Heroes of Horror - an ongoing review

[demiurge1138]

I have to say, I've gotten relatively little use out of Heroes of Horror. Both core classes have seen play in my games, as has Taint, occasionally in the same character (my Eberron game currently has a gnome archivist Tainted by direct exposure to the Mourning), but that's about it... with one exception.

That exception was one of the "creepy occurences" entries on that big table. The "when the party wakes up, one of the members has vicious looking bite marks on their wrists, ankles and throat... and one of the other party members is too full to eat breakfast". Best way to foreshadow infection by Far Realms parasites ever. Freaked my players out like no other.

Demiurge out.

 

[amethal]

Heroes of Horror
by James Wyatt, Ari Marmell, and C.A. Suleiman
Developed by Mike Donais, Stephen Schubert, and Rob Watkins
160-page Hardcover

The Fiend-Blooded (10 levels) provide a new transformational prestige class; this one turns you into a half-fiend by its end. It tries something different by having +1 increments to ability scores, which I don't think is entirely successful - there's too much chance that the increment is insignificant at that level. The class is clearly set up for sorcerers to take it, and has 9 levels of spellcasting progression. Thematically it's a nice addition to the book, but I'm dubious about the stat increments.

Its not that set up for sorcerers, with the requirement for so many ranks in (cross class) Knowledge (the planes).

There are ways around it without multi-classing, if you have enough WotC books, but I'm wondering if its a typo. (My favourite method is the Apprentice (Spellcaster) feat from DMG2.)

The regional feat in my latest Dragon magazine (probably not the latest Dragon - they tend to arrive a bit slowly in my neck of the woods) improves on the Blood Calls to Blood feat, and I'm going to houserule that it can be used as a substitute for Blood Calls to Blood in meeting the requirements of the prestige class.