Mundane No More: Texts and Tomes 2, by author Rich Howard, presents several new Asian-themed texts and tomes, as structured from his previous release Mundane No More: Texts and Tomes—detailed below.
Words. We love them. We’re gamers, after all. From novels to rule sets to textbooks to cereal boxes, non-magical language is the foundation of our imaginations. So why is it that PCs rifle through libraries in search of spellbooks and magical manuals while leaving generations of carefully cultivated knowledge strewn under their muddy boots?
Mundane No More: Texts and Tomes, remedies this by turning fantasy (and modern) libraries into treasure troves of knowledge. Mundane texts provide opportunities for any literate member of an adventuring party to retrain unwanted feats, refocus their skill ranks into areas helpful to the campaign, and to gain rare and exotic recipes for poisons, inventions, and, yes, even magic items.
Game Masters can use mundane texts to introduce plot twists, foreshadow events, patch holes in a party’s skills, and provide characters with the knowledge to confront enemies to come.
Within the pages of Mundane No More: Texts and Tomes you'll find:
A four-tier ranking system that describes the knowledge each text contains and how your characters can benefit from it.
A system for using tomes to retrain your character's skills, feats, spells and more, compatible with the retraining rules found in Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Ultimate Campaign.
Detailed crafting-recipe rules that encourage characters to research the creation of mundane tools and weapons, alchemical preparations, and magical items as opposed to "knowing it all" with a single skill rank
Creation rules for mundane texts.
A dozen pre-built tomes and manuals of all types and tiers ready to drop into your campaign right now.
Don't wait, pick up a copy and add the power of the written word to your character’s arsenal!
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This expansion to Rich Howard's Mundane No More-pdf on research rules and tomes clocks in at 9 pages, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 1 page ToC, 2 pages of advertisement, 1 page SRD, leaving us with 3 pages of content, so let's take a look!
The pdf kicks off with a minor errata of book 1 (which, in my opinion, has nothing to do in the pdf-age -why not simply update the original file?), but oh well.
So what does the book contain - well, to cut a long story short, we receive 4 different sample tomes, including background stories etc. - which would be nice. More interesting would be the massive table that breaks down just about every kind of special material, from adamantine to Wyroot and Aranea-skin as recipes, providing a significant synergy with the main book's cool take on this alternate means of crafting material. Beyond the default, though, we are also introduced to red mithral -which is similar to adamantine, but lighter and less durable. And yes, making weapons and armor of this material has significant repercussions for their efficiency, allowing e.g. one-handed weapons to be Weapon Finesse'd. (And yes, this can be pretty bad, but exerting a restrictive control on the amount of red mithril in a campaign is pretty easy to achieve...)
Finally, we also receive a pretty powerful meditative Yumi as a new magic item.
Conclusion:
Editing and formatting are top-notch, I noticed no significant glitches. Layout adheres to a printer-friendly no-frills two-column b/w-standard and the pdf comes fully bookmarked for your convenience, in spite of its brevity - nice service!
This is a solid expansion to the exceedingly inexpensive and awesome first book, with an appropriate amount of content for the low price. Since I really liked the recipe-rules, I did enjoy the addition of the special materials, though in my opinion, general guidelines to price new materials yourself would have been neat to have indeed. From Viridium to fire-forged steel (of interest for Sword & Sorcery campaigns where the riddle of steel has not been made public...), this pdf offers a cool array of recipe-pricing, yes. Then again, pricing guidelines would have *really* helped. In the end, I'm going to settle for a final verdict of 4.5 stars, rounded up to 5 since the pdf is very inexpensive and the materials make a great addition to the base system.
