A Question of Honor: A Guidebook to Knights

[Jraynack]

The medieval knight - a deadly foe that brought horror to the hearts of every infantrymen on the battlefield or a chivalrous champion defending courage, truth and honor. Many set off toward the crusades with hopes and aspirations of performing a glorious service for something greater than themselves, while others journeyed with greed, power, and ruthlessness clasping their petty hearts. Who will you be?

A Question of Honor: A Guidebook to Knights offers new prestige classes for all classes from Troubadour to the Fallen Knight, as well as new feats, weapons, magical items, monsters, and spells to enhance any game.

In addition,a free supplement, offered for a limited time, detailing the Hill Lands, an area that can be placed in any campaign world or become a launching place to travel the world of Terra. Presented in 3.5 format, however still compatible with 3.0.

 

[GameWyrd]

The Alea Publishing Group are one of the new generation of d20 publishers to spring up. They don’t have a 3.0 edition legacy nor do they have 3.0 edition baggage either. Their PDF d20 products are entirely 3.5 and so, hopefully, everything will be smoothly cross compatible. Mind you, having said that, one of the new feats in the supplement is marked with a great big 3.0.

It just takes a quick look at A Question of Honor: A Guidebook to Knights to see that Alea have got the tricky stuff exactly right. The PDF is slick and pretty. It’s decorative, illustrative and yet uncluttered and trim. More importantly, although there’s the usual dose of prestige classes, there are some good and original ideas in here. Original ideas? D20? I’m not kidding. It’s good to see companies like Alea entering the hugely competitive d20 market and bringing fresh-faced innovation with them.

It just takes a quick look at the very same A Question of Honor: A Guidebook to Knights to see that Alea have made some telltale rookie errors and have some more serious mistakes. English and editing are weak throughout the product. This is a rather insidious disappointment because in every other respect the PDF has that professional gloss. The telltale rookie errors are, perhaps, less worrying. There are no internal hyperlinks or bookmarks in the product. This makes it harder than it needs to be to read and jump around the PDF. There’s no friendly printer alternative either. Ouch. My ink! My ink!

Let’s combine the bad and the good and have a look at the refreshing innovation from Alea and the problem with sloppy writing. In other words, let’s have a whopping great quote from the book (but safely within the ‘fair use for review purposes’ clause – Ed). Oh. I could find many more quotes with shakier English in but this section on Minor Attacks of Opportunity shows how important it is to be crystal clear when describing game mechanics.

"As stated above, some Combat Stills use unspent attacks of opportunity. However, when it is discussed about a character provoking an attack of opportunity, it only applies to a character making an attack with a Combat Skill. These are called minor attacks of opportunity so as not to be confused with a normal attack of opportunity. Furthermore, a minor attack of opportunity is used in place of your normal attack of opportunity when dealing with Combat Skill checks; however, you may not use a normal attack of opportunity in place of a minor attack of opportunity when using a skill check (see below for skill descriptions and an example to illustrate this concept more clearly)."

The information to take from the Combat Skills is that there is a range of moves and techniques that fit inside the usual d20 combat. If you have an attack of opportunity then you have a chance to try something rather more impressive than simply swinging out for an extra hit. There are also combat skills that give you a chance to try and recover from a failure and stop your assailant getting an attack of opportunity against you (erm, a minor attack of opportunity, I mean). Combat Skills are bought out side the usual skill system and are not feats. That’s right. They’re not feats. Combat Skill points are directly tied to a character’s base attack bonus. Characters earn 8 Combat Skill points per 1 BAB. A fighter with BAB +3 will have 24 Combat Skill points to spend but a wizard of the same level with BAB +1 only has 8 Combat Skill points to their name. Okay. This means that characters are probably more powerful than they’d otherwise be - but only slightly. I like the system because it piggybacks so cleanly. A GM could ignore these extra rules for a fight without picking on the combat characters. For example, a melee that sees the entire gaming group against some bandits could be done without these rules in order to keep things quick. A high drama duel between one PC and a villainous Baron at Court is the ideal time to use them.

A Question of Honor does tend to increase the power level of the game. Stop right there. Game balance is incredibly important but it is specific only to one gaming group and one campaign setting at a time, perhaps only the gaming group. Why some people expect products, especially third party d20 products, to be balanced exactly to their gaming style and why they whine when this doesn’t happen, is a mystery to me. This guidebook to knights doesn’t suit a low fantasy, low level and gritty game. A Question of Honor is up front about this, is actively points out when a prestige class or similar mechanic is especially powerful.

This is a guidebook to knights. A knight is an armoured warrior? An honour bound warrior? Some guy on a horse? Authors Cameron Guill and Joshua Raynack are perfectly aware of what a knight is – or was. They’ve done their research and this is good to see. At the start of the supplement we’re told that the guidebook will do its best to cater to both the fantasy version of knights and to provide a historical portrayal of knights too. They offer an historic feel. This is good. If we’d been told the guidebook was able to provide d20 mechanics to suit historic knight combat then I’d have horribly sceptical. The d20 system is lost to fantasy but it is possible to conjure up a strong historical ambience. Look at Green Ronin’s impressive Testament for the divine proof.

There are some nice ideas for armour. Exotic bits of protection – kidney belts, for example – kick in only when there’s a critical threat. A kidney belt doesn’t increase your armour class until someone is making that second roll to see whether a critical threat turns into a critical hit. The natural compliment to this are those weapons and techniques which might make it easier to turn a threat to a critical hit. Armour tends to come a poor second to a high dexterity but this seems to even the scales slightly.

I did note that most of these innovate new rules didn’t come in the form of prestige classes and feats. This doesn’t stop the supplement being full of them. It is. It’s here especially that the PDF pushes the power level of the game upwards. Feats are potent and prestige classes powerful. The Advancement Feats, in particular, will appeal to those gamers who like to do well with numbers. Ancestral Feats imply something special about your bloodline. I think they’ll work well in a game without elves, dwarves, gnomes, etc but where the campaign world might have had such races in the past. Taboo feats aren’t quite as interesting as they might sound. There are no perks for shirking taboos; instead there are perks for picking a taboo and sticking to it.

The knight becomes a prestige class. Okay. I suppose a Knight is a prestigious and skilled lifestyle-cum-occupation. Since this is a d20 supplement there are dozens of knights. Black Knights, Knights of the Dawn, Dwarven Tor, Ancestral Knights, Champions and the two famous orders – Knights Templars and Knights Hospitallers. And more. I tend to grumble about 5 level PrC’s that can be entered into before the PCs reach 10th level but this isn’t too much of a problem here. Still, it’s somewhat ironic that a few characters will strive not to become a Fallen Knight because the player has decided that it is a dead end class. Kudos to Alea for including the Dwarven Tor in their prestige class selection. The problem with the knightly image is that it is strongly bound to human history in a way that wizards and sorcerers or even just clerics and fighters are not. Ah yes, speaking of which, how is it possible to have Templars and Hospitallers? These knightly orders are specific to the Crusades. If you want, it would be a bit like having a football team in your fantasy game called Manchester United, a hero called Robin Hood or a pair of bards called the Warner Brothers. There is an answer, I suppose, and that’s that the establishment of an order to protect an important temple or a string of religious buildings is perfectly feasible.

Then there’s Terra. This campaign setting from Alea will not win any prizes for most original name. A Guidebook to Knights has hefty samples of Terra material in it. It might just be that the rather familiar "Terra" was picked as the setting name on purpose. There are distinct overtones of Earth in the campaign world previews. We’ve already paused to note how the Templars and Hospitallers are echoes from Earth history. What about Argos? The full colour map of Argos is worthy of a mention. It’s good. Alea are not short of artistic talent and are therefore free of a common problem for small PDF companies. The map of the Hill Lands and the sea is too small scale to really be sure that it looks like the eastern end of the Meditation – but if it was then the cities are positioned as to reflect the important battles in the various Crusades.

Alea have done well. At least, they’ve done well where I’d expect them do trip up. They’ve not scored quite such a success with the bread and butter of the supplement. I think this will be easy to fix. I’ve a positive feeling about Alea, I think they will tidy up the writing, I think they aim to be as professional and as successful as they can. It’s a company to watch.

* This A Question of Honor: A Guidebook to Knights review was first published at GameWyrd.

 

[Crothian]

Question of Honor: Guidebook to Knights

The fantasy genre of role playing is obviously very popular. It surprises me though that this is really the only book I have seen that focuses on knights. Knights are a staple fantasy concept as well as a historical one. There have been a few prestige classes presented in many books that fill the role of the knight. These are mostly found in books devoted to the Paladin or Fighter classes. However, none of them really fill the need or the even cover the possibilities of the knights and their orders. Question of Honor does a good job of covering these topics.

A Question of Honor is a pdf book by Alea Publishing Group. This is their first product I believe though they have released more since. This is also the first product of theirs I have seen. The pdf is written by Cameron Guill and Joshua Rayneck. The book is sixty five pages in length and come in a zip file under five megs. The pdf itself is still a bit under five megs and also comes with a small document that has some new rules in it. The rules re also presented in the nice pdf.

The book is nice to look at. They did a good job with the layout and the formatting. The art is very much on topic and does a great job of enhancing the book. However, with the art and the colored borders this book is a bit of an ink eater for anyone who would like to print it out. For those who would like to use it from the computer, there are no bookmarks to help with finding things. The table of contents is pretty good but there is also no index. That is not that uncommon though. It does seem indexes are not being included much in products I see.

The book starts out with a brief overview of knighthood. This was too brief for me. It is not even a full page and I have the feeling it could easily have been ten. I would have preferred seeing too much on knighthoods then too little. Then the book moves onto new rules. New rules area tough thing to do. It is hard to balance useful of rules with complexity of game. While I can see a point for the rules presented here as they do fit the subject of knights, I feel that they do add a bit too much complexity to the game. For instance there is Critical Armor Bonus. This is a special armor bonus that gets added only when someone is confirming a critical against you. There is also critical attack bonuses and critical damage reductions. There are other new rules like dragging with a lasso from a horse and two rules on finding items in a town or city. I do like the dragging rules.

There are of course new uses for skills and feats. This is a very common section in gaming books these days. The new skills are okay and really do enhance the theme of the book. But they might be a little complex. For instance the new use for diplomacy is getting a besieged castle to surrender. This is by far the most complex of the skills and while it is very fitting to the material it seems just overly complex with modifier coming from all sorts of things. The feats are mostly pretty good. There is however what they call advanced feats that I do not like. These feats increase a characters level adjustment by one. The feats are strong but I don’t think they are enough to warrant level adjustment. For instance one of the feats Weapon Master adds plus one to hit and damage with all weapons one is proficient in. The feat can be taken as soon as second level for most classes. I would have preferred to just see tougher requirements for the feat and not worry about the level adjustment. The feats also include ancestry feats. These are feat s that can only be taken at first level and define something in the characters forefathers. I really like these types of feats as they add character to the character. The third type of new feat is the taboo feats. These are also really good feats. There is one called superstitious which gives a +3 bonus to all saving throws against spells, even beneficial ones. The character can never cast spells though. There are a lot of general feats as well, most having to do with combat.

There are some optional rules that allow combat styles. These are skills that one gets skill points for based on the base attack bonus of the class. Whenever the base attack bonus increases the person gains eight skill points that can be spent of fighting style skills. This is basically taking combat and making it into a skill itself. Many of these skills are well thought out but do add a complexity level to ones game.

Prestige classes are a dime a dozen these days. The ones presented here are well done, but I would have liked the descriptions to be longer. I do like what they have done with some of the concepts. The Black Knight is a knight who hides his identity to seek vengeance. Knight of the Wild is a ranger like knight who takes trophies from his kills. But for all the kings presented and for are the honor and chivalry talked about, there is no definition of what a knight would do to be honorable and chivalrous. There are no codes presented or examples of how upholds ones honor.

There are many character right ups in the chapter on knightly followers. These give good examples of the kind of people and their abilities the a knight with the leadership feat would attract. Following that is new armor and equipment. Some of this use the new rules that are presented in the early part of the book. The equipment is useful and many have special rules for them. There is an item variant for the whetstone and some historical notes on weapons and armor. I would have liked to see more items like these. From there there are some new magical items and spells presented. The magical items also feature awakened items. The idea of items the gain power with the character is nothing new but it works well here.

The last section is a place that can be used called the Hill lands. It is a nicely described place that features knights. But it is the cartography that is really amazing looking. The credit is given to R&R Maps and I do not know who they are but the map of the city of Argos they have here is phenomenal. If only it where bigger.

Question of Honor is a good resource for knights. It sticks with the subject and everything revolves around it. I do feel that many of the rules are a bit complex, but it I know there are people that like that. Through out the whole thing I just wanted more. Knights are a huge topic and they play a part historically as well as in fantasy. I would have enjoyed reading more about that.

 

[Turanil]

I have that PDF too. I bought it after having read two good comments about it by precedent buyers. However, I found the Guidebook to Knights deceiving. Not bad, just plain average (I agree with a notation of 3) and deceiving when it comes to character classes. For one thing, most prestige classes are extremely short on background descriptions, so you take these classes just a set of game mechanics and special ability, but not for the role (unless you have decided about what this class will represent for you). Then, there is nothing really reflecting what the knights of legends were supposed to be (it seems that the authors have not done a great amount of research...). Just take the Black Knight for example: only two lines of background description, then a few spell-like abilities, and that's all. The Black Knight deserved a much more thorough treatment. I said it out of memory (I don't have the pdf right now under my eye), but most classes are like that if I remind well.

Yes, this PDF was deceiving: it's not about what knights were in legends. Just plain knights of common easy fantasy ala FR. But maybe that's what most gamer prefer after all.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

Love and War, from Atlas Games and by me (so I'm not *completely* unbiased), also deals entirely with knights, with a heavy emphasis on the virtues that make someone a knight rather than just a fighter on a horse, and can make you a knight even if you're a wizard on foot. I've not seen A Question of Honor, but from the sounds of the review, Love and War would complement it rather than overlapping much.

It's a print product rather than PDF, and you can buy it from Amazon via:
http://www.dchart.demon.co.uk/books.html#lnw

David Chart

 

[Messageboard Golem]

A Question of Honor: A Guidebook to Knights
By C. Guill & J. Raynack

This is a sourcebook that focuses on knighthood within the d20 system. It is Alea Publishing Groups (APG) freshman book and is available in PDF. This is a comp copy for review and it was not playtested.

Overview: This book is a solid collection of rules and prestige classes. Mechanically, the book is sound - providing a myriad of knightly options. It does add some new mechanics to the game to better simulate knightly combat – some of them are good additions to the game but others require a bit more bookkeeping than most are willing to do. The major gaffs in the book are its editing and perhaps that the focus was a little strong on Prestige Classes. The book could have scored higher marks with a more through discussion of knighthood. That said, A Question of Honor is a solid buy and worth the money to players and DMs who desire to add more complexity to a chivalrous world. It also comes with two rather nice maps.

Appearance & Layout: The PDF is attractive. It has a nice border, logical demarcations, and good integration of the artwork. The TOC is well organized but not hyperlinked. I did not print the book out but it looks to be an ink hog, primarily because of the borders.

Art: The art varies considerably from the d20 norm but is evocative. Art is subjective and the label of ‘goodness’ given to the art in this book is liable to be schismatic but I think the art works very well for them. It may not be for everyone but I like it. The map work is solid and includes two pieces - the Hill Lands and the City of Argos. The city map is stunning to look at but its usefulness is questionable until blown up to poster size.

Sections:
Introduction – Entirely too brief for me. This section discusses the why and wherefores of historical knighthood and could have easily run 10 pages instead of 1 page. What is included is good but it was a morsel rather than a feast.

New Rules – This section adds some inventive options for weapons and armor. These rules would make good additions for most games that have a lower magic item density. I will be using all of them in my d20 games. They cover things like critical armor bonuses (increase AC versus the confirm roll of a critical) and the rarity value of magic items (some items are harder to find / take longer to find than others).

Feats, Skills, & Fighting Styles – I think APG hit the nail with new uses for old skills. Again, these uses should be easily portable to any game not just the knightly type of game. One complex skill is the diplomatic negotiation of a siege; I think the use strikes a careful balance between ‘DM adlib’ and Wargame complexity, a difficult task to manage. The new Feats ranged from those that are careful revisions of closed content - feats like “Bigger than He Looks” (similar to a “Monkey Grip” though I must admit that APG has the better name ) to feats that will likely become staples in many games such as the variety of statistic feats which give a +1 to all skill rolls that use that particular stat: for example ‘Charming’ is the feat that gives a +1 to all Cha skill rolls. A few of the feats were over the top but overall it is a healthy and balanced diet.

If you want to add more options to combat and book work does not scare you, then the Fighting Styles may be just what you are looking for. This collection of skills (gained with Combat Skill Points based off BAB) enables tweaking of combat with a variety of stances, guards, and ripostes. Overall, it was more complex than I think I would use for d20 but it appears to be sound, if cumbersome mechanics.

Prestige Classes – The weightiest section of the book. All of the PrCs are useful but occasionally I was jarred out of fantasy when I ran across a name like Knight Hospitaller or Knight Templar. Several orders such as these were ripped out of history and placed within APGs own game world and the flavor text for these entries do not explain the names nor the crusades that they were formed during. Barring the naming issue, the PrCs also suffered another problem with uniformity; several PrCs begin with first person flavor text in italics but others do not. It may just be me, but all of them should have been written this way of the few that were should have had that section dropped. So, there is a naming and formatting issue with the PrCs but overall the category is useful and appears to be well balanced.

Followers – the oddest section of the book. This is a collection of various followers that you might find in the company of a knight; these are not individuals, just stat blocks. Some folks will find these very useful while others will not. I think they make a good addition to the game and they will likely see use in my Birthright Games.

The two short sections that follow are on equipment and magic items. Both have a variety of useful additions to any d20 games. I particularly liked the two artifact swords that use the rules for ‘awakened’ items: The Sword or Dawn and The Sword of Fallen Lords.

The Appendix is an overview of the Hill Lands, a section of APGs game world, Terra. It has a quasi-historical feel to it but once again the names sometime interfere with the immersion – for example the write up for Bath works well even though it is a historical name but then we discover that it is located within the Ancient Plain – ruins of the Grece & Romus empires. Naming issues aside, (maybe it is just a personal quirk of mine) the Hill Lands is a nice regional setting that I would like to see published.

Summation – A Question of Honor is a good book. It works to achieve its stated goal of integrating knights into d20 but it falls a little short of that goal. Editing also played a factor in my score and this product would have received a score of 4 if the text, punctuation, and uniformity were cleaned up. As a freshman book it is outstanding, if APG can learn from their mistakes I expect that they can etch out a loyal following of consumers who like a lower magic item/spellcaster density in their games – consumers like me.

Eosin

 

[Crothian]

Love and War is one book I've wanted but never just picked up....

 

[Pinotage]

A Question of Honor: A Guidebook to Knights is a pdf supplement from Alea Publishing Group. It features a whole host of new material to revitalise the medieval knight and crusader, including feats, spells, prestige classes, equipment, magic items and new rules. This pdf has a page count of 66 pages - 2 devoted to covers and cover art, 1 for credits, 1 for a table on contents, 3 for OGL declarations, and 1 blank page for campaign notes, leaving 58 pages of knightly content. A Question of Honor: A Guidebook to Knights normally retails for $7 on RPGNow.com

Initial Impressions:

A Question of Honor: A Guidebook to Knights is a fully bookmarked pdf. Also included in the product is a separate pdf that helps to identify all the OGL items in the pdf, as well as well-drawn maps of the free Hill Lands supplement contained in the appendix. The artwork and layout is well done, although not spectacular. Layout is in two columns, the text is easy to read, although the chapters flow into each other without a suitable page break between them. There is some really good material in here, but also some very ordinary, but the variety means that there's probably a little something for everyone with a taste for knights.

The pdf contains a lot of crunch material, although after reading through everything I had to admit that the Hill Lands supplement and its fluff was probably one of the better parts of the pdf. While I like crunch as much as the next guy, the prestige classes, for example, were described with very little in the way of descriptive text or roleplaying background. Many of them were even only slightly over half a page long, leaving me with the feeling that it was just one crunchy bit after the next. That's not a bad thing if you like your crunch, but some parts, such as the optional rules for fighting styles, were confusing, while some of the other crunchy bits were sometimes bland. There's a lot to like about the pdf, but it wasn't jump out of the page stuff, perhaps because of the lack of supporting descriptive material amongst all the rules and rules material. In any event, time to explore in a little more detail.

The Details:

The pdf is divided into seven chapters and two appendices. It starts with a brief and catching introduction on knights and the medieval concept of knighthood and the crusades, focusing on the commitment that it required, all which I found compelling and an interesting read. I'd hoped to find more of that amongst the rest of the pdf, but it was generally lacking in flavorful descriptions that got me hooked on the ideas they had.

Chapter 1: This chapter presents several new rules and expands on the existing core rules to incorporate the concept of the medieval knight. It covers everything from critical attack bonuses that certain weapons gain when confirming a threat, to the concept of a delay time when buying magical items or searching for that elusive mithral armor. It has to be said that it's a daunting task to cover aspects of the medieval knight, and the rules presented are a bit of a mixed bag of success and failure. For example, the critical attack bonus appear to be nothing more than a complicated, yet interesting, take on the magical armor fortification ability. I found it very difficult to grab hold of something here that inspired me.

Chapter 2: If you're after new feats then this chapter has got scores of them. New types of feats such as advancement feats and taboo feats are presented, the former giving you an LA on taking the feat, while for the latter you give up some aspect in order to gain the benefits of the feat. Advancement feats, while there weren't many of them, were lacking in details on how they worked, and how taking the feat would affect taking a level at the same time. New skills and new uses of skills are presented, but again a bit of a mixed bag. The diplomacy skill, for example, is extended to include its use to force surrender during a siege, but very little detail is given on medieval sieges, how they were performed and what was required to capture a city or town.

In addition, fighting styles are presented for a more accurate take of combat, presenting a complicated and confusing mix of new skills called combat skills. I was left with a confusing aftertaste, and couldn't help but wonder why four or five extra rolls would be worth the effort for your strength bonus in damage, and how that would be enjoyable. It's not a bad system, but the complexity doesn't make it worth it. It was particularly interesting to note that those creatures that can't possess combat skills, such as most monsters other than humanoids and giants, are immune to their effects, meaning that in many campaigns this won't find any use in any case.

Chapter 3: Prestige classes. I have to admit that I'd have loved to see a little more detail on these classes. Roleplaying background, some more descriptive text, rather than what sometimes appeared to be an endless stream of more rules material to cram another class in. In addition, the rules text for the prestige class abilities was done alphabetically, leaving the reader with no real feel of how the class progresses from one level to the next. Some of them were interesting and good, but the pdf just didn't do enough to get me hooked, while others such as the Ancestral Knight offered little incentive to ever bother taking the class. The Knight Hospitillar and the Knight Templar were good, and the idea of trophies, granting benefits to the knight that displays them, behind the Knight of the Wild was interesting and different. The Troubadour, a romantic bard, offers some excellent roleplaying material, and I can see a lot of players enjoying the class for what it offers. Overall though, I got the impression that it was just another string of prestige classes sprinkled with some good ones.

Chapter 4: A handy addition to the pdf in providing stat blocks for typical followers for those knights with the leadership feat, or presumably capable of hiring them. There were some minor errors in the stat blocks, but these ready-made followers offer a nice time-saving addition to a knight's repertoire.

Chapter 5 and 6: These chapters present the new equipment and magical items suitable for your knight character. Awakened items are interesting, being items that develop as you progress your character and achieve certain feats with respect to the items, thereby unlocking their powers. New special materials are presented which are both good and useful, and the new weapon enhancements are well done. The mundane weapons and armor incorporate the new rules of critical attack bonus and the like, although Crusading Armor, granting a +10 AC with a -5 armor check penalty, is probably too strong an armor even with the weight supposedly being a restriction. A well done chapter with a bucketful of useful tidbits for most campaigns.

Chapter 7: This chapter presents a useful collection of spells, ranging from the damaging Cleansing spells to the Ease spell that will reduce your arcane spell failure chance for your next spell. Sense Evil/Good is another useful spell, offering a detecting spell that's not concentration limited.

The Appendices: One of the most useful parts of this book, the appendix details the Hill Lands, a land where you can set your knightly adventures, or it can be used as a bigger part of the world of Terra. The history, background details and presentation of the material was well done, a good and sometimes intriguing read, offering some novel ideas that can be used for adventure hooks. It would've been nice to see some more details such as a timeline or perhaps a summary briefly detailing the history, rather than scattered bits of history and background in the descriptions of the terrain or cities of the Hill Lands.

The pdf concludes with two new creatures, the green night and the rust knight, as well as an NPC in Sir Gerald Winters. Again there were a few stat block errors contained in these, but adventuring knights would be warned to make sure they pay these creatures proper respect.

Conclusions:

A Question of Honor: A Guidebook to Knights offers a whole host of new material for a campaign based on the medieval knight. There's a lot of useful material in there, but my overall impression was that the descriptive text that hooks you on an idea or a concept was lacking, leaving an endless stream of rules material in its wake. If you like your rules, then you'll like this pdf, but to me the concept of the medieval knight and the crusades is much more than just rules. In the end it was the Hill Lands supplement that was the most interesting, although there are a few intriguing bits in the pdf that might find use even in a non-knightly campaign. This pdf gets a grading of average or three stars, containing lots of material, but unfortunately not bringing that material home for me.

 

[monkeynova]

Review: A Question of Honor: A Guidebook to Knights

This review is for the PDF "A Question of Honor: A Guidebook to Knights". This is a 65 page PDF file, published by Alea Publishing; I didn't pay for the copy I reviewed.

In brief, this supplement aims to give a set of character options (in terms of feats, specialized skills, and prestige classes) to aid in the creation of knightly characters; primarily, the supplement seems to take the viewpoint that -- by using the new rules the supplement provides -- a knightly character will end up having more martial training than a fighter or paladin, but not necessarily as much divine spellcasting ability as a paladin.

The supplement is divided into seven chapters, with two appendices. The first three chapters (New Rules; Feats, Skills, and Fighting Styles; Prestige Classes) are the meat of the supplement crunch-wise, especially the chapter on feats. Chapter one (New Rules) introduces four new rules that essentially deal with manipulating scarcity in two areas: critical successes and item availability.

Chapter two (Feats, Skills, and Fighting Styles) is the second-longest chapter in the supplement; most of the feats seem to be focused on martial proficiency. However, there are some interesting feat types introduced, specifically the Taboo feats (follow stricter character behavior, gain a benefit); these seem like -- if developed -- they would make a good choice for characters who want to take vows, but don't want to take the fairly restrictive vows presented in Book of Exalted Deeds. An interesting skill idea is the prestige skill, which is only available to members of a given PrC, and which is class if taken with a level of a PrC, and cross-class otherwise; unfortunately, only one example of this is given in the supplement (at least, I could only find one), but it seems like that might actually be a better way of representing special abilities granted by a prestige class: a skill that gets more powerful as you focus on the prestige class, but that can be still developed “on your own” (outside of the prestige class).

The real interesting part of chapter two – and I think is the best part of the supplement -- is the Fighting Styles portion of the chapter. In essence, it seems to be an impulse system for combat that uses attacks of opportunity as the impulses. Generally, each impulse is used to perform an action in combat; the more impulses you have, the more action you can perform. I like the fact that the combat skills are actual skills, and not feats; this allows characters without a large feat selection (say, rangers or paladins) the chance to become as lethal in combat as a fighter. I also like the dynamic nature of the combat skills; as written, the combat skills seem to make position and style of blows more important than actual damage at times. I would have liked to see more than one example of the rules in play, though.

Chapter three (Prestige Classes) is the longest chapter in the supplement; most of the prestige classes presented here are different ways of looking at the knight. There are two things that struck me as "nice touches": you get a nice diversity of classes (fourteen, by my count), at least two of which deal with "black" knight-type characters and one that covers the squire (interestingly, some of the PrCs in this chapter require having taken the squire PrC first), and a good selection of the PrCs are five levels – allowing for a greater flexibility in developing a character (either, closer to a concept or allowing it grow more organically). Note, however, that there are no multiclassing notes for paladins which would allow a paladin to freely take levels in a given prestige class.

The next three chapters (Knight Followers, New Equipment, New Magical Items) present ways to further round out your knightly characters; the chapters are pretty straightforward in terms of items and NPCs. However, chapter four discusses followers, but doesn’t discuss where the followers come from. In fact, one of my major criticisms of the book is the lack of information on the real-world medieval knight: no discussions of feudalism, no discussions on training, no “day-in-the-life” type discussions of a knight in medieval society, no discussions on military orders.

I was a little less excited about chapter six (New Magical Items) than I thought I would be: the weapon and armor enhancements, while keeping in touch with the idea of knights being martial experts, seemed a little bland, with most focused on providing minor bonuses to various combat activities (a +1 or a +5 to an attack or skill roll, respectively); also, the two artifacts presented didn’t appeal to me all that much (one of the main concepts behind their use, awakened items which grow in power, seems to be more-or-less similar to ideas presented in Weapons of Legacy, a WotC sourcebook which was able to devote more space to covering the idea; the comparisons are regrettably inevitable, and it is unfortunate that the authors chose this supplement to introduce the concept rather than waiting for a campaign setting book). Additionally, I would have appreciated more examples of the supplement’s awakened items and more wondrous items.

Chapter seven (New Spells) is something of a mixed bag for me: I think the spells could be useful for creating a character that, while very martially skilled, has a very limited amount of divine spellcasting ability. On the other hand, after reading the main chapters of the supplement, I am left wondering what the authors’ distinction between knight and paladin is; my own assumption, based on my reading of the supplement, is that the knight is an extremely skilled fighter with little or no divine spellcasting ability. However, a good portion of the spells seems to assume that the caster actually has some level of spellcasting ability (out of the eight spells presented, at least five seem to assume a caster level of at least three); this seems to be at odds with the idea of a highly skilled fighter. While this doesn't affect the utility of the spells in the slightest, it does make them off-limits to the knightly character unless you come from a strong spellcasting background (cleric, wizard, or sorceror) or from an experienced paladin who has decided that paladinhood is no longer the answer.

The two appendices (Hill Lands Supplement and Monsters and NPCs) seem to deal with setting information for Alea’s upcoming Terra campaign setting. The Hill Lands Supplement in the PDF iis very high-level, and I’m not sure that you could run a campaign set in Terra based solely on the information provided (although, to be fair, it seems to be based strongly in real-world settings, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to fill in the blanks); however, it could give ideas for unexplored parts of a DM’s campaign world. Two things to note: the second map in appendix one for Argos didn’t seem to have any legend identifying locations and no such information exists in the supplement entry for Argos that I could see; also, appendix two contains two monsters and an NPC, and that’s it – you shouldn’t pick up this supplement with the expectation that there will be a large number of pre-made knightly NPCs (you’re given many tools, but you’ll have to roll your own knights).

Overall, I think this supplement is a decent read: I think that the focus on martial side of knighthood is well covered, and I think the authors have introduced a number of concepts that – with further development – could substantially differentiate a highly-trained military character from one who has just survived many wars (and picked up a few tricks along the way). I do think that the potential reader must keep in mind, however, that the supplement doesn’t cover the medieval life and training of a knight as strongly as one would hope.

monkeynova