Review: "Shadowsfall: Shadow Plane Player's Companion"

Okay, so I recently bought the Shadowsfall: Shadow Plane Player's Companion by Jon Brazer Enterprises.  I bought it partly as more grist for my campaign world design mill but also because I thought it looked like a cool setting all on its own.  Ever since I began learning about the various planes in the D&D universe (multiverse?) I've been intrigued by the idea of adventures on the Plane of Shadow.  It's an entirely eerie, shadowy, spooky place--probably like the inside of Tim Burton's head.

The pdf is 34 pages, including the full-color cover and two pages of advertising/legal/table of contents/etc.  First off, the cover artwork is great and appropriately conveys the atmosphere of the Shadowsfall setting.  There is then a good introduction/overview of the plane.  Next are chapters on races, classes & archetypes, animals, strongholds, feats, equipment, religion, magic, magic items, and a section on altered items.  The package includes full-color and black-and-white versions and also Herolab files (a very cool extra, since I have Herolab).

The main thing I liked was the strongholds section.  Due to the dangers posed by roaming undead, Shadow Plane creatures, and other monsters, life for "people" on the plane is centered mostly on the main fortified strongholds.  Each stronghold has its own unique character which provides good jumping-off points for player character backgrounds and DM plot lines.  Actually, this section was the main reason I bought the guide.  I'm looking for cool ideas to help me build my new campaign world and a ready-made setting I can use for games in the meantime.

The guide also provides the new feats, archetypes, class options, spells, and equipment which one expects with a new setting guide.  These all seemed pretty good at first reading, however there aren't what I'm looking for in a setting guide.  As a general comment, I really feel that adding these elements--unless they are very setting-specific--tend to add to the rules bloat which was a problem with the old D&D 3rd edition.  Pathfinder risks running into that same bloat at some point.

The guide has a great section on the races for the setting.  This being the Shadow Plane, there is a more evil and monstrous mix of races here--and they are playable races!  They include dhampir, drow, duergar, dwarves, elves, fetchlings, gnomes, half-elves, half-orcs, halflings, hobgoblins, humans, orcs, ratfolk, tieflings, and wayang.  This is important to me because I come from the school of thought that feels that humans are boring and that a fantasy setting should have fantasy races which you can play.  The guide comes through with flying colors here.  Okay, well I should say that I'm not too sure about the Umbral Kobolds.  Several settings out there have kobolds as playable races but I just think they're kind of silly.  That said, the Umbral Kobolds are written up well and are a fine option if you are into them.

One area that I'm not sure about is the new deities.  The guide has a full new pantheon of deities for the Plane of Shadow.  Since this is a Pathfinder system product, I was expecting it to use the default Golarion setting deities.  So this was a nice surprise.  However, if a DM is adding Shadowsfall to an existing setting, such as making is a major campaign arc in a game based on Pathfinder's default Golarion setting, then this bit needs to be removed or integrated.  Luckily it's not so heavily interwoven into the setting and so adaptation should be easy.  It's also not clear whether these gods are just on the Shadow Plane or are gods of many planes who also happen to have a presence here.  The nature of the Plane of Shadow is that it touches many other planes and thus the question of deities on multiple planes needs to be worked out by a GM.

So, overall I'm very happy with this product and recommend buying it.

Review: From the Deep, Player's Guide

Okay, so I downloaded the player's guide pdf for the Third Dawn adventure path From the Deep by Dreamscarred Press recently.  I didn't actually know anything about the setting, but hey, free pdf, right?  Actually I was very interested in checking it out because I'm still gathering ideas for the new campaign world I'm building right now.  I figured this player's guide would let me see if the setting was interesting enough to jump in and buy more setting material to feed my creative beast.

First the boring crunchy info: the document is 21 pages long, including cover and two pages of credits/legal/etc.  The art ranged from great (attention-grabbing cover and cool critter on page 7, for instance) to decent.  The cartography was a bit disappointing as artwork, but clear and absolutely usable cartographically speaking.

Now the bad news (from my point of view).  Right off I ran into a show-stopper in the second sentence of the introduction: the dreaded word psionics.  My attitude to psioncs in fantasy-type RPGs is summed up beautifully in the immortal words of a post on the Gnome Stew blog: "keep your crappy sci-fi out of my fantasy".  Okay, so right there I won't be playing this as an actual setting.  I quickly checked the section on classes and found that the rot went even deeper than the simple inclusion of psionics.  There were no arcane magic or divine classes at all.  In fact it was clear that most classes were psionic users.  Apparently they're going for the "keep your crappy fantasy out of our sci-fi pseudo-fantasy" approach.  However, there did appear to be psionic-based classes with enough similarity to the wizard and cleric so that if you arrived at the table with your heart set on playing a "wizard" you wouldn't have to storm away from the table, taking your whole bag of Cheetos with you, dammit. 

Anyway, moving on, all-in-all there were fifteen classes listed, which allows for a good range of choices.  On the races I was very pleased to see that they had some new, setting specific ones.  The descriptions were a bit sketchy and without artwork (this being just a player's guide) but several sounded pretty cool, such as the Orcans:
"Standing taller than most humans, orcans have pointed ears, a pair of sharp incisors and a wet snout, not unlike that of a bear. They are covered in body hair, which they take great pride in. Some orcans grow their hardened nails long and sharpen them, giving them the appearance of a cross between a bear and a human. Exceptionally strong, orcans are canny hunters with sharp eyes."  I was also pleased to see that the people at Dreamscarred included two cool new riding mounts instead of just going for the traditional horses.

The Regional Environs section, giving geographic, political, and social background information for the players, was decent and certainly enough to give players material for character crafting.  This was really the section I was  most interested in from a campaign design angle but there wasn't a lot of depth for me to draw on.

The guide also has a lot of other good details on the setting's unique races, traits, equipment, languages, and godminds (psionic semi-deities) for the players to work with.

Overall it's a well-done product: good detailing, covers the bases for character design, good artwork, professional layout, and good writing.

Anime Review: Tower of Druaga: Aegis of Uruk

Okay, so I just finished watching the anime series "Tower of Druaga: Aegis of Uruk" on Funimation's YouTube channel.  Yes, I know what some of you are thinking.  Why the heck has he gone off the rails and started watching anime?  He's not on break 'til we say he's on break.  We're not paying him to watch cartoons, we're paying him to whip up wholesome, nutritious RPG content.  Well, actually I only recently heard about this anime from the DandDPuzzleOfTheWeek channel on YouTube which did a vid about D&D style anime.  Afterwards I realized that although I had heard of most of the anime mentioned in the video, I'd never actually watched any of them.  Oh, all right, I'll go ahead and out myself as an anime fan.  But I generally don't have the cash to spend on entire series so maybe I'm more of a poser than a true otaku.  Anyway, luckily for me this entire series and its sequel, "Tower of Druaga: Sword of Uruk", are available on the Funimation YouTube channel for the low, low cost of watching a few advertisements.

This anime really is a dungeon crawl.  It mixes classic D&D dungeon crawl tropes like gender-changing magic traps with classic anime tropes like over-the-top powers and frequent mention of food.  The core concept is that there is a massive (really massive) ancient magical tower containing various monsters and an evil god at the top guarding an ancient magic treasure.  However, the tower is so large that there is a human city in the lower part.  The tower is so huge that in some places there are gaps in the sides which allow sunlight into large parts of it.  Thus the interior of the tower ranges from typical dark dungeon corridors to rocky caverns to open air terrain with vegetation and waterfalls.  It's a concept that could make for a good short-run table-top RPG campaign.

The plot involves several groups "climbing" up through the tower to take down the evil god.  There are plenty of good plot twists to keep things shifting nicely--but no spoilers here.  One word of caution is that early on in the first episode it suddenly goes from serious to lame and wacky.  I almost turned it off and missed out on a great anime story.  It's actually just a dream sequence.  Hang on and it will get back on track.

I plan to watch the sequel and as many of the others mentioned in the DnDPuzzleOfTheWeek vid as I can manage.  I'll post reviews as I go along.

D&D: Book of Vile Darkness (movie review)

Okay, so I watched the latest Dungeons and Dragons movie, Book of Vile Darkness a couple nights ago.   My wife and daughter were under the strange delusion that they had better things to do than watch it (no, really) and so I took it on single-handed.  Later, I asked all my gamer friends what they thought about it--and none of them had seen it either!  (What is wrong with you people?!)  Well, okay, one of them doesn't have cable television (it was shown on the SyFy channel)--but that's really no excuse.

Generally speaking it was typical SyFy channel "made-for-TV" quality.  It did live up to the name "Vile Darkness" in that it featured an evil party, including a fallen paladin, and they did indeed do a lot of out-and-out evil.  The basic premise of the plot was interesting: an evil party with an ex-paladin as the main protagonist.  Beyond that the plot was pretty thin.  However, there were a couple of good plot twists and a rather gratuitous sex scene.  Overall I'd say that if you're an RPG fan or fantasy genre fan give it a look.

That said, I was interested in the concept they were working with of an evil party.  As one would expect with an evil D&D party there were murders of party members by other members, party members going off on their own to commit murders and theft which bring armed reaction, etc.  It did give me the idea of putting together a post later on possible ways to successfully run campaign with an evil party.

Pathfinder Online: insane Kickstarter project

Okay, so Goblinworks has put up a Kickstarter project for its Pathfinder Online MMORPG.  What seems insane to me is that the goal is $1 million!  However, it does already have over 400 backers and over $40,000 pledged on just the first day.  There is a pretty big Pathfinder community out there and always people looking for a new MMO to play.  But still.  And I have to wonder how many Pathfinder players will want to play it as a table top game and also as a computer MMO.

Personally, I'm firmly in the table top gaming camp now.  It's what I started with (back before the terms "table top" and "MMORPG" had even been invented) and I prefer it for the human interaction.  Yes, online games include "interaction" with other humans but a lot of them are a**holes and you can't boot them from the game.  I'll be tempted to try the MMO version of Pathfinder, having played World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, Dofus, and D&D Online.  But I'd probably have to get a new computer to handle it, so maybe not.

BESM White Monk

Okay, so what the heck, I guess if I'm posting the chakra jutsus for the White Monk class I should put the class itself out there too.  As with all my BESM classes, it's built with 40 character points (CP) at the starting Novice level.

White Monk

    The White Monk comes from the Bangaa culture.  Few non-Bangaa are allowed to study at a White Monk Dojo.  The Bangaa religious tradition has only White Monks, Templars (a type of Paladin), and Bishops (White Mage).  To become a Templar or Bishop, one must first become a White Monk and then prove oneself worthy of the honor.  The White Monks use a unique class of fist weapons, from some like hardened gloves up to gauntlets with short blades or spikes.

Novice Kit [40 CP]

Attributes:
    Armour 1 [2 CP]
    Combat Techniques (Brutal, Critical Strike, Deflection, Hardboiled,
        Lethal Blow) [10 CP]
    Divine Relationship, Level 1 [2 CP]
    Energy Bonus, Level 1 [2 CP]
    Environmental Influence (Light), Level 1 [2 CP]
    Healing, Level 1 [4 CP]
    Heightened Awareness, Level 1 [2 CP]
    Massive Damage (Focused—Unarmed), Level 1 [4 CP]
    Melee Attack (unarmed), Level 1 [3 CP]
    Melee Defense (unarmed), Level 1 [3 CP]
    Organizational Ties, Level 1 [2 CP]
    Tough, Level 1 [2 CP]

Skills:
    Acrobatics, Level 1 [2 CP]
    Controlled Breathing, Level 1 [1 CP]
    Occult, Level 1 [3 CP]

Defects:
    Special Requirement (Faith) [-4 CP]

Chakra Jutsu, for my BESM White Monk class

Okay, so today I'm offering some more cool stuff for the five other people on the planet still playing Big Eyes, Small Mouth (BESM).  My last campaign world (may it rest in peace) ripped off a lot of stuff from the Final Fantasy series of video games--mostly from Final Fantasy Tactics Advance.  One class I was particularly interested in was the White Monk, which is a monk with cool fist weapons and some chakra energy abilities.  So, I put together a set of chakra abilities for my White Monks.  They also had some stuff stolen from the paladins, since I saw them as a sort of martial arts paladin.

Chakra Jutsu

    The White Monks have developed many techniques, called jutsu, which allow them to concentrate their innate chakra energy and then channel it.  To use a jutsu, a monk assumes the special summoning posture and focuses the required chakra energy (Activation -2: takes 1 round).  Once the jutsu is activated it will remain powered for use for one minute (Duration +3).  However, after the duration is passed, the chakra energy will be expended (Depete 1: -10 EP).

Chakra Sight
    Allows the monk to use melee, unarmed, and ranged attacks and defenses even when totally unable to see. (Combat Techniques: Blind Fighting and Blind Shooting).

Chakra Power
    The monks attacks are boosted with chakra energy, doing more damage (+2 to damage multiplier).

Chakra Strike
    The monk adds chakra energy to hit vital points (Critical Strike 1; critical damage is x3)

Chakra Shield
    Chakra energy is channeled to form a spherical energy shield around the monk, and anyone holding or being held by the channeler.  (Force Field 2; Armor +8; 5 times per day)

Chakra Immunity
    Chakra energy shields the monk from attack by elemental or divine forces. (Resistance 2; +2 to resist attacks by a specified element)

Chakra Quake
    The monk punches the ground (or any hard surface), sending a shock wave against a target. (Quake effect added to normal punch damage; target need Body save vs. 15 or knocked down and stunned)