Posts
today I'm going to take a look at the compilation of Richard Pett's excellent articles!
Your Whispering Homunculus
This pdf is
169 pages long, 1 page front cover, 2 pages editorial, 2 pages ToC, 1 page SRD
and 1 page back cover, leaving 162 pages of content, so let's check this out!
"Your
whispering Homunculus", or YWH, for convenience's sake, is a column in KQ written
by Richard Pett, one of the undisputed masters of creepy adventures and perhaps
one of the greatest adventure writers of our current generation. But what
exactly do these columns cover? Details. Any DM worth his salt is aware that
details go a LONG way to making a given setting immersive and believable and
YWH provides exactly that, in spades. Being a collection of articles with added
new material, the articles herein run the gamut of crunchy to being primarily
fluff-concerned and cover quite an interesting breadth of topics - and
interesting may mean hazardous and at the same time amusing: the first article
features 20 dumb bets - which include swallowing coals, balancing axes handle
down on your chin or eating raw potatoes. If you ever needed to drive home that
the commoners around here aren't the brightest lights in the sky, this will be
a godsend. Of course, once the PCs have succeeded in besting a local, their
gathering information endeavors may be thwarted by something different - like
50 topics of conversation that may be used as hooks to create your own
adventures, red herrings, or just spicy fluff. Later in the book, we also get a
neat little local-topic-of-conversation generator.
Horror is
hard to pull off, as are weird moments and thus, 30 weird moments are provided
for your convenience that range from creepy singing children to strange
occurrences and mass hysteria, which could be easily tied to the 20 new village
legends.
Of course,
not only occurrences can serve as fluff - 50 characters passing by and 50 weird
circus/freak-show-style performances are also included in this book. Of course,
the PC may also spend their coin in 100 strange new shops and emporiums and
potentially purchase 100 new pointless objects that may very well serve as either
red herrings or adventure hooks at your discretion or one of 50 strange
treasures (which come with GP-values). If the PCs buy one of the magic items
for sale, they should beware - while not cursed, there are 20 malfunctioning
magic items which add a bit of spice and unpredictability to the world and
magic - which is always good. Predictable magic disenchants me.
After
having had a magical mishap, the PCs may want to dine and 50 local delicacies can add a certain twist
to the local menus, perhaps being available only on one of the new 20 local
holy days also contained herein. Perhaps they are trying to sell one of the 20
humanoid treasures or even forget about one of the 27 strange things they could
encounter in the sewers. And should they go out at night, they might e.g. meet
Tarb Rustwind, who is convinced the PCs are haunted by an invisible demonic pig
named Sabdyne - and he's only one of 20 strange fellows!
Friends of
our often neglected d12 will rejoice, for there are a lot of neat "dozen"
tables - from barkeeps to insides of pit traps, weather changes, starting
disposition modifiers in conversations, minor afflictions, battle-scars on
monsters, watch captains, goblin chiefs, unusual rooms (e.g. a sludgery...) and
village squares provide quite some food for our poor d12 to be used. Oh, and if your PCs are in the city, be sure
to make sure of the new 12 consequences of bad rain and 10 instances of bad
snow in the city! And if afore-mentioned goblin chiefs need some servants -
there are 100 goblin features make them distinctive!
If you want
the PCs to go to the horse fair (perhaps due to owning 4WFG'S "Phantasia
Zoologica" or NNW's "Steeds and Stallions", a sample one,
including a race, is provided, as is an article on (un-)common breeds of dogs
and advice on how to freak out players and play to their sense when their PCs
are alone, but they obviously aren't.
There is
also an article that uses the troll-touched template to introduce us to a
variation on the concept of adaption/degeneration. More on the appetizing side
is the new feat and 20 sample ales that add magical effects to dwarven ale.
I already
mentioned monster scars, but in this book, we also get mechanical rules for
monsters that have actually been mangled - from disfigured nymphs to hydra-stumps
to an extremely cool mini-bestiary on one of my favorite critters Ankhegs! I'm
not sure whether it should be worrying, but this section contains content I
have also used in my campaign with variants prior to reading this. Pett is in
my mind! AHHHHHH.....Oo The Bestiaries also have a section on variant Basilisks
and the trog-kin template.
A short
article explains a subschool of malignant magic, variants of regular spells
that impose a toll on their casters but are also more effective than their
regular versions - I would pay for a malignant treatment of ALL spells in the
Core/APG/UM/UC, as they make for a great take on magic that is
inherently...taxing and potentially corrupt.
Random
encounters and adventure seeds also get the patented Pett-advice on increasing
their details and potential creepiness-factor. And have I mentioned the stats
for the master, his homunculus and the homunculus's familiar stirge?
Conclusion:
Editing and
formatting are top-notch, I didn't notice any glitches. Layout adheres to the
standard-paperback one-column standard and artworks, where applicable, are
stock. While the print version is nice, there is something jarring in the
pdf: Pages 31, 35, 41, 51, 63, 77, 81,
87, 93, 111, 115, 121, 129, 151, 157, 163 are empty in the pdf. While I get
that you want new chapters to start on the left when holding a physical copy, I
found the blank pages to be irritating in the pdf - if you print out the book,
you'll have a lot of blank pages. The pdf comes with extensive bookmarks. What
can I say about a book that compiles perhaps one of my favorite series of
articles from one of my favorite authors? The content is top-notch.
Unfortunately, the organization of the content is not flawless - why e.g. not
put the variant monster-entries back to back, the templates back to back, the
random weather entries back to back etc.? Organizing the book according to
themes would have made it much more user-friendly. Instead, the book opts to
present the articles as they've been written. While ok, this makes the feeling
of the overall book rather disjointed and potentially harder to navigate than
necessary. Don't get me wrong, I think ANY GM can benefit greatly from the
lecture of this book - it's a smart, cool set of tools to enrich your game with
details, details, details and even some cool rules here and there. However, I also think that the organizational
decision and lacking structure hurt the book and that the blank pages in the
pdf are unnecessary at best and potentially very irritating at worst. Thus,
while I want to give this book the full blown 5 Rudii plus seal of approval, I
just can't. Instead, I'll settle for a verdict of 4.5 Rudii for the print
version (in which the blank pages make sense) and a verdict of 4 Rudii for the
pdf due to them making no sense there and the lack of organization of the
articles. Still: Go ahead and check this out! Chances are you'll gibber with
glee!
All right, that's it for now, as always, thank you for reading my ramblings,
Endzeitgeist
out.
No comments:
Post a Comment