Sometimes it’s nice to take a break from huge campaign settings and monster books to look at something small and easy to digest. In that vein, I’ve got a Dozen Necromantic Machines in front of me.
First off, it’s a small PDF at only six pages. I’m looking at it, wondering why it’s in landscape format. It has no art and no fancy borders so I don’t really see the need for it. Just to be different perhaps? I notice the black borders with some dread. For something with no art, that’s going to eat a little into the old ink. Breezing through, I notice one thing I hate in magic item formats. There are no caster prices here. We get the market cost and caster level, but no gold and experience point cost. That should be fairly standard these days.
Editing’s fairly good. About the only thing I noticed is no space between A and slain on page 2 under the second paragraph on the special rules of the Devouring Engine. The writing is fair but seems wordy at times. It probably wouldn’t be as noticeable in a larger product, but because it’s a smaller volume, it’s easy to think, “Well, that could be worded differently.” Some of the writing seems a little forced, like James is trying to place the wording in a different frame of mind. For example, he uses the word ossified a few times and I don’t know what he’s talking about.
See, when I look up that word, it’s defined as “to change into bone”. So what then are “certain qualities like that of ossified flesh.” Is it the coloration that’s bone like? Is it the texture? The weight? The feel? It is just a bone? When he mentions that the purple flesh of the Mohrg’s Tongue as ossified intestinal tissue, what does that mean? That it’s bone along with the claws of the nub?
So outside of my nagging, what do we get? We have two stones, the ghast and ghoul stone, that are like alchemical items in that they are thrown to the ground and explore, each filling a 10-foot cube. Those caught within it have to save vs Fortitude or in one case, be sickened, and in the other, paralyzed.
One of my favorites is the Dread Exoskeleton. This is an oversized skeleton that acts as +2 full plate and provides the wearer with cold resistance and heavy fortification. What level of cold resistance isn’t mentioned though and to know what heavy fortification does, you’d have to flip to the DMG. Acceptable to a point but it’d be nice to have all those details in one spot no?
Another nice touch of using necromantic energies as modern technology comes with the Life Sensor. See, this item allows the user to sense life within 60’ as if you possessed blindsight but also sense their life force levels like if you had cast the spell deathwatch. Not overpowered or anything but a nice touch and a creepy feel.
There are two other little treats here. We get the material grave steel and the spell Legion of zombies. Grave steel is a magical metal that not only reduces spell failure for armor and shields made of it, but it allows the user to add the bane ability against undead for only one +1 kick up instead of 2. The spell, Legion of zombies, is a 7th level spell that creates ‘a small army of zombies’. It’s got a bit of a dozzy for spell components and probably won’t be cast on the fly, but it can help explain the presence of numerous undead rather quickly.
Overall I like some of the concepts here and will be using at least grave steel and the Life Sensor in my campaign. At the price, it’s hard to argue with the utility of the Dozen Necromantic Machines. If we get a revised copy with the caster cost in gold and experience points and the black borders go away, I'd consider this a 4 star product.
