Category Archives: Book Reviews

Death by Cliché

I used to be a voracious reader. In the days before I got into tabletop gaming, when I was much shorter, I read pretty much everything I could get my hands on. I preferred science fiction, but I spent a … Continue reading

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Occult Adventures

Speaking of class design. I knew I was going to get Occult Adventures as soon as Paizo announced it. I figured it wouldn’t be the same as the amazing Heroes of Horror, but I’d hoped it would be in the … Continue reading

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Pathfinder Unchained

Reviewing Pathfinder Unchained is hard because it’s pretty all over the place. If it has a single unifying theme, it’s “Pathfinder does stuff in certain ways, and he’s how to make it do that stuff in different ways”. That’s largely … Continue reading

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Player’s Handbook

I’ve spent about a week going through my copy of the The Dungeons and Dragons Strikes Back Player’s Handbook. It’d love to give a review if it, I really would. But normally when I look at a book that book … Continue reading

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Masks/Eureka

This blog is pretty unapologetically about D&D (which, for the purposes of this article, is synonymous with Pathfinder). There’s a reason it’s called “DMing with Charisma” and not “GMing with Rapport” or “Storytelling with Manipulation”. That’s not necessarily because it’s … Continue reading

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Mythic Adventures

Lest my previous post come down too hard on one side of the axis, I generally don’t have a problem with powerful, even startlingly so, characters. My concern is with situation where a player’s style is so focused on powergaming … Continue reading

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Ultimate Campaign

Ultimate Campaign is a curious book. It almost doesn’t feel like a book at all, but rather a bunch of small books all put together with the only unifying theme being “these things are kind of neat, but fully optional”. … Continue reading

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Ultimate Equipment

I wanted to write my impressions of Ultimate Equipment, but what is there to say? It’s not like reviewing a normal book, where there’s some sort of new game-bending feature (Words of Power, Ultimate Magic) or I can rail on … Continue reading

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Advanced Racism Race Guide

Considering how little I like racism, I’m shocked at how much I’m loving the Pathfinder Advanced Race Guide. It’s a lot thicker than I thought it would be, has a good balance of crunch and fluff, and provides new rules … Continue reading

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Heroes of the Elemental Chaos

I like Heroes of the Elemental Chaos. When I got Heroes of Shadow, I found that it was mostly just an expansion to the staggeringly limited Encounters line, in that it wasn’t good but it was the best there was. … Continue reading

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