Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="JoeGKushner" data-source="post: 2011655" data-attributes="member: 1129">Sometimes d20 saturation is a bad thing not in that it produces a lot of bad products, but that it covers ground already walked upon, sometimes numerous times. I own Hammer and Helm, Heroes of High Favor, and the Quintessential Dwarf. Do I then really need a book like Races of Stone, that covers dwarves, gnomes, and introduces the goliath?At first, no-one in my group thought so. What more could be said about dwarves? Gnomes, well, to be honest, my group doesn’t like them. To us, they, like Halflings, are a lost race, rarely used and only encountered when using some type of pregenerated adventure or town. The goliaths? Did we really need another new race? Didn’t we just get the half-giant in the Expanded Psionics Handbook?Well, after looking over Races of Stone, I can say that yes, there are many things in this book I’m going to be using. Now I’m not going to be using everything from this book as that would require some extensive rework on my entire campaign but I’ll get to that in a second.The first three chapters cover the three races, dwarf, gnome, and goliath. It provides various subchapters to handle different aspects of life among the races. Each one starts off with ‘A Day in the Life’, and ends with information on using the race as a character. In between, it includes numerous things to help insure that the race is more than a set of statistics. These aids include things for GMs to help them incorporate the race into the game.For example, each race has an example settlement. This allows the GM to give a player a home local and allow the GM to get use out of the book as well. Sections on religion though, confuse me. I’m an older player, running on thirty-three this year, and I don’t recognize many of these gods. Flipping to my Forgotten Realms Demihuman Deities book, I see why, most of them are new. Why they did this I have no idea. For example, Moradin is still here and is still the main deity, but one of my personal favorites and an old time favorite of many players, Clangeddin Silverbear, the Father of Battle and Lord of the Twin Axes, has been, well, axed and not really replaced by a dwarven wargod. Now I could be mistaken as I don’t have Roger Moore’s article about the Dwarven Gods around but most of these aren’t the standard ones and will see zero inclusion in my game.In defense of them though, perhaps they feel that not everyone is going to run one of their settings and can now have a handful of generic dwarven gods with brief details on them. If so, more power to them but to me, the classics are classics for a reason. This works well with the new race, the Goliaths, as they have no previous history to disrupt. Now that new race, the Goliath, well, to me, they fill a niche kind of empty. They’re a nomadic mountain people who treasure personal strength and community. They are a primitive people of hunter-gatherers who enjoy physical activities. Some great role playing potential is included in their very appearance. See, they have gray skin that’s mottled with dark and light patches, the pattern of which can be used to handle any number of prophecies. “Only the one with the light patches in the appearance of an elk may kill the great dragon.” They do have bone-and-skin growths that make them stand out from regular humanoids though.In looking at them mechanically, they remind me a little of the half-giant in that they’re stronger than most starting races, with a +4 bonus to Strength, and that they have the Powerful Build ability, which treats them as a size larger for most purposes like wielding weapons and opposed checks. They have some other abilities that relate to their mountain origin like Mountain Movement and Acclimated where they don’t’ take penalties for altitude but to make up for those abilities, they have a level adjustment +1. Not bad overall. Very powerful physical race.One of the most interesting things about the Goliaths and their respect of strength, is that those who are too old or infirm to contribute to the tribe, are exiled to die. A harsh reminder that strength is only good as long as you have it. Exile is the worst form of punishment for Goliaths but at the same time, makes for a great way to introduce such a character to a party. Nothing like having to adventure in the wide world to prove your worth to your people again.For those interested only in new races, Chapter Four, other Races, includes some new races that can be incorporated into the game; Chaos Gnome, Dream Dwarf, Feral Gargun, Stonechild, and Whisper Gnome. For me, the chaos gnome and whisper gnome both added a lot to the race as potential PCs. The chaos gnome is a trouble making individual whose a little weaker (-2 Strength), but has it all over in other abilities including agility, endurance and charm. They gain numerous special abilities including spell like abilities but like the Goliath, have a +1 level adjustment.The Whisper Gnome, is perhaps a little too good not to have a level adjustment, but perhaps just a little. See, the yare masters of stealth. They’ve got the small size thing going on, so they have that bonus to Hide checks, and they have a bonus to Dexterity and Constitution, while suffering penalties to Strength and Charisma. They have both Low-Light and Darkvision, and a racial bonus to Hide and Move Silently Checks in addition to a few spell like abilities in addition to having a favored class of rogue. Suffice it to say that I immediately made them a race that specializes in assassination in my campaign.The majority of the book after that is concerned with crunch. Chapter Five covers PrCs for example. Here we have several racial specific ones like Battlesmiths for Dwarves or Blade Bravo (think variant Duelist) for Gnomes. Each PrC includes background and game mechanics, as well as a sample character. I’m of mixed opinions as to the utility of a sample character as on one hand it saves me a ton of trouble in making such a character but on the other, takes up space. What’s worse, on a few of them that I’ve gone over, there are often mistakes in the mechanics. So, like me, take it for what it’s worth.One of the things I was greatly pleased to see was a psionic based PrC, the Iron Mind. They gain powers at almost every level, in addition to damage reduction and the armored mind, where they expend their psionic focus to add a morale bonus equal to the armor bonus from the armor, to a will save. Good stuff.For feats, turn to Chapter Six which covers character options. While it starts off with new uses for skills, it quickly turns into a feat listing. This includes new Bardic Music, Divine, Item Creation, Psionic, Racial, and Weapon Style. I personally like the wide diversity in feats and the fact that Psionic and Weapon Style feats are included here is a good thing.Some of the Psionic Feats are good for any Psychic Warrior like Invest Armor and it’s advanced feat, Energize Armor. The former allows you to expend your focus to get a +3 AC bonus while the latter gives your resistance 10 against the next energy attack. Others like the Shielded Axe allow you to use two weapons and retain your buckler’s shield bonus without penalty. Good stuff overall.Another option I really like is the substitution levels. In this case, we have racial substitution levels. There are certain levels that for certain classes that you can swap out for a more ‘racial’ version of your character. For me, when I saw the dwarf fighter levels, I instantly thought of an NPC who has those and the Paragon Racial levels from Unearthed Arcana, a ‘true’ dwarf of the old ages. Here, the dwarf fighter gets 1d12 hit dice and can be taken at 1st, 2nd, and 8th level. The first level gives the character axe focus, basically weapon focus with almost all axes, while at 2nd, it gives bonus damage against several racial enemies, and at 8thl, armor expertise where the character gets a +1 bonus to AC when wearing heavy armor. Not every class has every race and not every class has the same number of possible substitutions. For example, the gnome bard has four levels they can substitute. Now to equip your character with the latest and greatest, Chapter Seven includes new weapons, armor, and good old fashioned adventuring gear. Some of the weapons are truly devastating like the Goliath Greathammer as the large version inflicts 3d6 with a x4 critical multiplier. Good thing it’s an exotic weapon. To help counter that, we have new armors, including various Exotic Armors. One of the strongest, the Mountain Plate Heavy armor, provides a +10 AC bonus but has a –9 AC penalty with some other pretty stiff issues like a 60% chance of arcane failure.While there aren’t a lot of new spells or psionic powers, the fact that there are psionic powers at all was a nice surprise. Psychic Warriors can look forward to Blackstone Hammer, a formidable ability that can turn enemies into statutes or for those looking for a lower level power, Power Weapon surrounds your blade in a telekinetic field that deals force damage instead of normal damage. Good for attacking those incorporeal monsters.Now that you have all of this information, what do you do with it? Well, I did say that most of the book was focused with crunch after the races, not all of it. Chapter Eight, Campaigns of Stone, provides ideas on how to bring characters together, random community generators, numerous sample NPCs, holidays, and a few new monsters, closing off with an appendix that has one hundred adventure ideas. Note that these are merely a sentence or two that help you get thinking, nothing beyond something like, “A dwarf paladin plans to lead a great army into the mountains.”Now me? I enjoyed many parts of this book. The art was better than several other books WoTC has been putting out lately. W. O’Connor doe a great job on the Whisper Gnome, the whole inspiration of them as a race of assassins, even as Ron Spencer lends his abilities in several fields. I’m sorry, but the work by S. Roller has become like some of that by Wayne Reynolds, great, but regulated to Clip-Art. Black and white illustrations that have been in other books should be wiped from all future books. While I won’t say it’s errata free, I didn’t see a lot of the dreaded page xx or statements that were references to another book that weren’t written out like in the Complete Divine.The reworking on the pantheons makes no sense to me, and I’m not crazy about all the material that’s being slowly but surely yanked from the Miniatures Handbook, like the Stonechild, into other books. Having three races, well, more than three if you count those in Chapter Four, insures that the book doesn’t crush you with details on one race, and insures that your other books still offer a lot of value. After reading this, I pulled out Hammer and Helm and Heroes of High Favor to see how I could combine them.I like the support of psionics. I wish that the Complete series of books had support for them. I like the support for various types of feats like Divine and Bardic. I like the integration of Substitution Levels. The background material and campaign ideas help you to integrate the work quickly. Not for everybody by any means. If you hate crunch for example, this book isn’t going to be for you despite the ‘fluff’ material. If you’re an old standard of the old pantheons like me, you’ll have to ignore that section. For me, I’ll be using a lot of this in my FR campaign even as one of my friends playing a Psychic Warrior keeps looking over the Deflective Armor feat.</blockquote>

Verification