Endzeitgeist
First Post
This pdf consists of 17 pages, 1 page front cover, 1 page ad, 1 page OGL, 1 page editorial.
The art by Hugo Solis and Joe Calkins is of high quality.
That said, you get a nice 4 page IC introduction to the "race" (actually more a template) and as a bonus for DMs like me, who like to print out pictures of characters, 2 one-page portraits of the characters on the cover to present to your players. Nice touch!
The design of the "Restless Soul" template is elegant, using a subtype of outsider to get around the unbalancing undead immunities and, while giving the restless dead a kind of penalty for PCs that just died, also ensuring that this penalty can be offset. The prose is topnotch, but I'll comment on that later on.
After that, we get 22 new feats, most of them for Restless Souls and one of them to ensure that your PC comes back as a restless dead (Soul Jar).
Examples:
Aura Sight: Lets you determine nature and strength of other creatures
Baleful Gaze: Due to a painful death, you can let your enemies collapse in agony with a glance a limited number of times per day.
Companion of Light: Gives you a soul-light companion. (Spirit Lantern)
Converse with the Dead: Talk to the dead.
Fading Form: Lets you blink.
Love and Friendship: Due to the bond with a ward, you and the ward are continuously under "shield other".
Master the Storm: Control the Weather for the right mood.
No Last Rites: Makes you a regenerating badass.
Unfinished Task: Gold for Oathbound, lets you ignore debilitating effects in regard to the task once per day.
And so on.
The feats are plain AWESOME. Many of them are so imaginative and cool that my players would create characters based around feats like this as a concept! While some of them seem to be powerful at first, they are neatly balanced by availability due to death, monetary costs and the like.
After that, we get 10 new spells, ranging from level 0 cantrip "Apparent Distraction" (lets you try to hide when enemies are looking) over lvl 4 "Enforced Choke" (choking an enemy to death, great assassin-spell), lvl 7 "Implacable Beast" (summons a creature stronger than you to kill a target; If successful, you are destroyed) to lvl 9 "Virtually Indestructible", granting an item exactly what the spell name says.
All of these spells have in common, that they are to some extent clever, cool and all of them both are balanced and serve a specific need.
Conclusion:
The prose is awesome and, at least for people like me, who are inclined towards the darker subcultures and music-styles of metal and goth, just plain awesome in its cynical tone, making fun of the angsty cliché of "I wanna play kewl 1337 pseudo-undead tormented creatures" while actually utilizing the cool characteristics and tropes associated with just that and making them playable. Furthermore, "Restless Souls" can easily be implemented in just about ANY campaign.
Don't like the implied semi-gothic, cynical tone? All right, why not use the rules for Planescape-like Petitioners?
You know that a book is good, when the template spawns ideas for characters, feats spawn ideas for characters, prose spawns ideas for characters and spells spawn ideas for whole adventures (Implacable Beast, I'm looking at you!) - Plus, the fact that the feat for assured return as a restless souls gives players who have grown attached to their characters an additional option in campaigns that are loathe to use the Raise dead/Resurrection-mechanic of the core-rules.
Plus, I can see e.g. "Love and Friendship" leading to great, tragic, touching scenes in play.
Any Ravenloft-DM should get this NOW. Anybody who remotely likes the idea should get it now. Any DM running a rather dark/gritty campaign should consider checking this out. It tugs at my heart's strings. It's beautiful.
I liked "Ironborn" and "Wyrd" (See my reviews on them), I really did, but the "Restless Souls"-pdf ranks among the best-spent bucks in my 14 years as a DM.
The art by Hugo Solis and Joe Calkins is of high quality.
That said, you get a nice 4 page IC introduction to the "race" (actually more a template) and as a bonus for DMs like me, who like to print out pictures of characters, 2 one-page portraits of the characters on the cover to present to your players. Nice touch!
The design of the "Restless Soul" template is elegant, using a subtype of outsider to get around the unbalancing undead immunities and, while giving the restless dead a kind of penalty for PCs that just died, also ensuring that this penalty can be offset. The prose is topnotch, but I'll comment on that later on.
After that, we get 22 new feats, most of them for Restless Souls and one of them to ensure that your PC comes back as a restless dead (Soul Jar).
Examples:
Aura Sight: Lets you determine nature and strength of other creatures
Baleful Gaze: Due to a painful death, you can let your enemies collapse in agony with a glance a limited number of times per day.
Companion of Light: Gives you a soul-light companion. (Spirit Lantern)
Converse with the Dead: Talk to the dead.
Fading Form: Lets you blink.
Love and Friendship: Due to the bond with a ward, you and the ward are continuously under "shield other".
Master the Storm: Control the Weather for the right mood.
No Last Rites: Makes you a regenerating badass.
Unfinished Task: Gold for Oathbound, lets you ignore debilitating effects in regard to the task once per day.
And so on.
The feats are plain AWESOME. Many of them are so imaginative and cool that my players would create characters based around feats like this as a concept! While some of them seem to be powerful at first, they are neatly balanced by availability due to death, monetary costs and the like.
After that, we get 10 new spells, ranging from level 0 cantrip "Apparent Distraction" (lets you try to hide when enemies are looking) over lvl 4 "Enforced Choke" (choking an enemy to death, great assassin-spell), lvl 7 "Implacable Beast" (summons a creature stronger than you to kill a target; If successful, you are destroyed) to lvl 9 "Virtually Indestructible", granting an item exactly what the spell name says.
All of these spells have in common, that they are to some extent clever, cool and all of them both are balanced and serve a specific need.
Conclusion:
The prose is awesome and, at least for people like me, who are inclined towards the darker subcultures and music-styles of metal and goth, just plain awesome in its cynical tone, making fun of the angsty cliché of "I wanna play kewl 1337 pseudo-undead tormented creatures" while actually utilizing the cool characteristics and tropes associated with just that and making them playable. Furthermore, "Restless Souls" can easily be implemented in just about ANY campaign.
Don't like the implied semi-gothic, cynical tone? All right, why not use the rules for Planescape-like Petitioners?
You know that a book is good, when the template spawns ideas for characters, feats spawn ideas for characters, prose spawns ideas for characters and spells spawn ideas for whole adventures (Implacable Beast, I'm looking at you!) - Plus, the fact that the feat for assured return as a restless souls gives players who have grown attached to their characters an additional option in campaigns that are loathe to use the Raise dead/Resurrection-mechanic of the core-rules.
Plus, I can see e.g. "Love and Friendship" leading to great, tragic, touching scenes in play.
Any Ravenloft-DM should get this NOW. Anybody who remotely likes the idea should get it now. Any DM running a rather dark/gritty campaign should consider checking this out. It tugs at my heart's strings. It's beautiful.
I liked "Ironborn" and "Wyrd" (See my reviews on them), I really did, but the "Restless Souls"-pdf ranks among the best-spent bucks in my 14 years as a DM.
