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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JoeGKushner" data-source="post: 2704888" data-attributes="member: 1129">Guns! Guns! Guns!Treasure Trove SeriesSpirosblack ArsenalWritten by Steven TrustrumPublished by Misfit Studios<a href="http://www.misfit-studios.com" target="_blank">www.misfit-studios.com</a>102 b & w pagesThe cover of the Spirosblack Arsenal is a simple one, a black background with some firearm symbols up front with a treasure check in the receding background. One of the first things I couldn’t believe about the book is that there are no bookmarks. Another odd thing is that there is no printer friendly version. While the latter is by no means mandatory, the black borders on this book almost demand either included a printer friendly version, or made the one file printer friendly in the first place.The book uses standard two-column layout. While there is no index, there is a detailed one-page table of contents. Interior art is done by Phil Longemeier, Shawn Richter, Gary Dupuis and Liscar Scott. A lot of functional pieces and some fair art. Some areas should’ve been worked on for more consistency. For example, on page eleven, almost all the weapons are line drawings, save for the Iron Shot and Stone Shot, which are grayscale illustrations. One thing I didn’t like was the fiction, “Blood of the Clan.” When I want fiction, I read a book. I don’t mind a short fiction bit as introduction for a game mechanic or as background, but not a chapter of fiction in and of itself. For some, it’s perfect for getting into the game so if game fiction is you’re thing, you’ve got a nice helping of it here.Instead of an introduction followed by the chapters, the first chapter is an introduction to Spirosblack and a thanks from the author. It notes that while the material here is supplemental, you don’t have to own Spirosblack to use it. As I don’t have Spirosblack at this time, that’s a good thing.Chapter two introduces new skills and feats. It starts off with uses for craft, such as artillery making, or adding some new uses for alchemy, for example, making black powder. A huge lists of DC checks are included for the new skills so even new game master’s shouldn’t have any problem figuring out what any custom made guns or artillery would fall under in terms of difficulty. New feats include some variants for use in any campaign. For example, a fighter mage would love the feat Arcane Warrior. It reduces spell failure by 10% (to a minimum of 5%) on any armor that the wearer is proficient with. Others, such as Armor Prowess, may be a touch too good as it allows you to retain your base speed. Others will be at home in campaigns. For example, I can see allowing Outlandish Weapon Finesse, a weapon in which you have weapon focus allows you to use this feat to use it as a weapon qualifying for Weapon Finesse. As expected, there are many feats revolving around the use of gunpowder weapons. Because some firearms explode, it might be a good idea to have Cautious Loader, giving you a bonus on the mishap roll. Firearms are one exotic weapon proficiency, while Rapid Gunner lets you reload faster. After feats, the book moves into melee and ranged weapons. We have one simple weapon, fists wraps, and several exotic ones. This includes devastating weapons like the battle cleaver, which consists of a huge blade at the end of a club. In many ways, similar to a halberd but sounding cooler. Others go the route of two-weapon style like the hammer axe. Some of the weapons way out there in terms of standard d20 play, include the dwarven flameball gun. Picture shooting your enemy with alchemist’s fire and watching them burn for a few rounds. Now you’ve got it!When chapter four rolls around, it gets a little into the details of the setting. Things like how the various cultures use the fire arms. Not having the core book, I don’t know what it means for  iguannalon’s to have problems with firearms as they live in a swamp and don’t develop the weapons themselves. Nor does it matter to me that mentors avoid combat so generally don’t use firearms either.And for general races, they’re take on things is different than mine, which may be explained due to the setting. For example, elves having a preference for any type of firearm, especially when the longbow remains a very viable weapon with which they automatically have proficiency with, seems odd. When looking at firearms, they have a few other statistics that normal weapons don’t have. For example, penetration (PEN) that reduces physical protection. For example, if the weapon has a PEN of 4, that’s four points off any armor that a character may be wearing. This is a solid advantage and quite different from some other games where rate of fire or base damage may be used to instill the fear of firearms into a campaign. Black powder weapons also have a misfire range. If an unmodified die roll hits one of the misfire range numbers, it’s time to roll on the misfire results table. In the weapons listing, the guns include the standard game mechanics like name, cost, damage for size small, medium, and large, critical range, range increments, reload time, charge, and weight.Weapons range in damage from the 1d6 from the pocket pistol, to the 1d12 of a military musket with a .69 rating.  They range in cost from 80 gold pieces for a naval pistol, to 1,000 gold for an elven long pistol. There are some higher rated guns in terms of damage, like the Slayer gun, which inflicts 4d6 but most of the weapons fall between 1d6 to 1d12 in terms of everyday use. Those that do more on average, require something from the user. For example, the shield guns require a separate exotic weapon proficiency. Just as the book covered favored black powder weapons racially, it does the same with artillery, and again, I’m left scratching my head. It sounds like it makes sense from the perspective that I can understand, such as the swamp living iguanalons not using artillery as the swamp won’t support those weapons.That leads into the various cannons though and there are some big guns here. Not probably appropriate for a typical party wandering through a dungeon, but nice to have in those campaigns that support their use where such weapons have not been detailed yet. In addition to canons, we have mortars, organ guns, rockets, grenade like weapons, and a section on unusual artillery. Included in this section are rules for spooking animals with firearms, as well as bouncing cannonball shots.Chapter five moves away from the weapons listings with classes, starting with the technologist. It’s a d6 hit dice class with medium skill pool (4 points per level), whose main ability is mastering technology. That allows the to use gadgets following the rules outlined in this book. In many ways, these are spells. For example, a 0 level gadget might be flare. They can also manufacture alchemical items without having to be a spellcaster. For prestige classes, we have the following; artillery adept, grenadier, marksman, and pistoleer. Their abilities pretty much tie into their abilities. For example, the grenadier specializes in, yes, throwing grenades. The marksman specializes in precise shots while the pistoleer fights like a devil when using his pistols. Chapter six covers magic items. This includes new properties for black powder weapons, including better penetration power as well as handling some of the mundane issues of gun powder weapons like eliminating smoke or noise. In addition to general properties, we also have specific weapons. I always like seeing specific weapons because while new lists of powers are good, seeing those abilities put into play is better.In this case, we have weapons like Relgia’s Dueling Pistol, a +2 quick, spell-fueled precision pistol whose real ability is that targets hit by it are subject to a dispel magic spell as if cast by an 8th level caster. Besides weapons, we also have a range of other magic items. These range from the bulging bag of bullets, where bullets never run out, to cursed gun powder that backfires.My lack of knowledge of the setting only came up a few times. The more serious problems of no printer friendly version, no bookmarks, and almost twenty pages of fiction, lower what would be a four star rating to three. Of almost equal interest to me, will be Green Ronin’s own use of these firearm rules in the future as Freeport has some optional material of it’s own. Will that be expanded and covered with this arsenal material?If fiction doesn’t bother you, and not having printer friendly PDF’s, or book marks aren’t an issue, this is a great resource for adding technology based fire arms that aren’t afraid to use magic to your game.</blockquote>

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