100 Days of Halloween: Elements of Magic - Mythic Earth

Going back a bit when the D&D 3.5 edition of the game was all the rage and ENWorld began publishing material under the OGL and d20 STL.

This one covers the mythic magic of our World. 

As always I will be following my rules for these reviews.

Elements of Magic - Mythic Earth

PDF in a zip file. 58 pages. Front and back cover supplied as separate JPG files.  

You can tell this is the early days of PDF publishing. The publisher provides a README file to explain how use the layers to make a print-friendly PDF. Vey nice I have to say. Very polite.

This book largely assumes that you will be using this in a modern d20 game where magic is real.  There is an appendix in the back about using it with "Fantasy d20" coughD&D3.5cough.

Preface

A one-page overview of what this book is and how it is updated from it's predecessors (other Elements of Magic books).

Chapter One: Myths

This chapter is the foundation layer for playing a "mythic" game. This covers what sorts of myths you to use or create for your game. The default is a modern high fantasy. We get some very basic examples of how myths work in the world. Such as the abduction of Persephone causing the seasons to a basic overview of A Hero with a Thousand Faces monomyth.

Honestly, there could have been a lot more here.

Chapter Two: Spellcasting and Magical Traditions

This covers the spell-casting basics.  This includes "regular" spell casting and ritual magic. Magic is largely a skill-based system. Because of this any class can cast spells but some are going to be better trained than others.  There are new backgrounds, new skills, and of course lots of new feats.  Feats are the primary vehicle to differentiate the various magical styles.  It works much better than it would seem or even to anyone that is "feat exhausted."

In truth, the feat system is really rather perfect for this, or maybe, this book's conceptualization of these different mythic traditions is well suited for feats.  In other games, these would be all different classes or sub-classes.  Here it is entirely possible to build an arcane dabbler that knows a little runic magic, some voodoo. Your dabbler will never be an expert in anything due to the limited number of feats you can take, but that is also true in real life. They are also designed to provide some interesting playability if you do take more than one Tradition feat.

Examples of some magic items and a ritual spell are also given.

Chapter Three: The Magic of High Fantasy

This is our campaign world; magical modern Earth. They make a distinction between our Earth, "Terra" and the magical Earth, "Gaia." It is not a particularly new idea, but it is well executed here and that is the important part. Detailed within are various organizations that exist on Gaia that are related to magic. There is the governmental "Bureau" that act as the law enforcement in the magical world and "The Knights of the Round" that enforce the treaties with the Fey.  There is room for many more.

We are also given The Mage, an Advanced Class for d20 Modern. This rounded off with some NPC Mages.

Chapter Four: Spells

Spells here are applications of magical skills. The ten skills are Attack, Charm, Create, Cure, Defend, Divine, Illusion, Move, Summon, Summon, and Transform.  Each skill must be trained. So it is easy to see you can have generalists in all skills and experts in just a few.  Each skill has a number of spells associated with it.  You can design spells as needed with whatever enhancements seem to work the best.  Each enhancement requires a skill rank.  So four enhancements mean four additional skill ranks. 

The system takes a little bit to learn but is easily adaptable and usable in play.

Appendix

This covers converting the Mage advanced class to a Base class for use in Fantasy d20 worlds. 

It is obvious to me that this was someone's favorite campaign model for a while. There are a lot of really great ideas here and few I'd like to try out.  Reading it now I am taken by how much of this could be ported over to True20 or even a modern OSR game.

Monstrous Mondays: Pathfinder Bestiary 4

Still working my way through a bunch of different monster books. Been spending the month of September on Pathfinder, but today is something a little different.  Let's get to it!

Pathfinder Bestiary 4 and Box

Today I am going to cover the Pathfinder Bestiary 4 and the Pathfinder Bestiary 4 Box.  We grabbed these back in 2015 or so I believe.  My oldest was running his D&D 5e game and wanted to add more Mythos monsters to it.  We grabbed the Bestiary 4, which has quite a lot of them, and then got the box of monster pawns to go with it.  By then we had also discovered the Cthulhu Wars game at GenCon and bought a bunch of those minis for him to use. So the box has been sorely underused.

Pathfinder Bestiary 4

PDF and Hardcover book. 320 pages. Full-color cover and interior art. For this review, I am considering the hardcover I bought in 2014 and the PDF I got from Paizo's webstore.

We grabbed this book for the mythos monsters. There are over 250 monsters in this book, so there were plenty of reasons to grab it.

This Bestiary gives us Kaiju. This book introduces them and there are more in the Pathfinder Mythic Realms books. There are 11 kaiju mentioned and three are detailed here.  They are all mostly Chaotic Neutral, with some suspected at Chaotic Evil. All are CR 26 and higher. 

Among the Mythos creatures, which are known as Elder Mythos here, are the bhole, colour out of space, elder thing, flying polyp, mi-go, nightgaunt, ratling, Spawn of Yog-Sothoth, Star-spawn of Cthulhu, and an whole collection of "Great Old Ones" that include Bokrug, Cthulhu, Hastur, and even Dagon as a Demon prince.

I can finally do my big "Godzilla vs. Cthulhu" idea!

There are even some old favorites here like the Leanan Sidhe, Nosferatu and Swan Maidens. Even really old ones like the Lurker Above and the Trapper (Monster Manual 1 AD&D) favorites get an update here. Spoiler: They are from the same family of creatures, no shock there. 

So yeah, for a "4" in the series, this one still has great monsters to give us.

Pathfinder Bestiary 4 Box

The Pathfinder Bestiary 4 Box is filled with cardboard cut-outs of *most* of the monsters listed in the Pathfinder Bestiary 4 book.  

They are study and work fine in places where you don't have a dedicated mini.  Also, the price of the box is much more economical than getting all of these minis. 

Pawns and mini comparison.

There are no minis for the Kaiju or Great Old Ones. Which is one of the reasons we grabbed it.

Should have checked the back of the box I guess.

Still, this is great to have to fill out the places where I don't have the right mini.

Demons. Undead. Kaiju and Old Ones? Yeah, no wonder my oldest loves this one.

100 Days of Halloween: Blood and Broomsticks - Sorcerers & Witches

Getting back to some Pathfinder tonight. There is just so much great material for this game I feel I am barely scratching the surface.  One thing is certain though.  Morpheus is the witchiest of all the fonts. 

As always I will be following my rules for these reviews.

Blood and Broomsticks - Sorcerers & Witches

PDF.  41 pages. Front and back covers. Credits (including art credits). Compatibility and References. Table of Contents. 1 ad.  2 pages of OGL.  About 30 pages of content, minus various bits of art.  Full-color covers and interior art.

This book gives us one sorcerer bloodline and two witch archetypes. 

We open with a word about magic and spells and how Sorcerer magic differs from Witch magic. There is a bit on what are some of the best spells for both classes to take. 

New Sorcerer Bloodline: The Altered. This is the offspring of a witch whose patron altered them in the womb.  An interesting concept and one I have also played around with myself.  These sorcerers get access to the Patron's spells as their own bonus spells.  They also gain access to a handful of Hexes.  Not as many as the witch of course, but enough to keep the class interesting.

New Witch Patrons: These are also related. The Blood Patron and the Family Patron are the direct extensions of the offspring of witches. Others include Greed, Kinetics, Metal, Pyre, and Sunlight.

New Witch Archetypes: The Ink witch is a tattoo witch and various powers linked to markings.  The Pyre witch is all about fires and flames. 

There are 14 new hexes (of all levels) and five new magic items.

There are also 13 new spells. All can be used by the witch, and most can be used by sorcerers. 

I like how the book looks and the game material also looks pretty solid and fun.  Certainly something I would use in my games.

100 Days of Halloween: Love Witch

Something a little different tonight. NUELOW Games has given us a lot of off-beat supplements for d20; many using old comics that have fallen into the public domain. It is a good idea really, some of these older comics are actually good and some are kinda creepy and many lend themselves well to all sorts of games.  That is what we have tonight.  Though I will admit I am not 100% sure if the comic used IS public domain OR if it is one they licensed for this use.  The copyright notice seems to indicate that Marv "Teen Titans" Wolfman still owns and it is used with his permission. 

Love Witch

PDF. 56 pages. Color Cover. Black & White interior art.

Not to be confused with the similar-sounding movie out the same year. 

This product is split into four major parts.  Parts 1 to 3 are the comics about the "Love Witch" and Part 4 is the OGL d20 rules to use some of the magic.

Burnick is our titular Love Witch. The first comic introduces us to this beautiful but evil witch. The next two deal with her various battles, with the last one dealing with her battle with her arch enemies the Druids.

The Game related sections start on page 36 and deal with the fall of Atlantis and the migrations of the Atlanteans.  The magic of Atlantis, at least in terms of the d20 rules are a bunch of different feats that can be taken to provide magical effects.  Not a bad method and it certainly feels different.

In the modern eras, we get two groups that continue the Love Witches fight. The Daughters of Burnick continue in the steps of the Love Witch and the Watchers of the Stones who are the modern-day Druids.

It's fun and I could easily see a "Daughters of Burnick" coven that I could use with my own witch books or even better with the Hyperborea RPG. 

100 Days of Halloween: The Pantheon and Pagan Faiths

Tonight I am doing my third Samurai Sheepdog product, but this was not planned out that way.  Also, this is another former Mystic Eye Games product that Samurai Sheepdog has brought back.  It is also one of my favorite books from the early d20 days.

As always I will be following my rules for these reviews.

The Pantheon and Pagan Faiths

PDF. 208 pages. Color cover. Black & White interior art. 

Released originally in 2003 by Mystic Eye Games this was part of their campaign "Hunt the Rise of Evil" for their World of Gothos world.  I remember at the time thinking it was a touch cliché but still fun and it kept my attention.  This was my favorite book in all their publications to that point. 

Samurai Sheepdog is, as far as I can tell, the same people that made up Mystic Eye Games. So this is not a case of a new publisher buying the right to old stock, it is a new publisher re-organized from the remains of the old.  Does this mean we could get more "Hunt the Rise of Evil" products? Maybe!  But until then let's discuss this older product.

The obvious spiritual parent of this book is AD&D 2nd edition Faiths & Avatars book. Right up the art of the various priests, shamans, and witches of the various faiths in a lineup. I will not lie, it did appeal to me and help me know right away what this book was about. 

While this book is overtly for the Hunt the Rise of Evil campaign and the World of Gothos I used it rather nicely with my D&D 3.x games where I feel added materials from a lot of different d20 publishers.  It is "labeled" but also flexible.

This is also a good-sized book at 208 page and 10 Chapters. 

Introduction

This covers what this book is and how to use it. 

Chapter 1: Piety and Conversion

This covers the rules of dealing with the various gods and how they can grant favor. This is where we get to see our lineup of clerics. Additionally, there are rules for conversions. So if you are playing clerics in a d20/D&D 3.x game then this a great source of information. 

Chapter 2: Core Divine Character Classes

Covers the expected classes like Clerics, Druids, Paladins, and Rangers. We also get Shamans and Witches/Warlocks. Both classes are well-detailed. These witches are, naturally, divine spellcasters not arcane. The witch can also choose to be a White Witch or a Black Witch which is also called a Warlock.  Witches are even further divided into covens associated with a different god of faith. The covens are actually very interesting and kept me coming back to this book. They are also fairly tied to this world and these gods. 

Chapter 3: Prestige Classes

I will not lie. I do like Prestige Classes.  I like the idea of being able to further differentiate your character later inplay.  I do wish that 5e had prestige classes not tied to their base classes so much. 

These Prestige Classes are tied to this world but it looks a little easier to detangle them given the way Prestige Classes were most often constructed at the time. Here we have the Beast Friend, Covenant to the Hunt, Furies of Destruction, Hammers of Justice, Inquisitor of Justice, Ovate Bards (one of my favorites here), Slaughter Priest, Sorcerer Priest of Vlag, Strictor, and The Taken.  I did not try many of these but I did try the Ovate Bard and thought it was really great.

Chapter 4: Feats

There are some interesting feats tied with faith, birth, and how people can approach the divine.  It takes a game mechanic and weaves it back into the structure of the world. I rather like it to be honest. But, let's be honest, there are a lot of feats here. Maybe more than we really need.

Chapter 5: Spells in Gothos

Ok. You know I love my magic and this chapter does not disappoint. We get new cleric domains and new witch and shaman spells. Nearly 40 pages worth. There are new spells as expected for Bards, Clerics, Druids, Paladins, and Rangers. There are even some new one for Sorcerers/Wizards. 

Chapter 6: Saints and Sainthood

Now, this is an interesting chapter. Back in my starting days of D&D Basic I played a Cleric. We decided that this cleric would later be a Saint of those who fight undead and demons in my AD&D world. (Interestingly enough that same said cleric is a Patron Saint in the Duchy of Valnwall now.) This chapter lists a numbers of saints and the benefit to having a patron saint. There are both good and evil ones here.

I think most gamers of a certain age will agree that the Patron Saint of Adventures is St. Aleena the Brave. 

Chapter 7: The Pantheon

This covers the gods, the major clerics, and centers of worship or divine power in the world of Gothos. The gods are wonderfully detailed though like gods should they are tied to their world.  

Chapter 8: Outscat Gods

Ah, now here is something not often covered in campaign books. (well. the Forgotten Realms does a good job here too). This covers all the gods that have fallen, been kicked out, or have left the main pantheons including our cover boy Chargrond.  The gods here also get some special rituals.  These gods are all evil.

Chapter 9: Outsider Gods

Like the outcasts, these gods are not part of the main pantheons. Unlike the outcast gods, they never were a part of it to begin with. Their alignments vary. Like the previous two chapters in addition to gods, we get major clerics/worshipers and some rituals. 

Chapter 10: Pagan Gods

 In modern parlance, these are the "Old Gods" to The Pantheon's "New Gods." These are the gods followed by Druids and Witches. Like the previous three chapters we gets gods, major worshipers including some specialty priests, and rituals. 

We end with the OGL and a very nice index.

This book packs a lot into its 200+ pages and for less than the price of a Grande PSL you get a good value.

The print option has long been OOP, but sometimes you can still find them on eBay or Noble Knight. 

I unloaded mine in my D&D 3.x purge. Well. At least I still have the PDF!

Kickstart Your Weekend: A Tale of Three Platforms

It is a "Kickstart Your Weekend Here" but I am going to feature three campaigns from the three fundraising platforms.  Let's get started.

Pay To Die - Horror Slasher Comedy Film

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/pay-to-die-horror-slasher-comedy-film#/

I do love indie horror films and Lauren Francesca (on the poster) and Shawn Phillips (on the cleaver) know how to have a lot of fun with theirs.  This is a throwback to the horror comedy of the 1980s so expect some laughs, some scares, and a lot of blood. It really should be great. 

Coyote & Crow: Stories of the Free Lands

https://www.backerkit.com/c/connor-alexander/coyote-and-crow-stories-of-the-free-lands

Coyote & Crow had a record-breaking Kickstarter and now they are back on the new Backerkit platform to present some new adventure material in the alt-future city of Cahokia. I still need to review Coyote & Crow but the book is gorgeous and the game is rather compelling.  This should also do well.

Gateway To Adventure Trilogy For Old-School Essentials

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gamersandgrognards/gateway-to-adventure-trilogy-for-old-school-essentials

Gateway To Adventure? Old-School Essentials? Oh hell yes! This should be fantastic. Appendix N does great stuff and this should be no exception. 

Lots of great stuff here!

Review: Vigilante City #4 Into the Sewers!

Our last day for Vigilante City! It has been a lot of fun. Our fourth book takes us Into the Sewers so let's get to it.

Vigilante City - Into The Sewers!

PDF and softcover book. 224 pages. Color cover, black & white interior art.  For the purposes of this review, I am considering the PDF from DriveThruRPG and the soft-cover books I picked up from Bloat Games' own store.

Here we see Bloat Games' TMNT love on full display. And it works well here. I am sure other supers RPGs have tried this before, but I can't think of any that do this so explicitly. 

If Book #2 gave us an overview of Victory City above ground then this book covers the sewers and underground. Sadly the sewers are full of radiation, mutants and eve worse dangers.

We go through the sections and neighborhoods of Victory City and discuss what is going on underneath. General features as well special ones such as Shayana's Bazaar. Great for all your underground (literal and figurative) needs. 

It would not be a SURVIVE THIS!! game without plenty of random tables and this one does not disappoint.  100 things you can encounter in the sewers. There are plenty of new creatures too and they are detailed in this book. Yes. There are alligators and vampires in these sewers. 

There are two new introductory adventures, "Into the Sewers, We Go!" and "We're In a Pickle Here" to get the PCs out of the relative comfort of the above world down to where the action is. 

Given all of the new focus on mutants, there is also an updated Mutant Class with more abilities to replace or augment the one in the Core Book.  Just reading through them I can't see any reason why you could not use both if you wanted. Different strains of mutants. Likewise, there is an updated Anthropomorph class.

We end with some new skill packages which include assassin and sewer rat.  In this game, you can have a sewer rat skill pack applied to an actual sewer rat Anthropomorph. 

Graf von Orlock aka "The Nosferatu"

Living in the sewers under Victory City is a monster feared by humans, supers, and mutants alike. This monster summons rats and other vermin by the hundreds. He is the undead monster known as The Nosfertu.

The warlord known as the Graf von Orlock was not a pleasant man even in life, his death and rebirth is lost to the sands of time and even he does not recall it. Unlike the suave vampires of film and television, the Nosferatu is a monster; both in appearance and deeds. Over the centuries his face has become more and more rat-like.