Okay quick, name a race of lizard or serpent like creatures that ruled a vast empire before the current timeline? It is the Naga from Legend of the Five Rings, the Lizard Men from the Forgotten Realms Campaign setting or the Warhammer setting or the Asaatthi in the Scarred Lands? Well, it's all of 'em but this review focuses on Vigil Watch Secrets of the Asaatthi.
On the back, it notes “discover tips for using these serpentfolk in any d20 campaign, from details on the creatures' culture and lairs to unique magic and prestige classes.” Now that's a tall order.
The book is broken into three chapter with three appendices. The first chapter covers the history of the creatures and is short. Being an ancient race, they suffered the wrath of the gods so to speak and slumbered. Sleeping serpents must be a theme as that's one of the Naga's traits from Legend of the Five Rings. The second chapter is a little meatier, Lands of the Serpentfolk. The overland maps are well done but lack any real detail. What does a typical asaatthi house look like? What are their towers like? Do they need any special building rules or materials? One of the things I liked about the Diamond Throne was that the giants were such a force on that setting that their allies build their own houses bigger to accommodate them.
Won't find that information here. What you will find are details of their homes in the Swamps of Kan Thet and the Urkudan Desert, as well as quick snippets of what they do in other areas.
The largest chapter, not because it's the most detailed with sample characters and ritual information, but game information, is Chapter Three, Life of the Asaatthi. Most of these serpentfolk are still faithful to their matron titan Mormo and their life heavily reflects that. One interesting aspect of these creatures is that they're honorable, but only to one another. What's the point of having honor with a lesser reptilian race or a human? The good news is that with a few tweaks, a lot of the background can be used in a standard game but no actual tips are provided, no generic serpent gods or domains favored by the asaathi. For example, who would they worship in a Forgotten Realms setting and why?
One of the weaknesses of the book is the breeds. Several new variants of the core asaathi from the Creature Collection Revised are present but don't seem to do too well. None have racial hit dice, feats, skills or other features innate features. This means that a pureborn Asaatth with a level adjustment of +5 is woefully underpowered. What's worse, there are no notes for CR. As a humanoid race, knowing what challenge rating to assign to a character that players will fight is important. Knowing what it's real level adjustment is (or if you use the base CCR version's hit die information), it's true effective character level are, will prove difficult.
The true strength of the book is in the feats. These come in a variety of flavors including technique feats. These techniques are a group of feats related that hail back to the good old days of martial art mayhem. For example, the Utaan style allows its user to master two weapons with feats like As Night and Day, Pattern of Twin Heavens and Two Suns Rise. These abilities include hitting with both weapons as long as one hits and preventing all opponents with fewer hit dice than your own from attacking you. I know, powerful stuff, but with some high requirements.
Another great idea is weapon familiars. Here, the asaatthi awakens his weapon and gains numerous abilities including sentience and depending on the weapon, bonuses, as a familiar, to the master. The dagger grants improved initiative while the greatsword +2 to Sense Motive. As the character continues to rise in levels, his weapon continues to gain in power. Those wishing to increase their weapons power even more can take weapon familiar feats, another strong feature, that include various Eye of and Fortune of feats. The abilities granted by these feat range from allowing your weapon to detect magic to granting its spell like abilities to the wielder.
The last of the different types of feats is loci. These loci are limited in some ways. First in the requirements. A loci is incomplete spell energy, a mixing of different energies that are left in a spellcaster's mind after using his magic. So to have loci feats, each one requires different spells. Hand of Radiance requires light (x3), Knowledge (arcana) 5 ranks and Spellcraft 5 ranks. For having this, you can touch an object and give it a glow of natural light or even sculpt light.
The feats are a good deal in that they expand upon normal feats in different ways but have limitations and aren't likely to be used by every character. Some of them are perfect for characters who have distinguished skills that might not be perfect for battle, but make great encounters.
For those more interested in in spellcasting, the section on asaatth magic isn't broken up by caster, level and spell, but does provide some high powered spells that can add flavor to a campaign. For instance, Life Transfer, a 9th level spell, steals a target's soul even as Amnesia causes memory to fall even as bladeturn reflects attacks aimed at the caster. For an empire whose very lifeblood is magic, the spell selection is limited.
GMs looking to customize their creations have new equipment and magic items. One thing that the authors wisely did was weapon equivalents. This means that there isn't a lot of space wasted on weapons that do the same thing as others. Unfortunately, they're not illustrated. For example, it's good to know that a sithaas is basically a double katana or doublebastardsword, but what exactly does that mean in terms of weight and appearance as there is no double bastard sword? Would it be two exotic weapon proficiencies to use it?
Those looking for prestige classes will quickly flip to Appendix One. Not only do they include several new PrCs, but they discuss how Oriental Adventures would fit into the asaatthi culture. An excellent resource if it had been updated to 3.5 but with a few sentences on how being a samurai or blade dancer works for these creatures, doesn't do much except take up space.
Better are the PrCs. These range from ancestral warrior, asaath who master ancient family weapons, to the relic hunter, seekers of ancient knowledge, these 10 level PrCs come with everything you need to use them in your SL campaign. Each is a full 10 level PrC with special abilities, background, requirements, and abilities. Some of them come with new information. The relic hunter for instance, has a whole table about different things they can learn of relics ranging from a DC 10, common myths and legends, to a DC 30, obscure knowledge like the name of a mistress to a powerful lorde.
One area that the book is weak in is encounters. While Appendix Two, Adventures Among the Serpentfolk, gives you some tables and ideas on what to do with these creatures, they don't detail any NPCs. Now that's important for a few reasons. The first is that because the racial stats are a little dubious, it'd be good to see examples of how the authors used them. The next is that like the drow, unless your just running standard encounters, it takes a lot of time to customize each NPC. This is true even when the book provides an adventure like Awakenings. The stats are minimized to race and level for many of the NPCs while common monsters are fully listed.
I wasn't happy with a lot of the book. I pretty much summed up my negative feelings in a thread on the board and I'll repeat those issues here:
1. This book is overpriced compared to other SSS books.
2. The books overall utility is diminished due to having to own the Creature Collection Revised for the normal hit dice, feats, skill points, base attack,etc... of the variants.
3. There is too much white space.
4. The whole all purpose d20 feel is not there. Almost anywhere you look, the heavy hand of the SL setting is upon them ranging from where they live being influenced by the Divine War to how they live, being heavily influenced by their worship of Mormo. It's a SL book.
5. This doesn't count the fact that none of them have level adjustments as opposed to just effective character levels and none of the subraces have a CR.
6. As humanoids, each encounter has to be customized and there aren't any examples asatthi from low to high.
The good parts are that as a SL book, it does a fair job of bringing subraces of the asaatthi to life. It allows a GM who has Oriental Adventures and a fondness for the Yuan Ti to tie them into the Scarred Lands setting. It introduces a lot of great feat types and ideas. The prestige classes, spells and magic items can help round out any encounter with these creatures. It provides good background information for GMs able to immerse their players in the asaatthi lifestyle. Due to the other issues though, I'd say that this book is really only good for those who are definitely going to use the Asaatthi as the focus of a campaign, and are going to do so in their native setting of the Scarred Lands.
