Feral template and Savage Species

[frankthedm]

The material in SS is not released under the OGL, and thus can not be reproduced without the expressed written consent of WotC (and good luck getting that).

If that was true a message board could not discuss any supplemental d20 material. The problem was the OP asked for the information in a manner that did not seem to be congruent with the principles of Fair Use.

Fair use - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Greenfield]

Oh, we can discuss it all we want. We can even post excepts, since it's being done "for review" purposes.

What we can't do is post the whole thing without their permission.

 

[Wyvernhand]

Bingo. You can cite things. The exact amount you can cite is up to the lawyers, generally. In an effort to keep the lawyers off the table and to keep from getting as few nastigrams as possible, I'd wager that the mod staff would err on the side of caution. Quoting one ability to cite it is one thing. Reprinting the entire template verbatim is quite another, as is linking to a website that contains that info.

I don't know how strict the mod staff is around here, but over on GitP, doing that will earn you a quick kick in the electronic pants. I would imagine that they have the same desire to stay litigation free here. Although I didn't see anything in the forum rules regarding this...

 

[emanresu]

ok so if somebody posted just the +'s and -'s of template and the abbreviated class features would this be alright?

example
+1 str
-1 int
-1cha
fast healing / 2
pc looks more savage, beastly, for his race and scratches his body/head with foot

 

[Greenfield]

Because the template isn't a simple one, that really doesn't work. The benefits vary depending on the hit dice/"monster levels" of the base creature you're applying it to. (Don't count character levels, only base hit dice and/or "monster levels" if you've advanced them.)

So post some sample critter levels here, and I'll see if I can fill in a few blanks.

 

[Deset Gled]

Here's some more advice: Feral template, and much of Savage Species as a whole, is incredibly ing broken and you should save yourself the effort and money trying to obtain it and just ban the template (and the whole book!) from your game.

I will agree that if you take Savage Species and try to use it as is, it is not compatible with most games. But I believe that there is no good way to simply drop prefab monster races into a normal game without screwing something up horribly. I enjoyed reading SS immensely, and found a lot of the underlying game design information to be very useful. If you really want to play with non-conventional races, it's a solid (but unpolished) building block.

That being said, I would never allow someone to use the Feral template without an extremely good reason or heavy modification. Ditto for the anthropomorphic baleen whale or half-ogre.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

The groundwork laid by Savage Species monster "classes" (and their cousins, the paragon classes from UA) was, IMHO, perfected in Monte Cook's take on racial classes in his Arcana Unearthed/Arcana Evolved line.