PRESENTATION: The book is beautiful, with fantastic art, and a nice design. The information on the setting is nothing but a timeline and four pages of sketchy description making it nearly impossible to actually run this setting as written.
The book itself has a stylized font for may of the headers, and all of the feats that makes it hard to read. Additionally,there is no summary feat table, which confuses me since the table of contents has every feat and spell name itemized.
BALANCE: The races break from the pathfinder norm of offering one +2 to both a physical and mental stat, and instead offer stat bonuses and penalties that shoehorn certain races into certain roles (the harrowed in melee for example).
Most of the prestige classes offer less than half, or simply too few levels of caster progression in exchange for extremely weak class abilities. Many of the spellcaster feats, and most of the spells are overpowered. The book on the whole gives me the feeling that the author has a poor grasp on how spellcasters function.
COMPATIBILITY: Psionics rules are present, making this product NOT fully compatible with pathfinder, and requiring the 3.5 Expanded Psionics Handbook to use, which is not listed at any point of purchase. The feats Arcane rage,bane of evil,blessed touch, and channel divine healing all use outdated 3.5 mechanics, and the monster all use grapple bonuses rather than CMB/CMD.
CONCLUSION:A pathfinder compatible setting should offer at least a few new bloodlines, wizard schools, deities, rogue talents, rage powers, or any of the many other modular options that pathfinder classes offer. This setting offers none of these.
This product has consistent grammatical errors and compatibility issues, and the author appears to have little grasp on the design changes from 3.5 to pathfinder. While i love the idea behind the setting, and think that it could easily have been a 5/5, The book comes off as a half cocked, poorly edited waste of potential.
Posts
