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.

Advanced Bestiary

Have 5 stars.
Seriously this is just really good for a GM. Its more than a bestiary or a compilation of templates, or an NPC book. Its all three. In fact its more considering that the templates are often very involved. This massive book effectively multiplies the entries in all the bestiaries and NPC codexes saving me a ton of trouble and making for incredible encounters.

You can find this over at Paizo.com here.

Retrospective:

My original review for this was rather short. Others has posted reviews in great detail and I just wanted to add my stars to the mix, but really there isn't all that much to say.

The product is very basic. Its a big fat book full of creature templates. The templates are diverse and create a lot of interesting abilities and plot hooks. Each template has an example creature that is either an NPC or monster that has the template. So the entire book is one part bestiary and one part 'pimp my monster' but has some weird NPCs in there.

To understand how good this is, think about how many monsters you have. We have five bestiaries, an NPC Codex and a Monster Codex. Each of those creatures when they have a template applied is pretty much a new monster given that these templates are far reaching and add some bit of flavor. So the amount of creatures you have at your disposal multiplies with each template. With, what I'm guessing is 200 templates, some of which have multiple 'modes' you can seriously  never have the same creature twice for a really long time. Gone are the days when your players can predict how a creature works completely, even if it's the same monster they've seen dozens of times. Monsters that they've fought at level one can show up more often with newer and more diverse abilities. My usual method of advancing monsters has been applying class levels but with this many templates I can do quite a bit very simply. I could even design entire campaigns around some of the templates because they do more than add a few plusses but can add a new dynamic or a new kind of enemy. Besides that the book is effectively a new bestiary given the amount of sample monsters.

This book reduces a lot of work for any GM and has been one of the most useful books I have to make encounters more interesting or buff up a monster that wasn't too interesting to fight. It is pretty much an automatic five stars simply by how often it  gets used.