Almonihah's page

My group has completely destroyed the first section of this module.

They hated Mr. Sarlu so badly that they absolutely refused to work with him. The module provides no hints as to how to deal with this eventuality (and given the circumstances, it's not an unlikely thing for players to have reservations about), leaving the blindsided GM with little to do but insist, "But you have to!" And to scramble to come up with *something* to make continuing the adventure possible. While I've got some ideas, I'm not sure my players are going to want to continue at this point, given they might have to encounter this kind of situation again in the future--and I'm not sure I want to have to *run* something like this again in the future.

Perhaps the rest of it will be good if we push through and get to it, but if the intro section throws you off, that's not much good.

Argh, lost my review...

To summarize what I'd written, this PDF has a lot of interesting ideas. It's a cool location with a lot of character.

It also has a couple of mysteries your PC's shouldn't try to 'solve', at least not until much later, and that bugs me. I hate mysteries you're not supposed to solve.

If that doesn't bug you, then this is a good little location. But if you have a player who can't stop prying even when it's not a good idea... well, you may have some trouble.

This is a *massive* book (compared to most race books) covering four races--the kitsune, nagaji, samsaran, and wayang--in considerable depth. It contains about 150 pages worth of good stuff for these four races.

What kind of stuff? Well, it has two major sections, the race description section and the character options section. The race description section goes through each race in great detail, broken down into a number of subheadings:

*Facts and Falsehoods, each one having five commonly known facts and five commonly believed myths about each race.
*Life as a X, describing such things as physiology and life cycles for each race (including cool art sequences of a character of the race over their lifetime).
*X culture, covering the culture and relations of each race. As a 3rd-party supplement they can't talk specifically about Golarion lore, but most of the culture and such transfers without any problem.
*X ethnicities, detailing a variety of different ethnicities for each race, also with some great art illustrating them
*X origins, relating a few different origin myths for the race, great for mining ideas about the kinds of stories a race tells about itself.
*X religion, describing a god or philosophy that could be common among the race. Again, these aren't Golarion deities, so there's some translation required if you're playing on Golarion, but it's still good for idea mining.
*A section unique to each race, such as kyubi (multi-tailed kitsune) or reincarnation for the samsaran

After this section is the character options section, which is packed full of alternate racial traits, feats, archetypes, favored class options, and more. There's far too much to review, but the sheer quantity means that just about anyone playing one of the four races detailed can probably find something they'd like to use. Some of the options are even open to other races, being more Asian-mythology themed rather than something specific to a race.

Last is an appendix which includes starting ages and aging charts, height and weight charts, and random background generation charts.

All in all, there's a lot of great stuff in this book!

Blood of the Beast does just what a Player Companion should, in my opinion, do: it provides a large number of options that would be interesting to incorporate into a character or build a character around.