Friends & Familiars

[Ghostwind]

This book is a true sequel to Allies & Adversaries, sharing both the same strengths and the same weaknesses. If you enjoyed the first book, this one offers more of the same.

If you haven't read Allies & Adversaries, then let me give you a little detail. The book is 32 pages of full color with fantastic illustration by Jason Engle. If you don't know him by name and want my opinion of his art, it's fantastic. So much so that this book is probably better off as an art book than an RPG book.

Why is that? Poor editing in some places and bad game editing in others would be the answer. Now I'm not a game mechanic specialist or anything. As a matter of fact, I don't even go out of my way to catch errors so when they hit me, it's annoying. It's more annoying when the company has had indication with these problems in the previous product and doesn't fix them.

I know, some clamor for examples. How about undead with con scores? How about attack bonuses that don't add up or armor class figures that are wrong? Hit points with bonuses that have no root cause? Improper listings of feats? Simple stuff that is just plain annoying.

The editing was a little better but hit me in the first entry with Abernath. “Abernath died ten years ago, during the a great war.” A great war? The great war? Which is it?

The stats themselves are laid out in an easy to read fashion, but don't follow the same pattern from NPC to monster with monsters having a CR. Not truly important in some cases, but since Abernath and others in this book aren't human, it'd be good to know what level to consider them for say, experience purposes either for aiding or destroying. Another problem is a standard equipment list. While I don't need to know every item that say, Terean, a wizard has, it'd be nice to know what he commonly carries with him, if he's speed's affected by the weight and other standard things of that nature.

If the book provided some utility in using the creatures, and not all the entries are monsters, then it'd have a little more of a niche, but providing some great illustrations with no game mechanics to back up the creatures outside of adventure seeds, does not a book make.

If you're looking for impressive full color illustrations that are more painting that drawing, then this book has something for you. If you picked up the first one and didn't like it, this book is still more of the same.

Reviewer's Note: Normally because of the great illustrations and full color background, despite the high price, I'd give this product rating a three. However, the issues here are the same issues that the first book had and there is no reason for those errors to have crept into this tome. If Talisman Studios can get something from Bastion Press, I'm hoping that it's a better sense of game mechanics for any future releases.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

Friends & Familiars is a great book for players and DMs alike. Give your heroes sidekicks, cohorts, unique animal companions, or rare familiars with this collection of characters and critters. Whether you need a helpful character to fill out an incomplete gathering of heroes, or simply a quick and easy familiar with a unique personality and history all its own, this book is sure to come in handy.

Full color illustrations by industry leading talent, including critically acclaimed artist Jason Engle.
Ready to use characters, monsters, and animal companions, suitable for any fantasy campaign.
An easy-to-use format, for players and DMs.
Setting neutral material.
Fully detailed backgrounds, histories and roleplaying tips.

 

[GameWyrd]

Friends and Familiars is a very pretty book. It’s a luxury. I suppose it’s a bit like an extra generous slice of chocolate cake at the end of a meal; it’ll cost you extra, you can skip it without ruining the meal, it might not be worth it if you’re not fond of rich chocolate but if you’re a connoisseur then you’ll appreciate the quality, it might just be enough to add that special something to your meal and its hard to go wrong with chocolate.

It’s hard to go wrong with illustrations of this quality. Friends and Familiars is, for me, a book of fifteen wonderful illustrations that have been bundled with some stats and brief background blurb so that they can be published as a roleplaying supplement. If you’re looking for a mix of NPCs that includes traditional intelligent humanoids and smart animals/magical beasts then Friends and Familiars will appeal strongly to you. If you’re looking for a no frills, budget or even quantity over quality supplement then you’re unlikely to look twice as the book.

The blurb promises "Ready to use characters, monsters and animal companions, suitable for any fantasy campaign" and that’s pretty much true. Let’s not be anal about the phrase "any fantasy campaign" and so let’s not point out that there will be fantasy campaigns without animal companions, imps, golems or even monsters. Its safe to say that the races in Friends and Familiars are safe enough for virtually all D&D style d20 campaign worlds and yet interesting enough to be worthwhile having in a book. I don’t think it’s being anal to question the promise "Setting neutral material" though. Okay. Fair enough, Friends and Familiars isn’t an Oathbound expansion and there aren’t any assumptions you’re using D&D gods either. The book clearly struggles to do backgrounds for the NPCs which setting neutral. There has been no Plague of Black Harvests in my campaign world, nor are there any western plains and so I couldn’t use Shae, the level 2 human cleric, without re-writing that part of her background. Most of the NPCs have backgrounds that refer to somewhere (the Great Forest) or something (Great War) specific. It’s very hard to write backgrounds without tying them into key locations, armies or events but that’s why "World neutral" is a selling point. Oddly, by being liberal with the prefix "Great" Bastion Press seem to make this challenge harder. There’s more than one reference to the Great Forest, the Great Savannah and a Great War. It’s easy enough to insert any-old forest, savannah or war into most games but its rather harder to sly scribble a Great Savannah on to the map.

There are two types of backgrounds; there’s the style that define the character solely through one important event in their life and the style that presents a quick summary of the NPC’s life so far. I much prefer the latter but others will prefer the former; it’s good that there are both. I’d go as far as saying that I don’t like to see backgrounds focused around a single event – even if it’s the undeath of the character or his transformation into an intelligent stone golem, I advise my players to do better. This dislike of the style doesn’t impede my enjoyment of Friends and Familiars; there is more than enough between the illustration, the background and the crunchy bits to suggest a personality for the NPC.

There are plot hooks too - always handy. I don’t like the way the plot hooks share the page with the illustration. I’d buy the book for the illustrations and be able to show the players "It looks like this!" but that’s going to be awkward if I’m trying to cover up the plot hooks too.

The table of contents is squeezed into the very first page and this saves valuable space in the 32-paged book. 32 pages at $14.95 means that page space is very expensive – I did tell you it was a luxury purchase. The contents include bracketed text for the NPC’s class and race. Class and race are far more important than the NPC’s name if you’re looking for something in a hurry. It would have been better still if they’d pushed in a challenge rating note there too.

It’s easy to nit-pick at Friends and Familiars. There’s no shortage of nits. It doesn’t seem right though, the book’s better than that. Friends and Familiars is one of those books that can lift a struggling GM out of a rut. It is like that slice of rich chocolate cake, it is easy to come up with reasons to avoid it but if you’re willing and able to sit back and enjoy the bigger picture – then it’s well worth it.

* This Friends & Familiars review was first published at GameWyrd.

 

[Psion]

Friends & Familiars

Friends & Familiars is a collection of illustrated characters and creatures for the d20 System by Bastion Press, in the same vein as their Allies & Adversaries collection. The book is a slick-paged full color book, thinner than the standard Bastion format. The book is written by J. Darby Douglas and Kristen Schlicht and illustrated by Jason Engle.

A First Look

Friends & Familiars is a 32-page saddle-stitched softcover book priced at $14.95. The book is full color with glossy pages. As with Allies & Adversaries, you get half as many pages with this book as a typical black-and-white d20 System book of the same price.

Friends & Familiars is lavishly illustrated in full color, primarily by Jason Engle. Every character has a handsome full-page illustration. The pages are colored with a velum-style background.

The character descriptions are in a rather large font. Considering the book is expensive for the amount of pages that you get in the first place, this means you are paying a lot if you are looking at the content of the book.

A Deeper Look

Friends & Familiars contains NPCs and creatures for use in d20 System fantasy games, and includes humans as well more exotic creatures such as an owl familiar, an intelligent contruct, a fairy adept, among others. Each character or creature is laid out on two facing pages. The left hand page has an attractive illustration that takes up most of the page, save for a paragraph of role-playing notes. The right-hand page has the game statistics and background of the character.

Unlike Allies & Adversaries, (which only has high level characters), characters and creatures in Friends & Familiars have a wider variety of levels and HD, ranging from 1 to 20. The backgrounds are generally written in generic terms, allowing them to be used in general D&D games, though some are specific enough they might defy adaptation.

The nature of the backgrounds are generally improved from those in Allies & Adversaries, with a few more unique personalities, and a few less cliches. However, some of these still didn't seem too useful to me. For example, they spend two pages on an owl familiar, which seems to me like few players and even fewer DMs would use.

Though there is some improvement from the first book mechanically, there are still problems. For example, once again they goof up the hp of an undead creature, giving it a constitution score (and attendant HP) and not altering it's HD.

Conclusion

Friends & Familiars was a marginal improvement over Allies & Adversaries, but only a marginal one. The characters are a bit more interesting and a bit less cliche, but the format is still rather pricey and you are still paying a dollar per character. However, much like it's predecessor, the book is very nicely illustrated, though if you are looking for art book (or character books), there are better, cheaper examples.

Overall Grade: D+

-Alan D. Kohler

 

[Simon Collins]

This is not a playtest review.

Friends & Familiars is the second in Bastion Press' Legends Collection offering NPC compilations, this one providing a selection of cohorts, allies and familiars.

Friends & Familiars is a 32-page full colour softcover product costing $14.95. Each NPC takes up two pages - on the left page is a 3/4-page illustration of the character with a few adventure hooks, whilst on the right are the stats and background. Margins are large, particularly the top one and there is some wasted space on all the right hand pages as the text is not sufficiently long to complete the page. The background to all pages is a light tan colour with an attractive border design in a slightly darker colour. The quality of the character illustrations is excellent, and colour usage and texture evocation is superb. It's a shame that the writing style does not live up to the quality of the art - being basic at best and long-winded, repetitive and nebulous at worst. Editing seems good.

Thirty NPCs are presented in Friends & Familiars, from Abernath, a chaotic good undead ranger, to Wildwind, a guardian Pegasus. Other NPCs presented include a shadow mastiff, a clockwork automaton, a pixie adept, a nightmare, and a wandering wizard. Challenge ratings vary from 2 to 14, but mainly lie at the lower end of the scale.

High Points
The art is attractive. The characters presented could, with some work, be integrated into an adventure or campaign, and would best suit a high fantasy setting.

Low Points
The hooks are simplistic, the background information is of little utility, and there is a fair amount of wasted space with large margins and empty space. The stat blocks vary in make-up - for instance, the Challenge Rating is in the fourth line for some NPCs, towards the end in some others, and missing in yet others. Information in the stat blocks, like its predecessor, is just plain wrong, and stupidly so. For example:
Eriv, a 4th-level Fighter with 15 Dex and the Improved Initiative feat has "Initiative: +7 (+2 Dex, +4 Improved Initiative)" - yep, that's a direct quote. His Fort save is listed at +5, when it should be +6. His skills don't take into account his armour check penalty, cross-class skills or maximum rank limits. His longsword attack does not take into account his strength modifier, but the damage from the weapon does, except they even get that wrong by giving a +3 for a Strength of 15.
Succinctly put, the Legends Collection must get the vote for the worst stat blocks in the d20 industry.

Conclusion
The only thing that stops Friends & Familiars from getting a 1 is the art, which is very good, but little else in the book makes it worth paying the $15 for.