Into the Breach: The Magus (2nd Wave)

 Big thanks to Flying Pincushion for the review copy.

Previously Flying Pincushion was publishing under d20pfsrd.com Publishing and while there they put  out two Into the Breach series books covering the Magus and the Summoner. The Summoner was the first and while its original iteration was kind of lackluster but imaginative the revision and eratta made things much better. Unfortunately the Magus book did not get the same treatment and that was too bad because I really didn't like that book. Fortunately under their own banner Flying Pincushion released a new Magus book following their current styles and format.

At the beginning I'm immediately met with a bit of disappointment. Going through the archetypes I notice a lot of rules language that is either missing information that's needed to fully function, is drastically non-standard to the point  archetypes with similar changes don't have the same rules language or don't seem like they would work in the context of what the game actually does.

 For example; I really like the Mistblade, an archetype that makes illusionary doubles, despite missing crucial information on what save or skill check is required to disbelieve it, since whether or not it provides a flanking bonus depends on whether or not the opponent is aware that it is an illusion. It also implies that the doubles can be destroyed but no way to destroy them. One ability that makes them capable of dealing damage probably solves this problem and it can go away with a slight bit of houseruling but I hate having to do eratta work when it comes to player information.

There's also a habit of pricing abilities that use the arcane pool or arcane pool equivalent after the whole thing is described which isn't erroneous just a bit irritating.

Then there's minor things like "[Magus Archetype] gains one or more evolution points" where the 'or more' part throws me for a loop. Also minor is one archetype with abilities that function on a per combat basis which really irks me.

But it's not all bad news. Plenty of the archetypes function fine

I like the Fate's Edge. Its pretty precise when it comes to rules language and it has some neat abilities. It loses the enhancement bonus and gets a sort of future vision state that buffs it and allows it to use some other abilities. I absolutely love the Force Bulwark, an archetype that specializes in making force barriers. I even like the archetypes that have some kind of rules language that I don't like. You get a magus that can turn into a giant, teleport, create clones and so on, and really not that many are affected by undesirable rules language. The archetypes are imaginative and have strong ties to their themes. Not just that but they are actual themes not just ways to push a boring old magus that has a slight tweak.

The only ones that I really frown on are the elemental ones. There are two fire-themed archetypes here and while they do some cool stuff one. Then there is the Elemental Champion. The Elemental Champion is stable but relatively boring. It doesn't really solve the problem I have with elemental themed magi, in that its hard to find good touch spells for all the elements. But i could be suffering from being spoiled by other options. With other third party classes I have more than a mouthful of elemental themed gishes and even when just accounting for Paizo options there's plenty of ways to go elemental. This one just isn't doing it for me.

Following the archetypes are two new prestige classes.  One is a magus/alchemist mix that specifically requires the Hummunculist Alchemist archetype. I'm not esactly a fan as it suffers from a bit of rules language I don't like for it's bomb-spellstrike and it was not exciting to me but it's otherwise functional for what it is.   The other is a more nimbly magus. Rules language is still an obstacle. There's an obvious shortcut to what it does that the class doesn't take which makes the whole thing a little more difficult to understand. Its not one hundred percent functional but rules as intended is very clear.

We get one new feat that is a metamagic feat that interacts with fire spells.  (Again with the fire)

Before OGL credits we have five new spells. All of them are pretty nice. There's a duo of, for lack of better terms, lightsaber spells that create a beam of energy that I really like. I especially like the one that causes weapons to burrow into a target's body.

This one I'm conflicted about. In most of the options the rules as intended is very easy to get and I really like the archetype options, the writers did an excellent job thinking outside the box and bringing to the table archetypes that matter and grant a new play experience. It is miles ahead of it's predecessor in every way. But on the other hand there are plenty of niggling rules weirdness making some abilities difficult to fully grasp without GM oversight, and some rules language that makes an ability non-functional as its written. I'll probably have to give this three out of five stars. It may creep up to a 4 star if you're perfectly fine with making additional clarifications but I personally feel like it's at 3 stars.

You can find this over on Paizo.com here.

Cooking with Class

I love the idea of making food matter more for gaming but to some extent I don't feel like this book exactly delivers. It gives a lot of fluff that I've used in a lot of games but not too much crunch and the crunch that's there never gets used in my games.

On one hand I use the menus and food by region a lot but not much else. It has some great discussions about fluff but you won't be reading this too often or using too much out of it. I'm giving three stars to reflect this.

You can find this over on Paizo.com here. 

Retrospective:

I was excited to get this product and despite disappointment over what it could actually do I wanted food to be a bigger subject in my games but as time went on and the book became less and less used I just forgot about it. Even worse I've already made reviews on my blog that cover similar angles that are vastly superior. Dire Rugrat's Tavern series gives you a lot more bang for your buck in terms of making a resaurant feel alive and giving plot hooks that blend into and work with campaigns. Flaming Crab released a book on food that matters. Heck there's even a fat book that I haven't posted yet that gives you a lot to work with from weapon damage for bar items to new wondrous food items. Cooking with Class is just outclassed on all fronts making it borderline useless. Its easier to replace it with two items which combined are much cheaper and a thousand times better. 

At best there are three prestige classes that do not help in cooking at all and stink of fringe 3.0 design. 

I maintain my three star rating because it's not an inept product. You can get some value out of it and there's no overpowered crunch and some fluff to guide you along, it's just underwhelming and most of what it offers can be handled with a quick google search or some forethought.

Bevy of Blades

When I think of Amora Games and my book shelf of third party material the thing that stands out is the most excellent Liber Influxus Communis, which presented several new classes that give new play experiences and are a blast to build around. With this new product they introduce four new classes that appear to be martials in one way or another so I'm excited to see how  it stacks up to the quality and imagination standard set by LIC.

Since this product is pretty small, 21 pages counting the credits, introduction and cover, I can look at each class rather than my impression of the book as a whole.

The first class is the Aether Blade. Like a true martial it gains Full BAB and a d10 hit die. It also has good fort and will saves and 2+Int skills per level. The Aether Blade conjures it's own melee weapon and eventually can cannibalize magic weapons in order to get bonuses. Another important ability is an aura that it can use by the round (It scales similarly to Rage or Bardic Performance) which grants a scaling bonus to various things based on what kind of aura you want to apply.  As it levels the Aether Blade can use the power of staves, rods, or wands for increasingly more powerful effects.  Most of the rest of the abilities for the most part just give it numbers except from one class feature that basically gives it spells which I felt kind of put off by. It kind of feels like the ability makes it a 4/9 level caster but diminished when really we didnt' need to bring spells into the mix to begin with. Heck I would have rather seen another Arcane Paladin  than a pseudo non-caster caster. The mechanical negatives are fairly minimal. There are points like the Aether Blade's enhancement bonus redistribution not having limits on what weapon properties can apply or having the usual rules language that govern similar abilities that make me nervous and there are questions I have whenever pseudocasting comes up in regards to spell completion effects, but that's about it.  From a Flavor perspective I'm not particularly excited. It looks like it functions as a class but nothing gives me a reason to desire to play it over anything else with a similar gimmick that I could be playing. At best it's auras make it a unique gish-like class in that it can directly support casters when normally gishes are far from support classes.

Then there is the Shadow Blade. Another full BAB beef stick. The theme I've seen done to death but That can't be held against it. One of it's important abilities is it's Beshadowed Blade which grants a bonus to feint checks, which is important to activate it's strictly worse sneak attack-like bonus damage that activates when the targets is denied it's dex bonus. This ability gets some fuel from some talent-like options that start arriving at level 7. Beshadowed Blade comes at level 3 but it feels like just for the sake of making a centralized flavor and make it feel more diverse that could have come at level 1 and the talents could have come earlier and in place of the pseudo sneak attack. Since you do kind of want that damage on there it feels like the class want's you to be on the feint path of fighting which is kind of okay because I have some third party material that makes that work out okay but I'm not actually sure that it's really an effective thing to do with the core rules. The Shadow Blade does offer some options to make feint work without a million feats but since those are hard to come by you're a bit locked into some options since you have a lot of feint-based class features that you can't pick and choose from. The other really important ability is the ability to teleport through shadows. You only have a certain amount of feet per day to work with but if you go the Two Weapon Feint route it's a bit more doable, although situational. As far as I can tell this class mechanically works and nowhere am I stumbling to understand what to do.

The third class is the Verdant Blade. It has a retractable plant weapon that as passable wording governing it but some things make me wary about the rules language although part of it is for flavor concerns. for example; it takes root in the wielder's hand or wrist which makes me question how this affects the wrist or hands magic item slots. Other than that it's my favorite class out of the bunch. It has talents and 4 levels of druid casting but also has a cavalcade of interesting abilities like just macguyvering items together and planting seeds into creatures. It feels like what I would have imagined a Ranger would be if it were more of a magic nature warrior than a specific quarry hunter. Its also less of a damage dealer and more of a defensive debuffer with many of it's abilities either defending the Verdant Blade or obstructing an opponent without any real combat direction or damage boosts that most martials get.

The last class is the Vital Blade. Like two of the others it conjures a weapon but this one is made of blood. They also get a short pool of Blood Points that can be refilled with killing blows with the blood weapon or critical hits. I'm sure this will lead to bags of rats but the point pool is so small that there's no point so I won't see it as that big of a deal. It gains a list of talents it can take and on killing blows or by spending blood points it can get enhancement bonuses or weapon abilities (again no limit). The bonus gained is limited to the target's hit dice to avoid bag of rats tricks. Its probably the most concise out of the four, mechanics-wise but I've never been too keen on blood themes so its a net plus.

Following the classes we get archetypes for the classes. They all are pretty much mechanically sound and change their playstyles so they feel pretty necessary.  This is followed by new feats, one seems like a no brainer that should have been printed in the core rules by now, two are specific to class features of the classes in the product and two feel like they'll do way more to help arcane casters than these classes. In fact two of the feats are pretty strong when used for Bloodragers and Bards. I'll have to see them in actual play before I can call them broken but they seem really really good. One gives you 1/2  your caster level plus casting modifier as temporary hit points as a swift action effectively making a Bloodrager way better at tanking than a Barbarian by having an HP buffer each round. Its almost like having an Invulnerable Rager DR in one feat. The other one gives you some extra land speed as a swift action based on caster level so another feat nets the bloodrager some fast movement too. Sure these feats eat up your swift action but that never stopped anyone from using Arcane Strike.

Lastly we get favored class bonuses covering the core races

Overall there's nothing mechanically wrong with these classes other than what I've mentioned and for it's price tag the product is offering quite a bit, but other than the Verdant Blade I just have this continous feeling that these classes aren't exactly necessary, in the sense that I don't feel very compelled to use them to drive a theme or play with mechanics. That's not to say that I wouldn't be able to have fun with them as none of them are overtly weak or unfun in some way but Verdant Blade is the only thing I'm really clamoring for that I feel couldn't be portrayed with the base game and when third party material is involved it gets much worse because I see their mechanics and themes all over the place as archetypes or classes that have more to offer.

If you don't have a lot of third party material or you don't have the money for other material this is a pretty good deal and I feel that these Full BAB classes are mechanically more interesting to play than Fighters, Paladins, Rangers and Barbarians. But they do offer a rather narrow focus to the point where I think the product could have condensed the concepts into two classes and I'd be more enthused with it. Right now I want more of the Verdant Blade and the rest just don't appeal to me over other options I have, even just with the base rules, to appeal to the same character concepts. I'll give it 3 out of 5 stars with a note that it's a very strong 3 stars.

You can find this over on Paizo.com here.

Review: Tides of War: Volley Fire Teamwork Feats.

While I was a huge fan of Flying Pincushion's previous Tides of War title, Mounted Combat Feats, I was kind of skeptical about Volley Fire Teamwork Feats. While mounted combat is pretty linear no one is really a big fan of teamwork feats due to their very nature, and I've never ever seen a party shoot in unison, but with at least three classes where teamwork feats are important and the prospect of more GM tools is appealing so there's hope. So what's inside?

This is short. There are 6 pages of pdf and only two of them have feats so it's a small product like Mounted Combat Feats. Unlike the previous pdf this one is a bit messy, probably due to it's concept but some of it are just typo or positioning kind of quirks. For example; There's some bolding going that was probably a mistake, one key feat, Group Fire, I have a hard time understanding how it resolves, and a sidebar describing positioning requirements for all the feats after the feats instead of before it. The list is a bit longer but you get the gist. I would probably blame the complexity of the feats themselves for some of the more mechanical problems but also the nature of how turns and rounds work.

Once you do understand fully what these feats do you will realize that they are kind of useless to players. For the most part a lot of them are not worth it without at least 2-6 archers in a group firing in the same round, so nobody is going to use them even with a companion or cohort, and there's no way I'll allow a player to have enough NPCs to pull any of these off. They will extend the threat level of a group of 12 kobolds though. Basically if there's a group of monsters with ranged weapons with these feats (or one well placed Cavalier) whoever is fighting them is in for a world of hurt.

For the purposes of NPCs I'll definitely use this, but it took way too long to piece together what they actually do and the rules language doesn't help. It tries to cover a few needed concepts but doesn't have the simplicity that the Volley Fire feat has. Plus there are a few glaring mistakes or confusing formatting. Overall I'd give it 3 out of 5 stars. I may have rated it lower but the rules as intended are easy enough to extrapolate and I have the perception that this is mainly useful as a GM tool than a player tool which makes the rules language less of an issue.

You can find it over on Paizo.com here.