Harness the powers of air, earth, fire, and water to bring your elementally inclined character to life with Blood of the Elements! Whether you are the progeny of genies and wield a portion of their elemental wish magic or seek to glean some of the awesome arcana of the Elemental Planes for yourself, this Player Companion is the definitive guide to playing a Pathfinder RPG character with mastery over one or more of the four elements of creation.
Blood of the Elements provides a player-focused, in-depth exploration of the geniekin races and the Elemental Planes. In addition, each Pathfinder Player Companion includes new options and tools for every Pathfinder RPG player.
Inside this book, you’ll find:
New details for the five geniekin races—fiery ifrits, curious sylphs, hardened oreads, fluid undines, and elementally balanced sulis.
Tons of new race and regional traits, allowing you to customize your geniekin character for his or her heritage and situation.
A whole bazaar of new magical and mundane equipment to help you traverse the Elemental Planes in safety and style.
A bold new teamwork feat that allows you and your allies to combine elemental spells to achieve powerful new effects.
New rules options designed specifically for geniekin and elementally themed characters, including spells, rage totems, mutated bloodlines, a cavalier order, and more!
This Pathfinder Player Companion is intended for use with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, but can easily be incorporated into any fantasy world.
Written by Tim Akers, Judy Bauer, Jim Groves, Chris Lites, Dale C. McCoy, Jr., and Cassidy Werner
Cover Art by Kerem Beyit
ISBN-13: 978-1-60125-654-6
Other Resources: This product is also available on the following platforms:
I'm a huge fan of the "Blood of" books. "Angels" and "Fiends" set a very high bar, and "Blood of the Moon" introduced a whole new, fascinating race. I was looking forward to "Blood of the Elements" to give more crunch options to the elemental races, which are, as a whole, weak and so situational that it's hard to justify taking them for a whole campaign. Hy hope was that this book would give us some decent, crunchy ways to increase the versatility of these races so that a choice beyond sorcerer or cleric would make sense.
Unfortunately, we got none of that whatsoever. A large section of the book was given over to a discussion of each elemental plane, which simply doesn't belong in a Player Companion book at all. The character options that were presented were mostly traits, and while traits are nice they don't justify a race choice, and they don't redeem this book.
Overall, this book is both a great disappointment and a missed opportunity. There is too much material that belongs in a Campaign Setting book, too little that belongs in a Player Companion, and too little helpful crunch to improve a bunch of races that are interesting in concept but need mechanical help. Sadly, I can't recommend this book.
I found this one to be very disappointing in the crunch department. There are no elemental bloodlines, no racial feats, and very little alternate racial traits. After we got the awesome Blood of Angels and Blood of fiends books the bar has been greatly raised for the race book line. While there was some interesting info on the elemental planes I would much rather that in another book such as an AP or campaign setting line. While the book did have some good options and magic items, it is still the second most disappointing of the race books after the Blood of the Night book.
I really enjoyed this book, despite the "lack of crunch".
The book is a great read. The art is incredible (The map of the Inner planes is worth my money alone =) ) There is tons of great info on how the elemental/genie races fit into Golarion, and alot of great info for building background of the races.
Though not as "crunch" heavy as previous volumes (the rules/options they are all well balanced and interesting), IMO it is still a great buy if you are interested in the Elemental/genie Races.
I'm going to start with the good things I have to say about this product, because that'll go quickly.
The art and background do a good job of hearkening to the arabian themes you might expect of a document which draws so strongly on the ideas of genie-kin, and every race contains some descriptive filler and a regional trait to help tie them more firmly in to the world of Golarion.
... I also liked that the Undine got a Sorcerer Bloodline that helped them heal with water.
That being said, I was generally disappointed by this book. Each of the races (what I really was hoping to see some good cruch and options for) received 2 dedicated pages, typically enough for some fluff and 1 new class mechanic, like the ifrit's cavalier order (Order of the Flame, which fails the bag of rats test in a fairly spectacular fashion), the undine's sorcerer bloodlines, and some new elemental totems for suli barbarians. You'll notice I didn't mention the oread or the sylph. The oread received the "Oread Gem Magic" alternate racial trait, which allows you to stack some additional capabilities onto a very small and specific list of spells by expending precious gems. While the spells are fairly thematic, they're drawn from multiple spell lists so the overall result is fairly... Underwhelming. It basically is going to give you a handful of thematically appropriate "signature" spells that work a little bit better for you than other casters if you burn the cash for the gems. The sylph was even less impressive as their contribution was 2 spells and 2 race traits.
This book probably should have been released as an "Elemental Gazeteer" or something more along those lines, as fully half the book was devoted to talking about the elemental planes and key elemental locations like the City of Brass. Even that would probably have been a bit of a disappointment though, as the planes and locations are also given only 2 pages each.
Maybe, as others have noted, I'm "spoiled" by the high standards set by books like Blood of Angels and Blood of Fiends, or Blood of the Moon, which introduced an entire new race with half a dozen racial variants and robust and meaningful supporting options for each. This book just felt lacking, and screamed "filler"; it almost didn't seem like they were trying terribly hard and this was just a collection of snippets and descriptions that were laying around but didn't make it into other products.
The art and beautiful design of this product keep it from being a complete bust in my opinion, but I think that people who were looking for cool new options for elemental characters are going to find themselves disappointed by what this book has to offer.
After Blood of Moon, I was hopeful that this book would be worthwhile. Pair that with the racial boon I have and Ive been waiting months for this book. Unfortunately, this book is more in line with Blood of Night than Blood of Moon. Yes, there is tremendous flavor here but there is little meat on the bone. I was really hoping for something more than this book.
I don't know if this is the right place to post a question... but here goes!
The Order of the Flame looks awesome. I want to create a character for this order, however it seems too bloated on the swift action economy. It has four uses for swift actions: challenges, glorious challenges, foolhardy rush and daunting success.
The whole point of this order seems to be turning into a whirling, dervish of death while being more and more susceptible to attacks. Foolhardy Rush is an immediate action that allows you to set yourself up for battle, but then this precludes you from challenging on the first round (not that you will always do that, but it seems like the intended tactic).
Additionally, if you critically hit an enemy, there is usually a good chance that they will die (at least from my experiences). You have two options if the monster dies, Daunting Success or Glorious Challenge due to both requiring a swift action. There are the cases of a monster living through a critical, in which case you don't have the dilemma, however you could critical on your first hit into a daunting success (monster still alive) and then kill it with an iterative or hasted attack. Again, you would be unable to Glorious Challenge, which is primary purpose of the order.
How To Solve These Issues:
1st: If you made Foolhardy Rush just happen, instead of as an action, then this would resolve the first issue. You could also allow for a Challenge during Foolhardy Rush.
2nd: If you could Glorious Challenge as a free action or immediate action, then you could combine their use with Daunting Success and still be able to Glorious Challenge off of AoOs. Also, if you get high enough damage to one-shot the enemies, then you can Glorious Challenges multiple times per round. (If your iteratives each kill off a goblin or something similar).
