101 Mystical Site Qualities (PFRPG) PDF

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Create an Enchanted Realm!

101 Mystical Site Qualities gives you—yes, you guessed it—101 new qualities to help creature a truly mystic location.

From areas where magical items overflow with power, to new areas of dead, wild, unstable, and enhanced magic that can change the nature of an encounter; to areas where only the eastern martial arts hold sway, to evocative locales like Avatar's Landing, Endless Summer, and the Fountain of Grit. 101 Mystical Site Qualities brings a host of new options and wonders for your world.

Wholly compatible with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, 101 Mystical Site Qualities is designed so that you can bring a sense of the evocative and wondrous to your game and provide a benefit or challenge at all levels of play.

Get yours now and make your campaign mystical!

Pages: 38
Author: Steven D. Russell
Cover Artist: Thomas Cole

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An Endzeitgeist.com review

5/5

This pdf is 43 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 1 page SRD, 2 pages advertisement, leaving us with 38 pages of content - quite a massive bunch of content, so let's take a look!

After a short framing narrative we waste neither time nor space to delve into mystic site qualities. I'd like to go on a tangent here: Iconic battles and modules are not necessarily defined by the adversaries faced or brilliant builds of the foes you pit against your players. As much as these things matter, what makes combats and adventures more exciting even would be often overlooked component - the terrain. Using tables and ravines for tactical advantages makes your world feel more alive and immerses your players more in a cohesive world. Fighting a duelist is cool. Fighting a duelist on a shaking precipice of a grumbling volcano is awesome and so much more memorable. Sneak Attack Press' Terrain Toolbox did a great job of providing a toolkit for mundane types of terrain to make your campaign's encounters more memorable.

Rite Publishing's offering, then, is going one step into the magical world - instead of repeating mundane terrain customization, we get mystical qualities - essentially, these special qualities can be applied to just about any area: From small towers and groves to huge swaths of land, these site qualities modify the basic terrains and can change the way combats play out.

Each of the sites in this product comes with an effect as well as an evocative short example of an application of the respective site that can be considered an adventure-hook in its own right, offering inspiration to use the respective sites. Of course, I can't go through all of the sites contained in this pdf without bloating this review beyond usefulness, but I'll try to give you an overview. Now if you're familiar with Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed/Evolved, you'll, like me, consider the first site a blast from the past: The Akashic Node - a kind of collected storehouse of knowledge into which creatures may tap to increase your knowledge. Nice to see the cool concept disassociated from the Arcana Evolved base-class and transported into PFRPG, readily available for any class.

Arboreal Home is also a VERY interesting quality that e.g. I'd add in a limited manner to the Margreve: Elves, gnomes, fey, native magical beasts, and native animals in an arboreal home gain a climb speed of 1/2 their base land speed. There are more exotic ones included, like the astral chain - when you enter this site, the respective creatures subject to the site's effects may not leave more than 75 ft. from those linked to them. AWESOME! Of course more common sites are also included - blessed sites, places that induce nightmares, areas that bleed dry those bleeding on the territory, gaining access to spell-like abilities like acid arrows, sneak attack-enhancing sites are part of the deal just like the giant-infested cloudlands known from "Jack and the Bean-stalk", places to establish covenants with otherworldly powers (crossroads demons, baby!) etc.

Or take a site where a powerful servant of death itself was vanquished, resulting in Finger of Death becoming readily available. OUCH! Ethnicity-specific sites grant benefits to chosen peoples and there are even areas, where water can be treated as air and vice versa, allowing for underwater adventures sans the issues of requiring spells to dive into the depths. Some sites are saturated with magic to the point where subjects may tap into the powerful energies of that spot, gaining massive benefits from the sites or even changes the way DCs for your spells are calculated to include a d20, making magic that much more unpredictable.

If you're more inclined to include a mythic Hyperborea-style site, you might wish to check out the endless summer mystical quality and for those who enjoy a little humor, there also is fodder in here: While by no means exemplary since most of the qualities are rather serious, "Everybody was Kung-fu fighting!" is interesting: It makes all non-Asian/monk-weapons miss automatically , but grants people at the site access to monkish abilities - something e.g. the casting classes will quite probably enjoy as a nice change of pace. Wonky? Yes, but some slight humor, as long as it does not get overbearing, is welcome in my game.

One of the most interesting sites would be Fate's Web - it links all members of a group and evenly divides damage between the recipients, necessitating a massive change in tactics. Speaking of tactics - the PCs will need a lot of tactics and survival-knacks when e.g. visiting a site always haunted by massive amounts of violent weather like storms, earthquakes etc. Infinite Spaces are also part of the deal, as are morphic geographies for unstable locales, sites that prohibit healing, sites that allow you to create druidic cocoons, sites to travel the planes - the possibilities are almost endless.

As another concept I really liked, we also have the sites that actually reward the rightful rulers of a respective area, as is the massive d%-table included for wild magic, which should also work well in combination with SGG's stellar Chaos Magic-supplement. The pdf closes with a sample complex mystical site, including lore-sections and a sample story as well as a new sample curse.

Conclusion:
Editing and formatting are top-notch, I didn't notice any glitches. Layout adheres to RiP's 2-column full-color standard and the art-selection deserves special mention: While stock, the artworks are mind-bogglingly beautiful and evocative of the high-concept crunch contained herein. The pdf comes bookmarked.

Once in a while, a DM comes across a pdf that enriches massively one's campaign for ages - there are some pdfs that fall into this category, but honestly, not that many. This is one of them. Providing an awesome amount of evocative sites, this pdf provides us not only with sites and rules - it inspires. It inspires the DM to mix up the rules. To take these site-qualities and use/combine them to make locales stand out. Fighting in the accursed tomb of Grythax the Reaper will feel distinctly different than a battle in the primal heart of the Kelissara-jungle now - I took multiple qualities from this pdf, added them to the locales and suddenly, these places got completely different, inspiring, smart - requiring the players to use different tactics, offering new options and adding not only story-telling, but also tactical depth to any location. This pdf is one I absolutely loved reviewing, for it is chock-full of gorgeous and wondrous options that belong into the toolkit of any DM. Much like the Terrain Toolbox or Raging Swan's Dressing-line, this pdf is guaranteed to enrich your campaign for years to come. There are not many pdfs out there right now that will provide as much joy for 6 bucks as this one. Whether to add spice to modules lacking the je-ne-sais-quoi or to just make your locations more iconic - this is the universally-recommended toolbox for me and one of the scarce few files I'd rate 6 stars, if I could. This is an all-but required purchase for any PFRPG-DM looking to spice up their areas and well worth extremely easily-awarded 5 stars + seal of approval.

Endzeitgeist out.


An RPG Resource Review

5/5

OK, so what is a 'mystical site' anyway? To put it simply, it is any location that's got something special about it, a place where magic may act a little differently from normal perhaps due to something that once happened there or as part of the natural ebb and flow of magical forces across the land.

To aid you in making your campaign world suitably and subtly different from the everyday one you inhabit when not revelling in your shared alternate reality, herein is presented a whole bunch of 'qualities' that you can apply to appropriate locations within it. Each comes with descriptive text that may explain how the site has developed or what it feels like, or something else which lets you know the flavour, the feel of that location. Then the rule mechanics of how that location's otherness has an in-game effect, and finally a brief example to demonstrate that quality in action.

They can be quite powerful, quite disturbing or startling; and should be used sparingly. Placed to best effect, carefully chosen, they can be a potent reminder to your players that they are not wandering round Kansas or Cheshire, but are truly elsewhere, in that shared alternate reality that you are creating and inhabiting around your game table. They ought to be rare. You won't find a mystical site on every street corner or every hill top, but they should reflect the grand sweep of magic through your land, influenced by events and in turn influencing future events.

Just reading through them may spawn ideas for events, encounters or even whole adventures. Or you may realise that a location already in your campaign world is eminently suitable for this treatment. Maybe even something your characters have done in the past may lay the seeds for a mystical site... and their discovery of the changes that have taken place the next time they visit that spot will be memorable indeed.

Some are beneficial to creatures entering the area, some malignant... and some act differently depending on who you are and what you are trying to do. This is a resource to study thoroughly and to think about, before picking which qualities you want to use and where you are going to put them. Done with care they will enhance your world and the adventures you have there.


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Thanks for getting this up Liz.


Thanks for the review megan! 5/5 stars Snoopy happy dance of joy!


And reviewed first on Endzeitgeist.com, then submitted to GMS magazine and Nerdtrek and posted here and on OBS. Cheers!


Thanks for the review End.

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