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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Vanuslux" data-source="post: 2011485" data-attributes="member: 937">Just to get it out up front, I did not pay for this book.  It was given to me for purposes of review.  Unorthodox Druids by The Le Games is part of series of books with a pretty straight forward goal.  Each one gives five alternate versions of one of the standard classes.  Obviously Unorthodox Druids gives five alternate versions of the druid class, one of my favorites.  Appearances - The Le Games immediately earns a warm fuzzy place in my heart for having both a landscaped screen version and a portrait version.  That aside, there's not much to say about the artwork.  The cover piece is kind of ugly in comparison to most of the other covers I've seen for the Unorthodox series though not too bad.  The rest of the art is from Mongoose Publishing's Character Portraits: Fantasy Heroes.  Nice stuff and it suits the material for the most part.  Content - So let us see how the five classes stack up.  Each of them gets the standard druid spell progression, but various special abilities are swapped out for other special abilities to bring each class more in line with a specific druid concept. * Caller - The Caller is the druid's answer to the summoning specialist.  They pretty much lose all druid abilities not directly related to interacting with animals and get some extra abilities, mostly extra uses of spells like Charm Animal and Summon Nature's Ally.* Enforcer - Who in the forest kicks butt and takes names?  The Enforcer, that's who.  It reminds me of the way I played my Druid during my short fling with the Everquest MMORPG...like a tank.  I love playing with magic, but I also love my combat up close and personal and while the Enforcer isn't going to put the Fighter or Barbarian out of a job it does the trick for a more combat oriented defender of nature.  * Shaman - The Shaman leans more toward the more spiritual end of druidism.  Their main abilities are Commune with Nature, Spirit Guide, and Wild Shape. They lean more towards trickery than physic and are a fairly decent envisioning of a shaman without having to resort to a whole bunch of new rules ala The Shaman's Handbook. * Survivalist - Just what their name says...survivalists are good at surviving.  At least in the wild.  They're the weakest of the five classes in this book in regards to combat, but probably the best to have along during those times between epic battles.  Enduring harsh elements is what they do best and they have a few abilities that their companions will be quite grateful to have around, such as creating "Godberries" which can keep the whole party sufficiently nourished pretty much indefinitely when they're high enough level.  Starvation will rarely be an issue with these chaps around.* Tree Warden - The ultimate tree hugger.  Where the Caller gets really involved with the fauna side of nature, Tree Wardens are more interested in the flora.  So much so that they are able to turn into trees.  Personally I think their abilities are a bit too restrictive in comparison to what they give up for them but not so badly that they're not worth playing for the flavor angle.  In Conclusion - While the classes presented here aren't particularly revolutionary concepts, Unorthodox Druids does do well at what I think their main intention was...bringing five druidic archetypes to the table without going all out to reinvent the wheel.  There have been several attempts at a shaman class for the d20 system but none that I've seen are fully playable from only a couple of pages rather than requiring a number of new charts and tables and explanations.  My biggest complaint about the book is that it's a bit of a dry read, but the classes work.  I'd let them be played in a game I was running.  Heck, I think it would be kind of neat to run a game in which each player played a different class from this book.  So, for two bucks you get five perfectly useable classes.  I consider that a pretty decent value.  There's nothing that really blows me away, but I can think of few things I've spent $2 on that I've been more satisfied by.  That's less than most drinks on any given cafe's menu. For delivering goods worth more than the cost of the product, I feel it deserves more than a 3, but there is definite room for improvement too, so it gets less than a 5.  Hence I give this product a solid rating of 4.</blockquote>

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