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...holy crap. Page 28. Elemental Commixture teamwork feat.
IT'S CHRONO TRIGGER TIME
What classes can use the new sylph spells?
Alchemist/Bard/Inquisitor/Ranger/Witch get Enshroud Thoughts; level 2 for everyone except the Ranger, who gets it as a 3rd level spell.
Storm Step is a level 3 spell for the Magus, Wizard and Witch.
Is it worth holding off making my Sylph till I get this?
That really depends on what your plans are and what you're hoping to build.
Is it worth holding off making my Sylph till I get this?
No. The only racial options for Sylphs are some Race Traits and three new spells. Even if you're a spellcaster, you can learn those whenever you want.
Sounds like people are saying this book doesn't have as much "crunch" material as it should?
"Should" and "can fit into page count" are often two separate things—we could (and do) print several hundred page long hardcover books filled to the brim with crunch, and it's still not enough for some folks. Whether or not the amount of mechanics provided in Blood of Elements is to your liking is entirely up to you. But to date, we have not done any extensive lore regarding the genie-kin races in the Pathfinder setting (and what we did do was five or so years ago when we were still publishing 3.5 material), something that this book does take into account.
I'm going to be posting a review about Blood of the Elements sometime shortly after its street date. I have a lot to say about it.
I have just got it and and have only skimmed it...but it seems to me that there is limited usage out of this book. I mean unless you are a ifrit cavalier with the specific order in the book...there is not a lot crunch for you.
I think I would have liked to see a lot more broad base crunch.
Though I may still like the book if the flavor stuff is good.
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So far it hasn't been as good as I expected (somewhere below blood of angels and above bastards) but I will say some stuff is pretty cool.
The order of the flame is dumb good in the right build since you effectively can have an infinite damage set up so long as you keep having targets to hit. Also its second level ability isn't bad an the rest holds pretty solid. But seriously his challenge power is dumb good and beyond it's badass factor also has an order ethos that fits a lot of pf groups.
I will say though the first character I want to build with it though is an orc/half-orc.
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Sounds like people are saying this book doesn't have as much "crunch" material as it should?"Should" and "can fit into page count" are often two separate things—we could (and do) print several hundred page long hardcover books filled to the brim with crunch, and it's still not enough for some folks. Whether or not the amount of mechanics provided in Blood of Elements is to your liking is entirely up to you. But to date, we have not done any extensive lore regarding the genie-kin races in the Pathfinder setting (and what we did do was five or so years ago when we were still publishing 3.5 material), something that this book does take into account.
That might be more tied to having 5 races in a single Player Companion.
I'm curious about the mutated Marid bloodline. Details?
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I'm curious about the mutated Marid bloodline. Details?
Basically they are riffs on the water and marid bloodline for the wildblooded sorcerer.
1st is lifeblood which someone basically explained earlier (your water powers heal people of ailments and grant temp hp).
The other one is a riff on marid that makes you from a noble marid bloodline. they get swim speeds when they cast water spells and get the ability to puke up a wave of water to damage and throw back anyone adjacent to you.
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I was wondering how the art was? I wish there were more Qadira/Katapesh/Vudani related books. I'm hoping at least one of the new iconics will be Qadiran.
Well that's what you get. The whole book has a background meant to invoke a middle east style as well as all of the stylized font. That being said if you were looking for more indepth discussions of the various genie-kin origins including interesting and thought provoking discussions about how you get non genie sired genie-kin then you are out of luck. That last part is really bumming me out since I was interested to hear more about azer and salamander born ifrit or say how say a slyph can come from a green dragon (they are air subtyped so it isn't out of the realm). Instead the description on the latter so far has largely been, "elementalists mages, planar conjunctions, magic." which is really not that evocative or interesting.
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Yeah, this book could have used some cool racial feats, alternate race bloodlines, and more alternate racial traits. I think they should have spend more space on the actual races instead of the overview of the elemental planes. I think we have been spoiled by the blood of angels and blood of fiends books, since I judge all race books by those two as my standards.
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Yeah, this book could have used some cool racial feats, alternate race bloodlines, and more alternate racial traits. I think they should have spend more space on the actual races instead of the overview of the elemental planes. I think we have been spoiled by the blood of angels and blood of fiends books, since I judge all race books by those two as my standards.
With you. I'm about 3/4ths of the way through the sylph entry and my interest is already kind of waning. The Ifrit's have so far gotten some interesting crunch and the oread stuff was okay but by and large it's just been meh. The worst part though is the traits, which are pretty good but a lot of them don't really feel like they really have anything to do specifically with genie-kin. Take the Nightstalls Escapee Ifrit trait. It's a really good trait and in the right games can be amazing (you only need 4 hours of sleep to recover injury instead of 8) but the fluff and crunch don't have anything to do with Ifrits. Yeah you are an escaped slave and you've learned to sleep little since you could have to wake up and go at any moment but you could write that story for any character in the same circumstances regardless of what race they are and relegating it to a race and region just removes that option from players hands. It's sad to cause others like the Oread one are really far more evocative and in line with what you want from a trait for creature associated with the elemental plane of earth.
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Will say though, the map of the inner planes is freakin' beautiful. Stunning representation of the planes and the river of souls snaking through it. I kind of want to know more about settlements near the river or see an adventure with petitioners wandering off the path to see the sights of the elemental planes now.
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This is a good book if you are looking to introduce genie-kin into your game. What this book is not is a book about having elemental heritage aka blood of elements. There should have been at minimum 3 heritages for each element. Insted they focused only on geine-kin. Also, I was hoping to get some options to boost the four single element races to bring them more on par with the suli. And can we please get an alternate racial ability to replace elemental affinity for those of us who want to play these races as something other than a sorcerer. This is a good book if you are looking for blood of genies and it is a shame it was not titled as such.
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doc the grey
thanks, I guess I can continue to live in hope.
Yeah the art is really pretty and thematic with this cool old world arabian esque/victorian style that I really dig. In the pdf they actually have a 2nd pdf just for it which kind of makes me hope or wish it was a poster.
Unfortunately though I'm on pg 25 and there is really just too much other stuff on what seems to be everything else but freakin' genie-kin. I get that the planes are cool and the elemental ones in particular are so unexplored and at the same time most in need of explanation but I as a purchaser didn't pick up Blood of the elements to spend nearly a 3rd of the book reading about the planes, I picked it up to read about ifrits, undines, sylphs, ifrits, and sulis and there sociocultural set up in the world of golarion and to a greater extent how I can take that into my home games and a nice chunk of crunchy stuff for them to go with it. So far I'm on page 25 and I know more about the planes that the genie-kin's parents come from than the genie-kin themselves. How do Azer or Salamander ifrits work in the worlds of the material plane and what causes them, what is a slyph from a belker or invisible stalker like, how do oreads from earth dragons (or any genie-kin for that matter) work or are viewed in a world where dragon blood usually means claws and breath weapons, and what else comes from the plane of water that makes an undine? Seriously none of this is addressed at all and I feel like it could have been a much more impressive like I would have loved talking about belker Slyphs over this 2 page focus on how sylph collect secrets. Hell a discussion on elemental parents could have been cool too. Like the idea of Shoanti flame shamans doing big rituals to call elder fire elementals to breed ifrit burn rider chieftains/warriors who are literally one with the heart of the flame.
Again I just didn't feel like I was given a window into the lives of the genie-kin like I did in blood of angels, fiends, or the moon and I'm over 2/3rds of the way through and I still feel like I know the genie-kin like a commoner would, they are these things someone told me about once and people have gossiped a lot about them but has never actually seen one or even is one. That is not how I think I should feel by the end of one of these books, I want to feel like I can inhabit one of these guys every game day and I'm just still not getting that.
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Can anybody do an actual page breakdown?
Umm sure.
2 page intro that kind of introduces the idea of genie-kin and a vocab lesson for what's about to come
9 pages on each of the 5 races with each getting about 2 pages to themselves.
2 page spread abstract map of the inner planes that is absolutely stunning.
9 pages on the inner planes, 2 of which are on the city of brass
2 pages title elemental magic but is really about a new teamwork feat for elemental magic users that's pretty cool.
2 pages on magic items.
Brinebeast, don't you have the Advanced Races Guide? There are some good alternate racial traits for elemental affinity in there.
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Did anyone else notice that the Ifrit's Glorious Challenge ability is like, bonkers?
Glorious Challenge: A glorious challenge does not count
against the cavalier’s number of challenges per day, but
otherwise acts like a cavalier’s challenge class feature.
When he issues a glorious challenge, the cavalier takes a
–2 penalty to AC for the duration of the glorious challenge
(this penalty stacks with the usual –2 AC penalty against
opponents other than the target of the cavalier’s challenge).
The cavalier gains a morale bonus on melee damage rolls
against the target of his glorious challenge equal to 2 ×
the number of consecutive glorious challenges he has
issued thus far. As long as he continues to defeat targets
of his glorious challenges and there are more opponents
in range, the cavalier can continue to issue glorious
challenges indefinitely, with the penalty to AC and the
bonus on damage rolls increasing with each subsequent
foe. For example, a 5th-level cavalier that has just issued
his third glorious challenge after defeating the original
target of his challenge takes a –6 penalty to AC (–8 against
creatures other than the target of his glorious challenge)
and gains a +11 bonus on melee damage rolls (a +5 bonus
from his base challenge ability plus a +6 morale bonus for
three consecutive glorious challenges).
I'm not entirely convinced that the AC penalty is really much of a cost for unlimited challenges per day, and the ability created a couple of rules questions for me, like "Can your AC be dropped below 0?" and more imoportantly "Can my wizard summon up a conga line of goblins leading up to the BBEG?"
any bones thrown to druids?
fingers crossed for Elemental type "Shaman archetypes"
You would think that would have been a natural direction for them to go, but... no, not really.any bones thrown to druids?
fingers crossed for Elemental type "Shaman archetypes"
bummer...big dissappointment for an "elemental" book
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Did anyone else notice that the Ifrit's Glorious Challenge ability is like, bonkers?
** spoiler omitted **
I'm not entirely convinced that the AC penalty is really much of a cost for unlimited challenges per day, and the ability created a couple of rules questions for me, like "Can your AC be dropped below 0?" and more imoportantly "Can my wizard summon up a conga line of goblins leading up to the BBEG?"
Yup and it is awesome.
As for the AC penalty I like it and feel it's balanced. Remember once you start the glorious challenge you have a -2 to AC to your target and -4 to everyone else which does make a big difference. It's literally a hide armor off of your AC. Also though you can do a metric ton of damage you need to know how to string your challenges in such a way as to amp up the damage and not leave yourself so exposed AC wise as to be just destroyed by the BBEG when you finally reach him which means to really make it work you've gotta have some system mastery. All in all though I love the idea of an order built around diving into the fray and just trying to kill all the targets faster than they can kill him.
RPG Superstar 2014 Top 16
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Did anyone else notice that the Ifrit's Glorious Challenge ability is like, bonkers?
** spoiler omitted **
I'm not entirely convinced that the AC penalty is really much of a cost for unlimited challenges per day, and the ability created a couple of rules questions for me, like "Can your AC be dropped below 0?" and more imoportantly "Can my wizard summon up a conga line of goblins leading up to the BBEG?"
Yup and it is awesome.
As for the AC penalty I like it and feel it's balanced. Remember once you start the glorious challenge you have a -2 to AC to your target and -4 to everyone else which does make a big difference. It's literally a hide armor off of your AC. Also though you can do a metric ton of damage you need to know how to string your challenges in such a way as to amp up the damage and not leave yourself so exposed AC wise as to be just destroyed by the BBEG when you finally reach him which means to really make it work you've gotta have some system mastery. All in all though I love the idea of an order built around diving into the fray and just trying to kill all the targets faster than they can kill him.
While I agree with you that it's a significant penalty, for a character who is built around having just TONS of hit points and very little AC, then a penalty to AC means nothing to that person, because they're already getting hit by every attack anyway. Those are the characters who could REALLY exploit this.
*Runs off to build a Cavalier/Barbarian who has as many hit points as humanly (or rather Ifrit-ly) possible*
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While I agree with you that it's a significant penalty, for a character who is built around having just TONS of hit points and very little AC, then a penalty to AC means nothing to that person, because they're already getting hit by every attack anyway. Those are the characters who could REALLY exploit this.
*Runs off to build a Cavalier/Barbarian who has as many hit points as humanly (or rather Ifrit-ly) possible*
Or you explore alternative defenses like concealment and use tricks like giving you and your mount Escape Route to avoid movement-based AoOs. It also fails the ol' bag of rats test, since nothing prevents me from stringing the challenges along with some handy vermin.
I like the idea, I just think the execution is.... lacking. This supplement may be the first 2 star review I've given to a Paizo Player Companion. The crunch in general was very light, and often seemed to be severely lacking in one area or another.
The contribution for the Oread was a single alternate racial trait, along with 2 race traits and the obligatory regional trait that every race got.
The Sylph got two spells and two traits.
The Ifrit got a new Cavalier order with a fairly large design loophole, and 2 race traits.
The Suli got a new elemental Barbarian totem, and of course, the two race traits.
It was all just little stuff, much of which didn't feel particularly new or great, and the stuff that did seem rife with potential was also rife with issues.
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While I agree with you that it's a significant penalty, for a character who is built around having just TONS of hit points and very little AC, then a penalty to AC means nothing to that person, because they're already getting hit by every attack anyway. Those are the characters who could REALLY exploit this.
*Runs off to build a Cavalier/Barbarian who has as many hit points as humanly (or rather Ifrit-ly) possible*
Or you explore alternative defenses like concealment and use tricks like giving you and your mount Escape Route to avoid movement-based AoOs. It also fails the ol' bag of rats test, since nothing prevents me from stringing the challenges along with some handy vermin.
Ehh that's still not that bad in most games. Point buy helps even out investing heavily in con, feat and item investment for it cuts into money and feat slots you could be using to pump damage. Also most of the items that help with things like concealment are pretty expensive or temporary for the most part.
Now this can get a lot cheaper if you have something like a caster to help drop 1 sided concealment for you (pyrotechnics + ifrit smokevision anyone?) but again that's kind of part of the game.
As an aside I now have to build my nurgal worshiping orc cavalier of the flame ^-^.
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I wanted that Paizo hasn´t called this book Blood of the Elements. If it was named Elemental Handbook i would liked it more, but as is it´s sort of misleading as the book isn´t really about the genie-kind. We only got a bit of background information about the races, some random rules material that are barelly into the theme and info about the elemental planes that while great woundn´t be my first choice to appear in this book.
Now i feel like we will never have the genie-kind book that i wished that this book was (i am really a elemental fan).
I know that it´s not Paizo´s fault as they should really be hardpressed by GEN CON lauch line, but i am really feeling disapointed right now.
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It sounds like the crunch could pretty much fit on a double-page spread. I am not a happy customer. I was definitely hoping for at least two subraces (from different descents) for each element, in the same format as aasimar/tieflings. It sounds like the race player companions are getting worse and worse, the dhampir book at least had *something*. This sounds like it's just lame!
Doesn't sound like anything I was interested in seeing actually happened...might just skip this one.
Maybe they will do alternate heritages in some other book.
I have to admit I'm actually tempted to cancel my Player Companion sub after this one. Blood of the Night was a disappointment to me, but after Blood of the Moon I thought it was on the up again. I may just go to ordering the ones I 'm really interested in from now on, like People of the Stars, and even then wait until I've heard a bit about them.
Not to say that I didn't like some of the content, but it just didn't feel like a Blood Of book. I'll try to do a review sometime soon.
I think the magic rule for this is, in a player companion,
4 already introduced is the most you can give in 32 pages without deficiency,
1 new race is best on it's own with additional information for expansion,
Choose one's titles carefully when dealing with player races, Blood of Elements expects all possible heritages for elemental races, but Blood of the Genie, gives only expectation for geneie background heritages, such as this book appears to do.
I am interested in seeing the options in this book and will purchase it.
P.S. Still crossing fingers for player companion books for kitsunenand changelings. :)
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It sounds like the crunch could pretty much fit on a double-page spread. I am not a happy customer. I was definitely hoping for at least two subraces (from different descents) for each element, in the same format as aasimar/tieflings. It sounds like the race player companions are getting worse and worse, the dhampir book at least had *something*. This sounds like it's just lame!
a bit but the cavalier order and the new teamwork feat are both really cool.
The Order of the flame has the potential to have an infinite number of challenges and damage (if you don't die while trying to pull it off) if you've got the skill. Meanwhile the feat allows you to have casters cast together, mixing elemental spells to create new more dangerous ones.
It's pretty f#@@ing cool that you can mix acid arrow and burning hands and get an acid arrow that drips lava everywhere and lights the target on fire or a mixing lightning bolt and 2nd level cold spell and getting frozen lightning bolt that does half cold damage and knocks every target prone.
the problem is that that's about all the stuff that you really wanted out of it and I wanted more stuff for the Genie-kind and about them than I got.
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I have to admit I'm actually tempted to cancel my Player Companion sub after this one. Blood of the Night was a disappointment to me, but after Blood of the Moon I thought it was on the up again. I may just go to ordering the ones I 'm really interested in from now on, like People of the Stars, and even then wait until I've heard a bit about them.
Not to say that I didn't like some of the content, but it just didn't feel like a Blood Of book. I'll try to do a review sometime soon.
I've been having a similar experience with my subscription where I feel like if I didn't have it, I'd only be interested enough to buy half the books I'm actually getting.
I just don't know if a Teamwork Feat that will probably never actually be used in my book and a Cavalier Order with great fluff but poorly executed crunch it worth the $17 or so it costs for the book and shipping.
The art was nice, but the art I wanted to see (more original artwork for the elemental races and maybe some alternate looks) was fairly scarce, with most of it given over to detailing planescapes. Again, not bad, just not what I expected from the book.
Brinebeast, don't you have the Advanced Races Guide? There are some good alternate racial traits for elemental affinity in there.
I sure do Dragon78, and you are right! Guess I forgot about those, but still never hurts to have more. :-)
I thoroughly enjoy the Player Companion line, but I do feel like things are getting a bit muddled here and there. Blood of the Night I expected it to be all juicy Dhampir goodness and a little side of "How to be a Vampire", instead it was 2/3 how to be a vampire and a side of Dhampir. Blood of the Moon, after what we got with Blood of the Night I actually wanted a juicy "How to play/incorporate a Lycanthrope" instead I got "Shifters come to Golarion!" something I didn't want to see at all.
Blood of the Elements I was really looking forward to as I'm currently playing a Suli character. Flavor wise, wonderful book tons of flavor for geniekin. Mechanically it was a bit light compared to some of the other Blood books. I too was hoping for a "I may be an Ifrit, but my grandfather was a Salamander!" with all the neat alternate Heritages that we've seen in past Blood books. I'm a bit sad they aren't there but the rest of this book is still really good. I think personally, I would have ditched the City of Brass entry. I love me some City of Brass, but I'd rather have a Guide to Golarion's Planes/Planar Handbook, and see it written up there. The material in this book is everything I was expecting to see however, compared to the two previously mentioned Gothic Monster type entries into the Blood series.
now all we need is a blood of shadows to complete the set
I would like to get the PDF... but there's still not one available. Any word on the date the PDF will be available for download here?
That's interesting -- the last time I looked I could have sworn it said June 25th (so a week from tomorrow). I wonder what heppened?
The digital versions of June releases will be available on the 25th.