The third in our line of Gothic Grimoires, The Sepulchral Swaths of Tanoth-Gha unfolds the lore of an elder cult devoted to primordial things venerated in the dawn ages of the humanoid races, when civilizations now thought ancient were not yet born, or taking their first halting steps of infancy. As enlightenment and the younger faiths arose, these Elder Things lurked still in forgotten places in the lone lands, waiting for the unfortunate or the foolish to call upon them again. Sepulchral Swaths of Tanoth-Gha is an ideal complement to a Gothic Adventure Path or any game where characters wander across a lost and ancient ruin holding cultic rites and lore best left forgotten, including 5 new feats like Bind the Ancient Dead and Bones of the Earth, 6 new spells from accursed monolith to primeval interdiction, and a pair of new monster templates: the fossilized skeleton and mummified zombie.
Designed by Jason Nelson with the Legendary Games design team of Neil Spicer, Greg A. Vaughan, Clinton J. Boomer, Matt Goodall, Jim Groves, Russ Taylor, and Clark Peterson. Who better to provide you with alternate magical books, spells, and rules for your Adventure Path campaign than the very writers of those adventures themselves? Answer: no one. Legendary Games' Adventure Path Plug-Ins supplement and enrich your campaign experience, offering adventures and supporting products that incorporate and expanding upon unique concepts, themes, and rules subsystems introduced in the Adventure Paths while filling in the background characters, items, and locations that make those adventures come alive in delightful (and often dangerous) detail. Legendary Games combines stellar writing talent with innovative layout and product design, hyperlinked internally and to online Pathfinder resources for easy interactive reference, and top-notch artistic values that we think will bring you back again and again.
Check out this 8-page gothic-themed magical accessory and Make Your Game Legendary!
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This pdf is 8 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial/SRD, 1 page how-to use and 1 page back cover, leaving us with 4 pages of content, so let's check this out!
This installment of the Gothic Grimoire-series of disturbing tomes details the ruminations of living mummies, bound to their bodies by a proximity to an elder evil, an insane twist of pharaonic burial rites transcribed by those inflicted with the contagious madness of Tanoth-Gha's presence.
Transcribed in pictograms and tribal symbols on threadbare cloth and establishing a contact with the inscrutable Tanoth-Gha, studying this tome has a disturbing effect on the mind and may result in dangerously sleepless night - but also allow access to get Tanoth-Gha as an eldritch patron if a witch.
Beyond this option, studying the tome also allows you access to 5 new feats: They allow you to apply the mummified zombie or fossil skeleton templates to your summoned creatures and more complex ones: By taking a feat, you can modify your elemental servants to work versus the incorporeal undead and gain the engulf special quality that also dimensionally anchors those subject to it. Furthermore, those slain by your servant's engulf-attacks turn to stone. Neat! Even better, if you have learned this art, you may grant your summoned elemental (if you call just one), the ability to add chill touch to its attacks and the final elemental-enhancing feat also adds death ward and death knell to the repertoire of your elemental servitors.
The pdf also included the mummified zombie and fossil skeleton-templates that make your undead rather harder to kill - both at CR +1 and both featuring unique, interesting mechanics.
The grimoire also allows those that brave its swaths access to 6 different new spells: Eldritch monolith creates a solid illusory double of an ancient structure, resized to fit into the spell's area, but only its outside - detailed information on interior structures is not part of the deal. Though it indeed allows you to create your own composite monolith from maddened, half-remembered visions. Another spell allows you to create cursed versions of the monolith (combine with Rite Publishing's 101 Legendary Curses for extra fun...) and there also are two different powerslave-spells - variations of lesser geas and geas that provide the caster with the options to grant enhancements to his/her respective slaves, but also strains the mind of those enslaved this way. The coolest spell, though, would at least for me be "Primeval Interdiction", which allows the caster to prevent divine powers to be used in an area, greater dispel divine spells AND spell-like effects (and be better at it, the more insane you are...) or even bar a creature from casting divine spells for 24 hours upon succeeding a caster level check, again, enhanced by your madness. Finally, "Wasted Years" prevents gaining morale bonuses and combines that with inflicting the curse of the ages.
Conclusion:
Editing and formatting are top-notch, I didn't notice any glitches. Layout adheres to Legendary Games' 2-column standard with a printer-friendly white background. The artwork of the sepulchral-swaths is glorious indeed. The pdf is extensively bookmarked in spite of the shortness - very commendable since it makes using the book simpler.
I'm slowly feeling like a broken record with regards to Legendary Games' Gothic Grimoire-series: Each entry so far has brought an exquisitely iconic tome to the table and features well-crafted, interesting new options and the sepulchral swaths are no different. What is different is that we get some nice templates that fit in well thematically. All in all, yet another excellent addition to the great line - final verdict, unsurprisingly, clocking in at 5 stars plus seal of approval.
This one sounds rather bizarre and pretty much like what I'd expect a Mythos tome to be. The fossilized skeleton is the one I'm curious about; I'm assuming this one allows for you to create/face stronger versions of the "normal" undead dinosaur/megafauna skeleton?
I have to wonder, does Tanoth-Gha and the fate he inflicts upon hapless mortals owe any debt to the Mythos story Out of the Aeons and the Great Old One Ghatanothoa?
Jason Nelson
RPG Superstar 2008 Top 4; Contributor; Publisher, Legendary Games
That sounds like one of those SECRETS MAN WAS NOT MEANT TO KNOW!!!
Then again, I've heard that great designers take great inspiration from great source material! :)
Probably a stupid question but is the mummified zombie meant to be an add-on to the zombie template i.e. do we just apply all the other modifiers from the zombie template to a mummified zombie that are not mentioned as changed or removed?
