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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JoeGKushner" data-source="post: 2009893" data-attributes="member: 1129">Races of Evernor II is a lot like the first one.  It presents twelve new races to augment your standard D20 fantasy game, but this time, the creatures are a little more unusual than the first book.While tied into the Evernor campaign world, the ties are very lose, acting more like a guide as to how these creatures would be encountered in most standard fantasy worlds than an anchor dragging you down.Each race starts with its name and a stat block.  Following the name we get type, pronounced, singular/adjectival form, plural form, and frequency.  Most of those are pretty self explanatory, but the Frequency bares note.  A rating of seven means very common, while one means extremely rare.  After the stat block, we get Frilf’s Notes, a look at the race through the eyes of an adventurer.  These notes are usually an introductory paragraph but lead into the body of the text where we get background, personality, physical description, diet, relations, alignment, lands, religion, languages, names, adventurers, In the Realms of Evernor, Roleplaying Tips, Adventure Seeds, Racial Traits (the actual game mechanics of the race), and new materials (spells, feats, weapons and other goods).It’s a nice set up that allows a GM to look over what each race specializes in, select a name, come up with a description, provide some new twists, grab the unique goods, and start off a new character down the path of glory.  Take the Raellorian, a race of elves that live high above in the skies.  You can have one hailing from the city of Silver Clouds whose wings are in need of healing after a battle with a vicious harpy.  Of course, if you’re like some DMs, you may just steal their Prime Example for your own game.  See, each race ends with a Prime Example, a 1st level character of the race with its own background.  I mentioned it in the first book, and I’ll mention it here, having the 1st level characters with fleshed out backgrounds is nice and if the character creation process was fully laid out, could be customized for player use, but for GMs… well, at least I need more examples than a 1st level character.  Show me the great villains and heroes, the lost souls who wander for redemption, not some 1st level character on his way out of the village.Now if you want really different, there are some strange birds here.  Let’s look at the Vorl.  These creatures were a slave race of the mind flayers.  Shaped like towels, the creatures have escaped from their masters, developing their latent psionic powers and resistance to the dreaded mind blast of their masters.  Part of the nice thing here is that as you read about the Darkling Realms, it provides a bit of spark to ideas for your own Underdark Campaigns.  It shows that not everything has to be humanoid.One of them, the Pofferil, stands less than three feet tall and resembles a raccoon.  The illustration shows one in a spellcaster stance and their favored class, sorcerer or bard, tends to favor that avenue.  Little suckers have a few surprises though, like the fact that they don’t age and have bonuses to several charisma based skills.  Add onto this a +4 bonus to Charisma, and you’ve got one smooth talking raccoon.One of the areas where the book fails is that the creatures just aren’t that unusual or unknown.  Take the Aavali.  A winged humanoid race that could be from the recent sourcebook Seven Strongholds from Atlas, or way back from first edition.  Sure, they have a different culture and background, but winged birdmen original and different?  Hardly. How about the Magnar?  These humanoids origin is unknown as some think they’re the offspring of some elemental force and humanity and others that they’re merely gifted individuals.  The point being that rare and unique of the world doesn’t really make them a rare or unique idea, just a rare one for this campaign setting.Of the new feats, most of them improve an innate ability that the race already has.  If you click over on the PDF file to the Quicklist of Feats, you’ll see a lot of improved things.  You know, things every elf needs like Improved Tail Grab and Improved Burrowing.One of the nice things about the product is that it makes it easy for you. It provides a quick listing of the races from this product and the first one, a break down of the races by ECL, random starting age, height, and weight tables.Art is top notch for most of the product that gives it a very classy feel.  I can’t tell the illustrator’s name who signs his images with a card, but he’s one of the better ones in the industry and I’m glad to see him return to Silverthrone games with this product as he wasn’t in the original Book of Templates.  Layout and white space are good for a PDF file.  Now I say for a PDF file because it doesn’t crowd the races together.  This means that if a race ends with two-thirds of the page empty, so be it.  I can understand why this is done for printer reasons but… The PDF file is in black and white so it’s not a printer killer.  The bookmarks make it easy to move around as well so most people should be able to find whatever their looking for quickly, including a compilation of the feats, spells, and other goodies.The second Races book in the series continues the good work done by the first and continues to offer some sound choices for GMs and players looking for more.  If we can get more art, better layout, different levels in the NPCs, (including perhaps some use out of the Book of Templates?) and some more solid ideas, we’ll be looking at a 5 star rating.</blockquote>

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