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Mythic 2e
Publisher: Paizo
by Ben W. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 03/29/2023 09:06:06

IMPORTANT NOTE 29 March 2023: This review rating was mistakenly based on an older version of this supplement. I will be amending it to reflect the author's changes and notes in their reply below.

This product has brought me out of review retirement to give my honest opinion and thoughts on this conversion of the Mythic Rules from Pathfinder 1st Edition into Pathfinder 2nd Edition.

The Good

A remarkably faithful conversion of Mythic Paths, Path abilities, and Mythic Feats.

The use of Focus Points to replace Mythic Power is inspired and fits the existing PF2 game well.

The Bad

Persistent use of the term "damage reduction" throughout the product instead of Resistance, except in a few cases where "Mythic Resistance" is mentioned, but there's no indication what that actually means (so gaining "5 Mythic Resistance" is frustratingly meaningless, though I assume it means "resist all physical damage 5 except from a Mythic source").

Some abilities have the Focus trait but no focus point use.

Abilities exist that are nonsensical, or contradictory, or don't quite properly account for the rules of the game (for example, an ability which is a reaction that if it works allows you to make an attack of opportunity, except attack of opportunity is a reaction, and you've already used your reaction, so... it really should just let you make a melee Strike).

The Conclusion

As a long-standing fan of the Mythic rules (it's second only to the Kingdom rules for me), I truly want to love this product, but it feels to me as though it was rushed out without a developer pass, which would have caught all of the problems I've found. It is definitely not an overall "bad" product, but undoubtedly will take some work to make it function properly, even though the design intent is very clear in most places.

I would have liked to see some treatment of Mythic monsters to accompany this, as that would have rounded the product out nicely, but I can forgive it if we assume it's solely meant to be the player-facing rules being converted.

Overall, I have to give this 3 stars. It's probably good enough for most people, and I'm borrowing heavily from it for my own use, but the amount of effort I'm putting in to make it actually function within the confines of PF2 is a serious detriment.



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
Mythic 2e
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Creator Reply:
Hey Ben W. First off, thanks for the review! Secondly It took some time but I fixed some of the problems you pointed out. Damage Reduction - Removed references to damage reduction, replaced with resistance. Mythic Resistance - Mythic resistance is explained in the glossary, any damage from a non-mythic source is reduced. Focus Trait - Fixed most of the Trait abilities, clarified wording, this has been a work in progress and initially there were no action indicators, so wording was included to explain how many actions each activity would take. I have removed much of this now. Contradictory Wording - A lot of this was a result of specifying number of actions. Cleared up most abilities descriptions. Mythic Monsters - I am working on a supplement for Mythic Monsters and Mythic Spells! Thanks for your support and for the review. This document is updated monthly, so keep the reviews coming and look out for the next two supplements.
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Malevolent Medium Monsters
Publisher: Legendary Games
by Chemlak G. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 10/20/2017 16:07:56

Magnificent Marvelous Monsters Make Me Masterfully Merry

If I have one single gripe about the Pathfinder rules, it's that high-CR almost always equals big. I have always enjoyed coming across monsters that are medium or smaller and tougher than your average bear (or level 8 Barbarian, at least).

Enter Malevolent Medium Monsters from Legendary Games. I heaved a huge sigh of relief when I saw this, not least because I know that LG can pull it out of the bag.

And then I bought it.

Hooo boy!

Please ignore the fact that this is part of the "Righteous Crusade" AP Plug-ins. This book is great for anyone playing a level 10+ game.

The Good I could go through everything in here (and I expect Endzeitgeist will when he reaches this product in his schedule), and drool over how utterly awesome everything is, but that's not me, so here we go with some high points:

The Alabaster Beetle. This thing is terrifying. Whatever genius came up with the idea of an underground beetle that can burrow, fly, spray paralytic poison, reproduce asexually, and is invisible to dark vision, is simply... a genius. A sick, twisted, my-kind-of-evil genius. CR 12 and comes in groups of up to 20. Because players need to learn fear, sometimes.

Homonculous Dragon. Oh, hell, yes. It's... well, it's sort of the best (or worst, depending on your perspective) of all dragons. This round it might be breathing a cone of electricity, next round a line of ice. And its aura might be acid this round. Fire the next. Or something else. Because being predictable gets you killed. And being unpredictable tends to kill PCs.

Fiendfused. Okay, I want more of these. A lot more. A whole book more. Preferably with Mythic versions. Because... oh, there is nothing not to love about these: they're people who died while they were possessed by a fiend, and the fiend merged with the mortal body and... awesome fiendish stuff happened. Like the one based on the balor that has an explosion every time it takes a critical hit. Or the marilith-based one that has four arms and infuses its weapons with magic. Or the pit fiend one... you get the idea.

The Bad Nitpick time! I like all of the monsters in this book, so that leaves me looking for things that are missing, don't make sense, or just seem out of place... and there's so little.

Save vs what? I can calculate a DC as well as the next guy (27, since you're asking), but the Bedlam Breath ability of the homonculous dragon is missing it from the entry.

Free metamagic? Maybe? Weirdly, this is another "issue" with the homonculous dragon (which is one of my favourite creatures in this book!). It has an ability to spend points from a pool to add metamagic feats to its sorcerer spells. It's a free action to spend the points, and it adds the feats on the fly, but... I can't tell if the casting time increases like it would normally for a sorcerer casting a metamagic spell. Part of me wants to say "yes, it does, be consistent", and the rest of me wants to say "CR 16, this thing should be nasty, let it be completely free!" I'd have liked it spelling out in the text.

The Conclusion If it's not clear, I'm Legendary Games fanboying again. This is wonderful. Thurston Hillman and Jesse Benner have absolutely knocked it out of the park. Other than my minor issues with what I spotted in the homonculous dragon, this is just thoroughly amazing. Clearly it's not perfect, but it's focused on a gap in the market that has been bugging me for years, and that cuts it a huge amount of slack. I'm going to use this book just as soon as I can. This is not something I can leave on my drive and forget about, because if nothing else it gave me fiendfused and I just want more of them (even if I have to make them myself). I can't help it, one day Legendary Games will produce something that I can't just enthuse about from start to finish. 5/5.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Malevolent Medium Monsters
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Forest Kingdom Campaign Compendium
Publisher: Legendary Games
by Chemlak G. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 10/03/2017 17:57:35

The Forest Kingdom Compendium is a compilation and expansion of the various supplements Legendary Games have released which support (in typical Third Party fashion) the Kingmaker Adventure Path. At this point I will immediately say - if you don't have, don't want, and aren't going to play that AP, that should NOT prevent you getting this book. It's generic enough (within the areas it focuses) to be useful.

The Good There's Everything. Okay, that might be a tiny exageration, but not much of one. It's called The Forest Kingdom Campaign Compendium. And the only one of those words that's even a little bit extraneous is "The". Archetypes, feats, prestige classes, spells, magic items, fey, royal tournaments, countries, characters, heroes, monsters and two adventures to supplement the AP. All of them with a foresty or kingdomy slant.

Subsystems FTW. I'm a fan of subsytems. I've been writing my own since the 2nd Edition D&D days (most of them not very good!), and I love reading new ones, and this book has a few (mostly involving fey and since I've got a possible nymph/paladin relationship of some kind in my kingdom campaign, those are awesome). The single biggest is Royal Tournaments (available as its own book), which is just crammed with amazing rules for running a festival, taking part in events at a festival, or just plain hanging out at a festival.

Beautiful art. I have a distinct fondness for fantasy art. Generally speaking, the more realistic the better. The art in this book is stunning. Yes, lots of it is repeated from other books (no real surprise), but just going to another page and seeing yet another pretty picture that perfectly fits with nearby text.

The Bad When is a feat not a feat? Okay, this is really nitpicky, but there are two feats in the section that describes faerie bargains with mortals, and they fit there thematically, but 90-something pages earlier are a whole slew of new feats for characters, and it's a bit weird for the feats to be separated.

Prestige classes. I love the idea behind prestige classes. I think the implementation of them in the 3.x/Pathfinder rules sucks. They were overused in 3.x D&D, and Pathfinder has done a lot to make them less of a feature of the system, and I think that overall the game is better for not having many. So the addition of three prestige classes rubs me the wrong way. That's not to say that there's anything actually wrong with the classes themselves (though I do have to question a 6-level class), just that I think I'd have preferred archetypes to fit the niches.

The Conclusion I love this book. Putting aside my personal dislike of prestige classes and questions of where feats should be in the book, it's an excellent resource for players and GMs, whether you're playing Kingmaker or not, if you're going to spend any amount of time in forests, meeting fey, or at kingdom fairs, then this book has something to offer you.

The things that I think are wrong with this book do not even put a dent in the amazingness that is everything else. I'd be particularly mean to deduct a star for those things, and this book is being integrated into my home campaign (which has nothing to do with Kingmaker except Kingdom building). Got to give it 5/5.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Forest Kingdom Campaign Compendium
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The Firemaker
Publisher: Four Dollar Dungeons
by Chemlak G. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 06/15/2015 15:34:35

Bring a 10-foot pole. And be prepared.

The Firebringer is an adventure for 1st level characters, providing enough treasure and XP to bring a party of 4 characters to 2nd level by the conclusion. It is based around an old abandoned dwarven mithral mine, since overrun by goblinoids (amongst other things), set near the village of Pig's Trotter (heh).

I was lucky enough to be sent a review copy for 4DD, and was warned that it is a) their weakest work, and b) quite tough.

If this is their weakest work, I'm looking forward to seeing more, and this thing is deadly as all hell.

When playing this module, I had to take some liberties with the setting - I'd already run an introductory session for my players and was hemming and hawing about how to move a plotline along, when the review copy of this module fell into my possession, and it was a godsend. I needed goblins. It has goblins. I needed the goblins to have a home. They have a home. I needed them to have a reason to be out raiding. They have a reason to be out raiding. So far, so good.

On the downside, I have only 3 players (plus a plucky half-elf teenager NPC), and the intro session was set in the wilderness, some miles from any settlement.

So, I set about making the few minor adapatations I needed to this adventure to squeeze it in to my setup, and set my players loose.

[b]The Good[/b] A complete adventure, with an extraordinary amount of detail, background, and flavour. Every creature has a reason for being their, and different relationships with the other creatures present. Every room has a reason to exist, and the little touches like statues of the individual dwarves who founded the mine being scattered around the 4-level complex were delightful (and yes, my players did pick up on the keyhole/hidden key thing).

XP/Treasure table. This addition was perhaps my favourite part (and I really liked a lot of things in this adventure): near the beginning is a room-by-room breakdown of the dungeon, with the XP award for defeating the challenge, and the treasure awarded, with values, so you can easily see what there is. There's also guidance on the table for increasing the treasure if you have a larger party.

Zombie dragon! My favourite creature in this whole thing, which my players avoided like the plague (they made good stealth checks, it sucks at perception) is the zombie white dragon. I was really looking forward to describing it drunkenly flopping down in front of them, gobs of flesh hanging from its bones, as it lazily shambles towards them. But they ran away. Ah, well. Other notable creatures include the half-wit half-ogre with mommy issues, the mommy ogre with [i]everyone[/i] issues, and the insanely arrogant ifrit sorcerer. Love them all, love the little touches that make them incredibly easy to play and turn them all into real characters. Bang-up job writing engaging NPCs for the GM, even if the players learn nothing at all about them.

Maps! Maps, maps, maps, maps, maps. I love maps. They're one of my biggest weaknesses (or at least one of the things that makes my bank account go "ah, there are maps, so that's why I'm empty again") as an RP collector. Give me a good map to purchase, and I will devour. This adventure comes not only with the maps in the adventure pdf (which are beautiful), but blown up image files of each of those maps (in all their delightfully attractive cartographed glory) and simplified versions (without all the cool drop-shadows and shading, and whatnot), [i]and[/i] unlabelled versions of each of those, too! Utterly perfect for the GM running the adventure online a VTT - upload, fit, line up the squares, and bosh, you're ready. Brilliant.

[b]The Bad[/b] Hot DAMN this thing is tough! My players aren't really old-school, so never struggled through The Saga of the Shadow Lord in BECMI like I did back in the day, and some of the design concepts in this adventure are... problematic for players whose GM has been a bit hand-holdy. First, while there's guidance on making this adventure scale to groups larger than 4 PCs, there's nothing in it about how to adjust for smaller groups. Second (and I know this is going to seem a bit weird at first) the lowest encounter CR in the whole thing is 1. In fact, of the thirteen encounters, exactly 4 of them are CR 1. All the rest are 2 or higher, topping out at a whopping CR 4 in one case. In case that didn't sink in: less than 33% of the encounters presented in this adventure are CR-appropriate, the rest are higher. Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing, in itself, since the PCs can typically roll all over anything you put them up against, but I had an under-sized party to begin with, and this exacerbated the deadliness of those encounters a fair bit. I even went so far as judiciously modifying a few bits and pieces here and there to make it less deadly (like that pit trap. I love that pit trap. It's hilarious. And way too deadly, even if it practically hits the players over the head with the obvious stick. Players will screw up and fall down it. Trust me. They will).

Room number which, what, where, huh? Nitpick time! The room numbering on the maps goes haywire at level 3. The text has a room with no number right at the start of the level, and then the next room picks up the numbering again with no break, but the maps are numbered in full, so you have to subtract 1 from the map's room number to make sure you're reading the right room in the text. Phew! That one threw me for a loop for a bit.

Read-alou-ooh-adventure-details. I'm not a fan of read-aloud text most of the time, because it's almost always too much. "This ancient room is designed in the Targorn period of architecture, with buttressed ceilings of sandstone run-through with so-called bloodstains - red streaks of iron-rich silt. The walls are covered in tapestries depicting historical battles from ages past, and your eye is caught by a particularly attractive needlework scene on a stand of the star-crossed lovers Wandero and Julia from a famous stage tragedy. On the floor is..." Bleurgh. This adventure manages to go to the other extreme by not including any read-aloud text at all, but falls down because the GM-details are mixed in with the room descriptions. Several times I found myself reading a small passage verbatim because the description was actually what I [i]want[/i] from read-aloud text, only to have to catch myself before I revealed some secret that only the GM should know. I'd love to see those frankly elegant and perfect room descriptions cordoned off as read-aloud, with the GM-guidance text swiftly following on.

[b]The Conclusion[/b] I got this adventure with mere days to spare before my game session, and I was able to read it through, upload what I needed, change what I needed to fit into my existing plot, and other than a few concessions to make it a bit less deadly, run it as written. It was tough for the party, but this adventure is an excellent piece of pick-up-n-play work. It's by no means perfect, but for the harried GM in need of a quick adventure to kick off a party, this is really good.

I've been arguing with myself about what rating to give The Firemaker, and I've settled on 4-stars: The extras such as the maps; the XP/Treasure table; the brilliant room descriptions; the wonderful creatures and their relationships, hopes, and dreams. All those things push this above just average. It's a total beast to your party, but this adventure is a good one to have in your repertoire.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
The Firemaker
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Creator Reply:
Just for the sake of the people on this site, because I know I\'ve already answered you elsewhere, I have now corrected the room numbers. A debate about read-aloud text and general room-description techniques regularly starts and stops on the paizo forums. I have tried various other techniques in later adventures and I dare say one day I\'ll get it right :-) Anyway, thank you once again for taking the time to review The Firemaker. All the best Richard
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Mythic Monsters #9: Undead
Publisher: Legendary Games
by Chemlak G. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 05/08/2015 18:35:04

Legendary Games very kindly sent me a review PDF copy of this instalment of the mythic monsters series, which I picked from their selection with malice aforethought. Let me be straight with you: I don't like undead. As a player or as a GM. They just bug me with their insane slew of immunities, nasty special attacks, and all-too-common damage reduction. I tend avoid them like the plague, or only use them if there's a logical reason for their presence in an adventure.

So, you may well ask, why the heck did I ask for a copy of a book about creatures that I don't like? Two reasons, really. First, because my natural enmity towards undead means this review isn't just going to be an automatic five-star love-fest for what Legendary Games put out, and secondly to see if the authors can do something to make me want to use their creations.

Guess what? It worked.

The Good As with all of the Mythic Monsters series, here we get common bestiary creatures mythiced up, with new thematic abilities to put the willies into your players. As usual, Legendary Games doesn't disappoint, presenting such noteworthies as ghouls and ghasts, the demilich, and my personal favourite the spectre (if incorporeal blitz doesn't scare the bejesus out of a party, nothing will), getting just the right amount of extra oomph to really make them worthy of the word "mythic".

Special mention has to be made of the new undead nasty in this book: the jigsaw man. I love this thing! An undead serial killer that can transform into a swarm? The flavour text is evocative, creepy, and downright scary, and I can see one of these as the subject of an investigative adventure, and at CR 12 it's no pushover (and it really wants your PCs to bleed).

The Bad Okay, layout error in the introduction where demilich is the only non-bolded monster name on the page, and it's a book full of undead (with all of their attendant problems). This product doesn't thrill me (unlike Mythic Monsters: Dragons, for example), and it's not a page-turner, making me desperate to see what's next. In that regard it's almost humdrum.

The Conclusion I came to this book with at best neutral feelings. And I leave this book ready to throw some really scary, nasty, frightening beasties at my players. Yes, it's "just another" mythic monster book, but the contents are by no means "just another" group of undead monsters. Played right, these can be the terrifying, scary, nightmarish undead you never wanted to meet, and leave your players wondering what the heck they just faced.

I know I'm going to use the jigsaw man as soon as my players get up a few levels, even if I have to rewrite my plot to fit it in.

I can't separate my feelings about undead enough to give a completely unbiased, objective review rating: I've been wavering between four-stars because I simply don't like undead, and five because this book absolutely delivers what it promises. On balance I'm settling on four because heck, it's my review, but if you like undead nasties, this is a five-star book.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
Mythic Monsters #9: Undead
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