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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Psion" data-source="post: 2010571" data-attributes="member: 172">Friends & FamiliarsFriends & 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 LookFriends & 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 LookFriends & 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.ConclusionFriends & 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</blockquote>

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