Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Morgenstern" data-source="post: 1070486" data-attributes="member: 5485">Had more time to actually read through the book today. I'm gonna stand by one of my intial impressions - the layout is blah, but now I see why: if this were a .pdf, this would be the most ink usage friendly format I've ever seen. Those pages are WHITE.That said. Um, I'm gonna have to TOTALLY disagree that the races are in any way setting specific. Skip the cutesy flavor text and go to the racial mechanics, and you have a list of modifiers and abilites that would drop in anywhere, any time. If fact, I was a little startled how completely typical they are. 100% compliant and a little ordinary honestly. Though I find this is largely made up for with the racial classes (as I hoped, they were quite sugestive on how to do my own in the future). Have to laugh that the cat and dog racial classes have almost identical bonuses, with only the order you receive them in changing, and the cats getting a speed increase. Fi you insist that the flavor text IS the race, then yes you can trip yourself up with the trappings. The flavor text isn't what I'd be buying the book for (remember, I said first time around I was looking for a mechanical toolbox to spruce up my own setting), so the racial levels stuff is pretty much exactly what I was looking for - a non-game wrecking mechanic for stronger than normal races that could be played along side regular ones. (BTW, I think ECL absolutely fails as a balancing mechanism, but that's a rant for another time <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />)The Weapons and armor were interesting. Some I'd use, and some I'd merely read for insights. Articulated armor strikes me as a bit overdone, but the underlying mechanic is -very- interesting. I'd aply it to some of the armor types in OA in a heartbeat. The dire weapon bit was cool, but I had though it was the highligh of a bunch in the design diary, and it turned out to be virtually the only weapon template. Still, I found the section full of examples and ideas I'll haul off to other games.The spell templates- now that section really is sweet. I haven't read the spells yet, but I'd port the templates back to regular D&D right now!Be a few days before I can glace through it again. Still reading a store copy and mulling it over. It is rapidly moving on to my pick it up list though. You may now return to your indivual attempts to convert all others to your respective viewpoints <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />. I say~"The book is in most major bookstores and they don't shrink wrap - go read a bit and make up your own mind. It is certainly good enough to be worth your time cracking the covers"</blockquote>

Verification