I purchased this looking for a TMNT/Yosag Jimbo type of rules. I was looking to create a homebrew "Justifiers" conversion to the D20 modern/future rules.

I was very disappointed in the furry fetish comments throughout. I really did not want to have obscure and sexualized material in the book.

I hope the author takes feedback and adjust future products accordingly.

This series is the best 3rd party material for d20 / Pathfinder I've seen so far. With the bundle, which contains the first three installments, you can create just about any anthropomorphic or non-human character race you'd like. The series also contains templates and campaign models, allowing for stone age and other variants. Though it isn't strictly necessary, Psi-Watch Ultimate edition is beneficial because of the cross-compatibility of the psionic feat system in Psi-Watch, which is frankly better thought-out than the standard 3.5 psionics system. In short, Fursona has my actually wanting to try Pathfinder.

Fursona contains a considerable number of useful tools and discussion for creating anthropomorphic characters and using them in a campaign world but it seems unpolished. Considerably more effort could have been used explaining the racial traits and disadvantages as well as discussing how to build a balanced and interesting races from the options available. If you wish to include anthropormphic races in your campaign, this is a good reference but it is only a starting point.

Fursona: the Definitive Guide to Creating Anthropomorphic Characters is a 106-page PDF (104-pages if you remove the cover and OGL page) for the Pathfinder RPG written by Chris A. Fields and published by Otherverse Games.

Fursona has mostly a traditional two columns layout and is easily readable, though the tables are in an odd fonts. The art is full color cover and a mix of color and black and white interior pieces in a wide range of styles. Informative sidebars are scattered through the pages but it sadly lacks either an index or table of contents.

Fursona begins “Why Be Human?” a brief discussion about why use anthropomorphs in games -noting that they already show up in the form of gnolls and other animal-shaped races- and give some sources of inspiration (such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Thundercats).

The idea behind the system presented here for creating anthropomorphic races is very clever, first you choose the Order (species, animal) from among 33 choices ranging from arachnids to orcas, tigers to bears, and includes fantastical one such as dragons and Lovecraftian squamous beings. Each order has its own set of abilities and, sometimes, unique penalties. Some of these seem quite powerful (one give +6 to Strength with two -2 penalties to other stats for example) and should be looked at closely.

Then you can choose racial traits, an anthropomorph starts with 4 points to buy such and can get more from disadvantages, trait come in major (3 or 4 cost) and minor types (1 or 2 points). Which would not seems too unbalancing except that each Order has a handful of favored abilities, major abilities that cost -2 points for that order which allows for some quite powerful builds.

However, several of the disadvantages used to get more points simply makes a character unplayable in some situations (such as Waterbound, where the character must immerse themselves in saltwater every few hours or start to die) with no real rhyme nor reason to them. Which is a shame as several disadvantages are quite interesting and have good roleplaying potential while others just cripple a character.

Twenty-one templates -many of which include a Level Adjustment which is not used in Pathfinder and is an artifact of 3.x- allow for further customization by playing to different origins (genetically created anthro-soldier, free familiar, god-cursed) or made of different stuff (stone, clockwork, living cartoons). Working in those with Level Adjustment could prove to be challenging however. Many of these are good to review simply for way to explain the existence of such creatures in a campaign.

The product concludes with advice on fitting athropomorphics into your campaign which provides a variety of ways and campaign frame to do so. This section also includes a handful of spells and magic items, a sorcerer bloodline and new diseases as well as rule for neanderthals.

Disclosure: As a featured reviewer for RPGNow/DriveThroughRPG, I received my copy of this product for free from the publisher for the purpose of this review.

A good source book on the subject and one of the better resources I have found out there on the subject I have found. The manner in which the material is presented to build characters is very balanced in my opinion. I have created furry races myself and this is something I would consider using in my own campaigns instead of that material I have already created.

However, there is material in here that I hope to the gods does not make it into the the print book if an when it comes about. Now keep in mind I am a furry myself and have commissioned adult artwork in the past. With that said I do not appreciate the sexually explicit options presented in the book.

Fetish is something that can destroy a game with its inclusion and there is so much of that stigma already attached to the furry community that I really don't think we need to highlight it within the context of a book This is the sort of thing that gives the furry community the stigma that many within the community wish would just go away. The sexual aspects, I will not deign to detail them here, do not need to be in this material and is not indicative of the community as a whole and how they try to conduct themselves.

That said I do like the flexibility of most of the material presented here and when there is a print version of it available regardless of how it is available, I will gladly pay the price to have a proper book sitting on my shelf. When a printed book is available it will be a vital part of any campaign I plan for Pathfinder. In fact I will go so far to say with this series, I finally have the patch to recreate Iron Claw in Pathfinder and run a version of that idea the way I want to see that game get played.

Any gaming supplement that allots a heavy amount of page space to show how to create a furry campaign automatically gets the ballsiest publisher of the year award.

Thankfully, Fursona – The Definitive Guide to Creating Anthromorphic Characters, is much, much more than a book for RPG animal lovers. It is one of the most thorough and creative race creation books to come down the Pathfinder line. Fursona is not just a book on how to create animal races. It is actually a book on how to create any weird race, with any weird traits that you can think of. At 105 pages, there is very little that you can not build by using the system. The layout and simple black and white images matches the standard set by the clear and concise writing. The creation process is also very simple. You first choose one of the 33 different orders which are takes on the various species in the animal and fantasy world. Then you receive 4 points to choose minor or major advantages- over 130 choices to choose. There’s also an optional 60 disadvantages that can get you more build points.

The PDF offers a ton more choices as you get to the end. There are a few templates to give you bizarre options for creatures. The last few pages take the time to explain how to recreate the traditional races for a more animal campaign.

For the Players There’s a furry in every gaming group. The amount of choices is absurdly plentiful. Any animal you can build a race into.

For the DM I tended to lean more towards the Lovcraftian type options: Tentacles, multiple eyes and mystic powers.

The Iron Word The balance of the book is simple. The abilities players receive never seem too overpowered than what else is out there. Futura is a high recommendation if you are into customizing campaigns as a player or dungeon master.

I was expecting much more of certain things here -- and much less of others.

I was only a handful of pages in when I first ran across the word "yiff," a sexual term in the furry fetish that doesn't belong in this book. There are other ... comments ... laced throughout, as well as certain disadvantages and one of the templates, that are common things in the furry fetish but will be totally unexpected to Pathfinder players.

As to what's missing ... no turtles? No otters or weasels? The book claims that weasels and otters have the same statistics as rats, and that turtles have the same statistics as dolphins. I looked over the stat blocks and I have grave misgivings about that, and these aren't uncommon or obscure species they're skipping. Meanwhile we have entries for dragonmorphs (useful, but not really relevant) and shoggothmorphs (WHAT?)

The 660 million possible races figure seems to be arrived at by simply figuring out how many possible combinations can be thrown together without any rhyme or reason. It's like claiming that Dungeons and Dragons has hundreds of possible character classes because it contains feats. Not to mention, this also includes a LARGE number of "racial abilities" that are nothing of the kind -- social disadvantages, telling magic riddles, berserker rages, the flippin' Ranma 1/2 curse ... it's not a racial ability if a member of any race could have it or acquire it!

Also: rules for playing video game sprites, cartoon characters, Earth humans turned into furries, and Neanderthals DO NOT BELONG IN THIS BOOK.

I bought this book hoping to be able to use it to add normal furry races to my campaign world -- the sort found in Spellsinger, Ironclaw, World Tree, Usagi Yojimbo, etc. I'm finding myself having to do a lot of "well, I can use THIS to mean THIS, and I can substitute THIS for THAT" just to create major characters from those properties, at which point I'm thinking I could just do it myself from scratch and that I wasted ten dollars.

As is, for all these reasons I wouldn't be comfortable handing this book to a player and saying "make a race," and that's the whole ball game right there.

I'd recommend: Pull ALL even remotely sexual or fetishistic material (including the Half-Willing Prey template, which is playing to a fetish I don't even like thinking about), maybe for another book. Abandon scientific classifications and find a better way to group animal types; multiple entries for subcategories of canines and separate entries for whales and dolphins don't help, and disparate animals like those mentioned above shouldn't be lumped into categories together. Overhaul the racial advantages/disadvantages list to restrict it to things that are inherent to racial PHYSICAL traits like flight and water-breathing, making sure nothing that could be acquired is listed as inherent. And remove the silly templates.