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I've enjoyed reading Mario Podeschi's previous Kobold Quarterly articles, and I wasn't disappointed with the piece featured in this issue. "Servants from Beyond" hits all of the things I like most in an RPG: weird magical creatures from the realms beyond mortal ken.

Basically, it provides four NPC (with monster stats, of course) outsiders that can be contacted through "Lesser Planar Ally" and "Lesser Planar Binding" and used as (level appropriate) early planar contacts. I thought his suggestions for how negotiations can proceed (as well as what these planar creatures' goals are) served as a nice way to make these spells fun for 7th level characters while containing nice adventure hooks that could be thrown into just about every campaign. Although there isn't a "make your own planar ally" template or anything like that, the Podeschi's approach to the topic is extremely easy to replicate and should give GMs a lot of ideas on how they can turn this spell (and the sorts of things that answer the summons) into the sorts of things that could drive certain campaigns.

Re: "Elves are better than you" syndrome, I didn't get that vibe from the piece. But then again, I don't see why the class must be racially restricted at all (and in my campaign I as GM would simply tell people that they can ignore that because, well, it's my game and the act of including anything from a third part press amounts to me deciding how it's implemented).

As an aside, though, I do wish people wouldn't look at material like KQ from a "this is no use to me/this is useful" lens. I read a lot of fantasy novels (and reviewed a few of them for KQ a few years back) and I've found them to be seriously useful even when there were no rules at all for implementation. I found stuff in the magazine that would be useful to a GMs of any system (be they running PFRPG, 4e, AGE, Reign, or the hypothetical 5e) irrespective of mechanics. When I ran 4e, KQ was the most useful purchase I made each month even though I never used a single bit of the suggested mechanics therein - I found numerous PFRPG articles to be full of flavor that I turned into campaign-long storyarcs (magical/alchemical narcotics being my favorite from about two/three years ago). But I'm a tinkerer as a GM, so my experience, perhaps, isn't terribly "useful" to others, I suppose.