Forgotten Heroes: Scythe and Shroud (4E) PDF

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Forgotten Heroes: Scythe and Shroud introduces death as a new power source for Fourth Edition characters. All of the four new character classes presented in this book draw upon the death power source: the assassin, deathwarden, necromancer, and spiritsworn may now be played in 4E games!

  • The assassin is a dedicated killer that relentlessly stalks his victim, waiting in the shadows for just the right moment to launch a deadly assault.
  • The deathwarden is a sentinel on the boundary between life and death who uses his shield to make sure that, when trouble arrives, his friends and enemies each wind up on the right side of that boundary.
  • The necromancer is a student of death and undeath who is at home with the grimmest tokens of mortality. His dark arts give him command of the entropic forces that blossom when death triumphs over life, as well as the negative energies that allow the dead to rise again and wreak vengeance on the living
  • The spiritsworn is an armored knight who fights on behalf of those who are no longer among the living. His relationship to the souls of the departed allows him to draw upon the spirits to aid his cause.

Rules Set: 4E (GSL)
Writers: Tavis Allison, Eytan Bernstein, Brian Cortijo, Greg Tit
Editor and Developer: Aeryn "Blackdirge" Rudel
Cover Artist: Steve Ellis
Graphic Design and Art Direction: Erik Nowak
112 pages

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Forgotten Heroes: Scythe and Shroud Review

4/5

With the Forgotten Heroes line of products from Goodman Games, the good stuff just keeps on coming. While in their last installment they beat WotC to the punch with their renditions of a couple of essential, missing core classes, this time they bring a few yet-undeveloped classes that are a bit less likely to appear soon as core classes, but are no less desirable as additions to any campaign… especially one centered around the themes of death, mortality, the afterlife, or undeath!

Forgotten Heroes: Scythe and Shroud bring us the first 4E incarnations of four classes whose focus are death and undeath: the Assassin (classic!... glad to see it here!), the Deathwarden, the Necromancer (another classic!... right on!), and the Spiritsworn. The theme common to these classes being death, authors Allison, Bernstein, Cortijo and Tito cleverly work that into a new source of power ripe with new game mechanics, hooks and story arcs that are sure to engage the imagination of game masters and players.

But as with literally every Goodman Games product, the packed-in punch goes beyond just what you’d expect. Aside from a description of classes, builds, and powers, you get some serious crunch for your buck! The new stuff includes: 2 new epic destinies, 37 new feats from all tiers, about 30 new items and rituals (including new implements for the classes presented, and more than a handful of new poisons to make your Assassin all the more deadly!), and some great content with inspiration for your campaign. There are seeds for adventure, conflicts between the classes, the historical rise and development of the classes, broad suggestions for campaign arcs, and appendices to help you generate NPCs on the fly.

The painstaking efforts the writing team went to in Forgotten Heroes: Scythe and Shroud to provide new concepts and inspiration for your game alone are worth the price of the book. The bulk of it, of course, is going to be the game material you need to run characters of these classes, and the class features, powers, paragon paths and other details are well-developed and balanced relative to other official WotC offerings. These classes will fit right in alongside those from the PHB.

Maybe the Assassin’s “Death Study Points” are a minor hiccup or distraction in an otherwise very-well-developed bundle of game mechanics. As admitted by the authors in the textual description of this Assassin class feature, “the rules for spending and possessing study points can create some interesting situations…” That is to say, this particular mechanic is a bit cumbersome, but it does make sense once you get a handle on it. A side bar with examples of its usage helps to more clearly illustrate how it works, so you’ll no doubt get it. Just be ready to put a bit of time and effort in to the chore of tracking those Death Study Points.

The final verdict? Go get it. Death: great concept for power source, campaign story arc, and the seed of conflict between characters. The classes: interesting, well-developed, and fun to play. The extras: Goodman always delivers. You’re sure to enjoy!


Contributor

This book was a fun one to work on, especially when the playtest characters completely embarrassed the Tarrasque. If you decide to pick it up, I hope you enjoy!

[Paizo/Vic: The fourth author's name should be "Greg Tito."]

Paizo Employee Director of Brand Strategy

Brian Cortijo wrote:
[Paizo/Vic: The fourth author's name should be "Greg Tito."]

Knowing Greg, I think he'd actually prefer it kept the way it is.

Dark Archive

sweet. been waiting for this.


At this point I just want to know who to blame for the quote on the Mythic Hurler (Deathwarden Paragon Path).

Silver Crusade

I have enjoyed Greg Tit's work in the past, so I'm considering picking this up to see if there's anything I can adapt. Always looking for cool material to mine.

The spirit-sworn sounds like it would mesh nicely with some stuff in my current campaign.


I haven't looked at this one yet, but I do like the feel of coming up with established fantasy archetypes and basing a class off of that rather than taking a role, trying to come up with a new way to fulfill that role, and fill in the details later, which honestly feels like how some of the WOTC classes seem to come about.

Plus the Goodman Barbarian from the previous book actually feels more like the Conan-esque version of the archetype, which I like.

I'm almost tempted to pick this up even though I'm not currently in the 4E game I was playing in.

Grand Lodge

Pathfinder Adventure Path, Rulebook Subscriber
Brian Cortijo wrote:
This book was a fun one to work on, especially when the playtest characters completely embarrassed the Tarrasque. If you decide to pick it up, I hope you enjoy!

That isn't a good thing, the Tarrasque is supposed to be tough, if he was embarrassed by the play test characters, they were either over level, or over powered, and if they are over powered, as a DM I'm not going to let this book into my campaign.

Cool sounding flavour, check, but don't make 3rd party juiced splat book classes please.

I'm curious if the new WOTC licence would have allowed you to make Death Warden and Necromancer as class variants instead of classes unto themselves (variants of the Warlord (?) and the Wizard (or Sorc)) much like the * Powers books add variants to the classes.

Paizo Employee Director of Brand Strategy

Galnörag wrote:

That isn't a good thing, the Tarrasque is supposed to be tough, if he was embarrassed by the play test characters, they were either over level, or over powered, and if they are over powered, as a DM I'm not going to let this book into my campaign.

Cool sounding flavour, check, but don't make 3rd party juiced splat book classes please.

Many of WotC's own splat books add a huge power creep. I witnessed a playtest in which they used only the core and martial power books and taken on a solo lvl30 red dragon with a single ranger. So the assumption that it's only 3PPs who are adding power to the game is incorrect.


Galnörag wrote:
Brian Cortijo wrote:
This book was a fun one to work on, especially when the playtest characters completely embarrassed the Tarrasque. If you decide to pick it up, I hope you enjoy!

That isn't a good thing, the Tarrasque is supposed to be tough, if he was embarrassed by the play test characters, they were either over level, or over powered, and if they are over powered, as a DM I'm not going to let this book into my campaign.

Cool sounding flavour, check, but don't make 3rd party juiced splat book classes please.

I would note that it seems that just sometimes the players have abilities that just counter a monsters abilities. A monster may rely heavily on being able to move in and out of combat, but is heavily hampered when facing a single fighter.

I see luck and how PC abilities interact with monster powers as having a greater impact on how a combat goes than a set of classes being a bit more powerful than the norm. Additionally I would suggest that if one merely allows the Player's Handbook 2 in a game, it affects balance more than most third party products.

Contributor

Galnörag wrote:
Brian Cortijo wrote:
This book was a fun one to work on, especially when the playtest characters completely embarrassed the Tarrasque. If you decide to pick it up, I hope you enjoy!
That isn't a good thing, the Tarrasque is supposed to be tough, if he was embarrassed by the play test characters, they were either over level, or over powered, and if they are over powered, as a DM I'm not going to let this book into my campaign.
Actually, the problem in this case was the Tarrasque itself (which, according to most accounts, is not the threat it ought to be), not the classes. We tested this book at multiple levels against core parties of the same roles and levels, and found the results--in terms of damage, survival, and playability--to be roughly equal. In this case, it's the target monster that was the issue, not the characters we used against it. Other monsters and encounter groups provided significantly more challenge during the playtest sessiosn.
Quote:
Cool sounding flavour, check, but don't make 3rd party juiced splat book classes please.

Any designer, if worth the name, attemps to make classes that are flavorful and balanced. A bland, balanced class is no fun to write, and an overpowered, flavorful class is no fun to play.

This book isn't 'juiced,' by any stretch, but you're entitled to check the preview on the Goodman Games site and ddecide for yourself.

Quote:
I'm curious if the new WOTC licence would have allowed you to make Death Warden and Necromancer as class variants instead of classes unto themselves (variants of the Warlord (?) and the Wizard (or Sorc)) much like the * Powers books add variants to the classes.

The deathwarden is very different from the warlord--enough so that making it a variant of the warlord wouldn't have worked (in fact, I know Tavis specifically worked on making it a not-warlord). The necromancer might have been workable as a wizard build, but that's not how the class was designed.

I'm quite certain, however, that variant builds and powersets for WotC classes would be permissible under the current license. I don't think that all concepts work as variants, though.

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