Everyman Minis: Mystery of Music

This Everyman Mini clocks in at 7 pages, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 3 pages of SRD, leaving us with 2 pages of content, so let’s take a look!

On the introductory page, we get a new spell, hymn of peace, which clocks in at level 6 for bard, 7 for cleric/oracle. This is basically a 40 ft. burst cantered on you that prevents targets from taking hostile actions unless they succeed a Will save. The mystery (which is erroneously referred to as “symphony” mystery in the introductory paragraph nets Bluff, Knowledge (history) and Perform as class skills. The bonus spells granted range from solid note to disrupt silence, magnifying chime et al, includes the new spell, and culminates, of course, in wail of the banshee.

Now, let us take a look at the revelations featured, shall we? We have, for example, enthralling performance, which provides a variety of spells added to the spell list, with the HD-caps of the spells granted adjusted based on Perform ranks. This is a nice way to scale here. As a nitpick: Two spell references have not been italicized properly. Harmonic concordance  lets you enhance allied spellcasting with a short array of metamagic feats – basically, a teamwork casting ability, one that is limited in rounds and locked behind an appropriate minimum level. Inspiration of the muses provides a variant of the investigator’s inspiration that can be applied to Cha, Dex or Int-based ability and skill checks. Thankfully, it does not unlock inspiration-based abilities and can’t be used as a prerequisite. Instrument master lets you use class level in conjunction with magical instruments. Sound mastery lets you amplify or dampen sounds – your rogue friends will thank you for it.

Reverberation enhances sonic-based oracle spells with Widen Spell, or modify the area to a cone. Complaint here: the cone-modification should allow for a save if the base spell that targeted one or more objects or creatures did not, as the modification can bypass touch requirements. Skull-splitting screech is a single-target sonic attack that can daze a nearby target. Sonic body duplicates sonic form. Unwitting choir can force targets to lose part of their actions as they sing along with your merry tune, while allies joining in are buffed as per heroism. Vocal mimicry does what it says on the tin. Finally, the final revelation nets free application of a variety of metamagic feats to sonic spells.

Conclusion:

Editing and formatting are good – apart from one potential rules-snafu and a cosmetic missed italicization, I noticed no serious glitches. Layout adheres to the latest 2-column full-color standard of the series, including a white background, making it pretty printer-friendly. The pdf has a nice full-color artwork, but no bookmarks. At this length, it needs none of the latter, mind you.

Joshua Hennington delivers an enjoyable, neat oracle mystery. While there are a few minor formal snafus here, as a whole, this mystery does some pretty unique things, has a well-chosen array of abilities and, in an interesting manner, actually does not cardboard-copy bardic tricks. Instead of grafting classic into the chassis, we get some distinct tricks. So yeah, all in all, this represents a fun mystery. My final verdict will clock in at 4 stars.

You can get this neat mystery here on OBS!

Endzeitgeist out.

Comments