Forces of Darkness – Zunirei of the Thousand Eyes presents a demon who isn’t interested in your player characters’ souls, or setting the universe on fire. Instead, her interests lie in discovering the best-hidden secrets of your campaign world and revealing them for all to see, spreading chaos and disorder through their revelation. No one – governments, priesthoods, celestial beings, or even other demons - is safe from her desire to reveal their deepest, darkest secrets. What secrets do your players have, and can they keep them safe from her Thousand Eyes?
Each volume of Forces of Darkness contains a detailed history of a NPC to help you understand how they came to be a threat worthy of your players’ characters, a discussion of their motivations to help you design plots for them to enact, notes on allies and henchmen they regularly employ, a discussion of their tactics to help you when your players start to push back against their machinations, and several story seeds to help get you started integrating them into your campaign. Each focal NPC is presented in a minimum of two fully developed stat blocks, one version at their default power level, and a second, mythic version, to maximize their usefulness.
Misfit Studio’s Forces of Darkness line is an ongoing series of Pathfinder® Roleplaying Game compatible character supplements, each highlighting a single unique opponent to bedevil characters in your game. Written with a world-neutral point of view, each supplement is designed to give you an opponent that can be easily dropped into your campaign with minimal adaptation, thus making your life easier as a GM, all the while providing unique characters with unique plans and points of view to spice up sessions in your games.
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This is a review for 'Forces of Darkness: Zunirei of the 1000 Eyes', a supplement by Misfit Studios. I'm not a native speaker (I'm German), so I may have fumbled my language skill checks from time to time. Give me a note if I wrote something wrong and I'll try to make myself more clear.
Zunirei of the 1000 Eyes has 10 pages of text with some nice pics, one of those a full page (and a cover, table of content and so). Since this supplement is about an NPC and includes everything the PCs are bound to unsurface using detective methods or other in-game methods, the following contains SPOILERS. Please don't read further if you are a player!
Zunirei was sold into slavery in a brothel while still being a child, but thrived there, becoming a spy for her country and then a double agent. Her motives were not money, but spreading chaos, pain and suffering by leaking the secrets she learned with her profession. When caught and executed she was reincarnated into a succubus by the forces of the Abyss.
Up to this point her story is nicely done, but nothing too unusual for a fantasy environment. That changes when she was summoned by a wizard and bound into his tattoo. She managed to escape and now spreads those tattoos herself, while not revealing that she can manipulate them with her powers. Unsurprisingly tattoos are a good part of the following content.
In the supplement we get informations regarding her history, schemes, allies, a living tattoo statblock (its a CR 2 construct), a CR 12 'normal' and a CR 15/MR 6 mythic version of Zunirei herself and notes how to use her in a campaign.
I'll start my review with the not-perfect parts.
There are too few versions of Zunerei, I'd love to see her at a lower CR.
I'm on the fence for these ones:
The mythic version of Zunirei doesn't add that much flavor to her 'normal' self, which is too bad. On the other hand her normal version is so well thought of that adding to it would have been difficult. Still, a really new way to use her tatttoos would have been appreciated. We get this in Tattooed Exchange, but the reach of this power seems a bit much for me. I can envision it for combat, though, in a very iconic way.
On to the good things:
The part of Zunirei's allies and minions needs to be fleshed out to be easily droppable in a campaign. The GM has much to do here to make it playable. That said, her allies are bound into her tactics and strategies nicely, with, for example, doppleganger allies impersonating her to ensure that the artists Zunirei has 'married' are well cared for while she can seduce other persons or ferret out more secrets. With her knowledge of secrets Zunirei uses shadow demons to possess her opponents loved ones as hostages. Her gemstone talons, disguised as fingernails and good weapons themselves, she uses for her tattoos instead of needles. All her special abilities center around her tattoo-experience, and such a nice concept alone make buying this supplement worthwhile.
And finally, the great ones:
- As I said above, Zunirei's background story is nicely crafted, a well of believable and interesting details explaining many of her actions;
- the 6 hooks about using her in your campaign are well thought out and make me itch using them;
- The living tattoos themselves are great, with some cute ideas how they disguise themselves, how they react to attacks and so on. I won't delve into more details here, save to say that they don't do hit point damage to their victims – they don't need to, they have other ways to annoy and endanger them, and all of them are subtle. A very nice concept to occupy the PCs in a very different way!
Conclusion:
If there would be another lower level version of her included and one or two fleshed out allies of her, maybe some special tattoos of the non-living variant to complement the supplement it would have easily gotten the 5 stars and the crown of approvement. But all in all you get so many great ideas how to use her and her speciality, and it is something totally new and creepy what she does, Zunerei has gotten a special place in my GM.heart quickly. So I'll give her 5 stars out of five. Well done!
This supplement is 18 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 1 page introduction/author bio, 1 page ToC/short intro of the concept behind Zunirei,1 page SRD and 2 pages of advertisement, leaving us with 11 pages of content, so let's take a look, shall we?
So, who is Zunirei? Born in the Eastern lands of a now forgotten prime material plane, she was born from the lowest of stock, sold into prostitution and climbed the ranks of her homeland by guile and deviousness, making good use of the skill-set of a courtesan. On her way to the top, she started working as a double-agent, following her one true passion - exerting power and destruction by revealing secrets in the most destructive of ways. When death claimed her, she rose through the ranks of the abyss - and now she's back, elevated even beyond succobus status.
Among her minions, we find her erstwhile succubus-sisters, a clan of doppelgangers and more exotic beings - for example a lillend with which she maintains a careful exchange of information. Beyond that, Zunirei has also taught the art of crafting living tattoos to some of the mortals she has tempted and one of the hooks herein actually see the PCs seek to reclaim the lost soul of one of her erstwhile lovers from the Darklands - interesting!
Zunirei herself is a CR 12 threat and a unique outsider with a whole array of different signature abilities -her guise as a radiantly beautiful woman conceals the ability not only to create,d etect and influence living tattoos and dominate members of her network sans save, she also has claws of gemstone hardness disguised as her gorgeous fingernails! Her living tattoos are CR 2 diminutive constructs that act as spies for their deadly mistress, complete with creation options - and yes, they may be reabsorbed after their host has perished.
Beyond her regular incarnation, we also get a CR 15/MR 6 Mythic version of Zunirei - fitting thematically with her agent-role, she has learned here to actually hide her presence and erase herself from the memories of others - oh, and she gets her very own extraplanar private sanctum, making the Mythic Zunirei even harder to track down and defeat. Worse, she can now change her place with beings with her tattoos - OUCH.
A short box on teh willing and unwilling bearers of her tattoos and active and unaware agents of her network is provided as well, as is a page of detailed suggestions of how to integrate Zunirei into your campaign - 6 rather detailed hooks are here to help DMs.
Conclusion:
Editing and formatting are very good - apart from a strange change of fonts in ~3 lines of the first page, I didn't notice any particular distinct glitches. Layout adheres to an easy-to-read 2-column standard in full color with a parchment-style background. The artwork of Zunirei by Caeli Smith is AWESOME and the other interior artwork thematically fitting - especially nice that we get a depiction of Zunirei's signature mark. The pdf comes fully bookmarked for your convenience.
Author Robert H. Hudson Jr. has created an intriguing demoness that strays from the default "bash-'em-in"-CE-outsiders approach - and kudos for that! Zunirei makes for a fantastic, cool adversary and I honestly don't have much to complain herein - personally, I would have enjoyed her expertise in seduction to be reflected in her skills, e.g. via Profession (Courtesan) or Perform (Seduction), but I get why they were omitted - fluff-only, both don't really have a lot of back-up rules-wise. The two builds of Zunirei are cool, with the Mythic one offering some exceedingly deadly and downright evil tricks that may have the PCs unintentionally slay her innocent, tattooed victims - EVIL with a capital "E" indeed. So yes, generally, Zunirei is a great build with top-notch production values and full color artworks to boot and the Mythic-support adds further value - but honestly, what I'm missing would be a minion-statblock or a lower CR-incarnation of Zunirei, something to occupy lower level PCs akin to FotS' different CR-builds. This gripe being mostly cosmetic, though, I will settle on a final verdict of 4.5 stars, rounded down to 4 for the purpose of this platform.
