Now available at Paizo.com

AWESOME!

Races with 26 different favored class options are:
Dhampir
Drow
Duergar
Fetchling
Hobgoblin
Orc
Ratfolk
Tiefling
Umbral Kobold
Wayang
Wanderer

With the Shadowsfall: Shadow Plane Player's Companion, be sure to check out these favored class options.

And reviewed here, on DTRPG and sent to GMS magazine. Cheers!

I appreciate you taking the time to review.

While I do appreciate the review, I do feel a number of criticisms within are a bit unfair.

For example:

Hobgoblin Inquisitors may e.g. gain a bonus of +1 to concentration checks to cast Inquisitor spells each time they select the ability ...I think this ability needs to cap somewhere or be + 1/2.

Another problem I found was that races like orcs and duergar can now choose for their barbarian to gain an additional round of rage per level - that's 1/6 of a VERY useful feat that become immediately available without the usual waiting over class-levels.

Wayang oracles even can add wizard-spells to their spell-selection in similar ways, though only those of the Illusion-school and one level lower than their maximum spell level they can cast. Here, wording is problematic, stating "The spell is treated as being one level higher, unless it is also on the oracle spell-list." Does this increase of the spell's level effect its DC? Is the increase applied before or after checking whether the spell is legible to be granted via this class option? Depending on the answer, the spell chosen would then actually have to be two levels below what an oracle can actually cast...

All of these particular criticism are about items straight out of the Advanced Race Guide (with the exception of the duergar getting the same thing as orcs). We included that to maintain maximum compatibility with Paizo. I do not feel that lowering our review for design choices by Paizo are fair to us, especially when our work is being compared so heavily against other 3pp material, that may or may not have chosen to maintain a similar level of compatibility.

(Disclaimer: I am not familiar with the products mentioned in the review. I am aware of them, but beyond that, I am not sure of their contents nor their level of compatibility.)

I get that you are feeling unfairly treated by this review and for that, I'm sorry.

To clarify some points: Generally, I'm rather in favor of the product, hence also my review of 3.5 stars. The comparisons with other 3pp-books are generally favorable ones that put the favored class options in a rather good light and position as innovative and cool. I made abundantly clear that I don't like Favored Class Options that much and that this pdf is actually a step in the right direction for the whole type of crunch, much like other nice publications have done for traits. The books I compare this pdf to have been praised for their innovation.

That out of the way, yes, this product is compatible with the ARG. Unfortunately, much like a bunch of content from UM (which I'd rate 1.5 stars, at best) and UE (1 star, what a waste of money), I consider several options in the ARG unbalanced. In fact, the ARG will not see use in my home-game as written. Maintaining compatibility with rules that are ambiguous is not something I'd consider desirable, the oracle-example prime among them. If you chose to retain design-choices by Paizo that are ambiguous or unbalanced, your content will also become ambiguous or unbalanced.

Were I to review the Paizo-books, I'd complain loudly about the very same things and quite probably much more vitriolic, since they DO create the groundworks. Which becomes increasingly problematic with the slips in quality that have plagued the hardcovers since the APG.

That being said, the product lost 1.5 stars. 1 star for the aforementioned rules-decisions (and the repetitions -to each race its own would have made the product better) and minor ambiguities and 0.5 for the sparse and minor glitches. That's still an above-average verdict and in my opinion, fair. I debated long and hard about this rating, but in the end, I couldn't bring myself to rate this one higher.

Again, I'm sorry, you feel unfairly treated, but I stand by my verdict. Cheers and all the best!

Fair enough. Again, thank you for the review.

You should write a review of the ARG. I haven't seen many comments negative towards the balance there, so it'd be interesting.

Well, I'll contemplate doing just that. Problem being that right now I have a lot on my hands with 3pps. Perhaps I'll manage to jam in a review of the ARG, but crunch-heavy books tend to take me quite some time.

I'll see.

I just noticed that Shadowsfall: Favored Class Options received a pair of Four-Star reviews. Thank you to the reviewers.

In response to this line in Endzeitgeist's review:

"However, on a personal preference, I would have loved the links to be indicated in some way, perhaps by underlining them - I've clicked on some of the hyperlinked words by accident and got the "connection to web"-prompt."

I wanted to mention that we (d20pfsrd.com) have offered the option to more visually indicate linking within the app used to link PDFs to the site. It will require a tiny bit of coding on our side but it can be done. This is one of those things where we honestly weren't sure which would be more preferable. A clearly indicated link that might alter the appearance of the source text slightly, or no change whatsoever to the text yet still linking. I don't want to side-track this product discussion though so if people want to voice an opinion feel free to start a new thread and if enough people want it that way we can go ahead and at least implement the code option then leave it up to individual 3pp if they want "visually obvious links" or "no visual change to links" type of option in the linkifier application.