Alzrius
The EN World kitten
Introduction
It’s a given that there’s some stereotyping of fantasy races in RPG’s. Dwarves are always gruff, axe-wielding Scotsmen while elves are haughty even as they watch humans replace them, etc. We’ve seen these before, and while they’re certainly not straightjackets for any skilled role-player, they are still boilerplate. Probably the only thing worse than a race that’s become so cliché is a race that isn’t developed enough to have any such pre-conceptions. Rather than being freeing, this just makes them seem blank and ill-defined; gnomes are a good example, as no one really seems to be able to provide a universal description for how they come across in generic fantasy settings. But none have it worse than anthropomorphic characters, aka furries.
Furries lack not only anything remotely resembling a coherent identity in fantasy settings, they lack any sort of uniform presentation altogether. Having a mish-mash of different races, from catgirls to lizard-people to winged-tiger/skunk crossbreeds, furries can look completely human except for having animal ears and a tail, or they may resemble animals that walk on two legs and have opposable thumbs, all depending on who’s depicting them. Worse, ever since they became associated with an erotic sub-culture, furries have been regarded as little more than a fetishist’s sex-toy, and thusly have been kept at arm’s length.
The end result of this is that, barring a few exceptions scattered across various sourcebooks, there’s little recourse for someone who actually wants an anthropomorphic character in their game, and there’s even less recourse if those few exceptions don’t match the character idea they want to depict. Enter Thinking Races: Freeform Anthropomorphica from Skortched Urf’ Studios.
Disclaimer
Before I go any further, I need to make something clear. Skortched Urf’ Studios is a company that I’ve freelanced for previously. There’s around a half-dozen books of theirs for sale with my name on them, and another one or two that have yet to be released. I’ve never worked with Chris Field, the author of this book, before, nor have I written under his Otherverse Games imprint, and other than making a pointed comment or two on the author’s blog prior to its release, I wasn’t involved with this book in anyway. That said, I wanted people to be aware of the potential conflict of interest in my writing this review. Now, back to the book.
Overview
Thinking Races: Freeform Anthropomorphica opens by making a case for the pedigree for anthropomorphic characters in popular culture, from the Kzin to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which while somewhat defensive does a good job in presenting some justification for why such characters are popular outside of their “yiffy” context. Speaking of which, a sidebar immediately addresses this view of furries and notes that you won’t find any of that here – outside of a few suggestive points, there’s no actual “furversion” in this product; while it strays into PG-13 territory at times, that’s as explicit as it gets.
Meant for the Pathfinder Role-Playing Game, Freeform Anthropomorphica is different from other race books in that, while it does have base races, you develop them via a toolkit approach with powers, drawbacks, and even a few templates if you’re so inclined. Thus, you can create the kind of furry character you want (though some differences, like having full-body fur or just the furry ears and tail, are mostly a matter of personal style). But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The first section begins by explaining that the first step in creating your anthropomorphic character is to choose an order. An order here is something along the lines of canis major, lycos, reptilian, etc. (though, since there’s only a little more than two dozen, players who want an exotic animal species will have to pick the closest equivalent – luckily, each racial description mentions some equivalent choices you could use that order for). Order is essentially the base type of furry you want, and really the stats treat this as a base race, having ability modifiers, a small number of racial abilities (e.g. low-light vision), etc. Notably, the book also gives you the option of having your character be either Small or Medium, though several orders are restricted to Medium-size.
The first section was also where the bit about this book being Pathfinder-compatible begins to fall off the rails. Now, some of this is on purpose, and in these cases it’s forgivable. For example, each order has a favored class, but a sidebar from the author explains that this is done in the style of Pathfinder Beta, and can be ignored if you’re using the final Pathfinder rules (where characters pick their own base class when they’re created). However, there are things here that are just out-and-out errors. For example, it notes that if you make your character Small, they gain a +1 to AC and attack rolls, which is correct, but that you take a -4 penalty to CMB, which is wrong (it’s -1). Worse, it then fails to mention that you also take a penalty to CMD, and notes that being Small gives you a +4 bonus to Hide, rather than Stealth, checks.
I wish I could say that that’s the only time that sort of error came up, but it fact it was like that throughout the entire book. Some entries mentioned old skills like Hide while others mentioned new ones like Stealth, poisons still used the 3.5 rules, and on and on. That’s on top of having found some, though admittedly not an overwhelming number of, spelling and grammar errors.
All of this goes back to what I think is a perennial problem with Chris Field’s books: there’s no editor – or if there is, s/he is not credited in the book, which is just as well for the terrible job s/he’s doing. Even one check-over by an experienced eye would have eliminated a lot of the problems here, but that doesn’t seem to have happened, and so here the mistakes remain. Having said that, none of these are deal-breakers. If a skill bonus uses Hide, you can substitute Stealth rather reliably, so most of these errors are nuisances, rather than things which actually break the product down.
Once you pick your order, then you can pick out your racial traits, and this is where the book becomes more modular in what it offers. Traits are divided up between minor and major traits, as well as disadvantages. A major trait is worth two minor traits, however some major traits are favored among certain orders, which means those orders can take them as minor traits. Why does this matter? Well, for every major traits’ worth you traits you take (e.g. for every major trait or every two minor traits) you must take a disadvantage. Moreover, there’s no hard and fast limit to the number of traits you can take, though the book recommends no more than two or three major traits’ worth. Given that there are fifty minor traits, forty-five major traits, and forty disadvantages, meaning that there are some fairly major possibilities for how you want to build your character.
While I admire the freedom that this offers for making characters, I have to wonder if there are some balance issues here. Pathfinder doesn’t have level adjustments anymore, and indeed gave core races a boost, so maybe this is in line with that, but it seems like this opens itself up to min-maxing fairly easily. The book recommends that players be made to roll randomly for disadvantages instead of picking them like they do traits, and that’s probably a good idea, but even so it’s possible to make some rather strong combinations.
Following this are almost a dozen new templates meant for furries only. These are largely meant to cover archetypes that can’t be summarized by orders or traits, such as being an Anthro-Soldier, or Chimerical. Ironically, these templates do have a listing for a level adjustment (most are +1 LA).
There’s a short section regarding anthropomorphic characters in your game world, and the book is quick to say that it doesn’t have much help for you there, other than to offer some example ideas (which mostly consist of having furries be unique creatures, be their own races, or even replacing all human and demihuman races with furries, complete with an outline for which order replaces which race). Honestly, this section is almost no help with the flavor aspect of having furries in your game world, but I can’t really hold that against the book. As I mentioned at the beginning of this review, there’s no identity for these characters, and the book presents too many possibilities for different kinds of furries to easily create an in-game theme for them.
The book ends by presenting four new races, which seems like a bit of an oddity after the free-form design presented earlier. While it’s never stated clearly, these seem to be complete races unto themselves, and thus not applicable for the traits and disadvantages listed earlier, though I suppose one could use them anyway. The carta are a race of anthropomorphic otter gypsies. The monster brother/sister is the magical beast version of the furry, and gives a list of eleven different special abilities/qualities you can take for them, one associated with a different kind of monster. Neanderthals are the savage, primitive cousins to humans, and seem kind of superfluous here even though the flavor text says they’re best used alongside furries in a more savage setting. Finally, the wild faun are the product of a pure woman and a unicorn or pegasus that was drawn to her innocence.
Technical Aspects
I don’t ask for much from PDFs. Little things like bookmarks are all it takes to make me happy, and so I really can’t forgive products that don’t have them, especially when they don’t have a hyperlinked table of contents – or even a table of contents at all – the way this book doesn’t. Being eighty-nine pages in length, ease of navigation is something of a priority here, and no bookmarks or TOC is not helpful in that regard.
Artwork
This book admits upfront that its art is from stock art packages and online art published under free licensing, which means you see a wide variety of styles here. Pencil-line, full-color, computer-generated, and more all sit comfortably side-by-side. Surprisingly, most of the art is actually very good, and there were several pictures I found myself admiring. The pages have an alternating page border of small, colorful tiles along the left and right sides.
Having said there, I do wish that there was a printer-friendly version of this book. This book doesn’t skimp on the art, and printing it out looks like it could be taxing for some printers, especially since there’s more color art here than not. One that eliminated the pictures and border would have been nice.
Final Thoughts
Freeform Anthropomorphica accomplishes what it sets out to do, which is provide a framework so you can create your own customized furry character, but it fouls up a lot of details along the way. The erratic waffling between Pathfinder and 3.5, having no bookmarks or a table of contents, and an overall need for a round of editing keep this product from reaching its full potential. Make no mistake, these errors don’t undercut the book’s utility, but they’re speed bumps in what should be a smooth process. More effort was needed than was given here, and that’s a real shame since the book otherwise functions very well.
Freeform Anthropomorphica will absolutely let you make the furry character you want, no matter what you had in mind. Just be prepared to compensate for the book’s shortcomings.
It’s a given that there’s some stereotyping of fantasy races in RPG’s. Dwarves are always gruff, axe-wielding Scotsmen while elves are haughty even as they watch humans replace them, etc. We’ve seen these before, and while they’re certainly not straightjackets for any skilled role-player, they are still boilerplate. Probably the only thing worse than a race that’s become so cliché is a race that isn’t developed enough to have any such pre-conceptions. Rather than being freeing, this just makes them seem blank and ill-defined; gnomes are a good example, as no one really seems to be able to provide a universal description for how they come across in generic fantasy settings. But none have it worse than anthropomorphic characters, aka furries.
Furries lack not only anything remotely resembling a coherent identity in fantasy settings, they lack any sort of uniform presentation altogether. Having a mish-mash of different races, from catgirls to lizard-people to winged-tiger/skunk crossbreeds, furries can look completely human except for having animal ears and a tail, or they may resemble animals that walk on two legs and have opposable thumbs, all depending on who’s depicting them. Worse, ever since they became associated with an erotic sub-culture, furries have been regarded as little more than a fetishist’s sex-toy, and thusly have been kept at arm’s length.
The end result of this is that, barring a few exceptions scattered across various sourcebooks, there’s little recourse for someone who actually wants an anthropomorphic character in their game, and there’s even less recourse if those few exceptions don’t match the character idea they want to depict. Enter Thinking Races: Freeform Anthropomorphica from Skortched Urf’ Studios.
Disclaimer
Before I go any further, I need to make something clear. Skortched Urf’ Studios is a company that I’ve freelanced for previously. There’s around a half-dozen books of theirs for sale with my name on them, and another one or two that have yet to be released. I’ve never worked with Chris Field, the author of this book, before, nor have I written under his Otherverse Games imprint, and other than making a pointed comment or two on the author’s blog prior to its release, I wasn’t involved with this book in anyway. That said, I wanted people to be aware of the potential conflict of interest in my writing this review. Now, back to the book.
Overview
Thinking Races: Freeform Anthropomorphica opens by making a case for the pedigree for anthropomorphic characters in popular culture, from the Kzin to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which while somewhat defensive does a good job in presenting some justification for why such characters are popular outside of their “yiffy” context. Speaking of which, a sidebar immediately addresses this view of furries and notes that you won’t find any of that here – outside of a few suggestive points, there’s no actual “furversion” in this product; while it strays into PG-13 territory at times, that’s as explicit as it gets.
Meant for the Pathfinder Role-Playing Game, Freeform Anthropomorphica is different from other race books in that, while it does have base races, you develop them via a toolkit approach with powers, drawbacks, and even a few templates if you’re so inclined. Thus, you can create the kind of furry character you want (though some differences, like having full-body fur or just the furry ears and tail, are mostly a matter of personal style). But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The first section begins by explaining that the first step in creating your anthropomorphic character is to choose an order. An order here is something along the lines of canis major, lycos, reptilian, etc. (though, since there’s only a little more than two dozen, players who want an exotic animal species will have to pick the closest equivalent – luckily, each racial description mentions some equivalent choices you could use that order for). Order is essentially the base type of furry you want, and really the stats treat this as a base race, having ability modifiers, a small number of racial abilities (e.g. low-light vision), etc. Notably, the book also gives you the option of having your character be either Small or Medium, though several orders are restricted to Medium-size.
The first section was also where the bit about this book being Pathfinder-compatible begins to fall off the rails. Now, some of this is on purpose, and in these cases it’s forgivable. For example, each order has a favored class, but a sidebar from the author explains that this is done in the style of Pathfinder Beta, and can be ignored if you’re using the final Pathfinder rules (where characters pick their own base class when they’re created). However, there are things here that are just out-and-out errors. For example, it notes that if you make your character Small, they gain a +1 to AC and attack rolls, which is correct, but that you take a -4 penalty to CMB, which is wrong (it’s -1). Worse, it then fails to mention that you also take a penalty to CMD, and notes that being Small gives you a +4 bonus to Hide, rather than Stealth, checks.
I wish I could say that that’s the only time that sort of error came up, but it fact it was like that throughout the entire book. Some entries mentioned old skills like Hide while others mentioned new ones like Stealth, poisons still used the 3.5 rules, and on and on. That’s on top of having found some, though admittedly not an overwhelming number of, spelling and grammar errors.
All of this goes back to what I think is a perennial problem with Chris Field’s books: there’s no editor – or if there is, s/he is not credited in the book, which is just as well for the terrible job s/he’s doing. Even one check-over by an experienced eye would have eliminated a lot of the problems here, but that doesn’t seem to have happened, and so here the mistakes remain. Having said that, none of these are deal-breakers. If a skill bonus uses Hide, you can substitute Stealth rather reliably, so most of these errors are nuisances, rather than things which actually break the product down.
Once you pick your order, then you can pick out your racial traits, and this is where the book becomes more modular in what it offers. Traits are divided up between minor and major traits, as well as disadvantages. A major trait is worth two minor traits, however some major traits are favored among certain orders, which means those orders can take them as minor traits. Why does this matter? Well, for every major traits’ worth you traits you take (e.g. for every major trait or every two minor traits) you must take a disadvantage. Moreover, there’s no hard and fast limit to the number of traits you can take, though the book recommends no more than two or three major traits’ worth. Given that there are fifty minor traits, forty-five major traits, and forty disadvantages, meaning that there are some fairly major possibilities for how you want to build your character.
While I admire the freedom that this offers for making characters, I have to wonder if there are some balance issues here. Pathfinder doesn’t have level adjustments anymore, and indeed gave core races a boost, so maybe this is in line with that, but it seems like this opens itself up to min-maxing fairly easily. The book recommends that players be made to roll randomly for disadvantages instead of picking them like they do traits, and that’s probably a good idea, but even so it’s possible to make some rather strong combinations.
Following this are almost a dozen new templates meant for furries only. These are largely meant to cover archetypes that can’t be summarized by orders or traits, such as being an Anthro-Soldier, or Chimerical. Ironically, these templates do have a listing for a level adjustment (most are +1 LA).
There’s a short section regarding anthropomorphic characters in your game world, and the book is quick to say that it doesn’t have much help for you there, other than to offer some example ideas (which mostly consist of having furries be unique creatures, be their own races, or even replacing all human and demihuman races with furries, complete with an outline for which order replaces which race). Honestly, this section is almost no help with the flavor aspect of having furries in your game world, but I can’t really hold that against the book. As I mentioned at the beginning of this review, there’s no identity for these characters, and the book presents too many possibilities for different kinds of furries to easily create an in-game theme for them.
The book ends by presenting four new races, which seems like a bit of an oddity after the free-form design presented earlier. While it’s never stated clearly, these seem to be complete races unto themselves, and thus not applicable for the traits and disadvantages listed earlier, though I suppose one could use them anyway. The carta are a race of anthropomorphic otter gypsies. The monster brother/sister is the magical beast version of the furry, and gives a list of eleven different special abilities/qualities you can take for them, one associated with a different kind of monster. Neanderthals are the savage, primitive cousins to humans, and seem kind of superfluous here even though the flavor text says they’re best used alongside furries in a more savage setting. Finally, the wild faun are the product of a pure woman and a unicorn or pegasus that was drawn to her innocence.
Technical Aspects
I don’t ask for much from PDFs. Little things like bookmarks are all it takes to make me happy, and so I really can’t forgive products that don’t have them, especially when they don’t have a hyperlinked table of contents – or even a table of contents at all – the way this book doesn’t. Being eighty-nine pages in length, ease of navigation is something of a priority here, and no bookmarks or TOC is not helpful in that regard.
Artwork
This book admits upfront that its art is from stock art packages and online art published under free licensing, which means you see a wide variety of styles here. Pencil-line, full-color, computer-generated, and more all sit comfortably side-by-side. Surprisingly, most of the art is actually very good, and there were several pictures I found myself admiring. The pages have an alternating page border of small, colorful tiles along the left and right sides.
Having said there, I do wish that there was a printer-friendly version of this book. This book doesn’t skimp on the art, and printing it out looks like it could be taxing for some printers, especially since there’s more color art here than not. One that eliminated the pictures and border would have been nice.
Final Thoughts
Freeform Anthropomorphica accomplishes what it sets out to do, which is provide a framework so you can create your own customized furry character, but it fouls up a lot of details along the way. The erratic waffling between Pathfinder and 3.5, having no bookmarks or a table of contents, and an overall need for a round of editing keep this product from reaching its full potential. Make no mistake, these errors don’t undercut the book’s utility, but they’re speed bumps in what should be a smooth process. More effort was needed than was given here, and that’s a real shame since the book otherwise functions very well.
Freeform Anthropomorphica will absolutely let you make the furry character you want, no matter what you had in mind. Just be prepared to compensate for the book’s shortcomings.
