Monsters of Sin epitomize the very worst of our natures—and they prey on others' weaknesses. This fifth book in the Monsters of Sin series for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game is devoted to Pride, the unshakeable belief in your own superiority, a sin that festers inside many player characters as their adventures become legend.
It includes:
The most spectacular representative of an unimpressive race, the Emperor Kobold.
The Abominable Beauty, whose perfect appearance is a pain to behold.
The deformed Mirror Hag, who confronts others with their own ugliness.
The Embodiment of Pride itself, a mocking monument to the inferiority of all mortals.
Detail on Pride within the Midgard Campaign Setting.
Rules for incorporating Pride into your NPCs and monsters, and a Pride template.
Whether you're running a Campaign of Sin, or simply want to poke some holes in the egos of your game's heroes, Monsters of Sin: Pride is perfect in every respect.
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This mini-bestiary is 10 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 1 page SRD and 1 page back cover, leaving us with 6 pages of content, so let's check this out!
Starting off with a short introduction on the concept of sin and the rules to quickly make a prideful creature, we delve into the monsters:
-Abominable Beauty: This CR 13 fey considers herself so beautiful that none are worthy to behold her and thus have to die. Her beauty blinds, her touch burns, her voice deafens - perfection that destroys all it comes in contact with, showcased by great signature abilities. Great!
-Emperor Kobold: This new type of kobold gets +2 Str, +2 Dex and Cha, an energy affinity and a rallying yelp to make for a born leader among koboldkind -inspired by megalomania and considering him/herself a descendant of the dragons, these beings make for similar roles as e.g. Lizardkings. Ok, I guess, but BLAND. How many times have we seen this type of pseudo-draconic kobold angle done? Too many times. Plus: This is not a real new creature and the abilities are not as interesting as to warrant this entry
-Mirror Hag: These deformed CR 8 hags punishes those who recoil from her appearance by cursing them with reconfigured features to teach them the superficiality of their ways and instill some humility - rather a creature that punishes vanity than pride in my book.
-The Embodiment of Pride: At CR 22, this embodiment rocks hard - a being of pure pride and superior ego, the embodiment comes with a mocking dance, an aura of superiority (linked to a summoning ability - quite cool) and two awesome signature abilities: The primary means of attack of this embodiment is an open-handed slap across the face that can deal sickening amounts of damage and the creature can ignore up to a full round of actions 1/day by completely disregarding it. AWESOME and my favorite embodiment so far.
The pdf closes with embodiment of sin traits as well as a short narrative on pride in the midgard campaign setting.
Conclusion:
Editing and formatting are top-notch, I didn't notice any glitches. Layout adheres to a nice full-color 2-column standard and the artworks for the creatures are awesome. The pdf has no bookmarks, which is a pity - by now all but BP-length pdfs should have bookmarks.
Pride. If I'm guilty of one deadly sin much more often than any other one, it's definitely pride. And why not? After from lust, it's perhaps the one closest to being considered acceptable in society and is even positively connotated. Do a corpus search and you'll e.g. get "justifiably proud" -which other deadly sin can claim ANY positive undertones apart from pride? None. That's what makes this the most viscous of the deadly sins and if we take the Judeo-Christian mythology, it is pride (and envy) that cast down the devil from heaven. Pride is enticing. We want our parents to be proud of us. We yearn to feel pride and the lack of it can just as easily destroy a man as an overabundance of it. Pride. The "King of Sins". How does this installment hold up?
Well, on the one hand, we get two of the best creatures in the whole line so far. On the other hand, two of the creatures fail hard: The Mirror Hag is one that punishes superficiality and vanity and is at best loosely connected to pride and the emperor kobold is just there for the sake of kobold fanboys and obviously unimaginative filler with a tired concept and no stellar mechanics to lift it out of the muck of "been there, done that". While I personally abhor the high kobolds from SGG's Kobold King-pdf, I consider them the vastly superior take on the concept of a high kobold. Which leaves us with the imho best 2 creatures in the line so far, but only half the content of the whole pdf. And that is not enough. With only 4 creatures per installment, I expect imaginativeness, novel ideas and cool signature abilities to justify the asking price when compared to SGG's Mythic Menagerie-line. And this pdf, while it does deliver some stellar coolness, fails as hard as it succeeds. I guess Pride comes before the Fall, after all - my final verdict will be 2.5 stars, rounded up to 3 for the purpose of this platform. I hope the upcoming installments will be of a more consistent quality.
I'd love to see some virtues done; it'd be nice to see something for the good guys from you folks, and I don't think anyone has ever done the Cardinal Virtues for a game before.
Thanks for the review, End. Obviously I was hoping you'd enjoy it more, but you were fair and certainly had no shortage of positive things to say about the creatures you liked.
I should add that there is no definitive list of the seven deadly sins. Some lists include greed, others avarice, some include pride, others vanity. The final two books in the series will be Monsters of Sloth and Monsters of Wrath. I bring this up because one of Endzeigeist's points against the mirror hag is that it punishes vanity more than pride. We never explicitly state it, but this product lumps pride and vanity together.
I do like what I read of End's review, though I would like to know: what is the dividing line between pride and vanity? Because really, the Mirror Hag sounds like an awesome monster to me, and very fitting with some of the myths about hags.
