Cyrad's page

This book exceeded my expectations. Not only are the new classes great, but also the book had many fun surprises. The mechanics are well implemented for many of the odd options, such as gunblades and the new automaton ancestry. Usually niche/gimmick options like this are clunky in games, but Guns and Gears implements them extremely well.

My biggest nitpick is that some of the archetypes miss the mark. The spellshot class archetype is disappointing as it feels like it should have been a gunslinger way. Beastguns are wicked cool, but there's so few of them in the book that it would be difficult for any player to build a character around them.

I listened to the audio book on Audible as my first Pathfinder Tales listen.

At first, the novel rubbed me the wrong way. The plot takes a long time to really get going, and the author begins the book by throwing tons of exposition, names, and terms at you. This feels like it accomplishes nothing other than the author trying to show off their lore knowledge (even though they get a few details wrong). Someone unfamiliar with the setting would feel lost or confused. For someone familiar with the setting, it feels pointless and patronizing.

However, the longer the book goes, the more interesting it gets. Most of the characters are quite likeable, and I grew to enjoy the main duo.

However, one of the main characters is absolutely insufferable with few admirable qualities and don't really serve much purpose in the story. The book also makes a really massive revelation that makes absolutely no sense and does nothing but make the main character feel more like a Mary Sue.

Despite these misgivings, I enjoyed Lord of Runes.

The premise of this adventure interested me as it touches on a subject I'm surprised to not have seen already: the characters getting marooned on a hostile alien planet. A very cool concept that entire movies and video games have been based on.

Unfortunately, the scenario ended up being an example of how NOT to design and run a survival adventure. It's ultimately just a bland adventure with only one encounter that's actually challenging or interesting.

The premise of this scenario presents an interesting situation that would make for a highly memorable adventure for Starfinder. Unfortunately, it's marred by shockingly poor execution.

It's not just simply hard. At best, the scenario is a boring slog with a single, dreadfully long combat encounter that puts PCs in an unfair situation and takes away all elements that could make it fun.

The scenario presents an intriguing mystery in a series of encounters involving the protection of a wagon. While some of the encounters are creative, the interesting premise is marred by:

1) Lack of variety of encounters. The entire scenario is just a linear sequence of combats that gets tiring very quickly.

2) The mystery neither develops nor provides ways for PCs to interact with it. Even characters with special abilities relevant to the mystery and the encounters will find their expertise completely useless as the scenario does nothing to let such characters use their background and skills to solve the mystery.

3) The plot is nonexistent with the "answer" coming out of nowhere because of points #1 and #2 above.

4) The final encounter is a boring, unfair slog. One of the worst I've seen in society.

A huge disappointment.

This would be a middling adventure if not for the fact you're shoehorned into playing poorly designed pregens against threats that directly counter your character's main contribution to fight. Most of the encounters have enemies that leave half the party useless. This results in encounters that take forever to resolve. I literally fell asleep at the table because it took 10 minutes for my turn to come up only for me to just Step into flanking and end my turn since my character had no chance to hurt any enemies. The plot is also fairly uninteresting and disjointed.

An interesting adventure with decent lore and combat encounters involving situations and creatures with unusual tactics. My only complaint is that it's very easy for players to miss important details.

Look forward to see more from RPG Superstar Monica Marlowe!

Debt to the Quah has an interesting premise where your fellow Pathfinder has done the stereotypical Pathfinder action of raiding a tomb that the local tribes considered sacred. It's a fun deconstruction of the society that every character will probably have a different reaction to. The scenario is split into two parts. The first section requires the PCs to convince a council of Shoanti to let them fix the rogue Pathfinder's mistakes. This uses an abridged version of the influence rules from Ultimate Intrigue (thankfully provided at the end of the scenario). If you played/ran Solistice Scar, then you know what to expect here. The second part of the scenario involves a dungeoncrawl where the PCs have to restore (instead of plunder) a tomb.

The scenario's greatest strength lies with variety and quality of encounters. There are social encounters. There are puzzles. There are traps. There is combat with unique monsters possessing rather interesting special abilities. The players particularly enjoyed the last fight despite it becoming a slog for a 4-man party. The scenario also has the best designed haunts I've ever seen in a module. Other authors should take note from this scenario on how to write fun and interesting haunts, instead of haunts that are merely hazards that cannot be interacted with unless you're a cleric or a psychic class.

Unfortunately, the scenario is not without its flaws. I encountered the following issues when running this scenario.

Otherwise, this is a pretty solid adventure. I actually hope to see more adventures about this rogue Pathfinder.

One of the genius things about Starfinder is that it offers systems that make it easy and fun for Game Masters to create customized creatures. Alien Archive gave us the graft system similar (but infinitely simpler) to Pathfinder's template system that allowed the GM to create unique creatures by attaching simple flavorful bundles of abilities to generic stat blocks. Alien Archive 2 continues this by giving us much needed ways to create any animal creature we need using the Herd Animal and Predator Animal creatures and the environment grafts.

Alien Archive 2 also gives many awesome creatures to build stories around, including a Motherbrain-like ooze that controls starships, powerful guardian fey born from a dying planet, the adorable squox (with a feat to have one as a companion) and old favorites such as metallic dragons and Colors out of Space. We also got races, including aasimar and tieflings (now combined into a single race with different statistics). While we don't have catfolk, we do get new races, including bear people, cat people, and a really neat race of space wolf people that can give Resolve Points to allies. I did wish we got kitsune, especially when this book also (finally) introduces polymorph rules.

Speaking of polymorph rules, they were the reason I picked up the volume as shapeshifting is one of my favorite tropes in fantasy and science fiction. The volume did not disappoint. At a glance, the polymorph rules seem complicated, but they're quite easy to understand and remember. The rules are well thought out and give both GMs and players a sense of customization and agency that Pathfinder, 5th Edition D&D, and even the current iteration of Pathfinder Playtest failed to capture. While some may get turned off by the rules, I really appreciate the amount of work that went into them. Especially polymorphing could have easily been glossed over.

Polymorphing gives you a set of rules to create a form, allowing you to select a creature type and abilities. When you learn the polymorph spell (level 1-6 for both mystics and technomancers), you create four forms with limitations based on the spell level. When casting, you select one of the forms to transform your target into.

Baleful polymorph (also a 1-6 spell) works completely different from Pathfinder and instead gives the target cosmetic features, a penalty to many statistics, and possibly changes their size. If cast as a level 2 spell or higher, the penalty gets worse unless they succeed at an additional saving throw each round as the transformation progresses. At 3rd level, the spell becomes permanent if the penalty progresses too far. At 5th level, the spell can transform the target into a helpless critter when the penalty progresses too far. At 6th level, the spell can permanently transform the target into a helpless creature. Overall, I like this. While no longer the classic save-or-die spell, it makes the spell more cinematic. Though, it is a shame you can't change a creature into a new race, such as teaching that ysoki a lesson by turning him into a barathu.

As much as I love the polymorph rules, there are a few issues that hinder the fun. The biggest issue is that a form's natural weapons use a pre-determined attack bonus based on your level that completely ignores your base attack bonus, ability scores, and any buffs. This bonus equals to 1.5 times your level with a maximum equal to 3 times the spell level. While the weapon does scale in damage, the math means that the natural weapon's attack bonus will always be significantly lower than your normal attack bonus, making the natural weapon essentially useless. However, there seems to be an intentional loophole around this. The polymorph spell allows you to select a limited number of racial traits, which can be any trait from a player race that doesn't involve equipment. You can select one of the many natural weapon racial traits (such as the Vesk's). The best part is that you don't necessarily have to make the form look the race to gain their trait. Go nuts turning yourself into the ultimate chimera!

However, I still wish that there was a way to make polymorph last longer. There's currently no way polymorph someone into a form for more than 1 minute per level. You don't even have the option to cast polymorph with a higher duration at the cost of a lower level effect.

Overall, Alien Archive 2 is a great addition to Starfinder. It gives us plenty of fun creatures and the much needed way to create wildlife without having a seperate statblock for every animal in the universe. It introduces or brings back races that will easily attract players. A lot of effort went into the polymorph rules, something needed in a game with magic, science, and gods dedicated to evolution. While the rules feel a tad bloated and a little rough around the edges, it does a great job giving players and GMs a level of agency and creativity not seen in other games. A must have for any GM and most players.

Playing this scenario resulted in one of the most miserable experiences I had in PFS. And because the four-player adjustments felt non-existant, it almost resulted in a TPK twice and someone almost dying in every encounter. The explanation below doesn't reveal anything about the plot but does provide some tactical information about the encounters.

Overall, it was not a fun scenario. The encounters were poorly balanced for a low tier party of four. The roleplaying seemed shockingly minimal for a scenario that's supposed to have plenty of lore behind it. It has a potentially lethal "gotcha" moment. And the final encounter can easily railroad you into an unwinnable situation. The only reason I don't give this 1-star is because I strongly suspected the GM wasn't effectively bringing out the best in the scenario.

The glue holding a peg to its head peeled off when I gently wiggled it out of its correct socket, causing the head to pop off with the peg still lodged in the neck socket. While I could fix it with some superglue, this was very disappointing for such an expensive figure and made me worry about using the head-changing feature.

I purchased a set last Gen Con. After trying to use them, I found them way too clunky to use since you have to pick up all the miniatures to lay down the massive base. On top of that, they have a tendency to tip over, they're not very portable, and they're expensive. The only time they're useful is when the GM has a large flock of flying enemies.

Other times, you're better off using Chessex dice containers or flying miniature standees you can buy off of Amazon.

The miniature looks cool, but it's incredibly hard to paint. Despite being advertised as "ready to paint," paint just bubbles on the surface and looks pretty awful.

Pretty cool character overall. However, it has issues. The face's details are hard to make out. The sword looks too short and has an awkwardly blunt edge. Despite how it's advertised, Bones material is NOT ready to paint. The paint just bubbles on the surface. You will need to prime it.

This book is full of crunchy, interesting options, including options to "cyborg" yourself with elemental matter. Almost all of them are pretty well written and worth considering.

However, I have to remove one star from the lack of kineticist options. The community has a large demand for more kineticist talents. Many elements have a crippling lack of talents at various levels, and people hoped this volume would help solve that. Unfortunately, the book only got two pages of content.

This is definitely the best Iconic Heroes product in the series. Every figure has lots of detail honoring Wayne Reynolds's design of the iconic characters. The medium's scarf is patterned while his cards have been painted to look like they're a fan of cards. The occultist has tons of painted items all over his person. The spiritualist's translucent phantom looks absolutely amazing. And of course, the kineticist has her owlbear plushie Gom Gom.

I was surprised to see there's no PFACG cards with the set, but not a deal breaker. It's among the best pre-painted miniatures I've seen.

Awesome scenario. It gets a little hard to follow, but it had one of the most insane plot twists ever.

A promising premise marred by...

1. Overly pretentious philosophy running on circular logic and self-created contradictions that makes you feel railroaded into agreeing with a belief that makes no sense
2. A quiz encounter where the hours you spent on investigation feel meaningless
3. A pointless combat encounter that easily one-shots 1st level characters, and
4. Terrible map design where maps are drawn diagonally for absolutely no reason with tons of wasted space.

If my GM hadn't soldiered through this like a champ, this would have been miserable. Instead, I just feel neutral with a hint of disappointment.

Mikko Kallio did not disappoint with this awesome multi-table special that really captures the essence of the new season with uniting the factions together to cooperate and help one another. The challenges have a surprising amount of variety, which differs from my experiences with other specials. The challenges were creative and fun!

The scenario debuted at Gen Con with an issue related how boon rewards were granted, but the PFS team has since amended what is otherwise an excellent adventure!

Very cool and striking mini. The cloak has a smooth texture that brings out all the dramatic wrinkles. I love how it doesn't represent any particular monster by name -- it's just called DEATH. Made me want to create a summoner with a psychopomp eidolon that looks like this.

This is the first time I bought a class deck where I liked all three characters. Each one had an interesting play style on top of living up to the game mechanics that make the summoner break the mold. I bought this deck with low expectations and was very pleasantly surprised.

However, I have to give this only four-stars because the deck doesn't come with enough blessings and other basic cards to create a full deck for some of the characters. While I'm not crazy about paying money for common duplicates, class decks are a product series marketed as a stand-alone card pool for your character decks -- which is mandatory for organized play. You can't market a product like this and then force me to borrow components from the base set.

I was disappointed in the class. I love the lore and flavor. The production values are awesome with a beautiful PDF filled with cool illustrations. However, the class just feels really bland. It's basically just a warpriest with a gun. Honestly, I think it would have worked better as an archetype since the class seems to lack unique class features. I'm not a fan of the feats. Most feel too way too strong or have abuse cases. For some reason, the PDF includes a revised version of Gunsmithing that requires you to have to make Craft checks for ammunition.

That being said, it is a solid class that's cleanly written (other than ordering the class features wrong). And as I said, the PDF looks absolutely stunning and the illustrations of cool fantasy guns almost makes the product worth checking out. Though, with all the cool illustrations of gunblades, it does feel disappointing there's no option for gunblade-wielding priest.

I feel rather conflicted. I absolutely love the good parts of Legacy of Dragons. For the bad parts, I absolutely hate to the point of feeling insulted.

Legacy of Dragons has a great premise that deserves a larger book and possesses plenty of awesome options like variant draconic heritages and a feat that lets you get dragon-themed powers without having to be a sorcerer. The new Form of the Dragon spells were something we really needed, and the other spells are really cool.

However, Legacy of Dragons has some content that absolutely infuriates me. The drake companion rules and some of the archetypes are absolutely poorly designed. This isn't just the case of content missing the mark - there's major flaws here that render the archetypes totally worthless and unplayable. There's a fighter archetype that replaces bonus feats at levels the fighter doesn't get any feats. This archetype also gives Arcane Strike, but forgets to indicate the fighter's effective caster level.

The alchemist archetype is also particularly baffling in that I honestly don't see any reason to ever take this archetype. It severely weakens your mutagen without giving you anything in return. It takes away your 2nd level level discovery and gives you a worst version of feral mutagen. It restricts you to using breath weapon bomb for all bombs AND takes away Throw Anything, the class feature vital to an alchemist's damage. All but one ability this archetype gives are literally just worst versions of discoveries you can take as a vanilla alchemist -- except the ability granted by the archetype all come at a hefty cost of other class features for no explicable reason.

I absolutely cringe whenever I see flaws like this, and I don't know why it happens. Does Paizo hire inexperienced freelancers? Do they not have anyone checking for errors like this? Are their deadlines so tight that designers can't QA their work sufficiently? Whatever the reason, it leaves me feeling like Pathfinder RPG products are created by a company that fails to understand how its own game works. This is the main reason I only sparingly buy Player Companions. More often than not, I can get higher quality work from reputable 3rd Party Publishers and get it cheaper.

The real question is: Do I condemn the book for a few pages of terrible work? I don't know. But overall, I do feel positive about the purchase. I honestly wouldn't feel so bad about the bad content if we got a larger volume. With only 32 pages, a few pages of poor quality content can become a massive stain on an otherwise good product.

I expected to get a book that adds some extra crunch and maybe a little fluff to the kitsune. What I didn't expect was a book full of interesting, creative options. The archetypes, feats, and other content utilize rather creative design. Surprisingly, the content actually expands -- not invalidates -- the content of the Advanced Race Guide. A good example involves some interesting archetypes and uses for kitsune star gems, largely considered rather boring in the official Paizo hardcover, but now made interesting in this volume.

If I have one issue with the kitsune compendium, it's that there's surprisingly not a lot of flavor for the race beyond a few pages describing the typical kitsune's personality and physiology.

People long wanted a Pathfinder Player Companion for the kitsune race. If one did get published, it would have a hard time competing against the Kitsune Compendium in terms of quality and clever design.

I had the chance to play this scenario. The encounters are great and allows for really fun roleplaying. However, the story didn't make any sense to me. I never understood why we were doing what we were supposed to do. I never really knew what our objective was other than the vague notion of solving some kind of riddle.