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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Krug" data-source="post: 2009936" data-attributes="member: 2141">This is a review copy.Heroes of High Favour: Half-Orcs is the 2nd book in BadAxe's HoHF series, and it develops two of the most underdeveloped subjects of 3E. Half-Orcs and Barbarians. These books are as much about the classes as they are about the races, and after a tentative start with HoHF: Dwarves, HoHF goes all out, bursting with ideas and concepts to boost the Barb, in particular. This book starts off with the usual Feats. Herein you'll find a bunch of rage-based feats, and introduces the concept of Tribal focuses for feats. Basically by following a set series of feats according to his tribe, the half-orc gains bonuses they gain an additional +1 bonus to certain skills. It's an interesting concept. Next up is an extensive Skills section, and one of the best parts of the book. Here you get rules for crafting Savage weapons and armor, which costs a fraction of regular item and take much less time to make. However, they're prone to breakage. There's also rules for interbreeding animals, with bizarre results. I would have liked to see some examples though, something I always found lacking in other HoHF books.The meat of the book goes to the PrCs, and the concepts which arise from combinations of the Barbarian class with other standard char classes, are stronger. Some very interesting PrCs include the Moulder, the Barbarian-Druid combo who interbreeds animals (and himself with them!) with bizarre results; the Coal-Tongue Raver, a Barbarian-Rogue combo whose blood runs with poison; the Wyrd (Barbarian-Sorcerer), whose magicks can rage and destroy anything around him. Even the other PrCs are full of flavour, such as the Hoodoo and the Dire Stalker . The Barbarian-Monk and the Barbarian-Paladin combos are slightly more dubious, but remain interesting. The final section focuses on half-orc roleplaying, which gives insight into playing the Half-Orc. It's useful for beginners, or for those who haven't tried playing a half-orc before.Overall, I found this book very useful. It definitely fleshed out both the Barbarian and Half-Orc, and even if you dislike the latter, there's enough in this book for the former to warrant buying it. I felt this was the strongest of the three HohF books so far, as author Durbin has really let his imagination run, uh,  wild, extending the Barbarian class and making it much more unique. Krusk would be pleased.</blockquote>

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