Tides of War – Volley Fire Feats Redux

The revised version of Flying Pincushion Games’ Tides of War-book clocks in at 6 pages, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 1 page SRD, leaving us with 3 pages of content, so let’s take a look!

This pdf begins with a brief introduction to the subject matter, before presenting several feats. These are based on Group Fire, a combat/teamwork feat that, as a full-round action, allows you to make a single ranged attack while calling to allies within 15 feet that have this feat. The allies may spend an immediate action to also fire on the target you are attacking, with each participant granting +1 to atk and damage, including the initiator. However, allies that perform this attack are staggered on their next turn. Okay, this is a HUGE step up from the first iteration of the pdf, let’s see whether the feats that build on this are now similarly solid!

-Arcing Fire: Reduce cover-bonus to AC by half when firing in an arc; requires sufficient space, obviously. Solid.

-Call the Firing Line: When you call for a group fire, all participants get your Cha-mod as a morale bonus to attack, but you can do this only a number of times per day equal to your ranks in Profession (soldier). NICE restriction-element here for the powerful bonus!

-Clustering Volley: Add total damage of group shots together before applying DR. Solid.

-Dodge this!: Each participant targets a 5-foot-squares instead, with scaling Ref-saves to negate the attack. Now this one is genius for hitting high AC targets, but damage is calculated only via base damage die. Nice and in line with similar damaging mechanisms.

-Dynamic Duo: When only using Group Fire with two members, both get a free Intimidate-check using the higher result +5. Actually useful for small units, like adventuring groups – kudos!

-Flying Pincushion: Penalize flying creatures with scaling benefits.

-Gauging Shot: Forego any benefits, but grant +2 to atk and damage rolls for your participating fellows.

-Improved Group Fire: Call out for Group Fire as part of a full attack.

-Greater Group Fire: Allies that participate can use their lowest BAB-attack when using Group Fire – if they do, they are not staggered, but may not be part of a Group Fire attack on their next turn.

-Throw Everything: Use group fire with bombs, kinetic blasts, bloodline/domain power-based attacks, etc. and even held spells. This can thankfully not be combined with Clustering Volley.

Conclusion:

Editing and formatting are top-notch, I noticed no significant glitches. Layout adheres to Flying Pincushion Games’ two-column full-color standard and the pdf needs no bookmarks at this length.

Frank Gori, with help from David S. McCrae and Jeff Harris has thoroughly revised the original, subpar iteration and created a thing of beauty here – for a low price, you can make creatures (and PCs!) actually fear the power of volleys…and the pdf also expands the usefulness of the feats for purposes of the adventuring groups. With completely cleaned up material, this is pretty much the antithesis to the previous offering: Creative, powerful and sensible, this covers its niche perfectly. 5 stars + seal of approval.

You can get this inexpensive (and now awesome) little pdf here on OBS!

Endzeitgeist out.

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