Review: CLASSifieds: The Apothecary

The Apothecary is something that I picked up because there is a glaring hole in the caster types. Namely that there's no full BAB 4/9 caster or full caster of the alchemy list. This looks like it serves as the latter. Granted it's not exactly necessary and can be troublesome to have a 'more alchemist' but I wanted to take a look.

Off the bat I'm a little irked. Normally when you present a class you get its hit die, class skills, and skill ranks per level before you get to the class features. Well I can guess it's hit die because of it's BAB but I see no Class Skills or skill ranks per level. These can be guessed given patterns from other classes but That is seriously not something to omit. That kind of thing alone gives me reason to throw this into my folder of stuff I'll never use, but for now I'll power on because it is easy to assume that it has a d6 hit die, class skills as the Alchemist, 2+INT skill ranks per level.

In a nutshell the Apothecary gets full casting alchemy including zero level extracts(!?), Discovery-like Concoctions every other level, Brew Potion, and a capstone ability.  This is simple and looks like it works okay but there are some minor things that set off alarms in my head. Due to how extracts work I'm curious as to what the heck the Widen and Bounce Ray concoctions do. That just raises too many questions. This also makes some of the choices for the spell list questionable at best and useless at the worst. Beyond that it doesn't give me much to differenciate it from the Alchemist. In fact with the loss of BAB (and presumably Hit Die) the extract list, even extended to 9 levels does not support the class enough to make it survive. It's list is nowhere near the Wizard's list so the BAB is not justified and it does not have enough abilities to support itself.

Overall the class as written doesn't work and even when you extrapolate what information should be there it is weak beyond belief and some of the abilities and the extract list show a painful misunderstanding as to how extracts even work. For me it picks at too many pet peeves for me to find useful so I'm giving it 1 out of 5 stars.

You can find this over on Paizo.com here.

Review: Megafeats Revisited.

We have an over 80 page pdf full of feats with no feat table. I'm already upset.

Looking at the feats I immediately started to encounter really broken feats but that's not the norm for feats other than the 'Birthright' feats, feats that can only  be taken at first level. Its a nice idea that I've seen before but most of them are obscenely overpowered. Also, unfortunately, the first one I encountered is a result of a sexual encounter between a human and animal. Because that happens in legends I let that once slide but the book does have a number of feats that are not subtle. There's a feat that gives you bonuses to sex related charisma checks, one that involves period blood and one called Zooamourous Breeder, an item creation feat that allows you to breed mixed creature type creatures in your womb(or an artificial one). What is this F.A.T.A.L.? I noticed that the same author has a book called 'Fursona', should I be concerned? The fact that feats like this keep popping up every once in a while makes the product feel creepy despite there not being that many of them. And that's disregarding the descriptions on some of the birthright feats that conjure images that you don't want in your head. Now full disclosure; I'm a total perv, but this product is off putting to me because the attention to the subject does not feel mature to me, or at least feels like the work of certain kinds of players that will turn a game session into their weird sex fantasy.

There's some feats that feel like they had another system in mind. I find references to rules or actions that don't exist in Pathfinder. Ability score names are in ALL CAPS which is weird but doesn't hurt anything. Some have abilities with no description on what kind of action it takes to use them. Metamagic feats don't tell you how they raise the spells level.

I don't like this book. The tons of feats have no tables, they are either too broken, too weak, too gross or just outright don't work, and on top of that the feats referring to some sex act that even the old Book of Erotic Fantasy doesn't touch make me feel embarrassed that I paid money for it. I wouldn't allow most of the things in this book. Its like a litmus test for who's going to be the player you're going to have to kick out of the game. I'm giving this one out of five stars. And then I'm taking a shower.

You can find it on Paizo.com over here.