As has been mentioned below, there are 30 magic items with a gothic or horror inspired feel. All of the items are good, the vast majority are falvourful as hell and will fit well with the gothic adventure path this is designed to support.
However, as the title implies, there is one thing that lets it down from a 5 star review and that is that hardly any of the magic items seem to occupy slots. Masks, crowns, helmets, gloves, apparently all of these float aorund like ioun stones. Given the standard of design for the product, and the standard expected given the creative talent involved, this is severely disappointing on an otherwise excellent product.
Facts:
The PDF is 36 pages long.
This consists of Adverts (2 pages), cover (1 page), Title page (1 page), Introductory story and introcudtion (1 page), OGL (1 page) and 30 pages of content.
The content consists of a new class (Divine Channeller, 3 pages) and advice on how to use these with existing chanelers such as Clerics (1 page), 8 new feats lreating to channel energy (2 pages) and the remaining 24 pages are a new mechanic combining domains and channel energy for using channel energy for new effects.
Opinion:
This is an awesome idea. It makes channel energy mroe than just heal/harm and gives a lot of diversity to a central Cleric feature making them more customisable.
The presentation is clear, the effects do not seem over-powered (although I haven't had a chance to play with them yet) and there is a lot of variety within each domain.
The Divine Channeller itself is a cometent class, but I have some problems with it, mostly with the inconsistent progression of the Channel Energy. Also , for a class ostensibly devoted to Channel, it doesn't actually end up with much more powerful channels than a Cleric (although you will end up with a lot more channels). This might have been better as a Cleric variant rather than a whole new class.
I'd like to give it 4.5 stars as the flaws aren't that major, but sadly that's not possible.
This pdf coonsists of 10 pages. 2/3 of the first page is the cover and one page is for the OGL.
The Time Thief is a skill-based character with medium BAB progression, light armour and 6 skill points. As you might expect, her skill list overlaps to a large extent with the Rogue's.
The Time Thief's abilities stem from an ability to borrow time from elsewhere rather than travel through time. This enables the Time Thief to redo actions, take move actions as if they were swift actions, take twenty on skills without a time penalty and, at high levels, age opponents or 'cast' time stop.
Like a Rogue, the Time Thief gets a talent at every even level to customise the character. These can be used to take thigns like trapfinding, allowing them to serve as a rare rogue replacement in this area, or to improve their time manipulaiton abilities. The capstone ability is immunity to aging effects, which is awesomely flavourful but will not be of much utility in most games.
As with all Genius Guides, it includes a one page section on incorporating the Time Thief into an existing campaign, which is always helpful.
This gets 5 stars as I can't think of a way it could be imporved within the confines of the product. That said, if Super Genoius decide to expand on the idea with a full fledged chronomancer I won't be too upset.
This is, in my not humble at all opinion, the best product Super Genius have put out. The rest are merely awesome.
This product introduces the concept of Archetypes to the game. An Archetype is an ability package that can be traded for antoher Archetype. This PDF includes arhcetypes for all 11 core classes and introduces 5 new Archery focused Archetypes to get your Robin hood on with. It also features Archetypes for every Super Genius class published to date, which is another great thing about it.
The 5 Archer Archetypes introduced are:
Archer Alchemist: The trick arrow specialist, along with some trick arrows. Clearly inspired by some four colour archers (although no Boxing Glove Arrow. For shame ;-) )
Sharpshooter: Trades in multiple attacks for damage bonuses and making ranged combat manoeuvres.
Spellbow: Archer who doesn't need a bow. Can fire ammunition at terrific velocities.
Tempest: The anti-Sharpshooter. All about putting up a hail of arrows.
Zen Archer: Shooting around corners, against opponents you can't see and other Wuxia tricks.
Even if you don't want to be Robin Hood (and really who doesn't?) this product is well worth buying for the Archetypes. If you like customising your characters, you really need to buy this. Just swapping around the Archetypes from the base classes gives you well over 100 new options to play with.
The game plays well, is immensely popular in my boardgames club, and allows a wide variety of tactics to be successful.
The advisor mechanism is a unique idea and works well, while the catch-up mechanisms for the player with the lowest number of buildings ensures that no one is completely left behind.
The only thing I could say as a complaint is that bad dice rolls will really hurt you, especially later in the game, which has been mentioned to me several times.
