Review: Blood of Fiends (for Pathfinder)

Okay, so here is the companion review to the Blood of Angels player companion book for the Pathfinder RPG.  As Blood of Angels focused on the aasimar, or mortals with a background connection to good outsiders ("angels"), Blood of Fiends focuses on tieflings, or mortals with a background connection to evil outsiders.

As with Blood of Angels, Blood of Fiends is a 36-page pdf with three pages of front and back cover and a full-page no-text version of the cover artwork.  The artwork here does not disappoint.  I liked all of it.

As with its counterpart, Blood of Angels, Bloof of Fiends jumps right in by laying out the racial traits for aasimars.  I like having that information right up front in quick-reference style on page 2 and I like that it's all on one page to print as a handout for the players.  I like the traits they've given tielfings--except that they get darkvision.    It is a very powerful ability which most characters only get by magic items or spells. I'd prefer that no PC races have darkvision; better to use low light vision or infravision.  I would definitely change this for my campaign.  One of the characters in my current campaign is playing a half-orc with darkvision and it really spoils what otherwise would be much more tense and dramatic scenes.  I also found it a bit odd that they offer a list of male and female names.  Wouldn't characters have names from the local culture into which they were born?  This presupposes that there is some sort of separate tiefling culture from the mainstream cultures.  That said the names are

Like Blood of Angels, there are good sections in Blood of Fiends discussing the many ways that an tiefling may have been conceived, possible influences and experiences during early childhood and adolescence, physiology, relationships with other races, adult worklife paths, dress, habits, romance, and homes.  There's also a small but decent section talking about tiefling who are not human-based.  These are all great for building background on characters, whether PCs or NPCs. Most of this material is setting-neutral but for those who are actually using Paizo's Golarion campaign setting there's a geographic section with a paragraph or two per country/region on how tiefling might fit there, including some good plot hook material.  There's also a section talking about how the tiefling race works as an option for each of the Pathfinder core and base classes.

Blood of Fiends contains a table of 100 variant tiefling abilities to replace the standard spell-like ability to use the darkness spell once per day.  I like this sort of semi-fluff/semi-crunch in rules.  They provide additional flavor with just enough crunch to notice.  Some examples of variants are:

• You can eat and gain nourishment from ash, cinders, dust, and sand.
• You possess the scent special ability.
• You can see creatures on the Ethereal Plane.

 Next are six specific heritages for your tiefling instead of just sticking with the generic traits.  The intro explains: "Each heritage presents new ability modifiers, spell-like abilities, and skill modifiers that replace the default aasimar racial traits, as well as a pair of custom traits. Each entry also discusses the most common (though by no means ubiquitous) personality traits, physical features, and places of origin of aasimars with that particular heritage."  These include the Pitborn (demon-spawned) and Spritespawn (div-spawned) .  Eight heritages are included, providing plenty of opportunities to provide deeper options than just the table of variant tiefling abilities.

Feats are next.  Let just mention here that I now look on feats as one of the primary areas of rules bloat for Pathfinder.  The number of feats is already massive.  Eventually you get to a point where there are so many feats available that you might as well throw them all out and just let the players make up whatever feats they want because they already exist out there somewhere.  Anyway, there are fourteen feats in Blood of Fiends.  However, I felt that only four of these feats were really fully tielfing-specific.

Chapters adding class features to the oracle, inquisitor, bard, and sorcerer follow.  As a fan of the oracle class I really liked the new oracle curses.  I think the oracle class has huge potential in for roleplay and I'm always keen on new material for it.  The three new inquisitions for the inquisitor class are almost all oriented towards inquisitors of evil deities, but that makes for great NPCs send to hunt down the PCs after the inevitable raid on some evil temple somewhere.  For the bard (a class I think is rather silly, thanks for asking) I was glad to see a dance included as a bardic masterpiece.  The dancer class/job in Final Fantasy always intrigued me and I really want to see a dance style bard in Pathfinder.  Last up is a daemon bloodline for the sorcerer class.  I love bloodlines for the sorcerer class and this one is well done.  (Strangely enough, even though I like reading up all the cool bloodlines I have no interest in actually playing one.  I'm not sure why.)

In the same vein as the feats above, Blood of Fiends includes a section on traits for tieflings.  Traits are a contributor to rules bloat in exactly the same way that feats are.  New feats and traits really should be held to a minimum.  All the traits presented here good, but as with feats I often think that players might as well just be able to make them up in cooperation with the GM.

And finally there is a random d100 table of random physical features for tieflings, such as Face: missing nose, Teeth: metallic, and Other: infernal glow.  Again, I love fluffy stuff like this for fantasy races.

Bottom line: I like the Blood of Fiends player companion and feel that it was a worthwhile purchase.

Are We Playing Pathfinder?

I've noticed something about my gaming groups since getting back into it after 2000 or so.  Back in high school my players and I didn't talk about "playing D&D", but instead called it "adventuring".  They'd ask "are we adventuring this Sunday?", not "are we playing D&D".  Now all the games seem to be defined by which set of rules they use.  It's "When are we playing your Pathfinder game again?", or "When are we playing Bill's Mutants & Masterminds game again?"  It sort of saddens me because it makes it sound as though the sessions are all about experiencing the game rules rather than experiencing an adventure.

Is this because the newer Pathfinder and D&D 3.5 rules are so complex that it's all about the rules?  Well my original game was run with Chivalry & Sorcery, not D&D.  C&S is a pretty complex set of rules--overly complex in some areas.  And yet those were the rules for the gaming we called "adventuring".

Perhaps it's because there are so many rules sets out there that people have to keep mentioning them to keep track of what they're playing this time.  Or perhaps it's because the rules so heavily influence character-building, the action at the table, and character development.  I'm not sure that this constant mention of the rules is necessarily bad, but I'm not really happy with it.

Maybe the solution is to have a title for each campaign, like the title of a movie or a television program.  My current game is using the Shackled City adventure path which is based in the city of Cauldron.  There were originally seven players so I started calling the PC party the "Cauldron Seven".  That's my nickname for it but not an official title.  I think next time I start a new campaign (which may be soon) I'll give it a formal title.  A title may help take the focus off the rules and also set a tone for the campaign.

Upcoming Posts...

Okay, so I did just put up a new post yesterday but quickly realized that it had been about two weeks since the post before that one.  Ouch.  That's really too long for a properly active blog.  Part of the reason (besides boring real-life stuff) is that I have been working on drafts of four new posts all at the same time.  So I do have some (theoretically) interesting stuff in the pipeline and will get back to posting on a more frequent basis as I finish those up.  The four I'm working on at the moment are:

• Better Barbarian Rage (for D&D/Pathfinder)
• Review: Adventurer Conqueror King System
• Review Blood of Fiends (for Pathfinder)
• BESM Mecha Madness (crunchy technical/tactical rules)

If there's one you're particularly keen on seeing next, let me know and I'll try to move it to the top of the stack.

RPG Blog Carnival May 2013: Campaigns I’d Like to Run

Okay, so I'm jumping into this month's RPG Blog Carnival, hosted this time over at Age of Ravens with the theme "Campaigns I'd Like to Run".  Recently I've been exploring some new campaign ideas and I think that right now I have three main ideas in development.

The first and most recent is a game based on WWI, but set in an alternate universe with some steampunk and supernatural elements.  Mostly it would be a series of "dungeon" crawls in huge fortress complexes.  But there would also be outdoor travel to new unexplored fortresses and friendly bases, as well as other types of missions to mix in other adventures besides just straight dungeon crawls.  I would do the outdoor adventuring as a hex crawl, where the squad makes its way across a vast shattered landscape laced with trenches and struggles to stay alive.  But I do worry that the WWI genre, even an alternate steampunk/supernatural version, is limited in scope.  So maybe it would be best as a mini-campaign with the overall goal being to clear a certain set of fortresses in order to make a difference in the overall war (or perhaps to discover that ultimately nothing makes any difference and the slaughter will continue regardless).  There are a number of rules sets which could be used for this game.  My immediate go-to rules would be d20 Modern, perhaps with d20 Past (which I don't actually own yet).  I know d20 Modern isn't popular but I find it easy to run: I ran a couple Warhammer 40,000 scenarios with it using just the core book.

Another game which I've been thinking over for a very long time is a mecha game.  Now, for me "mecha" really means the flying/transforming kind as in RoboTech and Gundam.  RoboTech was my introduction to mecha and that concept has stuck with me ever since.  When  it comes to developing a campaign framework, however, there are several things which I'm having a struggle working out to my satisfaction.  One is that it is a military setting.  That limits the players' ability to make decisions (well, without getting in trouble with command).  Thus it could devolve into the GM (me) just running them through a series of combat missions in very railroady fashion.  In proper anime style I would balance the combat missions with plenty of drama back at the base ship.  There would be rival squadrons, difficult and quirky individuals in the crew, romance, food fights in the mess hall, uncooperative robot vending machines, etc.  Another problem area is a more crunchy one: how to model very high-speed, three dimensional aerial combat.  I've worked some ideas already on how to handle a dogfight abstractly, but I feel it falls apart a bit in modeling several separate simultaneous dogfights dispersed over a large area.  There is also the question of how crunchy to get with the combat rules.  In any game based around a combat vehicle, such as mecha, pirate ships, or Mad Max cars, the cool technology involved a huge part of the action.  The players will probably want to wallow in all the technical bits, particularly those into optimizing their play.  That's all fine, but I worry that the combat may come to resemble a stodgy miniatures game rather than the sort of fluid, cinematic, high-voltage sort of action I want. Hmm, must think more on this aspect.

And that leads into the third campaign idea: CthulhuTech.  This could merge in with the mecha campaign idea because CthulhuTech has mecha.  Using the CthulhuTech campaign world would lead to a game which is Cthulhu mythos flavored rather than anime.  I love the whole idea behind CthulhuTech but it contains so many different campaign concepts that I want to try them all out.  Actually, probably the first game I'll run is a survival horror one set in the aftermath of destruction by an army of cultists and creatures.  I already wrote this one up for Gnome Stew's New Year, New Game Carnival for 2013.  You can read about it here.

So there they are, the Campaigns I'd Like to Run (at the moment).

Map: The Dragon Spire

One of the things I did a lot with my last campaign, the one using the Big Eyes, Small Mouth (BESM) rules, was use artwork as inspiration for me and visual aid for the players.  At one point they were on their way to meet with a dragon.  I found a fantastic castle painting by the famous Ted Nasmith to use for the dragon's current hideout.  Then I made up maps of the interior.

Background: this is an old frontier watch tower built by the kingdom of the black (water) dragons many centuries ago.  The dragon statues are of heroes of the kingdom who fell defending it.  It had a small lighthouse to warn river traffic away from the rocks and a small village where the humans and other small servant races lived.  Because the tower was meant for dragons all of its architecture is dragon-sized.  Huge doors and windows, huge rooms, and soaring ceilings are common throughout.  There is also a landing balcony so the dragons can fly in and out.

Today it is the lair or hideout of Ragecloud, the brother of the last dragon king.  The king, Ragewave, is in suspended animation on the verge of death in another massive old complex.  The brother seeks ways to finish off his brother once and for all in order to lift the curse and finally rule the kingdom himself.  Ragewave has several dragonkin (15' tall bipedal draconic humanoids) as his elite bodyguards and leaders, fifty or so human guards, dragonpriests, and scouts, and a dozen or more demon-dogs which roam the tower and areas along the river banks.

The painting:

The maps:

Overview and Courtyard
Below the main keep is a small courtyard which covers the steep winding trail which leads up from the small village below.  In the courtyard is a guard barracks with storage, bunkrooms, mess hall, and armory.  There is also a small stable with a few horses for scouts and messengers.  A tall statue of a dragon overlooks the courtyard from the northeast wall.

Keep Ground Floor
The massive main gates lead into a wide entrance hall with huge wooden double doors on the sides and an archway ahead.  Pools of water stand on either side of the entrance so that travelers may refresh themselves.  The rooms are mostly empty of furnishings except the kitchen in the back on the west.  The central room has an artistic statue in the middle, a deep pool stocked with live fish from the river as snacks for the dragon and dragonkin, and a staircase leading up.  At the very back is a large refuge room with secret doors concealed by carved scenes on the wall.

Keep 2nd Floor

Keep Landing Balcony
This floor has the landing balcony for the tower.  Several demon-dogs roam here to protect against any landing by intruders (the local mountain troll tribes fly on bat-winged opossums, or oppossobats).  In the main chamber a large teleportation disc is set into the floor.

Tower 1st Floor
The floor has huge windows on the east and west sides and huge wooden double doors to the north and south.  The south doorway leads out onto a balcony with a large dragon statue on the ledge.  The north doorway leads to a wide, open walkway ending in a small ancestor shrine with a traditional black stone stele with gold leaf dragonscript on it.  The walls of the main room are hung with massive tapestries.  A teleportation disc is set into the floor; it connects with the landing balcony floor down below.

Tower 2nd & 3rd (top) Floors

The 2nd floor contains two tall bronze lanterns on 15-foot tall stands flanking a teleportation disc set in the stone floor.  There is also a huge carpet.

The Roof is open to the sky except for four stone arches meeting above the center.  There is a teleportation disc connecting to the 2nd floor and a huge black ancestor stele (40' wide by 60' high).  the stele has lines of dragonscript in gold leaf.  On the floor in front of the stele are several huge candles.

It's fairly simple, but with lots of room (literally) to add what ever you need for an adventure.

Review: Lamentations of the Flame Princess

Okay, so I have seen a lot of references to the Lamentations of the Flame Princess (LotFP) rules by James Edward Raggi IV and finally decided to give it proper full read and do a review.  (FYI, the version I reviewed was the "no art" free version from the website.)   Right off, I was intrigued by the subtitle: "WEIRD FANTASY Role-Playing".  I knew that it was a D&D old school renaissance game, but this subtitle suggested that these rules would have a different flavor or texture to them.  As you may have seen in earlier posts of mine I am not a fan of OSR rules but I was willing to give it a look based on the subtitle.

Diving in I found it to be a huge disappointment.  LotFP is pretty much just another OSR game. There are a lot of tweaks and cleaned-up bits.  Alignment is just Lawful-Neutral-Chaotic.  Halflings are available as a playable demi-human class.  And so on.

So where's the "weird fantasy" stuff?  Well as far as I can see there isn't any.  It's just a vanilla OSR game.

When an author says there's going to be some weird content, I'm expecting something along the lines of Wermspittle over on the Hereticwerks blog.  Wermspittle is a seriously weird, creepy setting.

Bottom line: if you're looking for a walk on the weird side, skip LotFP, go straight to Wermspittle.

Review: Strip D&D by Andrew Shields

Okay, so here's a very short review of a very short set of rules.  Last month Andrew Shields over at Fictive Fantasies posted a "new and improved" version of his Strip D&D rules.  No, it is not a D&D version of strip poker.  As he explains "This game is based on the much less provocatively titled “Searchers of the Unknown.” The root idea is, “What if the characters in D&D did not need more information than a monster’s stat block?” "

The basic rules fit on exactly one page, the five classes spread over four pages.  It is indeed a mega-stripped down version of D&D.  I think it is an entirely usable set of super-simple rules.  I'm not really excited about it as something I'd like to play, but it achieves it's design goals.  The main difference between Strip D&D and what you'd expect in a super-simple version of D&D comes in the classes:

Fighter (simplified, and the simplest—the default)
Thirster (weak-blooded vampire)
Wizard (with a whole new magic system)
Martial Artist (not necessarily a monk)
Lightbringer (mortals with a touch of divine blood)

The obvious differences are the addition of the Thirster (which has almost a full page of abilities/limitations), the Lightbringer (a sort of aasimar/paladin/cleric, but with few special abilities), and the lack of a specific thief class.