EZG reviews Amazing Races: Goblins
This pdf is 4 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page SRD, leaving us with two pages of new content for goblins, so let’s take a look!
We get 4 new traits, one that grants a bonus to saves to avoid becoming fascinated, one that makes you immune to stench,+2 to enchantment-saves and +1 to atk when seeing/hearing a hobgoblin, bugbear or barghest. Goblins may also replace their skilled racial trait with the option to ignore the penalty to atk incurred by being shaken and instead gaining a +2 bonus to weapon damage while shaken. Alternatively, the goblins may reduce the improvised weapon penalty to -2 and gain a +2 damage bonus when using improvised weapons.
The pdf also provides 6 new feats for goblins:
-Big Fire: Torches you wield deal int-mod fire damage.
-Combat Buffoonery: Use tangle feet versus creatures of your size as well and use Perform (Buffoonery) when using through an opponent’s threatened square to calculate the Tangle Feet-DC. Nice one to expand the basic feat.
-Foolhardy Fighting: Ignore the Int-requirement for a variety of feats and substitute Perform (Buffoonery) ranks for your CMB. Cool feat!
-Freak-Out: Reroll an AoO you missed, but lose dex-bonus to AC for the round in which you chose to do so.
-Inexplicable Survivor: Fall prone as an immediate action. If you do, you get +2 to AC versus the next melee attack and the usual penalties associated with the prone condition do not apply versus that attack.
-Splashing Embers: Makes your thrown torches deal splash damage and has synergy with the Burn! Burn! Burn!-feat.
The new archetype for the goblin rogue contained herein, is, unsurprisingly given the goblin-predisposition towards pyromania, the Firebug – this archetype needs a flint wedge in a free hand to deal sneak attack damage – and the sneak is fire damage. They also get a bonus to craft (alchemy) and fire resistance equal to half their level instead of trapfinding and they may also increase the DC of their minor and major magic rogue talents if the spell-like abilities have the fire descriptor. Nice little archetype!
Conclusion:
Editing and formatting are top-notch, I didn’t notice any significant glitches. Layout adheres to Abandoned Art’s no-frills 2-column standard and the pdf has no bookmarks, but needs none at this length.
Goblins get some nice toys in this installment, especially those of a particularly pyromaniac disposition – between archetypes and feats, igniting things has seldom been so much fun -especially the feats ooze goblin flavor and will definitely see some use in my campaign. The content herein is overall solid, feels well-balanced (though the torch-feats could e considered somewhat weak) and should provide some nice tools for our big-headed green menaces. While aforementioned torch-feats feel a bit weak to me, I still feel justified in rating this nice collection of racial options 4.5 stars, rounded up to 5 for the purpose of this platform.
Check out this nice pdf full of mayhem here!
Endzeitgeist out.
