Thursday, November 19, 2015
Review: Anachronistic Adventures
If you bought enough of the previous component pieces of Anachronistic Adventures then this needs no introduction because you already have this. Enjoy. For everyone else that are potential buyers the general premise of Anachronistic Adventures is making a modern or pre-modern character that finds herself in medieval fantasly-land. This is done with six 20 level classes each based on the six ability scores. They're rather basic in the sense that they don't have setting assumptions in their crunch and are mostly flavored around their respective ability scores. They do have some deviations that set them apart from normal classes and binds them together. Each one has a few floating class skills to make them a bit more customizable and each have one more skill rank per level than what is standard to represent higher education standards in modern settings. They also each get an archetype from a pool shared by all of them. This is a big deal as there are a lot of archetypes with a lot of different flavors from a technomancer to martial artist. Because these archetypes are shared between the six classes this makes for a combination equal to six times the number of archetypes (21) making the classes very varied. For example, one is an Inventor. You can be an inventor that is a charismatic celebrity like Tony Stark or a pulp action scientist depending on what class you use for that archetype.
If this all sounds familiar, its basically d20 Modern in basic structure. And to that extent, being classes and archetypes without real mechanical setting assumptions, the classes kind of succeeds past their premise. Broken Earth suggests using it and the upcoming Conquest of the Universe from Tripod Machine uses it, so we have two settings with the settings of post-apocalyptic earth and outer space respectively, that can utilize these classes and from personal experience, it works. I've seen plenty of classes from scifi third party products and the Anachronistic classes do way more to meld with a pre-modern to post-modern setting. For example, I've seen a few 'pilot' classes that either drive cars or robots and are pretty much useless in any other situation. But here, you can take the Outrider archetype and attach it to six different classes to make whatever kind of pilot you want. I think the key part that makes this all work is that they don't try to make new rules to interact with, play well with Pathfinder rules as they exist, and the wording along with the floating class skills makes them work well with whatever third party thing you throw at them. Also it comes with proficiencies by progress level they come from so they don't choke on third party things.
Past that, there are a ton of new equipment and rules for adjusting to a new setting, including modern weapons and some rules on ESP. One thing I found genius was the Vehicle Template, which is a monster template that turns a creature into a vehicle. With one template you have as many vehicles as there are large enough monsters in your bestiaries and a foundation for making level appropriate vehicles. And the best part about these rules is that they play amazingly well with the rest of the game. Even new rules don't disrupt the game, so you have a lot of new crunch that does not choke on third party things like Broken Earth or Infinite Futures. And for the most part they are fairly mundane classes that don't suck so they fit wherever.
Currently this is my beloved baby simply by making Space Pathfinder more feasible. Technomancers aside I have not seen a product that gets so much done for the subject. This is outright the spiritual successor of d20 Modern and by sheer virtue of playing nice with the rules rather than being their own it succeeds it by being a potential foundation for other settings. This book is the very definition of what I look for in third party products too. It makes some things easier, it gives something new but still plays nice with the rules that exist and is useful beyond it's premise, so I'm giving it 5 out of 5 stars and for any post-1700s setting an outright requirement.
You can find it over on Paizo.com here.
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