Tides of War: Volley Fire Redux

A while ago, Flying Pincushion released an addition to their Tides of War line covering volley fire teamwork feats. I had uses for it but really the language made the feats difficult to understand and in some ways the rules as written didn't quite work. But they have since released a revision so here is a retrospective for the new product.

Like the mounted combat feats before it, this Tides of War is very short, with about two pages of usable feats but the pictures reduce it to about one and a half.

The first feat, Group Fire, is simple. Declare that you are making the special attack (A full round action) and anyone close to you with the same feat can make a shot as an immediate action at the same target. This gives everyone a plus one to attack and damage for each attacker at the cost of the participant (aside from the initiator) being staggered the next round. Its easy enough to follow and worthwhile for a gang of enemies or even a single cohort since it nets you at least a +2. There's a bit of weirdness where technically with the wording you don't need an ally to get at least a +1 bonus but given that its one shot for a full round action its not that bad since anyone in their right mind will just make multiple attacks. In fact at least it's something to do with the feat when you don't have allies which is nice I guess.

The rest of the feats require Group Fire and interact with it. Some are obvious, like the clustered shot one, and some seem to be there to compensate for situations where you only have one participant for your group fire. This is nice to have if you're an Inquisitor, or at least I assume so. I question whether or not for the purposes of Solo Tactics the participating ally gets to make an attack, gets the bonus and so on. Given the wording the I assume that the Inquisitor would be the 'source' of the ability and thus starts granting actions but not bonuses. I'm not sure how this works when she would have an ability that calls out granting a bonus to someone or even the clustered shot one. I'm guessing this is why Volley Fire and other teamwork feats function by things happening to you or you doing something than granting actions to allies. Bottom line is that I'm not sure if this is overtly useful for an Inquisitor.

For everyone else this is fine. With enough participants you can increase the threat range of weaker enemies, cluster your shots, get other ranged abilities a chance to participate, and hamper flying creatures among other things.

Everything is clear and easy to understand, which is a huge improvement from the product's previous iteration, but I do think that the inherent nature of how group fire works mucks up any ability that assumes that Teamwork feats don't grant actions or directly affects allies. Being initiated by an action as opposed to the feat enhancing an action does this as well. Case point is how Volley Fire works. As far as I can tell, only Solo Tactics gets confusing with it as it only calls out that participants don't receive bonuses but I don't think the rules intend for it to be able to grant immediate actions. Other than that I would take a hard look at any class feature that interacts with teamwork feats just to make sure.

I want to give this 5 out of 5 stars because the feats do grant new things to do and get creative with teamwork feats while being easy enough to implement, but the very premise is on shaky ground because I'm going to have to check for how it interacts with things. Perhaps Solo Tactics is the only outlier and I just have to rank all of this as mostly useless to it, but with the Inquisitor being one of the main classes that actually uses teamwork feats I'd like to not be confused as to how these feats interact with it. I also can't shake the feeling that this is inherent to teamwork feats not granting allies actions or new things to do specifically because of stuff like this. If we ignore those issues then these work fine whether you're dealing with a cohort or have a group of kobolds that you want to be a bit more dangerous.  In the end I'll give this a 'high' 4 out of 5 stars. There's a glaring issue but I don't think you'll encounter the issue in most circumstances that you'll use these feats.

You can find this over on DrivethruRPG here.

More Feats! Compilation: Volume 1

First of all, a big thanks to Fat Goblin Games for gifting this product. 

Abandoned Arts is a publisher that puts out some decent product. Not great but not terrible. But they are consistent in putting out their material that has a lot of crunch per page and not really wasting time on fluff or art, so you get quite the bang for your buck. However I'm not one to start picking up tons of little books, mainly because I don't want players (or myself) to go file hunting for just the right options by digging through a bunch of small titles. When it comes to player options I like my fat books or at least fat pdf that I can print out into a fat book, so the only Abandoned Arts book that I actually use is The Class Acts Compendium. Otherwise the company has drifted into obscurity for being fairly low profile crunch that I can honestly live without. Lately Abandoned Arts has started publishing under Fat Goblin Games, who I didn't really pay attention to until after their Fantastic Technology book, and most of the products I've seen after that book has been miles better than what I had purchased before so I see this as a huge step up for both companies. Here we have More Feats!: Vol 1, which is a compilation of Abandoned Arts More Feats! line.

This pdf is only 38 pages long but true to Abandoned Arts tradition it doesn't waste much space or time. These are a truckton of feats with seven pages being just the feat tables. The document promises another compilation as they put out more More Feats! books with two more compilations showing up sometime this year culminating in over 500 feats.

The feats here cover themes of Agility, Alchemy, Athleticism, Charisma, Courage, Dexterity, Endurance, Fellowship, Fury, Horsemanship, Intellect, Leadership, Marksmanship, Secuction, Speed, Strength, Style, Subterfuge, Wisdom, and Witchcraft.

The downside of wanting a fat book of feats is that I can't talk about every individual feat and how I feel about it so I'll just bring up my general feelings. Another downside is that this product is a bit difficult to judge. The feats inside are totally not equal. Some are pure gold that I want to take and are evocative and useful, granting you something new to do. Some are basically situational trap options that I'll never take. As far as I can tell not even one of them will break your game and they are written clearly enough for me to understand on the first try (Although I noticed a few typos and wonky language like gaining 'a bonus equal to the highest level spell..' not specifying spell level.), so do I judge it for the bad stuff or the great stuff? I guess judge by how much value I get for $9.95 it takes to purchase this product.

From that point you actually get quite a bit of value. I'm noticing some really cool feats for fighters and monks like one that lets you use Str for Initiative and a series of style feats that let you be really dangerous while mobile. There's also some really interesting social feats like distracting a room full of creatures enough to allow observed creatures to make stealth checks. The useless ones are situational but if you known what kind of campaign you're getting into they can be pulled off regularly. I would say that overall the feats are about as good as you'd expect from Paizo's Ultimate books with a large swath being ignored due to the abundance of feats you need for particular builds but the ones with good flavor and great usefulness peeking through, even producing new kinds of builds.

It does tend to mess up a bit less, where a number of the feats aren't bad but make me wish characters got more feats because really they do new things but will get crowded out by hyper-optimized combat focused builds needing feats to be way more aggressive. This is kind of a result of the product not exactly rocking the boat by revolutionizing the game or generating new subsystems or changing power dynamics but at the same time the tendency kind of keeps it playing safe and not messing up by completely bungling what its trying to do and wind up being completely useless or overpowered. Its the kind of thing that you wouldn't seek out with any real enthusiasm except for about a dozen feats and more of something that you're really happy to have when you have it. Its a dose of diversity that doesn't rock the boat that can be a really nice treat for casual games that have a particular kind of game in mind and giving a few new reasons to build in a weird way. From a powergaming grognard point of view there's only a couple of gems to break you from the core rulebook and is about as useful as your average Pathfinder Player Companion. That doesn't mean I wouldn't recommend it to a powergaming grognard because in context the same price is less than your average Player Companion and the density of the product does lend to it more actual content to sink your teeth into so it actually comes out as being as useful as a really good Player companion so I can deem it as well worth the price.

For the rate of traps per gems I'd have to lower my final score to somewhere between three stars and four, as that just adds more choice paralysis to anyone that has trouble finding feats, but I get more value out of it than others because I run and play a huge range of types of campaigns so my personal feelings lean it more towards a 4 stars out of 5 and call it a day.

You can find this over at Paizo.com here.

You can find this over at DrivethruRPG.com here.

Everyman Unchained: Skills and Options

When Pathfinder Unchained came out I was ecstatic. The talk of the town was the new unchained classes but i was all about the series of house rules to adjust the game. Unfortunately some of the patches for difficult parts of the game were a little too conservative which resulted in them being fantastic ideas in their own right but not really enough or very functional for the space allotted. Even the best ideas required a bit of adjustment before going into a game. But that's the nature of house rules so I was really eager to see how third party publishers polished off some of these great ideas, and so we get to Everyman Games, now a part of Rogue Genius Games, with Everyman Unchained: Skills and Options.

For the first bit we get a new skill system, a hybrid of grouped skills from Unchained and normal skills. To make things short, you get your normal ranks and skills as normal but additionally you choose skill groups as defined by the table inside at first level(You have to start with the Background skill group.), second level and every 4 levels after that. You get bonus skill ranks that you have to spend on skills within a skill group you selected but only if you have more than half your level in ranks from a skill in that group. On paper and in use this system works very well and gives you a wider range of skills without just handing off a bunch of extra skills willy nilly. But your milage may vary because I personally don't think I'll ever use this purely because Its an added layer of complication which I don't like even though it still works without having to adjust anything else. When presenting it to players I've had to explain whats being said and there was a lot of back tracking for players. To be fair half of my usual group isn't very adaptive to any level of complication so you may take that criticism with a huge grain of salt. Also for the other half it seems fairly simple enough. In the end I just feel like it's the background skills system that threw an added complication by adding your background ranks into something that you have to keep backchecking a chart for instead of simply adding them to a set list.

The next section is on favored class bonuses. There are things that I do like and things that I don't like. I like the favored class bonus options that are class specific (but not specific to race/class combinations). Its a cool way to really give a little more variety within a class. There are even a few third party classes in the mix. Same goes for the racially specific bonuses, particularly that they aren't class specific racial bonuses as well, something that I've always criticized because it means each new race is burdened to account for classes that don't yet through updates. At the same time the class specific ones have the same problem that makes me like the racial ones in that there's no way for it to account for third party classes. to a lesser extent the same can go for the racial ones because races not represented here get basically nothing. But this doesn't exactly mean that non-represented classes and races get no action.  One set of bonuses are specific to classes with an animal companion, which works with classes or even archetypes that could come out next year and still functions. Then there are the universal options, favored class bonuses that don't require a specific race or class, which is basically the holy grail for me in this section. Particularly I like that you can pay favored class bonuses towards a feat that uses your race as a prerequisite. This little rule make racial feats a kind of mini paragon path which ups their value and flavor. Besides that it completely bypasses all the problems I have with favored class bonuses not being able to account for classes and races that don't exist yet or are third party while still keeping it racially relevant. Its one of those things where I wished the game was like that from the beginning. There are new feats that interact with the new favored class bonuses. They are nice but the real noteworthy thing is that humans make out like bandits with a new racial feat that gives them oodles of HP, skill ranks or both.

Lastly we have Alternate Multi-Classing options for the Dragon Paragon, Mystic, Occultist(third party), and Technician.

I may have lobbed some criticism but all in all this is a decent product. If you liked the background skills system from Pathfinder Unchained then the skill system is a better alternative. (I did not so I wasn't too keen on this system.) If you aren't finicky about getting new races and classes in on the favored class bonuses then you at least have an option to give them something. The thing I'm mostly taking from this book is the universal favored class bonuses and the associated feats but i can seriously see anyone else taking away more. So right now I'm on the fence of what to rate this because of a fight between what I feel like I'd use and what I feel others would use. I think 4 out of 5 stars is fair. Its a rating that doesn't scare people who would like it from the product but expresses that I really only consider two pages of the product useful to me.

You can find this over on Paizo.com here.

You can find this over on DrivethruRPG.com here. 

Heroes of the Advent Imperiax

A big thanks to Purple Duck Games for the review copy.

Heroes of the Advent Imperiax caught my eye because I'm an admitted nut for scifi material for Pathfinder, particularly since I'm using the system to play a space campaign, and the cover has an alien woman with a space gun. I am a little bit sad that aliens aren't immediately apparent when starting to read it. This is the fault of not being very familiar with Porphyra and not being bothered to look at the linked wiki. Which is moot point, with products like these I really have to judge them based on how the elements fit into homebrew campaign settings because that is where they will likely be used for me.

After some prose to set the mood we have new races. One note of criticism is that images of individual races are not next to the racial descriptions (with one exception), although they do appear throughout the pdf. This irks me a bit as this means that printing out the races separate from the rest of the product is less useful. This isn't helped by the lack of physical description sections. You have to hunt down direct descriptions or images in the product to get a good idea of the flavor of the race. In addition to new racial traits for humans and half-orcs in the setting there are four stranger races. Two of them are pretty much your bumpy forehead alien types with some interesting abilities but nothing extreme. Two of them are much weirder giving something a bit more unique. There's a race of people with four arms but use two of them as legs. They have some rules to work with their weird anatomy that are partially awkward but useable. Then there are a race of psionic sneaky people and a race of hot green chicks and a race of half ooze people.

After this is flavor text detailing the state of the hot green chick race, that they are the remnants of a crashed spaceship that settled on Porphyra and got aggressive with protecting their technology. This includes some city stat blocks and brief history of the three main cities of the Imperiax civilization. This comes with new settlement qualities. There are important-to-the-setting NPCs but not exactly NPC stat blocks. Just their names, common locations, important equipment and a brief description. I actually really like this method. There are some NPC stat blocks later in the book but really for these I don't need too much information and this saves some space while getting to important information.

The next section is on class options. There is a prestige class that I can honestly live without. Its not bad, just that at this point I feel like there's enough material out there to have the concept without having to resort to a prestige class. Plus I'm biased against prestige classes so there's that. There are also new options and archetypes that fill in concepts for the setting. Though they are mostly for the flavor of the setting they look pretty functional, albeit nothing spectacularly new except for the otyugh mount.  The Prestige class and the archetypes have a bit of psionic support with a new Terror and archetype for Dreads and the Prestige class requiring a power point pool.

This is followed by new feats. There are some psionic ones and many of them are racial but there are some general goodies in there. None of them feel superfluous or like trap options although Alien Weapon Proficiency brings up a system explained later about alien weapons that aren't exactly necessary given exotic weapon rules and the Technologist feat is sufficient for creating that kind of barrier for using certain weapons. We also get new psionic powers including powers adapted from spells from the Technology Guide which is way more relevant and interesting than the three new powers. 

Here things start to get a bit rapid fire. There are two new race options using the race builder from the Advanced Race Guide, two new alchemical items, three herbs which function on an interesting basis that I'd like to see more of, and six new drugs/poisons. We also get new weapons and armor including technological items. The highlights are a nerfed powered suit, a stun gun, and a number of non-firearm weapons. Sadly there are two instances where I feel the rules are unclear about how something works but on the bright side they are easy to spot and only number in two. There are also some general technological items. The technological items are all priced lower than I expected which is a common theme among third party books with tech. Overall I really like the tech items here as I find them very necessary to flesh out the flavor of technology but also gives us a bit more new things with psionic-tech items. Among our general psionic items. We also have new vehicle stat blocks as well as a new type of propulsion type before getting to a list of common technological items in the setting.

Finally we get a gallery of NPC stat blocks using options from the book.

Lets get the bad out of the way first. A lot of the book kind of runs into each other without breaks after the class options section starts, so its a bit hard to find what you want. The lack of a table of contents for a 64 page pdf doesn't help matters at all. There are also a few points where the rules can be clearer or handled differently, particularly where the Femax environmental suit and the Dhosari race are concerned. The fluff, while there and interesting, makes me feel a bit lost on the product.  I feel like I need more context outside of the Advent Imperiax to get a real feel for the setting and how this subsection of the setting interacts with the rest of it. I'm also a bit hampered by a somewhat lack of description. I generally assumed what this was and the product has a hard time conveying what it is and how it can fit into your game. And lastly the concept and execution of Alien weapon proficiency is beyond useless given how the rules for exotic weapons are sufficient for this kind of weapon barrier and simply doesn't play nice outside of it's own context.

For the good things; The actual content is really handy and things that I'll immediately put in my scifi campaign. I really like most of the races, The fluff regarding the races is fascinating, the NPC mini descriptions give me a lot to work with outside the setting, the psionic support to technology is very useful, the technological items are instant includes to a scifi campaign. The book as a whole is amazingly handy whether it's the fluff or the crunch and I would recommend at least getting it for the player options if you are running a tech focused game and moreso if your tech focused game involves interacting with crashlanded aliens in a normal medieval stasis world or a Iron Gods-like situation. I think I would give this a 4 out of 5 stars. Its a bit awkward to sort through but its full of things that I'll definitely use.

You can find this over on Paizo.com here or at DrivethruRPG.com here.

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.

Class Acts Compendium.

There are a lot of bad things in this book. There are also a lot of good things in this book. Its pretty tight and concise making it a pretty dense book in terms of content. It opens up about as much class content as Ultimate Magic or Ultimate Combat. Its a fairly generic and unnecessary book bringing only a few inspired options along with a ton of option bloat. Overall for the price it expands potential list of choices without breaking the game and I see myself selecting quite a few of them so it rounds out at about four stars. Nothing special but nothing to sneeze at either and brings a lot to the table for a decent price.

You can find this over on Paizo.com here.

Retrospective: 

I agree with my previous short words on this. All the classes (Up to Ultimate Combat) get some love and a lot of territory gets opened up. Some of the archetypes are just plain bad and there's nothing groundbreaking that shifts balances or offer incredible new ways to play but it offers heavy amounts of crunch for a lower price than one of Paizo's hardcovers. Each class gets at least two archetypes and each class gets a slew of suboptions. 

However this product does suffer when you have your hands on other third party options. As I have leaned more on third party classes and options that do shift balances and offer new ways to play these options have seen less and less light until the point where its basically gathering dust now. There are just a lot of exciting things going on in Pathfinder for players to go gold digging through ignorable to 'pretty okay' options to get their build just right. 

I can't say that this is bad because really its not. If you have games that focus on Paizo classes and want to open them up as much as Ultimate Magic or Ultimate Combat does then here is your product and for a decent price tag. If you're more into expanding into psionics, spherecasting, martial maneuvers and new ways to resolve magic an fighting abilities then this might be a pass. If you do like the idea then I would recommend that you print this out and bind it at your local print shop and that you get this product rather than the multiple parts that make it up. The stress on printing is very low and isn't broken up by multiple OGL statements. Also even the ones with bad options have material that is very desirable so you'd want to get them all in one shot rather than pick and choose. 

The Book of Martial Action 1 and 2

Out of all the third party products I've picked up Book of Martial Action 1 is the first I'd have to penalize for simply not being enough.

The product contains a series of feats that allow you to generate a pool of points based on your BAB that you can spend on martial techniques. Each technique is it's own feat and the martial pool can be regained during the day.

Its a bit similar to Book of 9 Swords but dispenses with the whole 'vancian' techniques, however its is very sparse and shallow leaving me preferring this system but wishing it were longer. The product comes with martial pool archetypes for a number of classes but while that's nice I was left with a hankering for more techniques especially the 2-4 point ones so that I can do more with the pool.
A+ product but gets a C+ for just not being enough.

I was a big fan of The Book of Martial Action I so I was excited to see this.

The PDF consists of new technique feats divided into 5 schools. There is a Tank school, a speedster school, a dueling school, a buff school and a trickery school. Like before each technique feat uses points from an opt-in martial pool that refreshes after a minute of rest. If you're familiar with Path of War/Book of 9 Swords/4th edition these effectively makes them encounter abilities but since they are point based you can pull of a few large stunts or a lot of smaller ones. I like it a lot better than the 'Vancian' maneuvers of Path of War.

The new thing is the schools of techniques and they are a huge hit for me as they put a lot of flavor into the technique feats.

My least favorite part of the pdf are the new base classes representing each of the new martial schools. Because they are not nearly as robust as any other base class I cant help but to see them as unneeded class bloat, especially since I own a lot of third party products with new base classes. I'd much rather just use an archetype from the previous book or just get one base class that was flexible enough to represent any school. As it stands they feel like some extra content I don't care for but someone else may.

Overall the crunch is not useless but not broken and brings fun new things to do as opposed to full-attacking.

Retrospective:

When the stamina system came out with Pathfinder Unchained I fell in love with these books all over again, but by then I also had Path of War from Dreamscarred Press so there was a bit of complementing and a bit of conflict. 

Martial actions definitely have some power creep but way less than Path of War so it puts the GM in a position to decide just how much power creep is acceptable. Despite the power creep martial actions have costs that keep them somewhat more in line with Paizo feats and they have the unfortunate side effect that more martial action feats mean that you have several powers competing for the same pool of points. This means that while they add an interesting dynamic to the game they aren't all that powerful and they definitely aren't as pervasive as Path of War maneuvers and certainly not spells. If Path of War is more your speed then I cannot recommend these books but  if you want a slight nudge for you martial characters they aren't bad products. 

I will say that these aren't as popular with players as I wanted them to be. When you have access to better classes that can mix it up with fighting they just seem like a long list of more feats to think about and the high cost of some of them make them less accessible. Really, if you take a technique feat at the level you qualify for them, using it means you spend almost all your martial pool which puts an end to using them for a bit. The lower level ones are great but I could stand for the higher ones to be less powerful to  have less of a cost.

So overall I think being enamored with this has more to do with the novelty. Pathfinder Unchained has been out for a while but we still haven't had many third party things doing something with stamina but Martial Actions go really well with stamina  giving you a sort of a set of 'martial powers' that can boost classes like the Fighter without ignoring it and replacing it with a new class with a new martial mechanic. If something new came out that was more expansive and streamlined then I'd drop this pretty fast because for right now martial actions seem to fall more into enabling niche builds than being a martial revolution. I still love these products but I can see where it could have been 'more', and would definitely love to see the concept helmed by others.

 You can find this over on Paizo.com over here for part one and here for part two.

Liber Influxus Communis

So this book introduces 14 new classes. There are other things but I'll spend a lot of time on the classes.

Battle Lord
Battle Lord makes as much sense as anything else. Of course it has the same problem that I generally find in classes like Cavalier and other support classes in that how broken it is depends on how many martials are in the same area. This will make a nightmare of an NPC but relatively niche for PCs. I like the class

Conduit
The Conduit is much more interesting than I thought it would be. I thought it would be weird and cumbersome but mechanically this is pretty nice. I'm guessing he can absorb AOE spells if he's in the target zone? My only real problem is that my games will have veils, spheres, powers and other non-spell magics so this guy may have limited use in the future. I've heard promises of a patch that works in other magic systems so there's that to look forward to although if you're in a low magic situation the problem still persists. Also there's kind of an 'Uphill battle to awesome' situation here where fighting casters buffs you which is a dangerous thing to do. Its not really bad as it has plenty of workarounds but requires a clever player to make the most of the dynamic. I like the class.

Demiurge
I was skeptical about the Demiurge as soon as I saw that there is a complexity disclaimer, and low and behold I still don't quite understand how the class works. So it gets 'Enlightenments' which are pretty much Demiurge domains but where it gets tricky is the Fascimiles and everything involved with them. They are obviously 'creatures of law' considering that their abilities read like a contract: "rhetoric always involves two facsimiles, one that is designated as the “argument” facsimile, and the other as the “arguer” facsimile.". Oh god there has to be a way to explain what these things are doing without a huge use of philosophy book sub-terms. I can barely read the class and even then I'm forced to track a large number (quintessense) and my mental constructs need directions measured in commands that I don't feel are well defined. At the moment this class is banned from my games until it's rewritten to be simpler or I figure out how it actually works. Its just a philospher with summoned thought constructs. I really don't like the class

Medium
With Paizo's upcoming Medium, Radiance house's Occultist and Thunderscape's Thaumaturge I was not looking forward to looking at this class. Its basically a class that has the spirit of another character that it can gain abilities from.It has a place despite the Occultist medium and Thaumaturge existing so I don't dislike it as much as I used to. Its fun, somewhat unique and allows for an interesting playstyle. I'm okay with the class.

Metamorph
The Metamorph is something that I felt I'd seen before (LJP's The Host) but its a bit more refined and diverse. It feels like an eidolon and a sorcerer had a baby, with a bloodline-like selection that gains powers and access to evolutions. If you want to 'play the monster' like a sorcerer without the baggage of being a full arcane caster then this is the class for you. I love the Genesis concept allowing a lot of different flavors to fall into the class. I really like the class.

Mnemonic
The concept of blue mages in Pathfinder is a hard road to travel becaust there are so many kinds of abilities in the game (more if third parties are involved) that scale differently it's hard to determine how such a thing would actually work. The Mnemonic works well enough for that I guess. Its way less book keeping than other classes I've seen that try the concept out (Rite Publishing's Taskshaper) and for that it gets five stars. I like that it doesn't even try for spells. Overall I like the class.

Momenta
Sort of the Wendy and Marvin of classes. I don't mind support classes. I've had players be each other's butler and this class fills that role. I do have a complaint that it gets points at the start of combat rather than regaining its pool after a minute of rest. I just hate abilities that call out whether it works in or out of combat but that's kind of a minor complaint since the Inquisitor already prompted me to have to define the beginning and end of combat so no harm done. I really enjoy the idea of using the Momenta to make a 'Princess' or aristcrat character. This class is a good way to go about the concept which is great because most other solutions I've seen involve class-based gold acquisition (I hate class-entitled treasure) or some sort of social subsystem. I really like the class.

Mystic
When the Kineticist came out for the Occult Adventures playtest it became the playtest's darling for being the most mechanically fascinating and weakest class in the playtest. The Mystic is less mechanically interesting but definitely stronger and more interesting in other ways. Smart move in making it off of the Monk's chassis, as it adds some flavor and doesn't pigeonhole the class into being 'the blaster'. The class itself is surprisingly rich by comparison too. Two mystics of the same element can look drastically different. I really like the class.

Pauper
The whole despair/hope mechanic irks me for being fueled by something so abstract and environment dependent. I feel like its an argument waiting to happen. Other than that its an okay class despite being the most wimpy flavor-wise. Think of being the brunette girl from Yugioh and that's the class here. I'm not sure if I like the class, I feel like it could have been absorbed by the Momenta.

Survivor
The survivor is probably the most boring and best functioning class here. I really like it. Its basically a spell-less ranger that's not a racist serial killer or too bogged down by the whole nature them. I feel like chest hair should have been a class feature. I like the class.

Synergist
There are a lot of support classes in this product. I think designating people as your cast feels kind of useless. It feels like just more language. I like the class but it doesn't excite me as much as some of the others.

Umbra
Okay so this has two pools of points that have a third term for what they are collectively? I know its somewhat nessesary but couldn't things be built so that it doesn't need a laundry list of extra language? I feel like I have ADD with some of these classes, add to that some of the classes have relatively esoteric terms. That said this doesn't apply to this class that much, its just not complicated like the and doesn't require too much bookkeeping. Its kind of like an incarnum kineticist, getting power to invest in ties to different inner planes. I like the class.

Warloghe
Warlogue is the spooky class. Basically someone taited so attracts and can bind spirits in a minor way to pretty much become a walking haunted house. I like the class a lot.

Warsmith
This class is boring. Its practically a Magus' Arcane pool attached to a crafter with some sunder sneak attack ability. I love it! Its kind of the artificer I've always wanted without weird mechanics or some kind of spell-like technology. Just a guy that can make stuff and break stuff really really well. But seriously this class deserves way more support.

Chapters 2 and 3 are pretty basic. Just some things to support the classes. Nothing terribly fascinating or gamechanging. Then there are new haunts and hazards which are nice.

Overall I have problems with the Conduit and Demiurge but a lot of these classes add to niches unexplored or refined rare niches that other products have only graced. Even the ones I complained about brings something new to the table and the two most boring classes are some of my favorites. There's enough holes filled that I want to call this a must-have but I feel like its not for everyone as it hits a few pet peeves I have on class design. If the problems above aren't your kind of problems this is a five star, but I'm giving it four stars.

You can find this over on Paizo.com here. 

Review: Mystical Marketplaces: The Brass Drake

Another new product from Flying Pincushion covers a new subject for them; shops. The ole' Magic Mart is a strange place. Usually players just roll into town and roll some dice to see if what they want to buy is in the town. This series seems to want to make a store front that the players will want to come back to and interact with more than just picking up their supplies.

The marketplace in question has some crunch for the purchase limit and what they generally sell but also puts in a few other mechanics in there as well. You can barter unusual items, making for interesting quest material. You can also gain discounts and better sell prices for being a regular customer giving players incentive to come back. There are even a few quests to go on and an encounter that can kick off some events. It also includes a  new magic item.

There are some points of this product that do throw me off despite liking the concepts as a whole. The owner of the Brass Dragon takes bartering and gives goofy quests that have odd implications that to me make me assume that he's a Time Lord but stats-wise is just a terrible rogue . As a source of boons or unique items the whole thing is a little lackluster. One thing about the Player Companion Magical Marketplace was that you could get a number of exclusive items and class features. Here the main resource is discounts and quests. Although, to be fair, my criticisms mostly stem from this product having the potential to be more impactful from an equipment perspective when in reality it's more of a fluff piece but even on the fluff front I get a lot of flavor out of the owner of the shop that doesn't feel like it pays out in regards to the quests he has lined up. I just have the feeling that it could have done or been more. It's there to give a bit more description to a shop and give reasons to come back and excuses to go on quests, although that leads to my biggest criticism that the quests feel like they describe mini enclosed events rather than things that lead into adventures your own adventures. There are typos here and there but nothing terrible or anything that ruins the whole product.

All that aside the product succeeds in a lot of ways. It does present a item shop with a reason to return and means to extend into quests that make the place more of an adventurer hub than something that isn't even role played out. My sense that it could probably need more fluff or more crunch is easily dismissed as irrational because it is a very similar to another product I love, Dire Rugrat's Tangible Taverns line. It does it's job and I can see myself using it as a jumping point for adventures.

In the end I want to give it 4 out of 5 stars.  Its a good and functional product but I think that if it had more crunch or more fluff I would be way more satisfied with it, but for now I'll use it but I won't be jumping to use it.

You can find it over on Paizo.com here.

Review: Into the Breach: The Forgotten Classes

The subject matter in this one appeals to me a lot. This entry into the Into the Breach series from Flying Pincushion is a bit different from the rest. It  is about NPC classes, something that I feel is underused throughout the game. NPC classes represent an easy way to generate some stat blocks to do a purpose and become thrown away because honestly NPCs will either die too quickly or their stats rarely come up enough to warrant going through the process of building them as a complex base class. Its too much work for their lifespan so anything that helps on that front is very welcome. Also they represent some GM only territory to help smooth things along, present unique challenges and make a character unique. So lets take a look at what Flying Pincushion does with them.

Starting with the Adept the first archetype grants more complex class features than what I'd care for on an NPC. Basically it can summon incrementally stronger construct out of a chosen elements. You're basically making two NPCs at that point but once they're statted out they aren't too complex. I do feel like just conjuring elemental from existing bestiary stat blocks would have been simpler so points off for that but those points come back because you can actually make an interesting encounter with this archetype. One thing that has to be said is that this archetype is way too powerful for the abilities it replaces, but I'm not counting this against it. Mainly because this is GM only territory so that kind of stuff doesn't matter. I don't even think that the summon construct thing even has a per day limit  which is overpowered in the hands of a PC but with an NPC it is allowed to have these kinds of things.

The next Adept archetype is a cannibal that gets benefits from eating hearts and brains. It's simple and concise and is probably the best example of things that I want to do as a GM that I don't want players doing, or at least not with that specific ability. Its the kind of unlimited overpowered thing that is hidden behind an inept class so that players don't do it. After that is the Nun which is a support cure-y Adept, and a Vicor, a more Inquisitor-ish Adept that is way more varied based on it's domains. It also get some extra abilities based on what domains it has. The Aristocrat gets archetypes making it a nature cultist, junkie or tax collector. About the only one that I feel is less interesting is the first one but the other two have something about them that make them interesting to interact with or fight. The Commoner gets a woodsman archetype, an animal handler and a bum. The expert gets a locksmith, a crafter and a minstrel. The Warrior gets a savage, a peasant, a siege engineer, and an archer.

Following the archetypes is a new Alternate Class that is basically  a merchant. I don't know what it's an alternate class for but it fills it's role basically enough as a new NPC class.

After that is an entire slew of new mundane items including weapons and armor which is basically inferior to normal weapons and armor and would be used by peasants and savages.

 As a whole although only one archetype really became complex  handling NPC classes via archetypes is more complex that I would liked. The archetypes themselves make the NPCs more powerful, which is okay with them as a GM tool but one thing that is actually sad about it though is that having them as hirelings or cohorts in the control of the player is a bad idea for some of these. This does not apply to all of them but they do basically make the balance different so they cant' be handed over without some forethought. I am also disappointed that NPC boons were not covered at all as that is design space for NPCs that rarely gets explored. That said The archetypes are more about flavor than anything else and certainly add abilities that increase their flavor and can make interesting fights or interactions with player characters. They are interesting and I will certainly use them when their concepts come up, I'm just not jumping up and down over what they bring to the table. Another bit of criticism is that there are typos here an there. They don't really ruin rules or anything and I'm overall dismissive of them because of the GM-centric nature of the product.   Bottom line is that this gets 4 out of five stars from me.

You can find this over on Paizo.com here.

Review: The Chemist

Here is another ARMR free class. This is the one that got me to take a look at the series to begin with. So what do we have here?

On it's most basic level its an Alchemist/Paladin hybrid. It has the full BAB d10 HD chassis with four levels of  extracts. It gets an Elemental Smite; a butteloade of energy damage on melee attacks. It gets bonuses to saves against poisons and alchemy craft checks. It also gets bonus feats that can be used to access a limited number of alchemist discoveries. Their mundane alchemical items have higher DCs and they get a scaling energy resistance.

The chemist gets access to it's own exclusive discovery, and the pdf comes with three alchemical weapons. The weapons themselves are awesome but the weapon table is rather minimalistic so you're missing whether they are simple, exotic or martial and small weapon damage.

Well like the Zephyrus before this is mostly a big chunk of potential that feels like it doesn't go very far. Out of all the casting types Alchemy feels like it's in its own little niche, even with the Investigator around. Having a warrior alchemist is intriguing and the Chemist can certainly handle itself. Out of all the series the Zephyrus and Chemist are the only ones that have seen some play and the Chemist can get pretty tough since mutagen is involved. But of course this is a small pdf and so it gets only one exclusive discovery so mostly comes off boring after the first go around. The limited space for flavor doesn't help in that regard since the Alchemist can already be built to be a bit more fighty, disregarding that the Mutation Warrior Fighter exists.

That said if you don't have a product that covers it, the Chemist does come off as a satisfying alchemical elementalist that can utilize those crappy alchemical weapons you forget about by level 5, and it has a window of opportunity with it's discoveries for those kind of class features. It's technically a new play experience since you can use extracts on a much tougher character. Plus it settles my grid-filling instinct when it comes to casting types.

In the end the Chemist is a fun gimmick class that works and fills a mechanical niche but it has way more potential than actual substance. I would rate it as a 3 out of 5 star product for being so minimalist, but since giving it access to third party alchemical gear makes it far more interesting and it is free I'll push it up to 4 out of 5 stars.

You can find it over on Paizo.com here.

Review: Book of Heroic Races Advanced: Merfolk

Honestly I've only had merfolk in my campaign once but they have a lot of appeal. Like a number of races merfolk only get one page of material in the Advanced Race Guide and no entries in the Player Companion line so Jon Brazer Enterprises is taking a stab in another Book of Heroic Races book. The last full book had some bumps I didn't like but was still very good so I expect the same amount of quality this time around.

After some fluff text and some reiteration of the merfolk racial traits and alternate racial traits this product brings up groups of alternate racial traits with additions to form new sets of racial traits for racial subtypes. There are two new subtypes, Anglerfish Merfolk and Octopi Merfolk. Sadly there are no cool pictures of these subtypes.  One thing that's notable is the alternate racial trait to be able to gain a human form and a gain a land speed.

Like the Changeling BoHRA, there is a discussion of how merfolk fit in a world and their relationship with other creatures and classes which leads up to some class options specific to merfolk. The options are mostly solid but some abilities from the Sorcerer bloodline that will leave your players asking questions that the book does not seem to answer. The racial feats and items are all good enough to take or buy making them worthwhile additions to the game. This also includes interesting mundane armor made of underwater material like shark skin and coral.

There is one new deity and some new merfolk spells. Surprisingly there is also a new psionic power, for those of you who are into that, which allows merfolk to adapt to land much like the Advanced Race Guide spell that does the same. There are also new magic items including an artifact level trident (of course).

The book ends with a bit of advice on using merfolk in your campaign and seven merfolk NPCs.

Compared to the Changeling BoHR, this one feels a bit lighter on the crunch and fluff, plus the class options aren't as exciting as I would have liked, but a lot of quality is maintained and like having NPCs, thematic items a the racial subtypes is a delightful addition. I also love the extra consideration of giving a land adaption psionic power. But overall it suffers from me reviewing Changelings first. Its not bad by any means but it's sister product brings a lot more to the table. Despite this There is plenty to use and a lot of little considerations that make merfolk more playable in a game. The items, both magical and mundane evoke a lot of imagination although the mundane items are definitely more exciting and interesting to see. In the end I will rate it 4 stars out of 5.

You can find this over on Paizo.com here.

Review: The Animist: Nature Incarnate.

I have two sides to how I think of this class.

On one hand it practically has one class feature. Its a full BAB chassis with a good will save. it has it's animism, a class feature that interacts with his animism and a capstone. That's it.

On the other hand the class feature it does have is all kinds of interesting. It gets two kinds of aspect slots. For major aspects of seasons or creatures that have a scaling suite of effects based on how many aspect slots are invested in that particular aspect. The minor slots don't have the investment slots and each are an ability that can happen once per day plus an extra time every five levels.  At 5th level and every other four levels after that it can swap minor aspects that have static effects or haven't been used so you can get a bit diverse without getting gimped.

The aspect system, particularly the major aspects and the investment mechanic is inspired and interesting, and almost every ability feels relevant, like they each add some power. A number of them are quite overwhelming, probably to make up for the lack of other class features, and you can make some devastating combinations so the class can stand on it's own legs.

But I have a hard time even accepting the amount of class features that the cleric has without being bored so the Animist feels like it really could have been knocked down to a d8 hit die and 3/4 BAB and gotten some more class features to spice it up. In fact I feel like I'd take aspects over the Hunter's spells and creature boosts, as the actual class feature feels like what I wanted Animal focus to do during the playtest and then some. The lack of class features or even bonus feats make the class not be able to interact with other parts of the game and feel lackluster.

I'd give this product 4 out of 5 stars. I know I have some harsh gripes with it but it really it's not bad, just feels a bit flat and its really a matter of taste. As I mentioned above, the cleric feels the same way and many people will still enjoy the cleric. If it could give up some BAB for some other abilities or something I'd be way happier but this is nice too.

You can find this over on Paizo.com here.

Review: Into the Breach: Inquisitor.

The latest entry in Flying Pincushion's Into the Breach series covers the Inquisitor. Like the rest of the series it features several archetypes, an alternate class, Prestige classes and some options and items to round out the class in question.

The archetypes are imaginative and each one gives new and interesting options. Some of them however pick at a few peeves of mine when it comes to crunch. Some of it includes niggling details like inconsistent wording on replacing spellcasting or the Circuit Judge having an ability that calls out that it works for one round before calling out that it works for a number of rounds equal to it's level. Some of it includes personal opinions like some archetypes being too powerful, too weak or redundant for what they replace or Duplicating Accessor being, to me, a book keeping nightmare due to shifting ability scores as a payment for abilities. Nothing I've seen is outright wrong or anything that can't be solved with some clarification but the amount of instances where things like that happen make the product a bit awkward. The archetypes themselves may be worth the headache but tat would be chalked up to individual opinion based on whether or not what annoys me is the same thing that annoys you as none of them are objectively bad, or at the very least need more playtesting than number crunching to get a clear idea of how well or bad it goes.

The alternate class, The Vengeant, seems like a soup of classes. One part Paladin, one part Inquisitor, a splash of Monk and a slight hint of Cavalier. It's a full BAB, 4 level caster. Instead of armor it gets wisdom to AC. It gets an ability that functions a bit like Cavalier's Challenge ability and works with a Judgement-ish ability and makes the target susceptible to an Oath Strike, an attack rolls twice and takes the better number. Overall I like the class.

In the Prestige Class section is hard to judge for me because I generally don't like prestige classes. All I can say is that they didn't have any glitches I noticed and one is way better than the other in the sense that its incredibly more interesting mechanically.

The new Inquisitions are probably some of the most thematic inquisitions I've ever seen. There are some that are specific to a creature type, like Undead Slayer. They aren't too specific so you can make some actual use out of them. There are also racial inqusitions. A lot of them have some of the niggling problems I meantioned earlier, specifically that when an ability functions as a spell that spell isn't always italicized isn't always referenced as being spells or having a reference of what book it is.

Lastly there are new mundane items. Like any mundane item they aren't entirely impressive but hats off to them for having them. Its always magic item this and magic item that. Nothing happens unless it's magic. The all star of this one is probably The Bolt Feed, which along with Rapid Reload (I assume this works) lets you fire crossbows at the rate of a bow.

So as a whole? I like about half the archetypes which made me think this book was going to be a disappointment but the book gets much better further in. Like in a lot of the Into the Breach series I can feel the difference between authors of  the material based on different wording and inconsistent levels of clarification. This bugs the crap out of me and if you can get past that or give some GM oversight the classes I didn't like can be saved, and they probably should be because they do present a new play experience and an interesting take on what an inquisitor is. So it's a product with a lot of potential but kind of flawed on entry. I'd give it a high 3 out of 5 stars as a rating for myself but for the taste of others I'm rounding it up to 4 stars.

You can find it here over at Paizo.com