Real Scrolls 4: Gear Barrage (PFRPG) PDF

And now for something completely different - today I'll take a look at Kobold Press' Real Scroll-series, which portrays one spell per installment in a lavish, hand-crafted calligraphy.

Each of these pdf is 4 pages long - 1 page front cover, 1 page SRD/editorial, 1 page regular text of the spell and 1 page for the real scroll calligraphy version of the spell.

These reviews are not about content - they are about aesthetics and as such, much more so than my regular reviews, I invite you, the reader, to take these as just that - my personal preference and opinion regarding these. Got that?

Great! It should be noted, that the scrolls don't contain arcane gibberish, strange runes or glyphs or the like - they contain the spell's description and rules, rendered in lavish calligraphy - and that's it. whether these are worth it for you as a customer depends very much on how excited you can get about beautiful calligraphy, here rendered by Kathy Barker.

#4 is all about Gear Barrage, with a lot of swirly, brown lines at the top and bottom of the spell, each of the brown lines ending in a turquoise dot and spirals adhering to a similar schematic denoting the respective lines of the mechanical information for the spell.. The spell's title is the star here - with turquoise letters and brown borders of said letters, the title is just a beauty to look at. The borders of the scroll this time around are brown. While the embroideries and spirals of the text this time around rank among the best I've seen in the series, this scroll also suffers from there just not being that much text - the scroll features significantly large borders, with the text being not perfectly centered and more left-aligned, lending to an impression of the scroll being simply not that well-used - larger letters, more pronounced embroideries, something like that could have made this one truly stand out. 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4.

Now If you enjoy artfully crafted calligraphy or have tried your hand with it yourself, if you're an aesthete, then these will be worth the asking price indeed. If you're just out there for the crunch, then you might want to skip these. Personally, I hope the series continues - for I'm convinced that RPGs ARE art and crossovers/crosspollinations of different types of artistry tend to result in favorites of mine. I know I'm looking forward to when I can hand out a scroll of fireball to my players and watch their astonished faces!

Endzeitgeist out.