Vance Blackwinter's page

I'll update this post as I work through more of this, but at first blush my opinion is this:

The content is interesting, the class fusions look really cool. I'll playtest a few of them today and keep updating here, but....honestly, the actual writing makes me cringe constantly. There are typos all over the place, which is alright since this isn't the final publication, but the phrasing...sometimes it's fine, sometimes it feels kind of clunky....and somtimes it reads more like someone wrote it in German and put it through Google Translate, and then just pasted it in. For example:

Page 5, the description of the Bloodrager. copied directly "...where the potency of strange ancestral unions and deeds lashes out with supernatural furry with devastating ends. And while in these states, they can as near-instinct cast some arcane spells."

Problem 1: Supernatural furry? That made me chuckle, it's an amusing typo...but really.

Problem 2: The phrasing in that second sentence is horrid. Starting a sentence with "and" is incorrect, "they can as near-instinct cast some arcane spells" really reads more like amateur homebrew on a fan-site than a professional publication. And then, "devastating ends"? "Devastating results", please!

As I said, I'll update this page with my opinions and analyses of the various classes and whatnot as I find the time to test them.

I remember in 3.5 there were a matched pair of rings, one for the caster and one for his buddy. The buddy wearing it was impervious to the caster's spells.

Mostly, as you might imagine, I saw these used to avoid blasting the party fighter into smithereens while clearing the area around him. However, I'm designing a rather tough encounter in which the party faces off against a pair of Druid brothers, one a caster with the Animal domain and one is a heavily melee-focused wild-shaper, both Saurian Shaman archetype. The caster opens up the fight by covering basically the entire relevant area in a highly buffed (spell focus, greater S.F., Heightened) Entangle. Even with Woodland Stride, the melee druid has about a 40% chance to not get Entangled every bloody round.

The melee dude has Slippers of Feather Step, so he doesn't need to worry about the difficult terrain bit. However, I want to be able to avoid having him entangled every round. I couldn't find any feats allowing the caster to selectively not entangle his buddy, and I can't for the life of me find these rings. This is pretty much the final tweak to this encounter before I roll it out. Any suggestions? (These druids are both level 9)