An Endzeitgeist.com review

This Everyman Mini clocks in at 7 pages, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 1 page advertisement, 2 pages of SRD, leaving us with 2 pages of content, so let’s take a look!

All righty, we begin this Everyman Mini with a brief introduction and a new 8th level spell, which would be symbol of debauchery: This duplicates symbol of death, but instead affects the targets with reckless infatuation, treating creatures that they have healthy relationships as objects of desire, attempting to stay as close to as many of them as possible, using their actions to engage in consenting and relaxing activities. These are so taxing that they potentially prevent the regaining of spells. Tastefully handled! Big kudos!

Now the main body of the pdf, obviously, is taken up by the new oracle mystery passion, which nets Bluff, handle Animals and Sense Motive as class skills. The bonus spells gained range from charm person to mantle of calm, matchmaker and later nets the new spell as well as waves of ecstasy and overwhelming presence.

Now, revelation-wise, we have life link from the life mystery, as well as punitive transformation – the latter, however, is incorrectly credited to the nature mystery, when it is a revelation of the waves mystery instead. Beyond these previously used revelations, we also have a couple of new options: Awesome Beauty acts as a fascination-inducing aura that prevents targets, sanctuary-style from potentially attacking you if they could be attracted to you. Cool: Via an exchanging of gifts, you can bond souls together, allowing them to sense the direction of their partner and giving you an idea of the subject’s emotional and health auras. You can also send telepathic messages to the subject, duplicating sending (which is not properly italicized). One question: Does the message reach both participants or just one? Desire sight instantly nets you the 3rd round knowledge of detect desires of all targets within 100 ft., making the oracle a fearsome foe in social contexts! With another revelation, you get Conceal Spell and add Disguise and Sleight of Hand to your class skills, with later levels providing Improved Conceal Spell and forcing witnesses of Conceal Spell that could be attracted to you to roll twice.

Another revelation nets you the option to add mercy effects to cure spells or cruelties to inflict spells, with higher levels yielding more cruelties/mercies. You can also add bard spells to your array and another revelation lets you add Charisma modifier instead of Dex to AC and CMD. Finally, we have scaling save bonuses versus charms and compulsions that increase to encompass immunity. The final revelation is an augmented outsider apotheosis that lets you still be returned to life as normal. You also gain immunity to age effects and a constant greater age resistance as well as at-will threefold aspect, with bonus types changed depending on whether you cast cure or inflict spells and sans penalties. Additionally, you may designate Charisma modifier targets that are in a romantic or platonic relationship, granting them the benefits of the final revelation, minus the DR. Cool!

Conclusion:

Editing and formatting are very good on a formal and rules-language level, though I did notice minor glitches. Layout adheres to Everyman Gaming’s two-column standard with a white background, making this relatively printer-friendly. The pdf sports a nice full-color artwork and has no bookmarks, but needs none at this length.

Margherita Tramontano’s mystery is pretty much amazing – I really, really enjoyed this one and I love how it represents in a tasteful manner one of the most amazing forces that exist – love, passion and what they entail, concisely represented with viable and even culturally sensible options. I can see a community really benefitting from the gift-exchange tradition supervised by the oracle, for example. It’s a beautiful tradition that imho can serve as a great narrative tool to explain a healthy community. That being said, the minor hiccups do drag this down a bit, if not by much – hence, my final verdict will clock in at 4.5 stars, rounded down for the purpose of this platform. If you don’t mind these minor hiccups, consider this a must-own recommendation instead – as a person, I really…loved this! …sorry, couldn’t help myself. ;)

Endzeitgeist out.

Deities of love, romance, and sexuality are replete throughout both history and fantasy. As such, the lack of any mystery options for oracle characters in Pathfinder, even across multiple releases, was a void that was crying out to be filled. Everyman Gaming and Rogue Genius Games purport to have the answer with Everyman Minis: Mysteries of Passion. Let’s take a look and see what’s here.

Before anything else, I need to issue a disclaimer: at the time of this writing, the author of this product is running a crowdfunding campaign to publish a book of thematic character options that expand on what’s here, to which I’m financially contributing. That’s not something that’s influencing my review, but I wanted to put it out there anyway.

Mysteries of Passion is seven pages long, with one page for the cover, one for the credits, a page-and-a-half for the OGL, and another page-and-a-half for ads. The remaining two pages are a combination of the introduction, a reprinting of the cover art, and the new material.

I have to take a moment to talk about the cover art, which I found myself liking. A full-color piece that shows two anthropomorphic (i.e. “furry,” to use a loaded term) characters kissing each other, the artwork on the cover is more symbolic of the product than it initially suggests. It’s not just that the two characters are locking in a kiss that helps signify what this book is about, but also how they’re depicted. The alien nature of the characters, not being humans or your typical Tolkien-esque demihumans, helps to highlight what’s more universal, which is that they’re in a romantic embrace. This universality is highlighted by how the pair are androgynous; it’s impossible to tell if they’re both female, both male, male and female, or something else altogether. It’s an excellent way to signal the thematic nature of love that this book deals with.

The book’s crunch opens with a new spell: symbol of debauchery. This is essentially a re-flavored symbol of death spell (having the same spell level and material costs), but causing victims to uncontrollably begin to kiss and grope the nearest conscious creature. I had some problems with this, for two reasons: first, there’s no mechanical effect conveyed for what such a state entails. Are victims of this spell flat-footed? Staggered? Something else? This pretty clearly warrants some sort of condition, but I’m not at all sure what. It says victims may take no other actions, but to what degree can they defend themselves?

My other problem was that this spell doesn’t seem like it warrants having the same level and costs as symbol of death. That is a spell that KILLS characters, whereas this one just makes them lose control of themselves for one round per caster level. Now, you can make the argument that in a fight, being taken out of it – whether by death of being overcome by lust – is mechanically the same, but there’s a problem with that line of reasoning. While death may be a speed bump by the time you’re throwing around 8th-level spells, the cost of coming back from death is at least worth noting, in that it’s a few thousand gp. By contrast, coming back from what this spell inflicts doesn’t cost nearly as much, and so it shouldn’t be so difficult and expensive to cast this spell. I recognize that they needed an 8th-level spell for the Passion mystery, but this one needs more to be worth its level and costs.

The Passion mystery itself carries nine possible abilities, in addition to its class skills, spell list additions, one other power, and final revelation.

The powers here do a fairly good job of showcasing the range of what you’d expect from a mystery themed around love and sexuality, mostly being defensive or buffing in nature, though not always. Awesome beauty acts as a combined sanctuary spell and short-duration fascination ability, for example. Other powers include allowing you to form a bond that lets you monitor the well-being with someone to whom you’re connected, divining a target’s desires, or even polymorph someone as a form of rejection! I can already see the jokes about turning someone into a pig, there.

By far the more notable abilities, however, are ones such as Secrets of Passion, which let you add spells from the wizard or bard spell list to your spells known, so long as they’re enchantment spells with the charm or compulsion sub-schools. I was very glad for this, because it answers one of my major issues with a lot of thematic spellcasters: namely, that class-based spell divisions tend to get in the way of making a spellcaster that has access to the spells that fit their theme. Arcane spellcasters have a LOT of spells revolving around charming and beguiling, and those fit in naturally here. Similarly, although it’s not quite as thematic, being able to add cure or inflict spells via the Fickle Passions ability fits in here as well, and I especially liked how this let you add in mercies or cruelties (depending on whether your chose to heal or harm) on those as well. This level of versatility is enough to make these abilities must-haves, but they’re not unbalancing and fit with the themes of this mystery so well that it honestly wouldn’t have been complete without them. And Shield of Splendor…being able to swap out Dexterity for Charisma for determining AC. ‘nuff said!

The final revelation is themed around mastering aging, which seemed surprising until I realized it was emblematic of “eternal love.” You not only stop aging and become immune to aging attacks, but permanently gain two age-related spell-like abilities, which was unexpected. More notable was that you could share these benefits with someone you’re attracted to (and who is attracted to you) via a kiss, meaning that you can potentially keep someone alive forever so long as “the magic” is still there.

I found myself wishing that this ability could be shared with more than a single creature at a time, something like 3 + Charisma modifier (minimum 1) would have been much better, to my mind. That might sound unbalanced at first blush, but remember that this is only granting immunity to aging penalties and two relatively minor spell-like benefits…and that this is 20th level we’re talking about. Cutting loose and giving out a crazy benefit is expected at this point. Moreover, it strikes me as emblematic of someone that’s become the near-personification of love that they’d have several paramours, since being 20th-level tends to make you a mover and shaker. As it is, this instead calls to mind the “soulmates” idea, which is also thematically appropriate; I just wish it had more mechanical “oomph.”

I should mention that I noticed several small errors cropping up throughout the book, which was rather disheartening. None of these were major problems, but we had things like spells having the wrong superscript initials to show what book they came from, or repeated references to the Passion mystery as the “heart” mystery [insert Captain Planet jokes here]. These are the sorts of things that shouldn’t really exist in a product this brief. It was enough for me to knock a half-star off of the book, particularly since directing someone to the wrong books to look up spells can be a real pain.

Other than that though, what’s here is a quality presentation that does a good job focusing on the myriad aspects of passion, both positive and negative. It’s mechanically solid, and does a great job of offering expansive options, though the final revelation needs a bit more heft to it. With some polish, this would be a 5-star product; as it stands now, it’s a 4.5, rounded down to 4.