Before I get started, I’m going to warn you all. The kitsune are my absolute favorite race in Pathfinder, so everything you are about to read is incredibly biased. Proceed with caution.
Crunch
This book gives plenty of options for kitsune characters, including an alternate race, new racial traits, favored class bonuses, archetypes, feats, and magic items. I’ll cover each briefly. The alternate race is okay; the biggest change is the alteration of change shape so it allows you to transform into a supernatural fox (it uses the dog as a template). The new racial traits aren’t particularly interesting; the coolest in my opinion is one that changes the kitsune’s type to outsider (native and shapechanger). Favored Class Bonuses are exactly what you would expect; this product includes all of the core, base, alternate, and Super Genius classes, so there it’s a few solid pages of content. I don’t really care for this section, but SGG doesn’t do anything wrong here; they’re all about the same level as Paizo’s bonuses, and several are pretty creative. My favorite is the cavalier’s; you add +1/2 on damage rolls made with attacks of opportunity against the target of the cavalier’s challenge.
The archetypes range from meh to HOLY CRAP THIS BARBARIAN ARCHETYPE IS AWESOME! The alchemist archetype is called the arsonist, which is a shame. I hate when universal ideas are wasted as racial archetypes, and there is no reason for an alchemist archetype focused on burning stuff down to be kitsune only. The oracle archetype is a bit on the underwhelming side; it forces you to take some mediocre revelations, but it gives you some flexibility as to when you earn them. The sorcerer bloodline makes no reference to the Nine Tailed mythology, which is a bit strange. Both of these options should have done so. But man, I’m willing to forgive ALL of that for the barbarian archetype. It is phenomenally well-done. I don’t want to spoil it for you, but the basic idea is this: instead of raging, you change shape into a fox-monster. It is incredibly awesome and the best piece of crunch in the entire product.
The feats, on the other hand, are boring. There is a new take on the Nine-Tailed feat chain; it’s been condensed into three feats. The basic idea is that you get a ki pool-like resource based on the number of tails you have, and you can spend the points to do different effects. The powers themselves are okay, but where the feats fail spectacularly is that each feat actually penalizes you for taking it. These feats include drawbacks, and the drawbacks become more crippling as you invest more into the feat change. Pretty bad design, in my opinion. One new magic item rounds out the roster; a named meteor hammer. Now, to be fair, I did skip some crunch. The reason I skipped it however is that all of the kitsune crunch from Paizo’s Advanced Race Guide is reprinted in this book. Why? I have no idea, but it really bothered me. I can understand wanting to make the “definitive guide on the kitsune,” but all of those rules are available on various channels for free. It didn’t need to be hear and ultimately it came across as lazy. 2.5 / 5 Stars
Flavor
Super Genius isn’t really known for its flavor. This product is literally oozing with it; a massive 11 of its 21 pages is dedicated to detailing the kitsune; maybe more. I personally have very serious problems with this flavor, however. Mostly because it makes absolutely no effort to stick with the style for the kitsune established in the Advanced Race Guide, and instead focuses entirely on their Japanese heritage. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it goes as far as to introduce several different subraces of kitsune; the titular clans. One of them is basically a human with fox ears and a tail that can turn into an actual fox, one of them is basically a clanless kitsune who’s “gone feral,” and the final type is a fiendish kitsune who has either been possessed or transformed into an oni. Of those three types (four if you count the base kitsune), which would you want to hear about? For me, personally, it was the fiendish monster, and after the first paragraph they are mentioned in, the product never speaks of them again. Instead, most of the product is spent trying to talk about kitsune as a general race, and then focusing in on either the core kitsune or the new kitsune subrace mentioned early. I wish I could tell you more, but the problem is that the product comes up with these weird Japanese names for both subraces, explaining that its, “Just like how core dwarves are called hill dwarves.” I don’t think I’ve heard anyone use the phrase, “Hill Dwarves” since I played Forgotten Realms; that certainly isn’t a reference to make for Pathfinder. Because the product throws around these unfamiliar Japanese words, it is extremely difficult to keep track of when the product is talking about the kitsune that I knew and loved, and when it is talking about this weird not-really-a-Pathfinder-kitsune subrace. With all of this considered, the product does not take any effort to try and elaborate on any of the kitsune traits that are referenced in the Advanced Race Guide; it hardly talks about their loyalty and their love of art and culture, or their outgoingness. Instead, most of the book is spent contrasting the new subraces from the Pathfinder Kitsune; I really didn’t feel like I learned anything new about the kitsune in this product.
If I had to pick one thing that bothered me the most, it was the origin story for the kitsune. The book glosses over a lot of the commonly used explanations, but then it says that all of them are wrong and promotes a poorly paced legend involving agathions as the definitive answer. I really hated this section for two reason; one, I personally use lycanthropy for my campaign world’s explanation for the kitsune, and that is hand waved away without discussion. And two, the product gives you an answer at all! Why give players (or GMs) an answer? What it should have done was go into detail on each origin story and discuss the merits and flaws of each and then let the GM decide for himself/herself. 2.5 / 5 Stars
Texture
Super Genius Games has a nice layout, and it’s not lost on the Kitsune Clans. There is some really great kitsune art in this product; having searched for pictures on various social media I recognized some of them, but there were even a few new pieces here and there. Overall the product is pretty, although there’s this one section hanging out after the Racial Traits that is practically screaming, “Hey! Alex! Design more racial traits for us!” 4.5 / 5 Stars
I will not lie to you, readers, I went into this product expecting to love it. What I got wasn’t awful, but it left me confused, and I don’t think that this product is quite at the same level as many of the other Super Genius products. I nitpicked this product a lot, but if I had to pick three things that really hurt this product in my eyes, here’s what they would have been.
1) This product reprints everything from the Advanced Race Guide.
2) This product almost completely ignores established kitsune archetypes in favor of Japanese mythology, and then spends half of the fluff contrasting the existing kitsune with the newer ones instead of diving into the psyche of the existing kitsune much.
3) This product’s crunch is not top quality stuff.
There are exceptions to all of those; the barbarian archetype is fantastic, the name generator is insightful, and there is an excellent article at the beginning of the product that does a darn good job explaining why kitsune should have a place in a campaign world. But ultimately, this is an average product from an above average company, and I’d be lying if I said that I was hoping for more than I got.
Okay, that's going to be my one bad pun for the entire review. I promise. No croak.
Crunch
This product follows the Abandoned Arts design flawlessly; a chunk of feats, two race traits, two racial traits, and an archetype. First thing's first, I REALLY like most of these feats, with only two exceptions, and ironically both of those feats are in the same chain. The first is this nifty little feat that grants you prehensile toes. Think of the prehensile tail racial trait, except on your feat. The thing that is weird about this trait is that you can qualify for it as a vanara; the monkey race. That makes perfect sense thematically, but having an either / or in the perquisite description is odd; it makes me think that if another race comes along that thematically should be able to take this feat, it won't be able to without some GM houseruling. If it were me, I would have made the prerequisite for this feat a racial trait that I could easily build into, say, the vanara or other races. Prehensile Toes eventually builds into a feat called Webbed Warrior, which allows you to use your feet to fire a ranged weapon while prone. This is a pretty cool idea, except unlike the previous feat in the chain, it only allows grippli to qualify for it. Why not the vanara? Monkey feet would probably be better than frog feet at doing this maneuver anyway.
Aside from those two examples, the rest of the feats are well thought out and they feel very appropriate for the grippli. Every feat plays off of a racial trait, which ultimately looks and feels very good. The race traits are both pretty decent, but despite loving puns as a form of comedy, I hate having them in my class features, so the character trait, "Its Not Easy Being Green" really rubbed me the wrong way. One of the alternate racial traits, which grants you hold breath, is so perfect that I can't believe Paizo didn't give it to the Grippli in the Advanced Race Guide. The other trait is pretty interesting as well; it makes it nearly impossible for someone who is not trained in Sense Motive to make untrained checks against the grippli. Pretty neat.
Finally, we've got the Bogwalker. Its a swamp-themed druid archetype. I think that this archetype is a very good Druid archetype; its fun, its interesting, and it actually tries to give the druid some new powers. Aside from being swamp-based, however, it doesn't really feel like it should be limited to the Grippli. So I give this archetype a big thumbs up, but I don't see it as being grippli only. 3.5 / 5 Stars.
Flavor
I'm pleasantly surprised. This product does a good job of painting an excellent picture of grippli society through its flavor text alone. That is extremely hard to do with any race! The products hint about what the grippli value in each other, how they treat outsiders, and their overall survival instincts. Sure, its not much but when you're buying two pages of content that is almost entirely dedicated to fluff, you'll take what you can get! 5 / 5 Stars.
Texture
I like Abandoned Art's layout and style. Its very simple and elegant, and like I say in most of my reviews, it proves that you don't always need art on every page in order to have a gorgeous product; you only need something that is pleasing to look at. 5 /5 Stars.
I think Amazing Races! Grippli is a good product. If your campaign features the Grippli or you simply want to play as one of these adorable little frog people, you should definitely give this product a look. That said, I wasn't as blown away by this product as I was the merfolk one, and that's mostly because of the puns and strangeness involves in the prehensile toes feats. I appreciate thinking outside of the racial product presented here, but honestly such feats are better tied to the racial traits themselves than the actual race.
Sorry guys. I can't avoid the lame pun .... TIME TO DIVE ON INTO AMAZING RACES! MERFOLK! Hyuck, hyuck, hyuck.
Crunch
Wowzers. I really went off on a rant in the Amazing Races! Humans product about how bland it was and the lack of synergy between the human crunch and its flavor, and the lack of limited options that make sense. This product ... is the EXACT opposite. Every single feat, every single character trait, and every single racial trait is absolutely PERFECT for Merfolk. And doesn't really make sense for any other race. What's better is that almost all of the feats in this product play off of the merfolk's racial traits, so nothing feels wrong or out of place here. There is this terrifyingly cool chain of feats that allows you to basically squeeze the air out of your foes lungs while grappling them under water. So. Freaking. Cool. There's one feat that I personally think is sort of silly; it grants the merfolk a climb speed under rather specific circumstances, but I'm personally not sold on the whole, "Merfolk crawling onto your ship" idea.
The product makes up for that one feat with one of the coolest sorcerer bloodlines I have ever seen. It basically turns the merfolk into a siren, and it even has some great multiclassing potential with the bard, which is a somewhat rare combination. The bloodline is actually a pretty good one, too, and most of the abilities are well-suited to the theme of being a merfolk. I really like this product's crunch. 5 / 5 Stars.
Flavour
There's a bit of flavor in this product, but most of it is in the feat and bloodline descriptions. Abandoned Arts isn't a very flavorful company, but AR!Merfolk is definitely on the better end of their fluff scale. I found the flavor of the crawling feat to be a little bit silly for my tastes, but otherwise its not bad. Not bad at all. 5 / 5 Stars.
Texture
Abandoned Arts uses the same set up for most of their products, and while it is very minimalist, it looks very good. If you want to see my full thoughts on their texture, check out my Amazing Races! Humans review. Otherwise, trust me when I say it is very aesthetically pleasing and I highly recommend it. 5 /5 Stars
This product is really, really good. I enjoyed this product a LOT better more than Amazing Races! Humans. The crunch is in the right place; all of the options are very good and very viable, but none of them make you think to yourself, "Man, why can't my human fighter take this feat?" They all play off of the powers and abilities of the merfolk and its environment. Most of the feats possess powers the other races can't get, but when you're talking about using your giant, fishy tail to suffocate a land dweller, I'm willing to let that one slide.
This PDF was included in my Pathfinder Online Kickstarter bundle. Now that I have some time to look through stuff, I'll be posting up some reviews on the several hundred PDFs that have fallen into my position.
... this is going to take a while. •_•
Crunch
Abandoned Arts is pretty much a player crunch company, from what I've seen. Class Acts seems to follow this routine, as the moment you open the PDF the product is like, "Feats! Feats! Get your fighter feats here!" I was a little hesitant going into this product because as a pretty hardcore fan of the Fighter class, I think its fine as it is. People underestimate the advantage of having 21 feats over 20 levels. But I'm not going to say no to some Fighter Friendly Feats, so what do we got here?
Honestly, most of the feats AREN'T fighter specific, but in my opinion the absolute best ones are the combat feats who do manage to tie into the Fighter class. For example, there is a nifty feats that cranks up the Bravery class feature to 11; you can outright ignore the shaken condition from most non-magical sources AND you add your Bravery bonus to the DC to intimidate you (brilliant choice). Very cool. I like it. As a matter of fact, the feats that tie into Bravery are all very cool. I could definitely see a few of them as real contenders for a fighter's feat slots, especially when he's got a few floater feats to kill, which a Fighter will have throughout his career.
There are a couple feats that are a little overpowered, such as this one feat that basically removes the penalty to deal nonlethal damage with the club if you're Power Attacking, and if you are Power Attacking and you use the feat the Power Attack damage (plus damage from Weapon Specialization) is doubled. Ouch; might be a LITTLE too good there, boys! That said, there are a bunch of feats that add to the gameplay of relatively underused weapons, like the whip (usually taken as a bard over a fighter), the club, and even the javelin. Overall, the feats are pretty cool, even if the rules are sometimes worded funny. 4 / 5 Stars.
Flavor
Honestly, this product doesn't have much flavor. The flavor text is decent enough, and there's nothing as bad as the Amazing Races! Humans flavor text that made me flip the heck out. Its passable, but considering that even I have no idea how to add flavor to three pages of feats, I'm not going to dock this product on flavor. — / 5 Stars.
Texture
I personally think that Abandoned Arts is proof that you don't need a big art budget to be a successful 3PP. This product is very minimalist in approach, and honestly I like it that way. Besides, let's face it, which are you going to use in the game? Two full pages of crunch, or one-and-half pages of crunch and a picture of a topless fighter babe. Actually ... don't answer that. Please. 5 / 5 Stars.
Final Score & Thoughts Crunch: 4 / 5
Flavor: — / 5
Texture: 5 / 5
Final Score: 4.5 / 5 (Rounded up to 5)
This is actually a pretty good product. Some of the game mechanics are worded a bit strange and there are a couple of feats that seem ripe for abuse in my opinion (mainly that club feat I mentioned early), but overall I like this product. I would allow most of these feats in my game, and I think the ones I did allow would make for good, fun, flavorful additions to my campaign as well as my player's arsenal.
Okay, so I finally got around to checking out all of the PDFs I got for backing Pathfinder Online, so let's dive in and look at the very first one I saw, Inkantations!
Crunch
This book and I did not get off to a good start. The first chapter is 100% in the flavor department, and so our first piece of crunch strolls by 8 pages into this 52 page behemoth. And the very first thing I see is half a dozen new Craft and Knowledge skills. Why? Why on earth would you take tattooing and split it up into a billion different skills? Folks, if you are going to create new skills and subskills, that's fine with me. But if you do, you better make sure that those skills are actually needed. Why do I need four different Craft skills, three different Knowledge skills, AND a Profession skill for this? Looking at the rules, Craft skills are used when something is actually created, so I would have said no to the Profession skill and lumped everything together into Craft (Tattoo) and Knowledge (Tattoos). Or better yet, merge tattoos into Knowledge (local). Why? Because Knowledge (local) is all about discerning the cultures and customs of the area, and Chapter One flat-out states that Tattoos are all about Culture and Custom. And then it goes on to say that you need one skill to mix the ink and another to actually apply it! Really? Why? In my opinion, this page is wasted.
Getting into the new feats, most of them are garbage. Why would I waste a feat on an ability that gives me a +3 bonus to Intimidate AND a –2 penalty to Diplomacy? I could use that feat slot on Skill Focus (Intimidate), which improves with my level AND doesn't penalize me. Most of the feats are like this; they either have very unimaginative effects, downright poor effects, or they penalize you. If you're going to penalize someone with a feat, it needs to be like Power Attack. That feat is worth the penalty. Grotesque Tattoo is not. The best feats in this chapter are the ones that interact with the actual Tattoo Inkantations, which I'll get to in a minute, but there are just so many tattoo feats that aren't worth it, its easy to skip over them by mistake.
When you finally get to the tattoos, the rules themselves are very weird. I get the feeling that 4 Winds sat down, maybe even talked to a tattoo artist or had some done themselves, and said, "How can we translate this exact process over to Pathfinder?" I'm sorry, but when you tell me that using colored ink has the SAME increase as making the tattoo masterwork, then that's the point where I say, "This is too much detail." If I am increasing my DC, I want real, tangible benefits. Not shiny colors. But of course, as I say that I find out that BRANDING people, as in touching someone with a blazing-hot iron rod, requires a skill check. What's worse is that this book came out in 2011, after brand was created by Paizo. A cantrip that does exactly what you're telling me I need a relatively difficult skill check to accomplish. Clearly all inquisitors are part-time tattoo artists.
When you actually reach the point of the book that you're reading the magic item tattoos, then the book becomes pretty cool. These items are pretty well thought out, are decently priced, and they're well-balanced too. There are a few neat tattoos scattered throughout the section, but most of them appear to mimic existing magic items. One that I especially like is one called arcane bonds Its a very neat tattoo that allows the tattoo's crafter to enforce a hold person effect on the person with the tattoo. That's the sort of neat, inventive stuff that I like! Sadly, there are just as many tattoos that don't make much sense, like this one that lets you scribe an animal tattoo on your face, granting you that animal's exact natural armor bonus to AC. See the problem? Considering the cost of the tattoo doesn't scale, how do you justify the natural armor of a Tyrannasaurus to the natural armor of a tiger? Both are pretty awesome tattoos to have on your face; one is clearly better than the other with no increase in cost.
There are some spells in this book too, as well as some body piercings that function as wondrous items. The spells aren't all that interesting; the spell that makes you super fertile is sort of random in the product. Its obviously there because there is a tattoo that transforms you into a fertility goddess, but overall it just feels strange. The product's crunch ends with a prestige class that basically uses these magic items better than anyone else, making it somewhat boring to read about. It seems solid enough, but honestly the tattoos themselves aren't really cool enough to warrant this prestige class. Ultimately, the crunch of this product had me scratching my head in confusion more than it did exist me. 1 / 5 Stars.
Flavor
This product tries really, really hard to have flavor. It is literally oozing it. The problem is that this product oozes flavor in the same way that a pizza coming from a questionable shop oozes grease. That grease is not why you eat the pizza; it is only pooling on top of the good stuff, taking up space and making you question whether or not you really want a piece of that pie. There is so much flavor in this book that I found myself skipping through it, going, "Okay, okay, I get it. Where's the crunch of the product?" Flavor is forcibly injected everywhere in this product and the flavor overwhelms the rules, to the point where there are many questionable game design choices simply because it fits the flavor. An example is the needless number of tattooing skills that are described in this product. Another example is the five different ways that are listed to remove a tattoo, even though they all have almost the exact same outcome. The flavor really bogs down this product and it probably added on at least 5 unneeded pages. 3 / 5 Stars.
Texture
This product's grammar is decent enough, but the layout is pretty bad. The sections and subsections are not well defined and there are no breaks for chapters in this book; it essentially reads like a giant run-on chapter. As a teacher, I found it incredibly disorienting. 2 / 5 Stars.
Final Score and Thoughts Crunch: 1 / 5
Flavor: 3 / 5
Texture: 2 / 5
Final Score: 2 / 5
I do not recommend this product. Throughout the entire thing, there was only one tattoo that I thought was remotely interesting. Everything else was rehashed material that I have already seen before placed in an item system that has been done to death. Paizo does tattoos much better in Inner Sea Magic, and there is one page, maybe two devoted to the concept there. This book expands mundane tattoos too far, presumably to fill a page quota, while most of the magic items are existing wondrous items re-flavored as tattoos. I hate to say it, but I'm honestly glad I didn't pay for Inkantations.
