Kaptain_Kantrip
First Post
The Quintessential series from Mongoose is shaping up nicely. The Fighter and Rogue books, while not perfect (and indeed flawed in certain areas), have provided much more solid, interesting, innovative and (most importantly) portable crunchy bits than their WoTC splatbook cousins.
The kits are helpful in generating character backgrounds, though some are unbalanced, or poorly balanced. Kits were one of the things I liked about 2e (seriously!) so I was surprised and pleased to see them make an (optional) return to 3e.
The PrCs are all generic enough to fit any campaign or character concept while still providing interesting abilties.
The new weapons and armors are useful and fun for the most part, with the exception of the hilariously silly footbow.
Guilds, Mercenaries, Stronghold building, secret bases, poisons, traps, all very nice and crunchy.
My main concern with the TQR "Reputation" mechanic is that it requires a bit of work to remember, much less keep track of, and it undermines the usefulness of Charisma. Anything that undermines the usefulness of Charisma (most player's "dump stat") is a bad idea, IMO. 3e finally made Charisma a bit more useful and to reverse this progress is unbalancing and unfair. Still, Reputation is a cool idea (used in other WoTC d20 games).
My other quibbles are relatively minor: some bad to medoicre art, too much white space with too little text density, some sections not alphabetized properly (TQF kits section is ridiculous in this regard, jumping pell-mell from one letter to another with no rhyme or reason whatsoever), the gray shading is too dark making photocopying rules summaries (for poersonal use, 'natch)difficult... TQF had a great, simple way to tell OGL from non-OGL material that was not used for TQR.
I give the Quintessential books a big "thumbs up" not only for what they get right, but for what they get wrong (IMO), because they are at least daring to expand upon the possibilities of d20 and don't always "play it safe" as WoTC has done. Kudos to Mongoose's Quintessential team for putting the "class" back in class books!
The kits are helpful in generating character backgrounds, though some are unbalanced, or poorly balanced. Kits were one of the things I liked about 2e (seriously!) so I was surprised and pleased to see them make an (optional) return to 3e.
The PrCs are all generic enough to fit any campaign or character concept while still providing interesting abilties.
The new weapons and armors are useful and fun for the most part, with the exception of the hilariously silly footbow.
Guilds, Mercenaries, Stronghold building, secret bases, poisons, traps, all very nice and crunchy.
My main concern with the TQR "Reputation" mechanic is that it requires a bit of work to remember, much less keep track of, and it undermines the usefulness of Charisma. Anything that undermines the usefulness of Charisma (most player's "dump stat") is a bad idea, IMO. 3e finally made Charisma a bit more useful and to reverse this progress is unbalancing and unfair. Still, Reputation is a cool idea (used in other WoTC d20 games).
My other quibbles are relatively minor: some bad to medoicre art, too much white space with too little text density, some sections not alphabetized properly (TQF kits section is ridiculous in this regard, jumping pell-mell from one letter to another with no rhyme or reason whatsoever), the gray shading is too dark making photocopying rules summaries (for poersonal use, 'natch)difficult... TQF had a great, simple way to tell OGL from non-OGL material that was not used for TQR.
I give the Quintessential books a big "thumbs up" not only for what they get right, but for what they get wrong (IMO), because they are at least daring to expand upon the possibilities of d20 and don't always "play it safe" as WoTC has done. Kudos to Mongoose's Quintessential team for putting the "class" back in class books!
but I agree with KK on the Quintessential series. It's a good souce book and I'm looking forward to the rest of them and wondering how the Race books will be handled.
