Meditations of the Jade/Lotus

Anyone Remember the Pathfinder Player Companion? Inside was a new feat type for Monks. I don't know about anyone else but for me those were terrible. Meditation feats, the feats in question, could be taken in place of monk bonus feats and represented getting bonuses for meditating. The entry feat gave you a one time +1 bonus to a roll if you meditate for one hour after 8 hours of rest. From there you can take more feats that give you different effects for the day that can be quite good or just offer another minor bonus. Then there's Combat Meditation which lets you meditate for a full round to gain instant benefits from other feats often with their own limits. I thought this was a neat mechanic but not much about it appealed to me because there weren't that many of them and there wasn't a real way to build around them. Plus I saw Combat Meditation and Meditation Master as pretty steep feat taxes for the kind of bonuses along the line.

Luckily Amora Games has release more meditation feats to let this new little subsystem play out, which is a great thing. The list of feats for monk bonus feats has always been awkward to me and meditation feats feel like a flavorful substitute that should have been a mainstay in the class rather than a small blip in a Player Companion. Potentially as big as style feats.

In Meditations of the Jade the feats are honestly not that exciting, at least in terms of combat effectiveness. There are a few that get cool and interesting, like the ability to spit poison, making a shadow double once a day, using dimension door, or detecting magic and invisibility, but others feel like they're more in there for flavor, like being able to switch styles in mid combat by using a swift action.  I would say that half of them are nice to have or do something mildly exciting while the other half I wouldn't ever take considering that Meditation Master is already kind of a feat tax. This being a small book its hard to really judge because a few good ones can make the product good enough for most purposes and the low price tag doesn't hurt. I would warn customers not to get TOO excited but if you like the idea of monks getting a bit of divination and a bit of teleportation then this is a solid 4 out of 5 stars once you ignore the stinkers.

You can find this over on DriveThruRPG.com here.

In Meditations of the Lotus we are greeted with all kinds of excitement. Self healing, the ability to cheat in a bunch of ki points, reroll will saves, use ranks as BAB (okay that's kind of dangerous.).  There are some that interact with Grit, Panache or Stamina that I feel aren't really needed but if you're multiclassing then it couldn't hurt. As exciting this is I keep getting the feeling like these are going somewhere but aren't quite there, but I guess I was expecting something more outrageous and wuxia. At the very least more effective combat applications for meditations. The feats inside instead stay well within usual design paradigms and try to do the best they can.  What I really want to say is that I wanted more monk fixes out of meditations but what I got isn't bad and can still be useful. Especially things that interact with ki since a ki ability intensive build needs as many of those as they can get. Overall I would give this 5 out of 5 stars. May of these I would gladly take with a few exceptions.

You can find this over on DriveThruRPG.com here.