Religion is meant for the masses, not the clerics and the paladins alone. While not everyone can cast divine spells, anyone can live a life dedicated to their god and anyone can pray. But only a few serve their god for centuries in a weapon.
Book of the Faithful: The Worshiping Swords details nine swords, each containing the soul of a faithful follower that chose to serve their god for all time—one sword for each of the nine alignments. The Worshiping Swords gives your players unique weaponry to obtain, use, or destroy. Give your players new challenges and new weaponry.
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This pdf consists of 14 pages, 1 page front cover, 1 page back cover, 1 page credits and OGL and 1 page ad.
The second installment of the Book of the Faithful series contains powerful magical weapons, all infused with the soul of a former believer or trapped within.
The artwork is full color and every one of the nine weapons gets its own picture that makes it hard for the weapon to be confused with any other one. Nice! This should be standard.
The formatting is also good: 1 column text and powers while the other half of a given page is taken up with the image of the weapon.
The main part of the pdf consists of 10 pages, 1 per sword and a small paragraph of designer's notes (that leaves the rest of the page unfortunately painfully blank).
The weapons themselves are powerful and intelligent, ranging from 55K to over 500K in price and thus constituting quite a formidable arsenal in itself and are best-suited for mid-to high-level gaming.
I personally would change the abilities of the swords so that they have to be activated like legacy weapons (without the feats and the penalties), just to hand them out sooner, but that is my preference. I only mention this, because of some very powerful at-will-abilities of some of the blades.
The neutral 220K blade can e.g. create an anti-magic field at will.
The crunch is nice and while I'm too lazy to do the math for every weapon, I didn't get the impression that there was a problem somewhere.
I've got some downsides to report, too:
The fluff is generic, follows the path of "And then the god put the mortal soul in the weapon" and...well. Boring. I know it's part of the product's premise, I just think it could have been executed with more different approaches than those already known. Sorry. As cool as the weapons are, as nice as the abilities are, apart from the Orcus-reference in the CE-weapon, none of the stories really put a smile on my face (The Barrister-sword had potential...) and, if I use one of these weapons, I'm going to have to write my own stories.
Conclusion:
It's a nice little book. Not a glorious book, but not a bad one either. If you're looking for some cool unique weapons for your group or for a recurring villain, you might want to check it out. Just don't expect too much from the stories. The weapons will make you think of enough of your own, so don't let that deter you too much.
I just want to say thank you to Endzeitgeist for his review.
My only comment on the review is on the part about how the product made few references to specific deities. Even after 10 years of of the OGL, few instantly recognizable deities are OGL. You can pretty much count them on one hand. Orcus (thanks to Necromancer Games) is one of those few. None of Paizo's gods are OGL. Same with FR or Eb deities. I could have made up my own deities or pulled from some OGL products that are not instantly recognizable, but then I would have had to define them somewhere within and I felt doing it was beyond the scope of this particular product.
Yeah, I know that the deities-problem in OGL really sucks. I didn't want to say that I wanted more specific references, but rather that I would have enjoyed a more diverse set of circumstances that led to being entrapped in a weapon.
Take the barrister-example, e.g.:
If e.g. the soul in the "Rapier of the Judge" had tried to bring another cleric of the same god (or the god of trickery) down (the other one being guilty of some crime), asked for divine assistance in the investigation and got the sword, but ultimately failed in the trial due to some blunder and had to pay the price for failure and the assistance, the sword would have instantly been more appealing: The barrister disappeared and PCs get the sword when they suddenly realize: The vanished agent of justice is in the sword and asks them to help him start pay of his debt to the god of justice.
Or what about someone, whose soul is now in the blade, while another entity like a demon or a ghost or the like inhabits his body?
Could pose an interesting conundrum: Do the players free the soul and lose their weapon or do they keep the weapon and torment the captured soul to vanquish other evil?
Both examples are generic and derivate from the tried formula and include ready-made hooks.
Stories like that would have gone along way to improve this book, which often follows the formula:
Champion of god has weapon. Champion dies. Soul gets somehow drawn into the weapon.
Only my two cents, though.
And I loved the pictures of the weapons! :)
Just got home from PaizoCon? The I'm Not Going to PaizoCon Sale is still going on, but ends soon. Grab Book of the Faithful: The Worshiping Swords for $1 before it is too late.
