John Cooper
Explorer
COMPLETE SCOUNDREL
By Mike McArtor and F. Wesley Schneider
Wizards of the Coast product number 957257200
160 pages, $29.95
The latest in the "Complete _________" series (or at least it was when I started reading it; I've gotten a bit behind in my reviewing of late), Complete Scoundrel seems like it would be specifically focused on rogues, and perhaps to a lesser extent bards, but that isn't entirely the case at all. As the authors explain on page 4, "scoundrels represent a style of play rather than a class. They're the sneaks, the cheats, the bluffers, and the opportunists. They use improvisation and imagination to gain an advantage, exploiting a weakness or a hidden benefit in even the worst situation. Anyone can play a scoundrel."
The cover artwork is a small piece (centered in the middle of a "magical tome" presentation) by William O'Connor. It depicts a manga-haired version of Gimble the gnome bard, decked out in some fancy armor with a sword of some type strapped to his back. The leather armor bits are very elaborate and seem to be strapped in pieces over a heavy coat, but I for one would never carry around a book strapped to my shoulder-piece like that: it looks like it could easily slip out without my knowing it, and I'd hate to lose a valuable book in such a careless manner. I'm also not overly fond of Gimble's "rings worn over gloves" look, but if you check the Player's Handbook illustration of our iconic gnome bard you'll see that William can't be faulted for inaccuracy, as he's sporting the same look over there. In all, it's a well-done piece that I just don't happen to like very well, due not to any fault of the artist but my own dislike for the subject. (I'm still irritated by the 3E "look" that they gave to gnomes - what ever happened to the bulbous noses and full beards? These guys nowadays look like they're trying to be groovy beatniks or something.)
The interior artwork consists of 55 full-color illustrations, 6 monochrome drawings, and 4 maps by 12 different artists and cartographer Mike Schley. As always, there are good pieces and bad; my favorites this time around include Miguel Coimbra's portrait of half-elf psibond agent Dieste Karisa on page 62 (her garb has an authentic-looking elven "feel" to it, and it's not every day you see an adventuring type with spectacles!); Carl Frank's battle between two hooded rogues and three members of the city guard on page 84 (nice to see the guards in identical armor, and he pulls off some tricky movement shots in an effective manner); Howard Lyon's painting of Lidda and Mialee fighting an orc on page 89 (very nice proportions between halfling and elf and orc, and it's nice seeing Mialee without her traditional horse-face now and again); the depiction of a spellcaster using wand modulation to turn a wand of lightning bolt to shoot a flame spell of some type at a band of hobgoblins on page 106 (also by Howard Lyon; I like his use of muted colors, the detail on the spellcaster's armor, and the spell transformation effect); and Ed Cox's painting of bottles of poison on page 112 (glass bottles can be very difficult to paint convincingly, and Ed does a great job here). On the down side, I wasn't particularly fond of Franz Vohwinkel's trio of "Ballerina Amber," "Pimp-Daddy Krusk," and "Court-Jester-With-Codpiece Devin" on page 10; Warren Mahy's battle trickster on page 29 (there's something inherently wrong about a dwarf skipping merrily with such a grin on his face!); Carl Frank's portrait of Sar Pios on page 39 (who looks like he assembled his mismatched wardrobe from out of a box of lost-and-found); Franz Vohwinkel's portrait of Ambrose Brasmere on page 42 (Yikes! Check out how long his legs are! Freak!); Randy Gallegos' portrait of master of masks Beriel on page 55 (this year's contender for the "ugliest outfit" title); and Miguel Coimbra's confusing symbol of the Free League on page 129 (what's supposed to be a "stylized dragon swallowing its own tail" looks more like a "stylized dragon with no legs, tiny wings growing out of its head, and a clawed tail growing out of the front of its tiny wings, which its decided to swallow instead of its tail, because its tail is right there behind it in plain view"). Still, the good outweighs the bad by a fairly large margin, and Mike Schley's maps are up to his usual standards: clear, easy to read, and really, what more can you ask for in a gaming map?
Complete Scoundrel is laid out as follows:
As with all such books, there's some good material in here...and some not-so-good. The authors took a broad approach to the subject (and I can't fault them for that), and then got really brave and decided to provide examples of scoundrels of each of the nine alignments, which is guaranteed to cause all kinds of arguments. (Personally, I don't see Batman as lawful good, despite the authors' attempts at redefining what "lawful good" means.) Some of the prestige classes were really clever, like the gray guard (I like the fact that it provides a way for a paladin to enter the "gray areas" of alignment without losing his paladin abilities, opening up the paladin character for grittier campaigns), the spellwarp sniper (I like the combat tactics opened up by the versatility in spell usage), and the psibond agent (one of the few psionic prestige classes I actually like, as psionics isn't high up there in my personal "likes" column; I tend to do without psionics in my own campaigns). Unfortunately, most of the other prestige classes left me with either a general "meh" feeling (I can appreciate the desire to create a prestige class around the new skill trick mechanic, but do we really need a battle trickster, a magical trickster, and an uncanny trickster?) or outright dislike (the master of masks is one of the sillier prestige classes I've ever seen; the cloaked dancer seems kind of silly as well; the combat trapsmith really stretches my suspension of disbelief past the breaking point, what with his creation of full-fledged traps in a mere 6 seconds, and it only gets worse at 4th level when all of a sudden he can create these traps with whatever he happens to have on hand; the fortune's friend, a prestige class that boils down to "you're really lucky" seems rather pointless to me). Despite the occasional decent prestige class, this was by far my least favorite chapter in the entire book, and is one of the poorer groupings of prestige classes in recent memory.
The feats and skill tricks were pretty cool, though. Skill tricks seem to be a clever concept, falling somewhere in the gulf between a skill and a feat; in effect, they're not as powerful as a feat but allow you to do something cool that doesn't fall readily into the existing rules. At a cost of 2 skill points per skill trick (and a list of prerequisites), the price seems about right, too. I also liked the luck feats, which "stack" in that the more luck feats you have, the more luck rerolls you have, each of which can be used for any of your luck feats. (For example, if you have Victor's Luck and Lucky Start, you get two luck rerolls per day, and if you need to use them both on Lucky Start (granting you a reroll on an initiative check) on a given day, that's your prerogative. It's also worth noting that Complete Scoundrel has some errata for Complete Warrior, in that the feats Arterial Strike and Hamstring are retroactively considered to be ambush feats. While I'm not normally a fan of errata from one book showing up in another (it doesn't seem fair to those who have the first book but not the second), in this case the point's moot since ambush feats are presented in Complete Scoundrel for the first time, so if you don't have this book, you don't need this "errata."
I did like most of the spells, though. My favorite is definitely wand modulation, a handy spell allowing you to cast a lower-level spell into a given wand than the spell it contains, and "retune" it to that spell for 1 minute/level. That means that you can get 10 rounds per level of that same spell out of the wand, as long as you've got the charges (and each "remodulated" spell from the wand eats up two charges instead of one). That can be incredibly useful when you're fighting, say, a fire-based monster and your only wand is a wand of fireball (which is unlikely to do it much harm); suddenly, the fact that you have a Melf's acid arrow prepared along with your wand modulation spell means that you just might survive the encounter after all. I'm also rather fond of armor lock, a hampering spell that seems like a natural for a wizard to have researched to use against his armored opponents; enlarge weapon (perfect for Small spellcasters who take a size penalty to damage with their weapons from the get-go); evacuation rune, a targeted teleport spell that rewards forethought; fatal flame, which deals no immediate harm to its target but causes its body to blow up when it's slain; siphon, which allows you to drain charges from a wand to "recharge" a previously-cast spell; and spymaster's coin, which creates a scrying sensor out of a Fine object. I did find it rather funny that the illustration for the fatal flame spell on page 99 uses an exploding kobold and has the following caption: "Fatal flame turns a dying kobold into a lethal booby trap for its fellows." Yeah, "fatal," that is, provided that its fellows have no more than 2 hp each, since that's all the damage the spell is going to deal using a standard kobold as its target (and that's assuming they fail their Reflex saves) - let's hope he had quite a few class levels, huh?
The new equipment chapter was also well-done. I liked the rules for creating hidden spaces in weapons, containers, and the like. The alchemical items and poisons were creative, although some of their names weren't particularly so ("nerv" is a substance that enhances resistance against fear effects, for example). As for the magic items, I really liked the rod of ropes, another very useful item that's more or less the functional equivalent to a rod of lordly might, in that it's got buttons that turn it into a variety of useful items, naturally all rope-related. The living items were a bit of a change, although I seem to recall a similar concept in the old 2nd Edition AD&D Dark Sun setting.
The scoundrel adventures chapter was a mixture of some sound DMing advice and a trio of new organizations that the PCs can either join up with or butt heads with. Of the three, I liked the Seven Ravens Clan the best, although the Blind Tower was also pretty cool - all of the daring thievery stunts they pull remind me more than a little of the Gray Mouser from Fritz Lieber's tales.
On the down side, though, I really disliked the sidebars that were randomly inserted throughout Complete Scoundrel. These might be a very short story, a letter detailing an encounter with a scoundrel of some type, the notes of the movements of a set of guards in a building a group of thieves wants to infiltrate, or something similar. They're all over the place in the book, and while you might try to argue they were included for "flavor," they simply reek of padding to me. I went back and counted: there are 15 such sidebars, each ranging somewhere in the vicinity of one-fourth to one-third of a page in length, so we're talking about 4 pages of completely wasted material here. I don't know if the authors simply needed to fill up 160 pages and couldn't think of any other way to do so, but it smells a bit like desperation to me.
Proofreading and editing were for the most part pretty good, but there were still a few errors that made it past the three listed editors (Jennifer Clarke Wilkes, Beth Griese, and John Thompson) and editing manager Kim Mohan. Here we're talking things like not dividing a word that splits between two lines at the end of a syllable (they went with "ro-leplaying" instead of "role-playing" - a sure sign that their dictionary program doesn't recognize "roleplaying" as a valid word and thus doesn't know what to do when the word must be split between two lines), incorrect word usage ("to" is used instead of "of"), simple typos ("of" instead of "or," "PCs" instead of "PC"), improper alphabetization ("Epic of the Lost King" should come before "Expanded Ki Pool," and the alchemical items on pages 110-111 aren't alphabetized at all), an extraneous word in a sentence ("which flips the weapon it into position" doesn't need that "it"), improper terminology ("liquid sunlight" - a new alchemical substance - is referred to once as "liquid light"), and the line coloration for entries 81-82 is off on the table on page 157. All in all, not too bad, and a much better job than some of the proofreading/editing jobs I've seen in similarly-sized books that have come from Wizards of the Coast recently.
As for the stats, there weren't a whole lot of them, and several of those that did appear had some errors in them, but before I get to my "unofficial errata" I want to point out the stat block on page 37, where an NPC's skill listing includes a +2 synergy bonus to Appraise checks related to alchemy and traps due to his having over 5 ranks each in the corresponding Craft skills. Reading that stat block nearly made me cry tears of unbridled joy. Kudos to developer Andy Collins for that - my hat's off to you, Andy!
As for some of the other stats, you might consider making the following changes:
I'm going to go with a rating of a low "4 (Good)" for Complete Scoundrel. Despite a rather poor group of prestige classes overall, significant padding throughout the book, and some stat block errors, I'd say the strength of the spells, skill tricks, and equipment pulled the book just a bit beyond the "average" range. The fact that the "general background" and DM advice sections made for interesting reading puts points in the book's favor as well.
By Mike McArtor and F. Wesley Schneider
Wizards of the Coast product number 957257200
160 pages, $29.95
The latest in the "Complete _________" series (or at least it was when I started reading it; I've gotten a bit behind in my reviewing of late), Complete Scoundrel seems like it would be specifically focused on rogues, and perhaps to a lesser extent bards, but that isn't entirely the case at all. As the authors explain on page 4, "scoundrels represent a style of play rather than a class. They're the sneaks, the cheats, the bluffers, and the opportunists. They use improvisation and imagination to gain an advantage, exploiting a weakness or a hidden benefit in even the worst situation. Anyone can play a scoundrel."
The cover artwork is a small piece (centered in the middle of a "magical tome" presentation) by William O'Connor. It depicts a manga-haired version of Gimble the gnome bard, decked out in some fancy armor with a sword of some type strapped to his back. The leather armor bits are very elaborate and seem to be strapped in pieces over a heavy coat, but I for one would never carry around a book strapped to my shoulder-piece like that: it looks like it could easily slip out without my knowing it, and I'd hate to lose a valuable book in such a careless manner. I'm also not overly fond of Gimble's "rings worn over gloves" look, but if you check the Player's Handbook illustration of our iconic gnome bard you'll see that William can't be faulted for inaccuracy, as he's sporting the same look over there. In all, it's a well-done piece that I just don't happen to like very well, due not to any fault of the artist but my own dislike for the subject. (I'm still irritated by the 3E "look" that they gave to gnomes - what ever happened to the bulbous noses and full beards? These guys nowadays look like they're trying to be groovy beatniks or something.)
The interior artwork consists of 55 full-color illustrations, 6 monochrome drawings, and 4 maps by 12 different artists and cartographer Mike Schley. As always, there are good pieces and bad; my favorites this time around include Miguel Coimbra's portrait of half-elf psibond agent Dieste Karisa on page 62 (her garb has an authentic-looking elven "feel" to it, and it's not every day you see an adventuring type with spectacles!); Carl Frank's battle between two hooded rogues and three members of the city guard on page 84 (nice to see the guards in identical armor, and he pulls off some tricky movement shots in an effective manner); Howard Lyon's painting of Lidda and Mialee fighting an orc on page 89 (very nice proportions between halfling and elf and orc, and it's nice seeing Mialee without her traditional horse-face now and again); the depiction of a spellcaster using wand modulation to turn a wand of lightning bolt to shoot a flame spell of some type at a band of hobgoblins on page 106 (also by Howard Lyon; I like his use of muted colors, the detail on the spellcaster's armor, and the spell transformation effect); and Ed Cox's painting of bottles of poison on page 112 (glass bottles can be very difficult to paint convincingly, and Ed does a great job here). On the down side, I wasn't particularly fond of Franz Vohwinkel's trio of "Ballerina Amber," "Pimp-Daddy Krusk," and "Court-Jester-With-Codpiece Devin" on page 10; Warren Mahy's battle trickster on page 29 (there's something inherently wrong about a dwarf skipping merrily with such a grin on his face!); Carl Frank's portrait of Sar Pios on page 39 (who looks like he assembled his mismatched wardrobe from out of a box of lost-and-found); Franz Vohwinkel's portrait of Ambrose Brasmere on page 42 (Yikes! Check out how long his legs are! Freak!); Randy Gallegos' portrait of master of masks Beriel on page 55 (this year's contender for the "ugliest outfit" title); and Miguel Coimbra's confusing symbol of the Free League on page 129 (what's supposed to be a "stylized dragon swallowing its own tail" looks more like a "stylized dragon with no legs, tiny wings growing out of its head, and a clawed tail growing out of the front of its tiny wings, which its decided to swallow instead of its tail, because its tail is right there behind it in plain view"). Still, the good outweighs the bad by a fairly large margin, and Mike Schley's maps are up to his usual standards: clear, easy to read, and really, what more can you ask for in a gaming map?
Complete Scoundrel is laid out as follows:
- Introduction: 3 pages briefly describing this book's definition of a scoundrel, including sample scoundrels from myth and legend, history, books, movies, TV shows, comics, and games.
- Chapter 1 - Scoundrels of All Types: Specific details about what makes a scoundrel, including scoundrels of each of the nine alignments and each of the eleven standard character classes; playing a scoundrel; several different scoundrel archetypes (acrobatic, aggressive, arcane, clever, divine, psionic, ringmaster, and stealthy); and five good feat choices for scoundrels.
- Chapter 2 - Prestige Classes: Avenging executioner (a former victim who hunts sentient creatures for justice), battle trickster (a combatant who incorporates death-defying stunts into his fighting maneuvers), cloaked dancer (basically a beguiling assassin...who dances), combat trapsmith (a trapmaker who's really, really fast at slapping traps together - one might even say ridiculously so), fortune's friend (a really, really lucky guy...yep, a prestige class for PCs who just want to be lucky), gray guard (a somewhat tarnished paladin willing to do what needs to be done for the greater good), magical trickster (a spellcaster who gives up some spellcasting ability for skill tricks), malconvoker (a summoner making pacts with evil to fight evil), master of masks (a spellcaster who makes these silly masks that give him specific abilities), mountebank (a fraud and con artist), psibond agent (a spy who can see through the eyes of others), spellwarp sniper (a spellcaster who can change area-effect spells into rays), and uncanny trickster (a master of skill tricks).
- Chapter 3 - Feats and Skill Tricks: 21 general feats, 10 ambush feats, 5 bardic music feats, 20 luck feats, and 42 skill tricks (new maneuvers that kind of fall outside of the normal D&D rules, which can be purchased at the cost of 2 skill points each).
- Chapter 4 - New Spells: 28 new spells designed with the scoundrel in mind.
- Chapter 5 - Scoundrel Equipment: Hidden spaces in otherwise normal items, 9 surprise weapons, 11 alchemical items, 8 poisons, 9 magic items, and 7 living items.
- Chapter 6 - Scoundrel Adventures: Creating (or adjusting) adventures to play to a scoundrel's strengths; several scoundrel adventure themes; 3 organizations (the Free League, a former Sigil faction of Independents fighting for freedom; the Blind Tower, an information network of agents and thieves honing their skills; and the Seven Ravens Clan, a former thieves guild that works to bring down criminal organizations), each with history and stats for a sample NPC; 9 legendary sites, where your PC can gain a permanent or temporary special ability just by visiting there; rules for gaining contacts (expanding upon the similar information in Dungeon Master's Guide II); and 100 scoundrel challenges.
As with all such books, there's some good material in here...and some not-so-good. The authors took a broad approach to the subject (and I can't fault them for that), and then got really brave and decided to provide examples of scoundrels of each of the nine alignments, which is guaranteed to cause all kinds of arguments. (Personally, I don't see Batman as lawful good, despite the authors' attempts at redefining what "lawful good" means.) Some of the prestige classes were really clever, like the gray guard (I like the fact that it provides a way for a paladin to enter the "gray areas" of alignment without losing his paladin abilities, opening up the paladin character for grittier campaigns), the spellwarp sniper (I like the combat tactics opened up by the versatility in spell usage), and the psibond agent (one of the few psionic prestige classes I actually like, as psionics isn't high up there in my personal "likes" column; I tend to do without psionics in my own campaigns). Unfortunately, most of the other prestige classes left me with either a general "meh" feeling (I can appreciate the desire to create a prestige class around the new skill trick mechanic, but do we really need a battle trickster, a magical trickster, and an uncanny trickster?) or outright dislike (the master of masks is one of the sillier prestige classes I've ever seen; the cloaked dancer seems kind of silly as well; the combat trapsmith really stretches my suspension of disbelief past the breaking point, what with his creation of full-fledged traps in a mere 6 seconds, and it only gets worse at 4th level when all of a sudden he can create these traps with whatever he happens to have on hand; the fortune's friend, a prestige class that boils down to "you're really lucky" seems rather pointless to me). Despite the occasional decent prestige class, this was by far my least favorite chapter in the entire book, and is one of the poorer groupings of prestige classes in recent memory.
The feats and skill tricks were pretty cool, though. Skill tricks seem to be a clever concept, falling somewhere in the gulf between a skill and a feat; in effect, they're not as powerful as a feat but allow you to do something cool that doesn't fall readily into the existing rules. At a cost of 2 skill points per skill trick (and a list of prerequisites), the price seems about right, too. I also liked the luck feats, which "stack" in that the more luck feats you have, the more luck rerolls you have, each of which can be used for any of your luck feats. (For example, if you have Victor's Luck and Lucky Start, you get two luck rerolls per day, and if you need to use them both on Lucky Start (granting you a reroll on an initiative check) on a given day, that's your prerogative. It's also worth noting that Complete Scoundrel has some errata for Complete Warrior, in that the feats Arterial Strike and Hamstring are retroactively considered to be ambush feats. While I'm not normally a fan of errata from one book showing up in another (it doesn't seem fair to those who have the first book but not the second), in this case the point's moot since ambush feats are presented in Complete Scoundrel for the first time, so if you don't have this book, you don't need this "errata."
I did like most of the spells, though. My favorite is definitely wand modulation, a handy spell allowing you to cast a lower-level spell into a given wand than the spell it contains, and "retune" it to that spell for 1 minute/level. That means that you can get 10 rounds per level of that same spell out of the wand, as long as you've got the charges (and each "remodulated" spell from the wand eats up two charges instead of one). That can be incredibly useful when you're fighting, say, a fire-based monster and your only wand is a wand of fireball (which is unlikely to do it much harm); suddenly, the fact that you have a Melf's acid arrow prepared along with your wand modulation spell means that you just might survive the encounter after all. I'm also rather fond of armor lock, a hampering spell that seems like a natural for a wizard to have researched to use against his armored opponents; enlarge weapon (perfect for Small spellcasters who take a size penalty to damage with their weapons from the get-go); evacuation rune, a targeted teleport spell that rewards forethought; fatal flame, which deals no immediate harm to its target but causes its body to blow up when it's slain; siphon, which allows you to drain charges from a wand to "recharge" a previously-cast spell; and spymaster's coin, which creates a scrying sensor out of a Fine object. I did find it rather funny that the illustration for the fatal flame spell on page 99 uses an exploding kobold and has the following caption: "Fatal flame turns a dying kobold into a lethal booby trap for its fellows." Yeah, "fatal," that is, provided that its fellows have no more than 2 hp each, since that's all the damage the spell is going to deal using a standard kobold as its target (and that's assuming they fail their Reflex saves) - let's hope he had quite a few class levels, huh?
The new equipment chapter was also well-done. I liked the rules for creating hidden spaces in weapons, containers, and the like. The alchemical items and poisons were creative, although some of their names weren't particularly so ("nerv" is a substance that enhances resistance against fear effects, for example). As for the magic items, I really liked the rod of ropes, another very useful item that's more or less the functional equivalent to a rod of lordly might, in that it's got buttons that turn it into a variety of useful items, naturally all rope-related. The living items were a bit of a change, although I seem to recall a similar concept in the old 2nd Edition AD&D Dark Sun setting.
The scoundrel adventures chapter was a mixture of some sound DMing advice and a trio of new organizations that the PCs can either join up with or butt heads with. Of the three, I liked the Seven Ravens Clan the best, although the Blind Tower was also pretty cool - all of the daring thievery stunts they pull remind me more than a little of the Gray Mouser from Fritz Lieber's tales.
On the down side, though, I really disliked the sidebars that were randomly inserted throughout Complete Scoundrel. These might be a very short story, a letter detailing an encounter with a scoundrel of some type, the notes of the movements of a set of guards in a building a group of thieves wants to infiltrate, or something similar. They're all over the place in the book, and while you might try to argue they were included for "flavor," they simply reek of padding to me. I went back and counted: there are 15 such sidebars, each ranging somewhere in the vicinity of one-fourth to one-third of a page in length, so we're talking about 4 pages of completely wasted material here. I don't know if the authors simply needed to fill up 160 pages and couldn't think of any other way to do so, but it smells a bit like desperation to me.
Proofreading and editing were for the most part pretty good, but there were still a few errors that made it past the three listed editors (Jennifer Clarke Wilkes, Beth Griese, and John Thompson) and editing manager Kim Mohan. Here we're talking things like not dividing a word that splits between two lines at the end of a syllable (they went with "ro-leplaying" instead of "role-playing" - a sure sign that their dictionary program doesn't recognize "roleplaying" as a valid word and thus doesn't know what to do when the word must be split between two lines), incorrect word usage ("to" is used instead of "of"), simple typos ("of" instead of "or," "PCs" instead of "PC"), improper alphabetization ("Epic of the Lost King" should come before "Expanded Ki Pool," and the alchemical items on pages 110-111 aren't alphabetized at all), an extraneous word in a sentence ("which flips the weapon it into position" doesn't need that "it"), improper terminology ("liquid sunlight" - a new alchemical substance - is referred to once as "liquid light"), and the line coloration for entries 81-82 is off on the table on page 157. All in all, not too bad, and a much better job than some of the proofreading/editing jobs I've seen in similarly-sized books that have come from Wizards of the Coast recently.
As for the stats, there weren't a whole lot of them, and several of those that did appear had some errors in them, but before I get to my "unofficial errata" I want to point out the stat block on page 37, where an NPC's skill listing includes a +2 synergy bonus to Appraise checks related to alchemy and traps due to his having over 5 ranks each in the corresponding Craft skills. Reading that stat block nearly made me cry tears of unbridled joy. Kudos to developer Andy Collins for that - my hat's off to you, Andy!
As for some of the other stats, you might consider making the following changes:
- p. 28, Peck, the Swan Street Slicer, male halfling rogue 7/avenging executioner 3: His skill list includes "Tumble +" with no number following. The way the skills add up, I figure he can put 10 of his rogue skill points into it, granting him Tumble +14, and this leaves him with 3 skill points left unspent. Put those into whatever skill you see fit. If you put any of those points into Disable Device, remember that his masterwork thieves' tools will add a +2 bonus to that skill. Finally, I'll just comment that it was a bit odd to see Peck show up here, as he featured prominently in a 2nd-level Dungeon adventure recently, so I have to assume that the fact that he's CR 10 here means that the PCs apparently didn't get him the first time! (Actually, author F. Wesley Schneider wrote the adventure that featured Peck, so I suppose he couldn't resist the temptation to reuse a character that fit his prestige class so well.)
- p. 40, Sar Pios, male human fighter 2/rogue 3/fortune's friend 3: Sneak attack damage should be +2d6, not +3d6 (+2d6 as a Rog3, and his ranks in the prestige class do not advance his sneak attack damage).
- p. 48, Dos, Tiny viper familiar: Hit points should be 18, not 16 (its master has 36 hp). Fort should be +2, not +3 (+2 as a Sor8 [same as its master], +0 Con). Ref should be +5, not +6 (+2 as Sor8, +3 Dex). Will should be +7, not +10 (+6 as Sor8, +1 Wis). BAB should be +4 (as Sor8), not +5. Grapple should be at -7, not -6 (+4 BAB, -8 size, -3 Str). Bite attacks should be at +9 melee, not +8 (+4 BAB, +2 size, +3 Dex with Weapon Finesse). Its skill listing is missing quite a few of its master's skills, which, as a familiar, its should get (it would have the same number of skill points allocated to each of its master's skills but use its own ability score modifiers, size modifiers, and so on).
- pp. 51-52, Argyll Te'Shea, male elf cleric 8/malconvoker 4: +1 holy heavy mace damage should be 1d8+1, not 1d8+2 (+0 Str, +1 magic weapon).
- p. 67, Tessa Senchan, female half-elf rogue 1/wizard 6/spellwarp sniper 5: Feats not alphabetized. (So call me petty - I can take it.)
- p. 67, Holand, owl familiar: Missing the following skills from his skill list (the result of being Tessa's familiar, since she has ranks in these skills): Decipher Script, Diplomacy, Gather Information, Knowledge (arcana), Knowledge (local), Knowledge (nobility and royalty), Knowledge (religion), Knowledge (the planes), and Spellcraft.
- p. 70, Ameslan Trag, male gnome rogue 7/uncanny trickster 3: Masterwork short sword attacks should be at +8/+3 melee, not +7/+2 (+7 BAB, +1 size, -1 Str, +1 masterwork). +1 light crossbow attacks should be at +12 ranged, not +11 (+7 BAB, +1 size, +3 Dex, +1 magic weapon).
- pp. 132-133, Valek Xander, male tiefling rogue 8/gatecrasher 5: Flat-footed AC should be 20, not 17, due to uncanny dodge (which isn't listed in his AC entry, although the improved version is). +1 anarchic light crossbow attacks should be at +13 ranged, not +15 (+9 BAB, +3 Dex, +1 magic weapon).
I'm going to go with a rating of a low "4 (Good)" for Complete Scoundrel. Despite a rather poor group of prestige classes overall, significant padding throughout the book, and some stat block errors, I'd say the strength of the spells, skill tricks, and equipment pulled the book just a bit beyond the "average" range. The fact that the "general background" and DM advice sections made for interesting reading puts points in the book's favor as well.
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