Necromancers of the Northwest's page

Did you know that Necromancers of the Northwest puts out free Pathfinder content Monday through Thursday nearly every week? What's more, did you know that YOU can have a voice in what kinds of content they put out? Right now, NNW is actively looking for your input on our 2018 lineup. So, if there's something you want to see, take a few minutes and fill out our survey here: https://goo.gl/forms/74uGHMIbXnQIs0h92

Thanks for asking! Regarding the 20th-level ability, Knight of Umr-At-Tawil, the wording is correct that it allows the temporal manipulation to be used as a free action even when it's not your turn: this is an upgrade from an immediate action, because characters are limited to 1 immediate action per round (which also counts against their swift action), and this restriction does not apply to free actions (which normally can't be made on others' turns). This ability essentially allows the temporal manipulation ability to be used more than once per round.

That said, upon closer review, I notice that we mistakenly said in the Knight of Umr-At-Tawil class feature that it let you use temporal manipulation as a free action instead of a "swift action" when it should have said instead of an "immediate action." We apologize for any confusion.

Necromancers of the Northwest is currently working on some new corruptions, as well as some other ways of expanding the corruption rules presented in Horror Adventures. They are expected to become available starting in late September/early October.

Thanks for asking! It looks like this was an oversight on our part. The intention is that the bonus on Charisma-based skill checks should apply outside the bloodrage, as well.

As for the portion of the ability that lets you gain a Charisma bonus while bloodraging instead of Strength and Constitution, it exchanges the entire bonus to both ability scores for an equal bonus to just Charisma.

We've submitted an updated file to Paizo with the corrections. We apologize for any confusion or inconvenience.

You do not have traits for the Iron Adventurer Challenge by default, no. You can take the Additional Traits feat from APG, but Ultimate Campaign is not on the list of books you can draw from, so you would not be able to take traits from there, no.

Apologies, that's a mistake on our part when the promotional text for the book was written. The obsessive murderer is a slayer archetype.

Thanks for asking! As a general rule, smaller publishers typically aren't able to match the comparatively low price per page that larger publishers like Paizo and WoTC are, because of a very large difference in the number of sales they can expect for each product. In general, most of the larger Necromancers of the Northwest products (ie., not the Weekly Wonders or Mythic Mastery products, which we put out weekly and are only a few pages each) tend to have a much lower cost per page than many other publishers our size, historically speaking.

One of the main ways that we accomplish this is by using very little art, and, when we do use art, using cheap stock art, which keeps our art costs down. For this book, however, we wanted to try doing things a bit differently, and one of the main changes that we wanted to try out was commissioning art. In addition to the beautiful cover, there are 15 additional pieces of art in the book that were commissioned exclusively for this project, one for each of the fifteen cults.

Art doesn't come cheap, and this was by far the most expensive book for us to make, which is what led to us choosing to experiment with a higher price point. We're still very confident that the book is well worth the cost for the use that you'll get out of it, but we can understand how, if you look at it in terms of cents per page, it may not look appetizing. In that light, I encourage you to check out our Advanced Arcana or A Necromancer's Almanac products, as they definitely offer the lowest cost-per-page of any of our products, and have tons to offer, as well.

How embarrassing! This was, in fact, an error on our part. Since this is part of an ongoing series, the book descriptions use the same format. Apparently we weren't thorough enough in getting rid of all the elves to make room for the halflings. It won't happen again.

Thanks for the review, Oliver! We're glad to hear you liked it.

Since you brought up the references in a couple of feats to "hunches," we thought we'd clarify, in case others had similar issues, that this refers to the use of the Sense Motive skill that allows a character to get a hunch. It's not a class feature or feat, it's just part of the skill. We apologize if the book wasn't clear enough on that point.

Short blades was renamed to light blades. Apparently we failed to update all the instances of it. Please use light blades, instead. We apologize for any confusion.

Marchen der Daemonwulf predates Blood of the Moon, so unfortunately, we weren't able to design it with that book in mind. A skinwalker could certainly take levels in lycaonite, it's compatible in that regard, but the skinwalker's ability to change shape would be a completely different ability from the transformations granted by the Curse of the Beast feat. That said, much of the "meat" of the book comes from the feats, and those were designed to be able to be taken by other forms of werewolves, as well, so as long as your GM is willing to accept that the skinwalker ability is similar enough to having the curse of lycanthropy to count as having the Curse of the Beast feat for the purposes of the other feats in the book, there's still a lot to be gained from the feats.

Luthorne,

Thanks for bringing these things to our attention! We've submitted an updated version of the book, which should be available as soon as the great folks at Paizo have a chance to put it up.

In the meantime, I wanted to take a moment to address your concerns.

In regards to the bonus spell at 9th level, the missing spell is fear.

As far as the giant spider is concerned, while the name of the variant may be "giant black widow," it is still ultimately a Large giant spider. Large is the correct size.

In regards to secrete venom and spider manifestation, you're correct that those are gained at 16th and 20th levels. This oversight has been corrected in the updated version.

The fact that the sorcerer bloodline has two class skills is different from most Paizo bloodlines. In this case, though, we feel both are important. The interaction with Eldritch Heritage is unfortunate, and if you wanted to houserule that you only needed Skill Focus for one of these two feats, that probably wouldn't be unbalancing.

Finally, on the topic of webs effecting larger creatures, this caused a bit of a split on the design team. Some of us feel that that would be cool and flavorful, and certainly shouldn't cause balance issues. Others point out that it stretches believability somewhat, and can alternatively be accomplished by becoming larger yourself (with a polymorph effect of some kind).

Hopefully that helps out!

Volvogg,

Thanks for commenting on the product! Sorry to hear that you didn't like the willow blade. While there are some class features in that archetype besides predefined feat choices, in retrospect, you're right that there do seem to be a lot of those masquerading as class features with that particular archetype. I think part of this has to do with the fact that fighter, as a class, uses bonus feats as a large amount of its class features, but even so, there are better options.

If you were looking for something else to add to the archetype, I would probably suggest something along the following lines:

Battle Grace (Ex): Starting at 3rd level, a willow blade gains a +1 dodge bonus to AC as long as he is wearing light armor or no armor, is carrying no more than a light load. Every four levels thereafter (7th, 11th, 15th, and 19th), this bonus increases by +1 (to a maximum of +5 at 19th level).

This ability replaces armor training and armor mastery.

As far as evasion goes, it probably wouldn't be too game-breaking to trade evasion for one of the bonus feats granted by the archetype, but I'd be wary about improved evasion. Were I to add it to the archetype, I would probably do so in place of the bonus feat at 12th level.

Hope that helps!

The update has been made, and should be available to you. We apologize for any inconvenience.

There appears to have been an error with the tables for tarot character creation. Thank you for bringing this to our attention! We will have an updated version with the complete tables available as soon as possible, likely sometime this weekend.

There seems to have been some issues with the final pricing of the gemstaves. While the existing prices should probably stay as-is, for any future gemstaves that you wanted to create, we would recommend the following formula for calculating their market price:

Price of the included spellgem + (25 x caster level x spell level) for each spell that the staff can cast.

I know it's been a while, but anyone who's still interested in seeing a more heavenly sort of heritage might want to check out Mythic Mastery: Angelic Heritage.

We're glad to hear that you liked it! Thanks for taking the time to say so.

You'll hopefully be happy to hear that we're currently working on another mythic heritage right this minute, the draconic heritage, which we expect to have available some time in March.

In general, we try to avoid directly responding to reviews, because we feel it generally comes off as unprofessional. In this particular case, there's not much to say because the only specific issue that was really brought up was the length of the product.

We do try to make the length of the product clear on the online retail sites that have a place for that information, and in the case of smaller products like this one, we always list a page count that reflects actual content, not the OGL, covers, and so on.

For those looking for an alternative opinion of the product's quality, we would recommend checking out this other review which has a few more specifics.

The existence of Way of the Wicked was definitely something that helped make the decision to write the book.

Bear in mind that the book does not directly relate to anything that happens in Way of the Wicked, and the individual archetypes and class options weren't designed with Way of the Wicked specifically in mind.

But yes, we think that groups who are about to start up Way of the Wicked could do a lot worse than take a look over Insidious Intentions.

For those who are interested, we've put together a free sample covering the flavor end of the book, which provides an overview of the main regions we'll be focusing on, as well as a look at how we envision the elemental plane of fire. You can download it from our website, here.

We are currently working on putting together a sample that will give a peek at the book's "crunch" content as well, which should be available in a few days.

We're currently working on putting together a document that gives a general overview of the four main regions of the plane that we intend to focus on. We're not sure yet whether or not we'll be able to provide a sample of the mechanical content before the end of the Kickstarter, but anyone who wants to get a good idea of what it will look like may want to take a look at Liber Vampyr, a free book that we recently re-released which takes a very similar approach on the subject of vampires. You can find it here.

Great question! At the moment, when it comes to mechanical support for player characters, the book is largely limited to the four "native" races that are featured prominently: azer, fire elementals, efreeti, and salamanders. That said, there are plans for providing support for players of other races and classes, and I can confirm that several groups of archetypes for exactly that purpose are already penciled in place in stretch goals, should the campaign reach that point. As for whether Sha'ir will specifically be included in those archetypes, I can't say for sure, but I would be very surprised if you didn't see something similar, even if it may not be of the same exact name.

For those of you who may not have heard, Necromancers of the Northwest is currently running a Kickstarter campaign for an upcoming book: The Traveler's Guide to the Elemental Plane of Fire, to allow us to commission high-quality professional art for the book. Any fans of Planescape or other extraplanar adventures will want to take a close look, as our goal with this project is to bring some much-needed love and attention to the other planes of existence.

I won't bore you with all the nitty-gritty details, but, as usual for a Kickstarter, the better the campaign goes, the more impressive the finished book will be. If you're interested, take a look for yourself.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. We've updated the files for the book, and the new version should be available as soon as it gets approved by the Paizo staff. In the meantime, the short answer is that the ranger still selects favored terrains as normal, he just doesn't gain any benefits from doing so other than for his camouflage and hide in plain sight class features.

As is our wont, we celebrated the release of this book with a series of related articles, including a prestige class designed for the wisdom-inclined, several feats pertaining to the more obscure Knowledge skills, to make them more appealing, a handful of magic items fit for a sage, and, of course, a selection of sagely spells, which anyone considering buying this book may be interested in perusing, as they're 100% free.

For those of you who are curious and would like a bit of a sample, be sure to check out this article on www.necromancers-online.com, which shows off one of the ten unique bloodlines in this book, and gives a good idea of how these bloodlines are different from what you're used to.

Also, be sure to check our website for more additional, supplementary content relating to these bloodlines.

For anyone thinking about buying this product, you might want to be aware that as a result of a public challenge, Necromancers of the Northwest devoted a series of articles to expanding on Sutra Magic, which may be useful to you.

Included are archetypes that make sutra magic useful to a wider variety of classes, a number of utilitarian feats that expand on how sutras can be used, a special type of scroll designed with the classless sutra magic approach in mind, and three brand new flavorful sutras.

Well, it took a while, but we've finally gotten around to getting making good on our promise from two months ago, with an entire week's worth of article's devoted to expanding on a product from another company.

We wound up choosing Rite Publishing's Sutra Magic book as our product of choice, and over the course of the next week there will be new sutra-related archetypes, feats, magic items, and even some new sutras, all available for free, at www.necromancers-online.com.

The first article, which focuses on providing several archetypes designed to make sutra magic a little more widely appealing, can be found here.

The sutra magic book itself can be found on this very website, here.

This is a stirring statement, a grand vision, and an inspiring challenge. I can't speak for other publishers, but as the head of design for Necromancers of the Northwest (www.necromancers-online.com), I've toyed with the idea of using content from other publishers, and always came to the same conclusion: I don't want to have someone buy a book that we make, and then find out that they need to buy someone else's book in order to fully use it, which is why we have tried to avoid that sort of thing (nothing would make me happier than if someone used our OGL content, but, as of yet, that has not come up).

That said, after seeing this post, and sitting down to politely point out this potential issue, I couldn't help but point out to myself that, at Necromancers of the Northwest, at least, we also produce free content on a regular basis, which neatly sidesteps this issue (it also occurs to me that I suppose you could just reprint the relevant material, assuming you only needed to reference a small section of it). So, I hereby take up your challenge. We produce our articles a ways in advance, so I can't promise it will be soon, but it will be happening.