Skillcraft Book One: Agility and Athleticism
[imager]http://edge.rpgnow.com/products/product_4457.jpg[/imager]
Agility and Athleticism is a supplemental rulebook detailing skill uses and other character options focusing on use of the skill system such as new skill related prestige classes. This book in particular is touted as the first of three such books; this book, as the title implies, focuses on physical skills. The book is one of the innagural offerings of Eldersygn Press. The book is by Geoff Kushnick, with additional design by Sean Marleau and Mike Nagle.
A First Look
Agility and Athleticism is available in print or pdf. The print version of the book is a 96 page perfect bound softcover book (similar in format to the 3.0 class books by WotC) available for $16.95. The pdf version is available at RPGnow, and is organized under their new “edge” banner (
link.)
The cover of the book depicts a handprint with an arrow shape in the palm against a red and gold pattern of circles.
The interior is black and white. Interior artwork is attributed to Sean Marleau and Mike Nagle (also listed for contributions.) The print quality seems good, but some of the line art looks a bit off to me, with strange proportions and odd cheekbones.
A Deeper Look
Agility and Athleticism is organized into four chapters and an appendix. The chapters are
Skills,
Player (includes details of classes, feats, and spells as relates to skills),
Gamemaster, and
Module (a short adventure,
Miners from Afar).
The
skills chapter features the stars of the book, the physical skills. There are no new skills here; the skills discussed here are the core skills from the d20 SRD. Each skill has the basics repeated from the SRD, including the tables of DCs and modifiers and basic descriptions of uses. In addition, there are new variant skill use descriptions (and DCs/modifiers) that were not in the SRD, many culled from OGC sources. This provides the GM with a great variety of resources for setting up skill based challenges.
One nice feature of this chapter is that all the variant uses and DCs are marked with check-boxes. This allows a GM to decide and clearly mark which variants are to be used in the campaign. This was a technique used by Malhavoc Press in
Requiem for a God and it was nice to see it here.
If you play heavily skill based games but like the additional guidance such skill uses provide, these entries may be useful. However, in some places, the fact that some of the OGC is put here out of context is an obstacle to actually using it. For example, the skill uses for concentration
maintain anchor to ley line and
maintain anchor to power nexus are gobbledygook if you don’t happen to know where they are from or own the source of the rules for ley lines and power nexuses (in this case, however, I happen to recognize them from Bad Axe Games’
Heroes of High Favor: Elves, and the ley line rules happen to be freely available online
here.)
The
Player chapter focuses on classes and feats. A subsection entitled
archtypes and anomolies presents a discussion of the way the core classes use skills, and presents an “anomaly” variant of each class, which suggests a character concept, how you would make it with skill choices, and a possible variant for the class to realize the concept better.
There are six new skill-focused prestige classes introduced here. Some of the advancement tables use the old-style progression scheme, which confusingly showed iterative attacks. One (the
Peregrine of the Ethereal Mist) is particularly confusing in this vein, as it seems to want to give another iterative attack at 2nd level. But this progression chart has other problems; I’ll get to that shortly.
The prestige classes listed herein are:
- Arcane Outrider (5 level): Sort of an oddity, the concept of an arcane outrider is a mounted arcane spellcaster. The arcane outrider selects a special riding trick from a list of such abilities, as well as an arcane mount that progresses similar to a familiar or paladin’s mount. The arcane outrider has full spellcasting progression, which normally is a no-no in my book for classes with significant abilities at every level, but in this case the conceptual synergy is mild enough and the prerequisites hard enough for an arcane caster to meet that I don’t suspect it will be a problem.
- Beast Slayer (10 level): This class is specialized in combat large beasts. Of course what exactly a “beast” means here is unclear to me since the Beast creature type went the way of the do-do. Another odd point is that an AC bonus that the class grants shifts from a dodge bonus to a natural AC bonus at high levels, which in addition to being conceptually baffling, is not really beneficial: dodge AC bonus is harder to come by and usually easier to stack than natural AC bonuses.
- Nimblestrike Swordsman (10 level): As might be apparent from the class name, this is a take on the “nimble swordsman”. In addition to bonuses to jumping and tumbling, the class has bonuses and tricks related to dodging and tumbling movement.
- Peregrine of the Ethereal Mist (10 level): A prestige class intended for monks. The concept here is of a monk with a special connection to the ethereal plane that allows them to do a variety of tricks. As alluded to earlier, the class has a somewhat confusing advancement table. The table suggests the class continues to advance in AC, speed, flurry of blows, and unarmed damage. But instead of a statement about stacking levels, the body of the text say nothing about it, and leaves the table to say it all. The way the table is laid out, it presumes that you come into the class and “step into” the monks advancement. This is a poor way to approach it. It would penalize a monk who comes into the class late, but can be exploited by someone who meets the prerequisites without having the monk abilities, and then jumps into the class to get the higher level monk abilities without having the prior levels of monk. Finally, the class has unusually weak saves for a monk variant (all poor saves); I’m not sure if this was a mistake, or a drastic attempt to balance the class (which was not so busted it deserved that!)
- Umrbrous Fallaciter (Um-what fa-who-iter?) (10 levels): Another class with an odd name and an odder class progression (totally nonstandard BAB and save progression), the Umrbrous Fallaciter is essentially a rogue with a talent for illusion; the class has its own 5-level spell progression; it can only learn arcane illusions. It also has a few rogue-like abilities (including a sneak attack like abilities), and they get an ability like the silent spell feat that does not add levels to their spells.
- Urban Ranger (5 levels): This quaint little class resembles a ranger with a short progression path, with its abilities swapped out for more urban variants.
The short classes here have promise, but the 10 level classes seem to have conceptual or rules problems.
The feats featured here are all of the skill boosting variety. No, not all +2 to two skills things (though there are a few), but there are a variety that assist your skills with bonuses or with a sole or additional bonus such as negating a situation penalty, a large bonus in a specific situation. There are also some flexible “athlete” feats that give you a bonus to your choice of 4 of the 13 physical skills.
The GM section is somewhat short. In addition to a short selection of skill related magic items, there is a decent section of creating and rewarding skill based challenges. The drawback is that this section relies on a page long chart that could have been summed up as a simple formula.
The adventure,
Miners from Afar, is written for PCs of 3rd-5th level, and includes a variety of skill based challenges. Though the introductory text provides a level range, it doesn’t really outline what sort of skills might be required to prevail, as you might expect for an adventure with skill based challenges.
The appendix is sizeable for a book of this size - 14 pages, with an additional 4 pages of “bonus” material in the back, consisting of rules and skill point summaries drawn from the core rules. I thought this was a bit much, and not composed of the sorts of tables I am likely to benefit from. Examples include the “apparent and in your PHB” like ability score modifiers, to the “not likely to use” like a list of skill modifiers for creatures.
Conclusions
I think d20 has a strong skill system, one which variant d20 system games have used to better effect than D&D. The skillcraft series could be one supplement that helps to realize the potential of skill based challenges in a d20 fantasy games.
That said,
Agility and Athleticism felt like a kernel of good material in a sea of fluff. The best material is in the first chapter. Much of the material after the first chapter (and the skill based challenges section of the third chapter) seem like they needed some serious work (mainly, the prestige classes) or weren’t too helpful at all (mainly, the appendices). I feel that you could have very easily boiled down this book to 64 - of fewer - pages and had a much better product per page.
Overall Grade: C
-Alan D. Kohler
