Review: Astonishing Races: Grippli

When I first bought Paizo's Advanced Race Guide my wife immediately cooed at the sight of the art for gripplis. And who can blame her? The little squirts are adorable frog-men that you just want a plushie of and have the cutest name. Unfortunately as a small 6 race point creature and not much else to them, they are completely unappealing to play. Plus they have pretty much zero flavor text making them bland to boot.  Well today I look at Fat Goblin Game's Astonishing Races: Grippli. I'm not sure what to expect, as I have only really seen four products from FGG, with things either being genius or terrible with nothing in between and I have yet to see how they handle underrepresented races.

The start is very promising with a much more lengthy description of the race. Seriously, there's five pages of fluff before you get to the racial traits. And the lore is very lovely detailing them as very sociable although as a result of crippling fear of loneliness. Adding to their general cuteness it makes you want to pick up and huggle the first little kermit you see.

When we get to the actual crunch we get a reiteration of grippli racial traits but also a sidebar suggesting to choose two extra Alternate Racial Traits to make them more playable which makes me happy. Interestingly the alternate racial traits come with their race point costs so that you can bring them up by the appropriate number. Like a lot of people I feel like the race creation costs are somewhat out of balance and I would never let anyone make a race from scratch due to this, so this is definitely a dangerous precedence but for the grippli alone it doesn't come off terrible with the racial traits being fairly mundane. Here I noticed a few typos (Like Vermin Hunter not making the word 'Attack' plural) but none that  cause any confusion or will be noticed at first glance. Of course there are Racial Subtypes that describe types of grippli you can make using the alternate racial traits.

Grippli favored class bonuses are greatly increased in number and come with a surprise. Instead of that boring list of what the favored class bonus does there's some flavor text added. The favored class bonuses are exciting without them, and believe me they are pretty exciting, but its nice to get some flair with them.They also get an alchemist archetype, (not as exciting as the racial discoveries that come with it and boy are those a blast. One of them literally.) a Cavalier order, (Needs some Clarification to be useful.) and a Ranger Archetype, (not badly designed but nothing I would particularly take.). There are also new grippli mundane items and a monstrous mount in the form of a giant dragonfly, and new feats and traits. Most of the feats and traits are pretty mundane but some of them will make you want to roll up a grippli.  The magic items, not so much although they are wonderfully written and are cute items and spells that draw out flavor. I can see these being handy for just encountering them.

The document ends with a table of random features. They have no mechanical purpose but again it's cute.

So the name of the game with this product is FLAVOR. I wanted more flavor but at some points this is way more wordy than it needs to be. This can definitely be a good thing because grippli in the base game have almost no flavor but this does mean that it's not a crunch masterpiece. It favors making grippli more adequate and worthwhile to play than loading it up with a lot of options. This isn't to say that there aren't useable options here, and really only one bit had me a bit confused as to how it worked, I'm just not jumping out of my seat to play a grippli over the crunch. I will be jumping out of my seat to play a grippli over the fluff though, which is really appealing here. As it stands the Crunch is valuable but not exciting and the fluff goes above and beyond.

As a PDF the book is ridiculously easy to navigate and is pretty and easy to read.

If you're going to play with grippli you're definitely going to want this if you want them to be playable or interesting.  I rate it 5 out of 5 for bringing grippli up to a level of interest in playability that's worthwhile with very few hiccups along the way. Easily a Player Companion quality race book.

You can find it over on Paizo.com here.