Mr. Patient
Adventurer
Unorthodox Bards is a 47-page PDF from The Le Games which presents new options for bards. It includes five variant-bard core classes, a pair of prestige classes, and a number of magic items, including one supposed artifact. A pair of appendices reprint the bard's spell list and class table. The authors are Jourdan Hamerly and The Le. It retails for $5.50, but I purchased it for $4 during the EN World merger sale.
The product includes several files: a PDF for on-screen viewing, a PDF for printing, an RTF file for copying-and-pasting, and a separate JPG of the cover art. This was a nice touch, and much appreciated.
The cover art by Tom Miskey is excellent, if slightly cheesecakey. I think it runs right up to the boundaries of poor taste without crossing them. There are a few original pieces of interior art, and they are generally good as well.
However, the problems with this product are legion. The writing and editing are absolutely abysmal, easily the worst that I have ever seen in a supposedly professional RPG product. The Le is listed as the editor, and he completely fell down on the job. There is a typographical error, misspelling, misuse of the apostrophe, grammatical error, or formatting error in virtually every paragraph and table. Only the passages copied more or less directly from the SRD tend to be error-free. d20 formatting conventions (spell names should be lowercase and italicized, skill names should be uppercase, etc.) are generally not followed, and indeed there is no single standard used at all in the product. Wizards of the Coast get a lot of grief (and deservedly so) for the shoddy job they do editing their products, but they are in an entirely different galaxy from The Le Games. The Le badly needs to hire an editor, one who can distinguish "it's" from "its", "tenants" from "tenets," and "profits" from "prophets"; who understands number agreement in a sentence; and who will take the trouble to notice that the column headings do not line up properly in his tables. I doubt that anything more than a cursory glance could have been performed before releasing this product. It's an embarrassment.
If the editing were the only problem, I'd be inclined to ignore it, but the content of Unorthodox Bards is pretty substandard as well. The new base classes range from mediocre to poor. The minstrel gets a few of the standard bardic music abilities, but no spellcasting. Instead, he gets the enchanted instrument (Su) ability, which allows him to generate a number of Su and Sp magical effects. Unfortunately, these are very, very underpowered. At 7th level, he finally gains the ability to create a lullaby effect. The save DC is much higher than normal due to the way enchanted instrument works, but it is still a 0-level spell, and not a particularly useful one at that. At 20th level (!) he gains invisibility while playing his music, which mostly defeats the purpose of being invisible. I like the idea of tying the bard's magical abilities more closely to his music, but the minstrel manages to be much weaker than the core bard, which is surely the weakest core class already (I should know -- I've been playing one for the better part of two years).
Also included are the skald, a sort of warrior-bard; the soothsayer, a diviner with some decent bardic music abilities and access to the Knowledge clerical domain; the spellsinger, who learns powerful musical notes that heal, manipulate the elements, and damage opponents; and the troubad'war, another warrior-bard who fights for love. Of these, the spellsinger and troubad'war are the most flavorful and playable, although their game mechanics need some rethinking.
The two new prestige classes are the muse and the protectorate. They have exactly the same prerequisites (that any bard can qualify for), and both provide enhanced bardic music abilities and nothing else. They'd be better realized as feats.
Following the classes are a few pages of magic items. First come baubles and "urus", which add enhancements to other items. For example, the bauble of critical leeching enhances a weapon to heal its wielder when it deals critical hits. Some of the baubles and urus are pretty interesting and useful, but not a single one has a caster level, market price, or crafting requirements. It's astonishing to see this failure so many years into d20 gaming. Unorthodox Bards also introduces a three-part artifact called Johansson's Song, which is about as powerful as a medium wondrous item.
A word on naming: as you may have seen, the class and item names in Unorthodox Bards range from the dull to the insipid. "Minstrel" is too generic to distinguish it from a normal bard; "troubad'war" is plainly ridiculous; and "protectorate" is simply misused. Note to The Le: a protectorate is a place, not a person.
The authors don't show an especially firm grasp on d20 rules, either. As a spellsinger advances, her note of death ability eventually bypasses damage reduction. Of course, damage reduction applies only to weapon damage, so this feature is useless. The muse and protectorate get nonstandard attack progressions. The troubad'war's deharmonizing strike ability allows him to disrupt "any enchantment that actively surrounds" a creature. What does this mean, exactly? Is it like dispel magic, but only for enchantments? Does it affect magic items? A new 9th-level spell of the Love domain, infatuation, is clearly weaker than dominate person, and is utterly inaccessible to the bardic classes in this book by virtue of its level.
In sum, this PDF is poorly edited and poorly thought-out. There are a few interesting ideas in here, but even those will need reworking by the DM before they can be used in play. I cannot recommend Unorthodox Bards to anyone.
The product includes several files: a PDF for on-screen viewing, a PDF for printing, an RTF file for copying-and-pasting, and a separate JPG of the cover art. This was a nice touch, and much appreciated.
The cover art by Tom Miskey is excellent, if slightly cheesecakey. I think it runs right up to the boundaries of poor taste without crossing them. There are a few original pieces of interior art, and they are generally good as well.
However, the problems with this product are legion. The writing and editing are absolutely abysmal, easily the worst that I have ever seen in a supposedly professional RPG product. The Le is listed as the editor, and he completely fell down on the job. There is a typographical error, misspelling, misuse of the apostrophe, grammatical error, or formatting error in virtually every paragraph and table. Only the passages copied more or less directly from the SRD tend to be error-free. d20 formatting conventions (spell names should be lowercase and italicized, skill names should be uppercase, etc.) are generally not followed, and indeed there is no single standard used at all in the product. Wizards of the Coast get a lot of grief (and deservedly so) for the shoddy job they do editing their products, but they are in an entirely different galaxy from The Le Games. The Le badly needs to hire an editor, one who can distinguish "it's" from "its", "tenants" from "tenets," and "profits" from "prophets"; who understands number agreement in a sentence; and who will take the trouble to notice that the column headings do not line up properly in his tables. I doubt that anything more than a cursory glance could have been performed before releasing this product. It's an embarrassment.
If the editing were the only problem, I'd be inclined to ignore it, but the content of Unorthodox Bards is pretty substandard as well. The new base classes range from mediocre to poor. The minstrel gets a few of the standard bardic music abilities, but no spellcasting. Instead, he gets the enchanted instrument (Su) ability, which allows him to generate a number of Su and Sp magical effects. Unfortunately, these are very, very underpowered. At 7th level, he finally gains the ability to create a lullaby effect. The save DC is much higher than normal due to the way enchanted instrument works, but it is still a 0-level spell, and not a particularly useful one at that. At 20th level (!) he gains invisibility while playing his music, which mostly defeats the purpose of being invisible. I like the idea of tying the bard's magical abilities more closely to his music, but the minstrel manages to be much weaker than the core bard, which is surely the weakest core class already (I should know -- I've been playing one for the better part of two years).
Also included are the skald, a sort of warrior-bard; the soothsayer, a diviner with some decent bardic music abilities and access to the Knowledge clerical domain; the spellsinger, who learns powerful musical notes that heal, manipulate the elements, and damage opponents; and the troubad'war, another warrior-bard who fights for love. Of these, the spellsinger and troubad'war are the most flavorful and playable, although their game mechanics need some rethinking.
The two new prestige classes are the muse and the protectorate. They have exactly the same prerequisites (that any bard can qualify for), and both provide enhanced bardic music abilities and nothing else. They'd be better realized as feats.
Following the classes are a few pages of magic items. First come baubles and "urus", which add enhancements to other items. For example, the bauble of critical leeching enhances a weapon to heal its wielder when it deals critical hits. Some of the baubles and urus are pretty interesting and useful, but not a single one has a caster level, market price, or crafting requirements. It's astonishing to see this failure so many years into d20 gaming. Unorthodox Bards also introduces a three-part artifact called Johansson's Song, which is about as powerful as a medium wondrous item.
A word on naming: as you may have seen, the class and item names in Unorthodox Bards range from the dull to the insipid. "Minstrel" is too generic to distinguish it from a normal bard; "troubad'war" is plainly ridiculous; and "protectorate" is simply misused. Note to The Le: a protectorate is a place, not a person.
The authors don't show an especially firm grasp on d20 rules, either. As a spellsinger advances, her note of death ability eventually bypasses damage reduction. Of course, damage reduction applies only to weapon damage, so this feature is useless. The muse and protectorate get nonstandard attack progressions. The troubad'war's deharmonizing strike ability allows him to disrupt "any enchantment that actively surrounds" a creature. What does this mean, exactly? Is it like dispel magic, but only for enchantments? Does it affect magic items? A new 9th-level spell of the Love domain, infatuation, is clearly weaker than dominate person, and is utterly inaccessible to the bardic classes in this book by virtue of its level.
In sum, this PDF is poorly edited and poorly thought-out. There are a few interesting ideas in here, but even those will need reworking by the DM before they can be used in play. I cannot recommend Unorthodox Bards to anyone.
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