tl, dr: surely the best non-Pelgrane book for 13th Age: it has a few rules suggestions but the vast bulk is player options for all the classes from 13A and 13TW. The average quality is very high: in particular, his druid rewrite is superior to canon, and tips me over to granting the fifth star. Because of the 13A power curve, it’s hard to say if even the stronger options would cause real problems in play.

Don’t be fooled by the title: some of this is dark and twisted (there are more evil paladin options than I personally care for), but most of it isn’t – and very little is street-level ‘gritty’ the way that alleys might imply. 13th Age is rather too high-powered for that to work well, frankly.

A few pages of rules clarifications, extensions, and half a dozen variants bookend the work, with a playable “novice” tier play put at the end. I single out “Base 13” random attribute generation which combines randomness and balance, at the cost of a strong push to the medium.

After that are new PC races (13 of them) and feats, half generic and half racial-based. These are the weakest sections, adequate but uninspired. I will say the pixie is a solid attempt to make a tiny flying humanoid into a functional PC: it would be interesting to see how it well actually works in play.

90% of the book is new material for all of the canonical classes from the core book and 13TW. Some of it is borrowings from D&D editions; some of it is new but rather carefully designed to follow the same tone and themes that you get from the original classes. So the bard, for example, has new spells and songs which lean heavily into enchantment, illusions, and party support – and several of them work better with the correct icon relationships are in play.

The new options buff up all the classes, at least at character generation and generally later in play as well. Of course, it’s not difficult to increase the power of the opposition to compensate: just be aware you may need to do that, as they level up.

If you don’t want to throw the book open to all players, the slight across-the-board power-up could work for you. If it turns out that in your game some of the classes come out a bit weaker than their peers, try giving them access to these choices and see if that helps. Even the pure talent-based classes will see some benefit, including but not limited to new champion- and epic-tier choices. The paladin’s smite power is also broadened, which should appeal to all players except the ones who chose the paladin because of its mechanical simplicity.

Using this entire book will probably help the arcane spellcasters slightly more than the other classes, since they can more easily make full use of the new powers on offer by switching out spells. The cleric gets fewer new spells, case by case, since they’re almost all specific to their Domain choices – and there are a lot of new Domains added.

The other classic divine spellcaster, the druid, deserves special note. The book rewrites it with the same talent pattern as the demonologist, giving specific abilities for each talent as well as access to the spells or other abilities of the “Circle” in question. The result is superior to the canonical class, not only incorporating all the 13TW abilities but adding two more Circles and a good bit of individualized flavor. The rewrite does not appear overpowered; if anything (as with the 13TW druid) some of the options look like they might come out a little weak.

The one class where this book may be genuinely unbalancing is the sorcerer. It is strengthened not just by all the new spells (really, having lots of chain spells instead of just two is a nontrivial power-up in itself) but also by adding bloodlines (lots of added flavor; little bit of added power) and metamagic abilities (significant additional power with no downside). Having played a storm voice across a long campaign, I am confident that sorcerers are already quite strong enough and would be hesitant to use all of this without some sort of compensatory weakness.

In terms of presentation, the full-page illustrations which introduce each class chapter are well-done, though some are oddly chosen (a ratkin commander, a necromancer with a ludicrously huge scythe, and an evil paladin). The rest of the illustrations are b&w drawings, substantially more amateurish, and the cover … well, you can see it: it’s just kind of there. The book is well laid-out and, in part because of the relatively sparse art, feels just as densely-packed as it really is.

tl;dr: six 13A character classes with properly creative mechanics as well as flavor. Considerably better than the average third-party production, if not quite not up to the (very high!) standard set by most official 13A products. Five stars would not be an unreasonable rating, even though I don't participate in grade inflation. But a few problems I spotted make me worry about the ones I missed: when asking the GM to let you play one of these, you should pre-emptively agree not to make a fuss if something turns out to be overpowered and has to be edited down.

Designing a good 13A class isn’t easy: if it’s more than just a change in flavor, your new class really ought to have something mechanically distinctive about it, and yet remain balanced with the others across all tiers. On the whole, the DPAS classes are notably superior to the usual run of fan creations – among which I definitely include the unofficial classes Pelgrane put on their website in the first year or two after 13th Age was released. If this book isn’t quite up to the level of 13 True Ways or the 13th Age Bestiary, it’s equal to the two Loot books, and better than any other third-party product I’ve seen.

The class descriptions give you the concept and flavor of each of the six classes; persons more familiar than I with mid- to late D&D will have to say how well the psion and warlock hit the correct tone. But they’re less clear on how much they really add to the player’s range of choices – which turns out to be considerably.

The abomination is mechanically almost identical to the fighter, a martial character built around flexible attacks with the additional benefit of using no weapons. On the other hand, it has the most distinctive flavor of any of the six, and probably edges out the fighter in providing high-level options that keep it up there with the spellcasters. It’s the only class in the book that’s as simple to play as a fighter: the others range up to the wizard in complexity.

The fateweaver flavor text is hyperbolic, but it does have some interesting noncombat spells. It has a mechanic reminiscent of, but broader than, the sorcerer’s gathering power, which gives some interesting round-by-round choices. Most important, its spells never require a to-hit roll, which is enough to make it a potential favorite for certain players I have known. Probably the most unusual of the six classes.

The psion’s power point mechanic is new to 13A. Because it uses the six-disciplines style of D&D 3E psionics, it ends up loaded down with choices: you could create an all-psion party of three or four PCs, filling all the classic dungeoneering roles, without any of them feeling too similar, though they wouldn’t quite match their analogues except for the thief. Adding psionics to the campaign world does feel like a bigger change than adding PC chaos magic or necromancy, though.

The savage is a designed to be a more complex version of the barbarian and fulfills that goal admirably. It is comparable to the 13G berserker classes, but will appeal to slightly different players (just as the Storm Bull and Zorak Zoran do). It looks a bit swingier than most other classes as luck in earlier rounds cascades into later ones.

The swordmage’s sigil power is distinctive; the basic concept of a spellcaster/defender isn’t new but is well executed here. Their spells do end up even more narrowly combat-focused than the 13A standard. It may also be somewhat too good as a multiclass option.

I’d say the warlock is more different from the sorcerer, its closest comparison, than the necromancer is from the wizard. Its curses break a standard 13A rule, with save numbers varying by level, which makes a battle involving them very slightly more complicated for the GM.

Each class closes with a few “riffs and variations” which also include notes on the sort of fantasy characters the author was drawing on as inspiration. There are also multiclass notes for each class, though only two have any multiclass feats of the sort offered in 13 True Ways. The swordmage and especially psion look like unusually powerful multiclass options.

The author rounds out the book with a dozen talent choices that give existing classes a taste of the powers from these six, and several dozen new magic items that include some designed to fit the six classes and some the author just thought were cool.

All of this material is well-conceived, and most of the individual elements appear solid. Most, but not all, and that gets to my caveats.

First, a few elements seem wrong for non-mathematical reasons. The warlock has free ritual casting: distinctly out of place given that the sorcerer has to spend a feat for that ability. The savage’s talents are supposed to be inferior to the barbarian’s – and they should be; the class has other advantages. But some aren’t, e.g. Unstoppable Determination is much better than the barbarian’s Natural Will (though, to be fair, I always thought the latter seemed weak for a champion-tier talent). Finally, the designer gives most of these classes the option of using DEX instead of STR for melee attacks, which the 13A designers correctly avoidded for most of the official classses. I could see it as justified for the abomination, but not the fateweaver, psion or warlock.

And then some of the math looks dubious – notably the warlock’s blast spells, which start off at exactly the normal base attack level but then add two stat bonuses instead of only one. It’s conceivable that the warlock’s lack of daily and recharge spells (or the various things martial combatants use to jazz up their attacks) means that its basic attacks need to be better than anyone else’s… but I’m not persuaded: the other spells should be enough to make up the difference. Similarly the fateweaver’s basic attack spell always hits, which surely means it should be comparable to the wizard’s magic missile: instead, it is slightly better even at low levels, and increasingly so at higher.

The author often fails to assign hit point thresholds for spell/power effects that should have them. This error shows up repeatedly in the psion’s long ability list, but it also makes the high-level fateweaver spell life switch completely broken. I didn’t notice any other abilities that are so unbalanced as to be unplayable, but given the huge number of them in the book, it seems more likely than not I missed a few more.

So there are some negatives. As GM, if you let one of these classes into your game, make sure that the player understands that it may be necessary to do some editing on the fly. If you’re a player who wants to try one out, either straight or perhaps especially as a multiclass, make your GM’s life easier by precommitting to accept any necessary edits.

This book isn’t up to the (extremely high) standards set by the official material for 13th Age, but there’s enough good stuff to make it worthwhile. Four stars would be a shade too generous.

For players, the book offers two full character classes, two races, three pages of magic items and a dozen feats, plus four clerical domains hidden away in the bestiary. The clear standout is the realm-walker, a five-star jewel of a new class: high magic without spells, and a nicely-gauged balance of direct combat and support options. It won’t fit into all games, but if you’re interested in including the planes as a campaign element, it should fit into yours.

All the rest of the book – 80% or more – is for GMs. Perhaps the biggest disappointment is how very little it contains about the overworld: literally no more than a page or so detailing one single location, plus one PC feat and a few NPCs. I’d expected suggestions about different ways to present the overworld, and probably planar structure as well, pointing in incompatible directions along the usual 13A pattern. Nothing of the sort.

On the one hand, it’s a reviewing sin to complain that the author didn’t write what you think they should have. On the other hand, “overworld” is right there in the title.

Similarly, there aren’t general guidelines on adventuring in other planes. What it does have is worked examples – pretty good ones – integrated into the adventures. These are about 30% of the book: one has little planar material, the other two cross multiple planes and are surprisingly dependent on random incident. This is also where the other planes strut their stuff, so maybe the touristy elements aren’t so surprising.

Another 30% is two sandbox settings. The Carrow Hills is adventurer-tier, and relatively scanty in otherplanar suggestions. The City at the Edge of Dawn is a pocket-dimensional answer to Sigil, champion-tier on average although you could push it up or down. Both are described in enough detail to get the GM started, with a nice selection of NPC ideas, and a considerable array of different adventure seeds

The rest of the GM material is a substantial bestiary, written as shorter core rules entries rather than the more developed format of the Bestiaries. Finally, there’s miscellaneous grab-bag similar to the random stuff at the end of 13 True Ways. Some of the bits, here and elsewhere, are in the gonzo F20 tradition going back to the early days of the hobby, but if you don’t care for that material it’s easy to excise.

Of the official 13A books, this one is most closely comparable to The Book of Demons, even to a roughly comparable player/GM balance. The planes are, to my taste, a more interesting subject for a book, but the narrower focus is handled better there than the potentially much broader canvas here. The adventures are OK but don’t really measure up to the same standard. The bestiary is larger, but probably less well designed and certainly less evocative. The sandbox material in The Overworld and Beyond does beat out the Floating Market and the citadels: it’s more broadly useful and ends up with more plot hooks and inspirational elements.