You shouldn't stop playing just because your character died.
This template is designed for use by player characters at every level of play, with custom feats, spells, that are changed out when you die and when you return to life; They are designed to be netural in regards to both challenge rating and level making for an optimal choice for any game where returning from dead makes the story more interesting. Presented with this is a plug and play 1st person point of view descriptive text that allows for an easy introduction of this new template into any existing campaign.
This product contains:
Restless Soul creature template
22 Feats
10 Spells
From the same designer who crafted the hugely successful Wyrd of Questhaven and the best-selling Feats 101 comes the third book in the extraordinary Questhaven Campaign Setting. This new line brings you the best of the 3.0 and 3.5 Open Gaming Content updated for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. Each element is customized yet kept modular providing game components beyond the core products helping to create an evocative campaign experiences.
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This pdf consists of 17 pages, 1 page front cover, 1 page ad, 1 page OGL, 1 page editorial.
The art by Hugo Solis and Joe Calkins is of high quality.
That said, you get a nice 4 page IC introduction to the "race" (actually more a template) and as a bonus for DMs like me, who like to print out pictures of characters, 2 one-page portraits of the characters on the cover to present to your players. Nice touch!
The design of the "Restless Soul" template is elegant, using a subtype of outsider to get around the unbalancing undead immunities and, while giving the restless dead a kind of penalty for PCs that just died, also ensuring that this penalty can be offset. The prose is topnotch, but I'll comment on that later on.
After that, we get 22 new feats, most of them for Restless Souls and one of them to ensure that your PC comes back as a restless dead (Soul Jar).
Examples:
Aura Sight: Lets you determine nature and strength of other creatures
Baleful Gaze: Due to a painful death, you can let your enemies collapse in agony with a glance a limited number of times per day.
Companion of Light: Gives you a soul-light companion. (Spirit Lantern)
Converse with the Dead: Talk to the dead
Fading Form: Lets you blink.
Love and Friendship: Due to the bond with a ward, you and the ward are continuously under "shield other".
Master the Storm: Control the Weather for the right mood.
No Last Rites: Makes you a regenerating badass.
Unfinished Task: Gold for Oathbound, lets you ignore debilitating effects in regard to the task once per day.
And so on.
The feats are plain AWESOME. Many of them are so imaginative and cool that my players would create characters based around feats like this as a concept! While some of them seem to be powerful at first, they are neatly balanced by availability due to death, monetary costs and the like.
After that, we get 10 new spells, ranging from level 0 cantrip "Apparent Distraction" (lets you try to hide when enemies are looking) over lvl 4 "Enforced Choke" (choking an enemy to death, great assassin-spell), lvl 7 "Implacable Beast" (summons a creature stronger than you to kill a target; If successful, you are destroyed) to lvl 9 "Virtually Indestructible", granting an item exactly what the spell name says.
All of these spells have in common, that they are to some extent clever, cool and all of them both are balanced and serve a specific need.
Conclusion:
The prose is awesome and, at least for people like me, who are inclined towards the darker subcultures and music-styles of metal and goth, just plain awesome in its cynical tone, making fun of the angsty cliché of "I wanna play kewl 1337 pseudo-undead tormented creatures" while actually utilizing the cool characteristics and tropes associated with just that and making them playable. Furthermore, "Restless Souls" can easily be implemented in just about ANY campaign.
Don't like the implied semi-gothic, cynical tone? All right, why not use the rules for Planescape-like Petitioners?
You know that a book is good, when the template spawns ideas for characters, feats spawn ideas for characters, prose spawns ideas for characters and spells spawn ideas for whole adventures (Implacable Beast, I'm looking at you!) - Plus, the fact that the feat for assured return as a restless souls gives players who have grown attached to their characters an additional option in campaigns that are loathe to use the Raise dead/Resurrection-mechanic of the core-rules.
Plus, I can see e.g. "Love and Friendship" leading to great, tragic, touching scenes in play.
Any Ravenloft-DM should get this NOW. Anybody who remotely likes the idea should get it now. Any DM running a rather dark/gritty campaign should consider checking this out. It tugs at my heart's strings. It's beautiful.
I liked "Ironborn" and "Wyrd" (See my reviews on them), I really did, but the "Restless Souls"-pdf ranks among the best-spent bucks in my 14 years as a DM.
While I don't know about allowing this into a campaign as a blanket option, or letting a player use it without carefully integrating the "race" into the campaign, this is a great tool to use for a campaign.
I don't know what more to say, other than that it seems to be a really balanced, flavorful way to deal with letting a character come back as "not quite dead" and move on with a campaign, and there is plenty of support for the concept in the PDF.
Between the really interesting options this presents you with for a campaign, and the price, it really can't hurt to take a look at this and add it as a potential option for your campaign.
Very good review as always Endzeitgeist. In fact it like a couple of others ones has convinced me to put this in my side cart. I was torn on it, I love the topic but find often people screw the idea up. By your review it sounds like they got it right. Least right from my point of view.
I wanted to thank Endzeitgeist for taking the time to review Restless Souls, 5 out of 5 stars! Snoopy Happy Dance of Joy!
Quote:
I liked "Ironborn" and "Wyrd" (See my reviews on them), I really did, but the "Restless Souls"-pdf ranks among the best-spent bucks in my 14 years as a DM.
Seriously, I've tried to find something, anything NOT to like in this pdf after realizing that I was inclined to like the topic in the first place (unlike "Wyrd", where I did not know what to expect and "Ironborn" where I was skeptical at best), but I just did not find anything. I found no filler-feat, no filler-spell, the artwork is great and player-friendly. Try as I might, I could not bring myself to voice a kind of criticism that would not be totally hare-brained.
For me, "Restless Souls" is just about perfect, I can insert it as is without any modifications and have found no flaw. It's a masterpiece and for $3.75 cheap to boot. My favorite Rite-product so far.
Steve, reading this pdf really made my day. Awesome work!
I found this great supplement as I was looking through the discounted Rite publications. It is absolutely great for an NPC I'd written up using the ghost template. I didn't really like the way the ghost abilities interacted with the PCs, but it was the best I could do for the NPCs story. The Restless Soul template is so much better.
All it needed was a bit of a custom feat, which I've included below.
Ghostly Memories (Restless Soul):
You spent considerable time after your death, anchored through some curse to the material plane as a ghost. Although you don’t recall events from this time, when you assume an incorporeal form memories from your ghostly existence come rushing back. Prerequisites: Incorporeal Form; Character Level 5th.
Benefit: Once per day as a swift action you can use remembrance as a spell-like ability (Caster Level equal to your character level) while assuming incorporeal form. Memories can be recalled beginning within a month after your death up within 24 hours of when you became a restless soul. These memories last until the next time you assume an incorporeal form. Your negative levels do not affect you in reference to this feat.
Special: Each subsequent time you take this feat you gain an additional use per day.
In The Company Of Monsters (PFRPG), contains six evocative player races and racial paragon classes that are sure to bring new and exciting player options to your game. Includes new options for the Gargoyle, Giant, Ironborn (constructs!), Minotaur, Restless Soul (a soul returned from the dead), and Wyrd (half-elf/half ogre mage) races. ($9.99)
