and even has a nifty randomization chart to spin tales on the fly.

The Iron Word Arrowflight presents a fun magic heavy campaign world. The theme is integrated well with the system, creating something that plays fluid. It does get long winded in places, but its nice to see passion in a product.

Iron Nugget Zombie Hospital puts the Directors Cut Survivor Horror RPG on full display with an original zombie story set in a diabolical insane asylum. You have to love any RPG product that has its own parental advisory disclaimer.

This is a vicious adventure. There is disembowelment, rape and mass murder, all before the adventure even starts. The players are outsiders trapped on the inside who must escape as a zombie onslaught begins.

The adventure has a ton of material for handouts and is told in a way that makes it easy to run sandbox style. With the players only go being escape, there is a lot of room and a lot of hooks to flesh into an ongoing story.

Outside of gaming, horror and horror movies is my second passion (outside of that whole family thing). So when a horror based RPG comes across my desk, I spend a tad bit more time with it than other new systems.

Directors Cut Survival Horror is exactly what you want in a system when running a horror RPG on a beer and pretzels night. It is simple, intuitive and incorporates mood quite well.

Directors Cut, Crispy Zombie Production first product, is horror in a 97 page PDF. The writers obviously know what makes a horror movie tick and how to fit that into an RPG while keeping suspense. They spend a great deal of time in the first few and last few chapters explaining how to set up your Survivor Cut game night. This includes music suggestions, player seating and tone.

The system itself is scarily simple. It is as simple as you want a system to be when the main focus is going to be on role-playing. When trying to create an atmosphere of horror at a game table, you do not want too many rolls. The more “game” you place into it, the more “role playing” you take out of the game. Crispy Zombie gets that. You will need no more than four d6s to play this game. There is a creative mechanic that combines your hit points, saves, and action points into one number that doubles as a deterrent to making erroneous rolls.

Skills are nicely packaged into a couple dozen options you can place bonus points into. They are descriptively vague enough to prevent players from becoming too bogged down on the numbers game. There is no skill that you can not perform, only skills that you perform better than others.

I do hate that, like most horror RPGs, Survivor’s Cut incorporates player elimination into the game play. Obviously people have to die in a horror movie, but in a game setting this can be a nuisance.

For the Director This was an easy game to run. It can be used for a three or four session campaign, but I doubt any of the characters will last longer than that.

For the Player The edges are very creative. Many are tropes of horror movie characters that provide big benefits when facing udder evil.

The Iron Word You can do zombie invasions, slashers or psychological thrillers and Directors Cut is easy enough to blend with all of those genres. A great way to get ready for Halloween, Directors Cut will satisfy any horror RPG cravings your group may be having.

My wife was the person who turned me on to how cool fey can be. Before I assumed fey were dainty little creatures that danced and frolicked and through occasional bacchanals. I discovered that a good many are borderline psychotic creatures that should always rival the most devious in the D&D universe.

Alluria Publishing's Clans of the Fey, originally released as a 4th edition supplement, makes its way pathfinder. It is just as amazing, creative and vicious a bestiary as its counterpart. If you like fey or just want a different kind of creature, to mix it up with your PCs, the Fey Folio is hands down the best bestiary out there for the Pathfinder system.

The artwork, ingenuity and writing in the 27 page Fey Folio is top notch. So much so you would assume that Alluria was a big time publisher. Each of the 13 creatures given two to three pages to absolutely shine. I have seen a many fey renditions of creatures, none more explosive as the ones here. The artwork jumps off the pages, escapes the pages and smacks you into appreciation.

The writing is concise and descriptive. It gives a lot of credit to the fables and folklore these creatures are based on. The abilities really play off of the unpredictability that fey are known for.

For the Dungeon Master My new favorite fey is the Jack-in-Irons. I once saw a rendition of it in another book, and it just felt like a giant with the fey descriptor. Fey Folio turns him into a god and a great antagonist for a campaign.

The Iron Word If fey are going to make any appearance in your campaign, Fey Folio, Clans of the Fey is a great supplement to help fill in the gaps. More than just creature of the weeks, they can be used to really push a campaign world.

Watching the movie Inception this weekend, I was given the final nudge to finish my review of Obsidian Twilight Campaign Setting by LPJ Designs.

The premise of Inception has nothing to do with the storyline behind Obsidian Twilight. The correlation comes with their level of innovation when compared to similar products.

Whether you liked it or not, you can certainly agree that Inception is a completely different kind of movie. The same can be said for the Obsidian Twilight Campaign Setting when compared to other campaign settings. Obsidian Twilight creeps off of the scale in terms of pure creativity. It's only drawback is that it should be longer.

For those who have not purchased any of the races or world info about Obsidian Twilight, it is a campaign setting that takes place after the heroes have failed. The world is ended, most if not all humans are dead, and the races that are left behind range from the goo like Khymer to the half-dead Harrowed. Undead rule the world. And the only somewhat good character is an angel that has had part of his face partially burned away.

In other words, this is very dark stuff.

The Obsidian Twilight Campaign setting is a compilation of previously released material with a hundred new spells, a few new monsters and a bit more flavor to flesh out the world. The 168 page PDF fleshes out all of the major eight races in Abaddon, gives tons of customer options with feats designed for the world and comes to life with unique new spells that play around with the post apocalyptic fantasy atmosphere.

As usual with LPJ, you are enchanted in by the amazing artwork and coaxed to stay by the solid writing. The only drawback is that there just feels like it should be more. The three prestige classes are fantastic, but I kept wanting to know how other classes would adapt to these new conditions. In other words, where does the bard fit in when there's nothing chipper to sing about? How do the priests function without gods.

For the Player Obsidian Twilight is the backdrop for my current campaign, and my players have thoroughly enjoyed the races. But one race has jumped to be the favorite of them all, so much so I had to limit the number of players who could be this race. Since the dawning of RPGs, players have always wanted to play lycanthropes and Lycans give the best opportunity to play it in a balanced game.

For the Dungeon Master Whereas the PDF is lighter than most campaign books on crunch, it makes up for in inspirational fluff. You will probably want more world design and information, but the plus side is there is nothing stopping you from imagining the world for your own. My Obsidian Twilight world is a mash up of this book and Paizo's Kingmaker campaign.

The Iron Word Like a medium-rare Kobe Steak Tenderloin, I was left wanting more but thoroughly satisfied at the experience I had, though brief. Obsidian Twilight Campaign Setting is inventive. Possibly one of the most inventive settings you are going to find. You can use it as an entire setting or branch it off as undead territory in your campaign world.

In the very first campaign I had ever ran, I had a character who begged, and begged, and begged me to let her to play a Centaur. I was a young novice buck of a dungeon master, and greenlit her character. Little did I know she’d bring a self-drawn portrait of the character fully nude and proceed to play the most vulgar PC ever to grace and be removed from my game table. As I flipped through the Genius Guide to Races of Hood and Horn, I was so impressed that I was slightly tempted to remove my ban on fey pcs from my table. Genius Guide to Races of Hoof and Horn is a 13 page PDF presenting 3 fantastical fey races for your campaign world. Once again the publishers, Other World Creations, gives us a creative project we DMs need to struggle to not include in our current campaign (I have a 4 Rite Publishing PDF limit now). Another disappointment was the artwork this time around. Some of the pics felt chopping and reminiscent of 16-bit Genesis animation. However, those are miner scratches when considering the publishers best quality, their writers usually think like gamers. Which is why Hoof and Horn does not just include races, but feats for them as well as options to tweak them. I only wish they would have included sample NPCs using the races like so few publishers seem to do when releasing new races. For the Player The Lapith are the unclothed centaur race that I think players would enjoy, especially those who like Druids. Lapith’s have a mystical quality about them and the writing really brings out fey more than the other races. For the Dungeon Master I like the Lapith because it makes the DM’s job easy. Aside form the obscenity of my friend’s Centaur, there was a major problem fitting it into campaigns where players have to go to “normal” places and can’t explain having a four legged beast with them. The book alleviates that by allowing the Lapith to have a “normal” form that resembles a half elf. For NPCs I like the piper, enchanters who are offspring of Satyrs. The Iron Word Those who wanted playable fey races in their pathfinder or 3.5 campaign will find a very user friendly and easy to incorporate product in the Genius Guide to Hoof and Horn. Despite my limit, I would not be surprised if this book found its way into my campaign too, considering my wife loves fey creatures.

Innovation happens every so often in the RPG world when a publisher takes an existing product and does a few things that everyone wanted to do, but no one figured out how to. Thus is the case for Kenzer and Company’s Trove of Treasure Maps, a remarkably unique product.

Treasure Maps feels like someone took a bowl of liquid creativity, blended it with chunks of detailed artwork and visual writing and baked it on the 44-page PDFs layout. Treasure Maps is sort of a book of short adventures. They are written to be plane enough to fit into any campaign but detailed enough so that the NPCs and locations come to life. It is sort of an adventure book, because, looking at it as simply that, the biggest part of it is lost. These adventures are all manipulated around a PC handouts and treasure maps, all of which are crisp and engaging. In most books, this is usually the other way around, with maps and handouts being an afterthought to the adventure. Each of the seven adventures contains one or two handouts, one of which is a map that drives the adventure. Most of the maps are puzzles, leaving it up to the PC to figure out the clues to reach the next step. These puzzles are give na difficulty and range from straight forward to truly mindboggling.

The good folk at Kenzer were gracious enough to provide both a Hackmaster and a d20 ruleset, making the product multifunctional. The only negative about this book is the font, which feels a bit too small and dotty. But that small tidbit does not take away from the overall solid layout work.

For the Dungeon Master When you get past the font, the clear writing make each adventure easy to follow. They are also all quite diverse. The City Underground will be a favorite for the DM that likes to test the mental worth of his party.

The Iron Word Trove of Treasure Maps is such a deceptive name for a remarkable set of adventures presented in a new, innovative way. If you are looking for well-written roleplaying driven adventures with fun, interactive handouts, you have reached the right place.