Showing posts with label Silent7Seven Games. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Silent7Seven Games. Show all posts

Saturday, April 4, 2009

Advanced Class: Sorcerer (Silent7Seven Games)


This new PDF brings us a variant spellsource for the sorcerer - a Far Realm (Sorry, farthest realm, but really, shouldn't it be furthest realm? :)) infected sorcerer that spontaneously (well almost) bursts tentacles or mouths amongst several things. The Big C flavor is good and strong (iirc at least, its been 20 years since I played CoC and read the books), and we are presented with several new interesting options. From the switching of racial stats to CON (making more races better for this kind of sorcerer) to the aberrant growths (I mean, who wouldn't want to be sprouting mouths or tentacles), passing by the upgradable powers (that means you might be able to keep your favorite power, without it ever becoming outdated). The powers are complex (lots of circumstances) and powerful, but this is balanced by the fact that they are fairly circumstancial. Some are really cool (I <3 distortion field, pushing people away from you before you teleport and again when you arrive), while at least one is quite broken (yes, Sorcerous Rays, I am looking at you - auto effects like blind, immobilize or fear is just too good, even for a level 9 daily). Overall, it's solid, with some great ideas. Had a few more things been properly balanced, I would definitely have upped the rating.
Rating:* * * *

Lunar Scrolls (Silent7Seven Games)


Lunar Scrolls presents us with a wealth of options for introducing a new power source into our campaigns: The Lunar power source. The fluff is decent, but to me, the core of thePDF are the lunar multiclasses , infusing your characters with lunar powers. The idea is intriguing, but sadly they suffer from various issues. First of all, they seem to "break" several of the normalmulticlass rules. Instead of taking an initial feat and then 3 separate multiclass feats, you take a multiclass feat, and then only take two feats to swap powers. The first gives you access to swap both an encounter and a utility power. Also, there are constraints as to which level of powers you can swap, seemsunnecessary to me. You also need to take all lunar multiclass feats in order to take a lunar paragon path. Again, why change what everyone else does? Another thing that "breaks" the usual rules, is the weird scaling of themulticlass encounter and daily powers that you can pick, if you have taken the appropriate feats. Instead, they should have made more powers, to swap in at higher level.Powerwise, there are a lot of things that are just too good. The first crescent striker multiclass feat enables you to remove 1[w] from an attack and daze instead daze the target until the start of your next turn. Even with the target getting an immediate save, it's quite powerful for a rogue using a dagger, since he only loses 1d4 damage. Also, there are a lot of possibilities for inflicting penalties to that save. The PP that grants -3 penalty to saves (at level 16) on all conditions that you inflict becomes a new must have PP for a lot of classes. Overall, a lot of powers seem fairly unbalanced, most of them leaning to the "overpowered" side, rather than the "underpowered" side. There are also a lot of clunky rules in there, for example the power that does X on a hit, unless it misses by more than 5, in which case it does nothing. Or regen that is granted that only heals up to Y times the target's healing surge value. Overall, the idea of a lunar power source was a good idea and could probably be great flavor for a campaign, but sadly, Lunar Scrolls would need a good amount of work before I could use it in my campaign.
Rating:* *

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Advanced Class: Druid (Silent7Seven Games)


This little PDF gives us 7 heroic and 4 paragon feats (and powers) for our druids for almost no money. Each feat gives you a +3 feat bonus to a different skill and a once per encounter special attack when adopting a particular form. You can take multiple feats, but can never use more than one special form within the same encounter. Overall, the crunch looks solid and the ideas are respectable, giving more flavor and panache to your druid. The paragon feats gives you another special attack (or improves an at-will) and even more importantly, access to a new level 13 encounter power. While the heroic tier feats felt well-balanced against each other, there is a bigger variation amongst the paragon tier feats, but none of them are better than the feats found elsewhere. They are just different. The paragon feats also allow for wild-shaping into Dragon and Umber Hulk forms, both of which are magical beasts. I see no reason why this should be a huge problem though. Overall it’s a good little add-on for a druid, and I could easily see myself using a couple of the feats for the druid I play in SoW atm.
Rating:* * * *