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I have loved the bard class since its crazy inception in D&D 1E. Skills, fighting prowess, magic: they've always been a little bit of everything. They've evolved on their way to Pathfinder, losing their druidic roots a bit and coming into their own.

This title for Pathfinder 1E clocks in at 35 pages of goodness (does not count stardard boilerplate, table of contents, etc.). It begins with the overview of the legendary bard class. Much of it is the same chassis as the 1E bard. But a few additions form the foundation of a greater bard.

First, their spellcasting transitions into an arcanist-type casting: they prepare a certain number of spells each day but mix and match them against their spell slots. I will note that unlike a wizard, the bard has no spellbook though he can learn every spell on his list if he desires. Bards also gain bardic fame, an increasing bonus over a larger and larger area to Diplomacy and Intimidate. Perhaps the most telling addition though are schools. Schools give a bard even greater flexibility than before. At 3rd level and every 4 levels after, the bard may pick a school and gain an ability. Bonus combat feats, sneak attack, bonus spells known, and other options can be taken over the bard's career to give them something of a focus. Are you more interested in fighting and swashbuckling? School of the blade gives you combat feats. You the party face and skill master? School of the socialite gives a selection of vigilante talents while the school of the expert gives Skill Focus. Taken together, the bard goes from flexible to more flexible in no time.

The most important change, however, are performances. Inspirations are split off, giving you two separate sets of abilities. A bard over their career can pick up a variety of performances, from old standby dirge of doom to the means to divine the future to calling down lightning. There are plenty of new options here to keep bards busy for years. On the other side, inspirations include friends like inspire courage and new friends that can grant allies DR and energy resistance, help casters, or just be heroic.

Did I mention flexibility? There are new favored class options for all races, boosting the power of inspirations (who doesn't love more inspire courage?), to rounds of performance. Then each bardic class ability has alternates you can pick and choose. Some have been seen before for archetypes, but all of them are fairly solid if sometimes boring, such as changes to the skills affected by loremaster.

New archetypes come with all this. Two of note are the warrior poet, who forgoes all spellcasting to gain improved combat prowess, and my personal favorite, the scholar of legends. The scholar drops down to 1/2 BAB and d6 hit dice in exchange for full nine-level casting. Remember that flexibility? The scholar gets one of two paths: arcana or nature. If arcana is chosen, you're now an Intelligence-based caster complete with new spells for levels 7-9. If nature, you move over to use the druid spell list instead complete with Wisdom-based casting.

Just for giggles, there are a few new feats to let your performances and inspirations work on creatures not affected by mind-affecting abilities, let you change which ability score affects your magic, and so on. A couple new magic items and a prestige class appear as well, just to round things out.

Overall, there were few problems with the writing and editing of the book (places where the pdf hyperlinks were not visible, which are still important to some; I have the actual book as well as the pdf). The ideas are sound: make the bard even more flexible without being overpowered. If you want to build that old-school bard, you can do it. You want a bard from D&D 2E, you might manage that too (school of the mage will help here). Whichever part of the bard class you love most, there's something for you here. I'd love to convert my arcane duelst using this book, as well as several of my other old bard characters. The dings from the editing notwithstanding, this book is excellent all-around...just like bards.

Our friendly neighborhood reviewer Mr. E.Z. Geist has already reviewed this book two years ago. I just received it for Christmas as a lucky gift and am taking the advice of the gift-giver to review this. So here's my commentary:

The Martial Arts Guidebook is a true pleasure to read. Too often, books come out that are strongly focused on the crunch of their ideas. More feats, more archetypes, more numbers...these are good things, to be sure, but not the totality of the game. Some books go the other way: tons of evocative ideas and description, and the only numbers to be had are things like "the city's population is 53,000 people, rising to nearly double that during trading season" or sucklike. It's too rare to find a book that gives the reader both well-detailed locations/people as well as solidly-designed new gaming material.

This book delivers on both, in spades.

Each school is a unique creation, with its own background and story. The martial arts styles feel and look very different in the mind's eye as you read about each one. It's been a few years since this book premiered and it still fills an important, relevant niche in gameplay. With new classes coming along from time to time, integrating older material into the game can be difficult sometimes. But the Martial Arts Guidebook gives multiple different paths to bringing the material to the game and to life.

I've never had the opportunity to play in a game centered around martial artists (something I'd love to try!), but if I did, this book would be one of two that I would absolutely want to integrate into my campaign of all third-party products. I cannot recommend it strongly enough as a tool for making combat more interesting while still adding to the campaign world you set your games within.

A nice short read, introducing an oracle mystery that matches the flavor of the season. If the others in this group are this good, snap them up. Flavor is excellent, abilities are varied from some old standby abilities to some new ways to do things. No words wasted here, just the minimum needed to create an interesting character.

The newest entry into the New Paths line gives us something often requested of Pathfinder: the d6 hd, 1/2 BAB divine spellcaster. The priest comes with the cleric's spell list, 4 skill points/level base, and the sorcerer hd, BAB, and weaponry. The priest's casting abilities are similar to the arcanist. Add a few bonus feats and channel energy to this. What we get to help the priest are divine blessings usable a limited number of times per day. They vary from boosts to spellcraft DC to AC boosts.

These divine gifts are what make or break the priest class. Swift actions for the most part, they provide the priest with a variety of buffing options for himself or others. Several attempts have been made to produce a viable spellcaster with this chassis, but none have gone this route. The divine gifts provide the priest with something to do in battle besides cast spells. The clerical spell list is often reactive, not proactive, the main problem with previous attempts to reproduced the 3.5 cloistered cleric. Divine gifts are a simple and effective tool to give players an extra, useful option in combat. While some of the gifts might need a bit of work and/or playtesting (e.g. Anointed, which boosts spell save DCs by the Wisdom modifier, comes to mind), they leave a lot of room for expansion in future products.

I still personally think that the d6 divine caster requires revamping the spell list. But the priest presented here is a very viable, well-crafted work of art. I highly recommend picking up this pdf and hope in the future there is an expansion of the divine gifts, or perhaps even archetypes to continue to flesh out this class.

Bear with me as this is my first review ever.

The Genius Guide to the Talented Bard is the newest in the line of Talented Products. Like its predecessors, the general format is to outline the basic chassis of the bard (hd, saves, skill points, BAB, class skills) before moving on to class abilities. These come in three categories. First is bardic performance. This operates much as the CRB, but you only start with one ability here: distraction.

Next are the edges and talents. These are similar to those in the other books in this series. Edges are more powerful, but rarer, while talents are much more plentiful and varied. With these tools it is possible to build the core bard or the various bard archetypes with minimal trouble, if you like those. But if you have a hankering to do some judicious alteration to a given bard, you now have options you lacked before. Maybe your arcane duelist just wasn't cutting it the way you wanted in combat. Now, you might take the Weapon Training talent and get a few more bonuses. Your bard isn't quite sneaky enough? Borrow from the rogue's list of talents. You want to become the great god of skills? We've got talents to boost all sorts of skills, all working like Bardic Knowledge. Advaned talents are also a bit stronger, and finally at 20th level you get a Grand Talent. Some of these I enjoyed immensely, like the Mage Grand Talent: you can now pick up a couple 7th level spells. Create lesser demiplane and limited wish anyone?

Overall, the variety of options is appealing. I read through the pdf and quickly sketched out what I would do to rebuild a magician and found myself with plenty of edges and talents to do the job. That brings me to my one criticism: quite a few advanced talents have level prerequisites that may make it hard for some bards to work as desired. The prereqs for lesser talents aren't too bad, but many advanced talents require the bard to be 14th or higher...and you open up advanced talents at 10th. I haven't tried sketching out a more combat-intensive bard yet to see how this might pan out, nor a traditional core bard, but it bears consideration if you routinely play to higher levels.

Formatting was excellent. The gray parchment-like pages were a pleasure to read, and the interior artwork was quite good (the masked redhead in particular). If I could, I'd give this 4 1/2 stars, but I was taught to round my fractions down. If an expansion comes out with more edges and talents, it cannot be too soon, as this work, with as many talents as there are, the bard class can certainly enjoy a few more. Excellent work overall!