Pathways #25

This installment of Rite Publishing’s free e-zine is 41 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page ToC,11 pages of advertisement and 1 page SRD, leaving us with 27 pages of content, so let’s take a look!

Dave Paul’s editorial this time around is all about tricksters and Steven D. Russell’s creature also complements well this April’s fool’s theme – at CR +3 we get the deadly prankster who can make floors slick, create deadly, obscure booby traps, curse beings to suffer when kicked throw burning hot pie at foes, curse foes with diarrhea (players will HATE creatures that do that to their characters!), curse inappropriate beings to fall in love and finally, make people run into damaging walls. The template is deadly and will be LOATHED by players – nice job! The sample faerie dragon creature also fits in nicely with this template.

Thomas LeBlanc has a short, but oh so sweet article for us that features 11 non-magical weapon qualities master blacksmiths may add to your weapons, including an easily navigated, comprehensive table of prerequisites, cost and DC-increases as well as a feat to become a master weaponsmith. A glorious article, especially for people like yours truly who prefer the grittier side of fantasy and don’t use that many magical items. Two thumbs up – I hope to see more!

Creighton Broadhurst, mastermind of Raging Swan Press has something different from the usual go-play encounters this time around and features an article based on camping in the wilderness. A total of two tables with 50 entries per table provides dressings and minor complications around campfires and sites and makes for a nice little mini-dressing installment. My one gripe here being that the first table, due to some weird reason, is really pixelated and not exactly crisp – no idea what happened there, but printing it out resulted in quite a smudgy end-result as well for me.

Now Rite Publishing’s lord protector Steven D. Russell has more up his sleeve and provides DMs with a list of new abilities for zombies, each of which increases the CR of the base creature by one. Unless I’ve miscounted, a total of 23 of these await us – from leaving a bloody trail that makes combat slippery, but the undead also easy to track to limited energy drain, channel resistance,turning channel energy back upon the foe and faster spawn generation – there are some nasty surprises here and if you want some quick modifications to e.g. Raging Swan Press’ “100% Crunch: Zombies/Zombie Lords”-pdfs, then this article is a great way to fix one of the weaker spots of the two books. Nice to have indeed!

After that, we’re off to this issue’s interview, with perhaps the man who provides one of the most useful services I ever encountered – John Reyst, the owner of d20pfsrd.com. If you ever used this extremely useful site, do yourself a favor and read this interview as a minor means of thanking the man.

Finally, we have a rather big array of reviews by yours truly, featuring the highest rated pdfs of the last month.

Conclusion:

Editing and formatting are very good, I didn’t notice any significant glitches. Layout adheres to RiP’s 2-column standard and the cover artwork is rather appropriate for the issue – I’m quite a fan of the gimmicky way the faerie-dragon has messed up the logo. The pdf comes fully bookmarked for your convenience.

This issue was a surprise to me – I didn’t expect the template to be this maliciously deadly. I didn’t expect to like yet more mini-adjustments for zombies. And most of all, I didn’t expect to like the article on weapon qualities – but that one is my favorite for this issue – elegant, simple and yet so damn cool. Two thumbs up for Thomas Leblanc! Creighton Broadhurst’s article comes in as a close second – though I hope the table gets fixed with a crisper version. All in all, an enjoyable, nice issue for a price of…diddly-squat! It’s hard to beat this content as a non-existent price-point and hence, I’ll settle for a final verdict of 5 stars, omitting my seal only due to the strange pixelated page.

Get this FREE E-ZINE here!

Endzeitgeist out.

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