Agents of Faith: Crusaders of the Gods

[JoeGKushner]

Agents of Faith, Crusaders of the Gods, is a book with one goal. To make all piety count for all player classes and races, not just those with divine spellcasting abilities or ties.

For these characters, the faithful, there are rituals that they can undergo to show their devotion to their deity. These rituals are also like ranks in the hierarchy and each one gives the user a bonus divine feat, described latter in this book. Right away, those who scream game balance are right to do so as the role playing elements are the main thing holding the character's power levels back but the good news is that if the character does stray, there are consequences.

The movement for non-divine classes continues with PrCs like the Crusader, a warrior who fights and uses example to show the strength of their religion. A strange choice of name as the Crusader name usually is put into either a historical context or a highly religious warrior with a narrow mind. The Planar Sentinel is like a ranger but they hunt those who hail from outside the material plane while the Reaper is like a holy warrior with the sole purpose of killing those who've come back from the dead too often or who've raised the dead too often. A few of the PrCs are good fits for clerics, especially NPCs', clerics like the Pacifist and the Proselytizer.

The priest's aren't left out in the cold though as the book boasts several new domains, not tied into any setting or specific god. Each has a granted power and 1st-9th level listing of spells with several new spells included and detailed in this section. It's a nice touch that allows a GM to add some classics like Ice, Peace, Poison, Corrosion and Blood as well as some odd ones like Electromagnetism and Vice to the game. Of course with an Acid Domain, there are a lot of acid spells to damage the foes of the caster and some of them are quite powerful, perhaps too much so in that they could take the limelight away from the mage with spells like Acid Storm, a 5th level Corrosion Spell with the potential for 15d8 points of damage.

The divine feats I mentioned earlier are detailed in their own chapter and it's the largest one in the book. The feats are broken up by domain, level, and have the name and page number so at a glance, you can see that Evil's six Feats and the page's their on. The important thing is noted that these fears are unusually very powerful and care will have to be taken by the GM in introducing them. Compared to some material on the market though, some of it seems standard. Take Chaotic Might, a feat where the character has to be 15th level that only allows him to add 1 point of damage per level to an attack or spell as long as he takes that damage as well. The nice thing is that the bonus is doubled against lawful creatures. Powerful? Yes. Too powerful? Looks over my shoulder at AEG's Feats, Swashbuckling Adventures and Mongoose's Ultimate Feats book, I'd say nope.

Not too long ago, Spellbound, A Codex of Ritual Magic came out and reintroduced Living Imagination's ritual system to the d20 system with lots of examples and details. More rituals are spelled out here for various domains including the flaw, and korba. If you like the ideas of rituals, especially those noted here, you'll enjoy this section. For those who don't have Spellbound, there is a brief explanation in the Appendix, a wise move on the publisher's part.

Since the book is focused on the divine, there are numerous holy magic items here as well. Not all of these are good though, as Childslayer is an evil artifact worthy of almost immediate destruction. The artifacts have backgrounds that can easily be tweaked for individual campaigns. The Boots of Haranur for example, are a gift of the Lord of the Forest, a fairly generic title and type that can be easily switched in most campaigns. My personal favorite is Ironclaw, a 'black, bejeweled gauntlet' that was crafted by fire giants but taken by dwarves but is now lost. The gauntlet's cool power is that it can change size to accommodate different wearer's so the fire giants may gain it again or say even a halfling.

The information on Behind the Altar helps the GM with some basic ideas of pantheon construction including size, structure and divine involvement with the mortals but the real meat of this section is on cults. It includes several ratings for different cults as well as how to use them in your campaign. Tied into some material from Call of Cthulhu and the Complete Guide to Beholders, and I'm looking at Cult heaven here. Still, I'd like more details or some sample cults with full personalities listed.

The book uses standard two-column layout. The art is the good news/bad news type in that it's all done by Marcio Fiorito so it has a unified look and feel but if you don't like his art, you're not going to be happy with the book. I enjoyed his various illustrations but found that I didn't like his border, which cut into the text at the top of the page and at the bottom, giving the text a jagged look. At 104 pages for $19.95, the book isn't overpriced, but it's not like some of their other books which are bargains due to their sheer volume.

This book is not for the DM or player who must have everything in balance. While the bonus feats and artifacts can be balanced, it'd require a lot of front work on the GM's part. This is very similar to those who want to use the various schools or special guild abilities from other publishers. This book is packed with crunch and if you're looking to add some divine flavor to you're campaign, Agents of Faith can go a long way in making every class a pious one.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

The definitive book of the devout, puts of the power of faith and devotion into the hands of all classes.
Introduces a system of divine feats to give any character the power of their god.
Over 200 unique feats are included.
Includes a hierarchy of worship, new cleric domains, spells, rituals, and magic items.
New prestige classes for the faithful.

 

[Psion]

Agents of Faith: Crusaders of the Gods

Agents of Faith is a d20 System soucebook devoted to religious characters; according to the ad copy, this is not limited to clerics and paladins. The book is written by Celeste DeAngelis, Harald Henning, John D. Faugno, Even Burstein, Steven Novella, Darren Sugg, Lawrence Fitzgerald, and Joseph Unfried. The book is published by Living Imagination, publishers of the Twin Crowns setting, but the book makes no mention of that setting on the cover.

A First Look

Format: 104 page perfect bound softcover book; 19.95 USD.

Art: The cover art by Dale Lawrence depicts a variety of characters in a lush green forest, ready for action. The interior is black and white and is illustrated by Marcio Fiorito.

Layout: Two column format throughout. Reasonably conservative body text font. Lines and paragraphs are single spaced, but frequent (albeit clearly labeled) section breaks occur that introduce a little space. The tables are clear and readable.

A Deeper Look

The book is organized into seven chapters and three appendices (one of which is the obligatory OGL.)

Those who remember my review of Living Imagination's flagship setting Twin Crowns might recall that my major objection to the rules material was how much sheer power was granted to religious characters. Of course I feared the same would be the case here.

The first chapter did little to disabuse me of that notion. Entitled, the faithful, the first chapter provides a variety of special status titles that can be granted to religious characters if they meet certain roleplaying requirements. The boons they grant for all but the most basic such status levels is more than a bit generous, to the tune of a bonus feat each.

In addition to the character status description and benefits, the first chapter provides some sample description of holy ground types.

The second chapter is entitled The Devoted, and is a collection of prestige classes describing religious character archetypes. These classes are:
-Crusader: This take on the crusader is a leaderly warrior type with the ability to inspire and aid others, including the ability to lend others the use of divine feats (see below.)
-Pacifist: The pacifist is a divine spellcaster devoted to the cause of peace, with class abilities towards that end in addition to continued (but slowed) spellcasting advancement. Unlike similar classes you may see elsewhere, the pacifist has no game mechanical strictures; they are entirely roleplaying. The entry requirements struck me as odd; the character is required to be non-chaotic, but I don't understand why a pacificist would be evil, either.
-Planar Sentinel: This class is a fighter type dedicated to fighting outsiders. They receive ranger-like bonuses against such creatures, and other bonuses and protections against other-planar creatures. The only ability I question is the fellstrike ability that they gain at 4th level that ignores all damage reduction of outsiders they have as favored enemies.
-Proselytizer: This is a brief (5-level) class specialized in gaining new converts. The class is not a fighting or spellcasting class. Their central ability is the sermon extraordinary ability, which allows them to inspire an audience of listeners to action.
-Reaper: A more specific concept, reapers are servants of a deity of death charged with ensuring that resurrected or raised characters return to their rightful place. The class has its own spellcasting advancement and are not good fighters. As you might guess, the class has abilities that make it difficult to return from the dead, such as aging damage and (at higher levels) a soul bind ability.
-Sacred Marauder: Sacred marauders specialize in the sacking of the temples of enemy religions. They are good fighters and have abilities that boost their combat statistics when dealing with enemies of the faith on their own territory.
-Sacrifist: These are divine spellcasters that engage in ritual sacrifice. In addition to slow continued spellcasting advancement, they gain expendable bonuses to rolls by sacrificing sentient living creatures. Given this, I am surprised that evil alignment is not a requirement.

The third chapter contains new domains and spells. The new domains are blood, corrosion, elecromagnetism, fear, ice, love, peace, poison, sound, vengeance, and vice. Most of these are suitable ideas for domains. However, playing the "one of these things is not like the other" game, the "electromagnetism" domain (which espouses it in very much the modern scientific meaning of the term, with spells that emulate spectrums of color, magnetism, and electricity) doesn't seem too fantasy in feel to me.

There are only new spells in this chapter that fill in levels in the new domains, and none of the spells are added to any existing class' spell list. The spells are overall suitable, and where problems do exist, they seem mostly conceptual. For example, "selfishness" is a high spell that lets the caster counter a spell and allows the caster to use it. While an interesting spell, I am not sure this well represents the concept of "vice."

The fourth chapter, Divine Power, provides a bevy of new divine feats to round out your religious character. As divine feats is where I ran into the most trouble in Twin Crowns, it is where I expected to run into the most trouble here.

The writers were obviously sensitive to these concerns, and start the chapter off with a variety of options for keeping the power of the feats in check, mostly schemes for limiting the choice of the player to limit "min-maxing". While this does have some impact to be sure, that won't compensate for a truly overpowered feat.

The divine feats all follow the same pattern. Each domain (core and introduced in this book) has one feat for every three levels up to 15th, and one "ascended" feat for those characters that reach ascended status. This is a very neat idea; I have always thought that there is not enough to distinguish clerics of different faiths. A whole feat chain devoted to each domain sounds like a useful tool to that end.

In actuality, this technique/these feats are campaign neutral versions of the divine feats in the Twin Crowns setting. That setting has deity specific domains for each deity, and a similar feat chain for each of those specific domains. Agents of Faith takes the technique presented there are applies it to the general domains.

At first, I was really impressed with what I saw. Looking over a few feats, they did not seem overpowered. Wind shield, for example, provides a 20% miss chance against missile weapons, which is not much different in power from Deflect Arrows. However, I was given to wonder how the generic domain feats here stacked up with the deity specific ones from Twin Crowns.

Not only did I discover that in many cases they were comparable, but many were the same. Blessing of Death, for example, was a hideous feat of the Grumach domain that grants all other initiates "within the sound of your voice" (I'll point out the mechanical ambiguity of this statement as a side note) gains energy drain ability with all melee attacks. Blessing of Death makes it to this book as part of the death domain feat chain. What's worse, the new death domain version states that it drains two levels. This, to me, is hideously powerful.

The fifth chapter is rituals, and describes a number of divine rituals. These rituals use the skill-roll driven ritual system that first appeared in Twin Crowns and later in Spellbound. For those without either book, the abridged ritual system rules are included in Appendix B.

Many of the rituals here are reprinted from Twin Crowns. Like those in Twin Crowns, many are generally available to divine spellcasters, while others are specific to domains (though much like the feat parallel, the Twin Crowns rituals are specific to each deity while the ones in this book are keyed to general domains.) Though usable as is, I think that you will probably want Spellbound's rules so you can use substances other than the generic substance "korba" for rituals.

The sixth chapter is Artifacts and Relics. Most of these artifacts are fairly potent, many of the sort the DMG would call major artifacts. Many of the artifacts are specific to concepts in this book, such as a cup that has additional properties in the hands of an initiate of a certain domain, or a cloak that grants the "skills and abilities of a 5th level sacrificist and ritualist." The later item seemed ambiguous to me; just which exact "skills" would such a character get, since a member of such a class could choose any number of combinations of skill ranks.

The seventh chapter is sort of a "GM advice" section, that provides guidelines, ideas, and options for creating a pantheon and using ideas in this book. Amongst other things, to book invites GMs to consider alternative methods of handling the issue of death and resurrection, including the gifts option that the Twin Crowns campaign setting uses, which explicitly limits the number of "lives" a character can have. Other methods randomize the handling of the return to life.

The first appendix introduces the spirit domain, along with domains and feats. This domain is included in the appendix because its spells are primarily only useful if you use the gift system, which allows you to track and contain departed spirits.

As mentioned earlier, the second appendix is a summary of the ritual system used in Living Imagination's Spellbound supplement.

Conclusion

The classes are probably the most immediately usable aspect of the game, if not the most original. The divine feat system had the most potential to add a lot of flavor to the game, but is held back in this aspect by the presence of several highly powerful feats that many DMs will doubtlessly disallow. Unlike most feats in book, picking and choosing from divine feats is less of an option, since they really are designed as a set of related abilities. However, a DM willing to do a little work could turn this into a good system for adding detail to religious characters.

Whatever the case, it seems to me that characters using this book have no hope of being balanced if you hand out feats at the rate suggested in chapter 1.

Overall Grade: C

-Alan D. Kohler