To add onto the ridiculousness of Advanced Weapons, their price points are overinflated.
Honestly, when it comes to expensive stuff I feel that armor and some mounts are perhaps the only really justifiable purchase for mundane equipment. Plate mail is crazy expensive at 1,500 gold, but given that it's the best armor in the game and when combined with a shield it nets you a base AC of 20, the benefits in missed attacks alone are worth the weight in gold. When it comes to weapons, a lot of these properties are situational or designed to mimic/replace certain feat traits, so they're less of a no-brainer option to take.
An excellent analysis! I would argue there's one more way these costs could be justified: if they serve as a springboard for the player to develop a "legacy" magic item. But that's such a niche instance that it feels like I'm trying to fix the developer's work in order to justify using them at the table.
Alright, folks: we're working with Magic Items today! This is a pretty light chapter, focusing mostly on magic items that would be most useful for various Transformations. Each Transformation gets four potential magic items. The Aberrant Horror, for example, could choose between the
fin symbiote, the
stalk symbiote, a
straitjacket, and a
star metal ring. These are not super-intuitive; you'd expect that
fin symbiote, for example, to give you a swim speed, but it's a an aboleth fin you can stitch onto yourself. All it does is increase your Transformation DC by 2. I figured the
stalk symbiote would give you some kind of beholder abilities, but it's basically the Alert feat as a magic item. The
straitjacket just lets you roll twice on the Aberrations table and choose which effect takes place. These are not what I'd call inspired design.
However, when we check the items for Fiends, we start to see some very interesting gear. The one I'm most interested in is
Ardor, an artifact-level battleaxe. This bad boy is a +3 battleaxe that does an extra 3d10 necrotic damage on a hit. It makes the wielder immune to the charmed, frightened, paralyzed, poisoned, and stunned conditions. It gives you a bunch of spells, including
bane, banishment, and
incendiary cloud. And as a bonus action, you can command it to hit something within 50 feet. If you give this thing out in your campaign, well, have fun wrapping it up.
So both of these examples illustrate that there is a wide gulf in quality in the writing and imagination on these magic items. There are some excellent items in here, but there are some stinkers, too.
There are a few generic magic items not tailored to specific Transformations, but only four, and none of them are all that interesting.
Alright, the next chapter is about Inspiration and Corruption. If you're looking to help bring that supernatural feeling of dark fantasy, you need Resolve Dice and Beast Dice (both are pools of d6's). So Resolve Dice are these odd meta-currency dice on the players side. Beast Dice are the same meta-currency on the DM's side (no relation to the YouTuber). Props on the names, boys - they're vague
and evocative.
Resolve Dice have a number of uses. They can be used (during a rest) to remove conditions or a level of exhaustion. You can spend two to reroll a failed death save. You can use them instead of HD. You can spend six Resolve Dice to grant the entire party advantage on all rolls, resistance to all damage, and all damage they deal is doubled...for one round. So they're useful, but highly situational. This is not something your players will be using every session, or even every few sessions. If you want your PCs to use them, you will have to remind the PCs about them. Resolve Dice can be gained by a player sticking to their traits, bonds, ideals, or flaws, or when the PCs hit certain milestones in the story, etc. Frankly, placing the recharge out of the PCs hands means that the PCs will be even more parsimonious about using Resolve Dice
because they don't know when they'll be getting them back.
Personally, I don't like this design. It's fiddly to track. Just give them a full pool of six at the start of each session and let the PCs spend them as they will. Use them like Fate Points in
Dark Heresy, for example.
Moving to the DM's side of the ledger, Beast Dice! Be a manly man and play with BEAST DICE! Basically, this pool increases whenever the PCs take actions that darken the tone of the game, or whenever a boss monster shows up. The text specifies a "particularly strong, evil, or frightening creature," but it's a boss monster. You get it. It also grows whenever the party encounters something particularly horrifying or disturbing. So, my first thought was that this is weird design. As noted above, the PCs' Resolve dice do not recharge on a schedule they control. But the Beast Dice can grow whenever the DM wants to throw in a nasty monster. It's also weird, because who exactly decides that something is horrifying or disturbing? I mean, assuming you can do something like that within the bounds set out at session zero. Is that a PC decision? Or am I OK to be like, "Yeah this is enough, and I can add a Beast Die"?
We'll come back to this in a second. First, let's see what Beast Dice can do! The DM can spend a Beast Die to reduce the disposition of an NPC (from Friendly to Neutral, for example). You can also roll a Beast Die when a PC hits 0 hp - on a 5 or a 6, the PC fails a death save. You can spend any number of Beast Dice to increase the number of creatures in an encounter. You can use them to inflict a curse or a Transformation on a PC. Or...you can manifest the Beast near the PCs. What does the Beast do? Well, that's up to you!
"The effects of the Beast’s presence are felt throughout the region and vary based on the closest region of the empire: fleshy abominations in Abendland, vicious puppets in Rauland, corrupted beasts and plants in Nordenland, and armor-fused horrors in Unterland. This option may also be used to represent some other major threat based on locations outside the empire, such as an outbreak of coldfire in the Valikan Clans. These events cause serious damage to the local populace and represent a major, continuing threat for the party."
So let's break this down: The Beast Dice can either 1) change things that should properly flow from the world (how many monsters in an encounter, the Curse / Transformation thing), 2) screw with someone's character (the death save thing), or 3) We don't know, make it up!
None of these are helpful. At all. Imagine having your character wake up and the DM says, "Look, we don't have time for you to get mentored by a lich, Steve, so I'm just gonna use these Beast Dice to give them the lich transformation. Have fun eating souls, bro!"
There are some "Neutral Abilities" that both PCs and DMs can use - you can burn dice to mimic a spell, add hit points, or have a "stroke of luck." These are all minor benefits that can manifest in a scene; they're fine.
In total, then, we have a system that functions much like PHB Inspiration - it's intended to reward RP, but it's removed from any mechanical recharge trigger, entirely on the DM to track, and only situationally useful. I'm not sure why people keep thinking that we can "fix" players not roleplaying with lightweight mechanical incentives. Pass.
The next section is about Dark Bargains. Save yourself some time, and go read the section on similar mechanics in
Van Richten's Guide, or in
Blades in the Dark. Much better advice.
Finally, there's a section on running Session Zero in Etharis. This is solid advice, and pretty well done! It's only three pages, too, so it feels less like homework.
So here at the end of it all, let's go back to our criteria:
- Does it do a good job selling players on the setting? Does it get them excited to play?
- Does it work well within the 5E standard game loop, or does it impose a unique burden on the DM?
- Does the content exceed what I could have come up with on my own?
This does a great job selling players on Etharis - everything from the races to the subclasses to the magic items highlights things unique to this world. It works pretty well within a standard 5E game loop, without imposing a unique burden on the DM. And most of this content is stuff I couldn't have come up with on my own.
I recommend you buy this if you're interested in putting more dark fantasy into your game, or if you're a fan of more edgy material. You might want to hold (wait for the price to come down) if you're just looking for mechanical options. Personally, I'm glad I bought this, and I had some fun with this review! Thanks for the recommendation, y'all!
