Why not choose the agility and feral grace of the wolf instead? The sensuality of the cat or the strength and ferocity of the warthog? The airborne agility of the hawk, or the impenetrable exoskeleton of the rhino beetle? Anthropomorphic heroes and villains are nothing new to gamers.
The Fursona system can quickly generate new alien species, demi-human or metahuman races for fantasy gaming, uplifted animals, genetically engineered mutants and animalistic superheroes, as well as magical beasts: magical crossbreeds, even unfortunates like Arachnae, who are cursed with animalistic form by the gods.
No matter their origin, FURSONA is designed to produce a fully customizable anthro character suitable for use as a PC in Pathfinder Roleplaying Game campaigns. With over 660 million possible combinations of Orders, Racial Traits, Disadvantages and Templates, you can build exactly the creature you've always wanted to play. This sourcebook is the definitive resource for custom building furry heroes.
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So what can be said about Fursona? Let’s take a look at how the PDF is set up first. It is 105 pages, so you get plenty of meat for your $10. The entire book is designed to allow players and GMs to customize their very own anthropomorphic races. You start off with a type of animal, gaining some racial adjustments. From there you are allotted a handful of build points to personalize your character. These can be used on relatively minor abilities such as improving ones senses or in grander ways, like becoming venomous. There are disadvantages as well, which by taking you can increase your build points. There are many choices for all of the above, so it is highly unlikely that any two races will be identical. The book not only covers furries, but lovecraftian horrors and clockworks as well, so there is a bit of something for everybody.
In the “pro” column I’d like to point out that the system is highly modular and customizable, which is something I’m personally very fond of. The creators seem to know their audience well, allowing players to create races anywhere from highly feral and natural to highly human in both appearance and ability. The creation system seemed very clear and easy to grasp to me, and I didn’t notice any major grammar or spelling errors.
As far as “cons” go, there are a few that I should mention. There is a handful of mature content in this book. To some extent that goes along with knowing their market, as stated above, but some of it seems to be put in merely to tap that market. Not everyone is comfortable with a game that contains highly sexual themes, but this is a minor issue as groups can choose to avoid these abilities amongst themselves, but because of the content I wouldn’t recommend this book for groups containing young or immature players. While I love a modular system, the ability to take disadvantages to stack on some very strong combinations of powers with build points has the potential to be abused by min-maxing players, so if your group is a mixed bag as far as how much your player’s optimize, this can create a big disparity in power levels- a GM will need to keep a close eye on their player’s personalized races.
Overall I enjoy this book, and would recommend it to any who would like to spice up their game with anthropomorphic races, and have recently purchased it as a gift for a friend. However since it fills such a specific niche, I can’t otherwise say it is a great investment. It is excellent at what it sets out to do, but certainly isn’t for everyone. If you have a handful of furry friends and can get a group together though, I suggest you purchase it and you won’t be disappointed.
Downloaded out of morbid curiosity... went better than expected.
As stated in the title I was a little reluctant to view this product, but I am actually rather impressed. I have no intent to use this as a PC resource, but rather a GM source book for a wide menagerie of exotic races for my campaigning world.
At a 105 pages, this is one pdf that I wish was a book. As a furry gamer having the option for furry races has always been a point of contention for me. Now before I go any further this needs to be said: Personally I don't mind certain aspects of fantasy gaming, but I know some folks are easily squicked; so the yiff stuff was unnecessary. In my opinion the folks at Skortched Urf should have done a kind of Black Tokyo version on the side for all the sexual based options and it would make the book a lot more accessible to the general gaming public.
As a system for creating anthro characters, it's a wonderful add on. For some of us, needed and wanted, maybe not so much other people but that goes for just about everything. There is enough customization options here that one could make just about any type of anthro character they might want.
For the furry community, this is something you should have as part of your Pathfinder library. For everyone else, maybe not unless you have a player who really wants to try this. It's a product with a lot of options and not all of them worthwhile or appealing to everyone as this does cater primarily to the furry community.
If you’re interested in something different for your PC races…
The PDF consists of 105 pages, with a cover (one page), credits (one page), an introduction (two pages), and the OGL (one page), and then we get into the meat of it.
First come the Orders, basically the furry ‘races’ you can use (22 pages). They run the gamut from the expected like wolves, cats, and the like to oddities such as aliens, worms (!), and Lovecraftian horrors. You do get plenty of variety in here.
Next comes Customization, a listing of Lesser and Greater racial traits, with some of the greater traits cheaper for certain orders (30 pages). They cost 1-4 points each, and the character starts with 4 Build Points for buying traits. Some traits come free with some Orders. Be warned, some of them are definitely for people who like the kinkier aspects of furry fandom. And one or two are missing their price cost.
And then Disadvantages (9 pages). You can take up to 2, each providing 2 build points, to purchase more traits. Again, be warned, as some of these may not be to the taste of every gamer group.
Templates are next (18 pages). To further individualize your furry character, with some of them being a bit too powerful for beginning characters. This is easily the best section of the PDF, with many of the templates quite usable even with non-furry characters, like a Wendigo template for people who have ‘gone windigo’ and turned cannibal; the Queen Bee/Worker Drone templates for races like an insect hive; and Earthborn, for characters born on ‘our’ Earth who end up in a heroic fantasy world.
And lastly is a section on Campaign Notes (16 pages). How to fit furries into a PFRPG campaign, either as lone creatures or as members of entire species, and how important and/or well accepted they will be in the campaign. It has a racial package for Neanderthals, as well as a somewhat powerful sorcerer bloodline, a magical transformation spell and an item for ‘furrifying‘ existing characters. At the end of the chapter it includes some anthro-specific diseases.
Really, it’s a fine book with some very good ideas, along with some material that will have an admittedly limited appeal to non-furry fans. But the good far, far outweighs the bad, and there is a lot of ideas here that are 100% usable even for non-furry characters and settings.
Yay, first post!
Fursona (well actually the first version of it) is what got me into Pathfinder.
While I totally understand the need to have an actual book in your hands, one solution is an E-book reader (and i say that working in a book bindery); most of them are lighter than your average laptop, and can scan for words so you don't have to flip pages looking for that one passage.
On the down side, you sometimes lose stuff, at least on my early Nook (my trusty Nookronomicon).
Anyway, I've been working on a character idea which is branching into a full blown story at this point. It started out with the "Earthborn" template, with a guy from our modern world being plucked out and reborn as this "furry monstrosity". It's been fun to play around with the system, to get the attributes just right, but that's what attracted me to the product in the first place; i love to tinker.
Looking in this product, slightly interested in it. But also noticed there was talk of a PoD option for this book. Has that been settled yet? (I ask because yes print versions are nice to have..also because I have some friends who are actually small time publishers and often do PoD publishing).
