The Amazing Races PDFs introduce new archetypes, feats, character traits, racial traits, and archetypes for the core, featured, and uncommon races described in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Advanced Race Guide. Every PDF contains two full pages of high quality content (no fluff or filler)!
Amazing Races: Grippli! includes new racial feats, grippli character traits, and alternate racial traits for grippli. In addition, this product features a new archetype for grippli druids: the Bogwalker!
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This installment of the Amazing Races-series is 4 pages long, 1page front cover, 1 page SRD, leaving us with 2 pages of content, so let's take a look!
The pdf kicks off by providing us with 6 new feats:
-Lasting Toxicity: Your poison remains potent for 3 hours after being applied.
-Prehensile Toes: Hold objects with your feet. VERY cool!
-Tongue Trick: Use tongue to make the dirty trick maneuver and choose one of the dirty tricks from a list every time you take the feat - gain +2 to maneuver-checks when using said application of dirty trick with the tongue.
-Tongue Trip: Trip foes with your tongue, dealin non-lethal damage upon impact. Cool one!
-Toxic Speed: Poison your body as a move action.
-Webbed Warrior: Fire bows with your prehensile feet as long as they do not touch the ground - very cool!
There are also two new character traits, one for +4 to use diplomacy versus other grippli and one that halves escape artist skills to squeeze through tight spaces.
Two new alternate racial traits are part of the deal as well, one netting them the hold breath quality in exchange for weapon familiarity and one that replaces camouflage with imposing a -8 penalty to sense motive attempts made by non-grippli.
We also get a new archetype, the Bogwalker Druid, who may choose to develop a nature bond with a limited array of domains and spontaneously convert said spells. The archetype is specified in marshes and bogs and hence takes penalties to wild empathy when using it with other animals. The bogwalker may also part the terrain of the bog and have it close behind him/her, allowing travel through bogs sans slowing down, can resist diseases and exchanges slightly less wild shape-prowess (when using non-swampy forms)for gaining bonuses when taking 20 in the swamp. A rather bland local archetype focused on one environment. Probably won't see any use in my home-game.
Conclusion:
Editing and formatting are top-notch, I didn't notice any significant glitches. Layout adheres to Abandoned Art's 2-column no-frills standard and the pdf has neither bookmarks, nor artworks and need neither at this length and price-point.
This installment of the Amazing Races-series kicks off strong with the feats dealing with using feet being interesting, very cool and making the race more iconic. The traits also work well, as do the alternate racial traits - and then, the uninspired archetype hits - bland, boring and sans any truly interesting ability, it feels jarring and like filler after the cool new options we got before - why not make the archetype actually develop these new strengths? Oh well, at this price-point, the pdf still is not a bad purchase, making me settle on a final verdict of 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4 due to the low price point. If you want to see a cooler take on the swamp mystic, give Purple Duck Games' Heroes of the Fenian Triarchy a try - there's a neat PrC in there.
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.
