I am associated with Adventureaweek.com, were I operate as the main PDF monkey. My reviews are written with a desire to remain unbiased as many of the designers, writers, artists and publishers are considered friends to me. Having said that I am first and foremost a reviewer, and in respect to these people and their product I intend to evaluate this product honestly and fairly.

100% Crunch: Orogs from Raging Swan continues this well done series with another collection of stat-blocks ready to go for the GM to make populating their toolbox a faster process. 27 stat-blocks are here presented all for the hybrid orgre-orcs known as Orogs. Formatting follows the standard format of a dual column approach for standard text, and the Pathfinder standard for the stat-blocks themselves. Editing appears to be good and solid. My actual complaint falls in with the layout decisions for the flow of the stat-block entries one into each other, or rather for the odd spacing from time to time between stat-blocks.

The CRs are collected together within the PDF to make them easier to view when scanning the book, as well as them being alphabetized in each CR section. Now, anyone who is familiar with these titles in this series should by this point fully aware of what these books are, but for those unaware, let’s cover the concept here, shall we? Julian Neale essentially creates for these collections a stack of NPCs all based on one race, with a grab bag of classes/templates/archetypes. Some of the books in this series have done very well in regards to the cool builds (like the ones for skeletons, liches or zombies…he really explored the idea of various racial options with those builds), but here I am seeing an extreme limitation in that without fluff, and the orog offering itself as a race to a strict concept for expectations..

The collection here succeeds in providing a solid collection of orogs, I just felt like I wanted to see more than so many fighter builds (including the cavaliers I count 9 that are fighters in one form or another, or 27). Now that is not to say that there is variety here, as there is the Dire Wereboar Ranger, Rogue, Bard, Monks (hungry ghost, qinggong), Wizards, Advanced and Cleric builds…..ah, perhaps I have seen far too many classes at this point, I find myself wanting to see them all used. But to see a Gunslinger, or Samurai, perhaps an Alchemist or two (ponder as orog alchemist for a minute, lol). No, again, what is here works, but it leaves the entirety of the collection not feeling as inspiring as some of the other entries to this series.

In the end I am going to have to go with a 3.5 star (rounded to a 4 for the purposes of this rating system), as what is here is mechanically sound and good, but I was left feeling that there was a great deal of room left unexplored here.

An Endzeitgeist.com review

This installment of the 100%-crunch-series is 24 pages long, 1 page front cover, 2 pages advertisement, 2 pages editorial, 1 page foreword/ToC, 1 page advice on reading statblocks, 1 page SRD, 1 page back cover, leaving us with 15 pages of content, so let's take a look, shall we?

We kick off this pdf with a list of statblocks by CR - this time they range from CR 1 to CR 9. In case you didn't know about orogs - they are the meaner, bigger cousins of orcs and get their full racial stats in the pdfs. Attribute-wise, tehy get +6 Str, +4 Con, -2 Wis and Cha, darkvision, 3d8 racial HD and count as orcs/ogres - if that's been not enough indication: Orogs are not meant as player characters! Even young orogs clock in at CR 1 and regular ones get CR 2.

Taking a look at the more advanced statblocks, one will notice that we actually get templates - archers for example tend to come with the accelerated template added for more oomph. Cavaliers of the Dragon-order are in here as well - and boy, they are neat! Why? Well, they ride dire boars! Dire-boar riding orogs! Come on, that's cool! And yes, we get more than one iteration of the cavaliers, which is neat indeed.

Beyond archers and cavaliers, there also are some uncommon orogs in here - rogue crafters, universalist potion brewers and two interesting variants - orogs of destiny and ogre-throwback orogs make for some neat additional statblocks that cover slightly more unusual topics. Theologian clerics, bards and even monks are included here as well - the hungry ghost/qinggong-monks! Also rather neat, we even get a dire wereboar ranger! Neat indeed!

Conclusion:

Editing and formatting are very good, I did not encounter any glitches that impeded the usability of the respective statblocks and while some stablocks have the same names (a minor mix-up) that does not impede the quality of the crunch. Layout adheres to RSP's two-column b/w-standard and the pdf comes in two versions. one optimized for print and one for screen-use. The pdfs come fully bookmarked for your convenience.

Julian Neale's orogs rank among my favorites in the whole series and definitely provide some versatility I did not expect from this installment - from mounts to interesting, fitting class-choices up to even a were-beast and the cool monks, we get some rather cool, versatile statblocks in here. Now aforementioned title mix-up might be a minor inconvenience, but remains ultimately a cosmetic one and thus, I feel justified in still rating this 4.5 stars, rounded up to 5 for the purpose of this platform.

Endzeitgeist out.