EZG reviews Pathways #30
The latest installment of Rite Publishing’s e-zine is 41 pages long, 1 page front cover, 12 pages of advertisement, 1 page ToC and 1 page SRD, leaving us with 26 pages of content, so let’s take a look, shall we?
We kick off this e-zine with David Paul’s editorial, providing an after Gencon-report for guys like yours truly who couldn’t attend as well as pointing towards some great offerings out there.
This issue’s sample creature should tickle a soft spot of all aficionados of Lovecraftian terrors and weirdness with the many-angled creature: Clocking in at CR +1, these creatures can be confused by mundane tasks and may actually transmit the depersonalization-insanity when being looked at (provided as well). Worse, they may deflect attacks back on attackers (ouch!) and force negative conditions on foes depending on the CR of the base creature. The base-creature provided is a CR 20 sample shoggoth lavishly illustrated by Richy Sampson.
Now Raging Swan Press goes uncommonly WEIRD this time around – we get a fully-detailed Storm Giant Pirate at CR 19 – which would be cool in and of itself. But add the WERE-TYRANNOSAURUS-affliction to it and we get pure awesomeness – especially since we get stats for both humanoid and hybrid forms! Awesome!
Now one of my gripes with the otherwise cool Jotunar-race from “In the Company of Monsters” was the lack of alternate racial traits. If you’re not familiar with the race, basic race traits are provided as a nice sneak-peek. 17 alternate traits are provided for the race and they actually are rather interesting – allowing you to embrace the cultural concepts of Vrid and Osoem and playing up their larger than life nature, Jotunar benefit greatly from these alternate racial traits – also due to some traits that offer powerful benefits like coup-de-grâceing foes as a move-equivalent action without provoking AoOs, but only once per week.
The excellent village of Longbridge (which I’ve btw. also reviewed) also gets a preview in here, wetting your palate for the neat full product. After that, we’re actually off to an article, by Liz Winters, on the new software by Lone Wolf (you know the company via Herolabs, don’t you?), Realm Works – if you don’t know about the software, be sure to check this article out!
After that, we’re off to this issue’s interview, this time with Legendary Games’ awesome Jason Nelson, providing not only valuable advice for freelancers, but also offering a neat array of insights into the genesis of the all-star team of Legendary Games and their plans for the future. Be sure to check out this interview!
Finally, the pdf provides a cream of the crop-selection of reviews by Joshua Gullion (also known as KTFish7) and yours truly.
Conclusion:
Editing and formatting are very good, I didn’t notice any significant glitches. Layout adheres to RiP’s two-column, full color standard and the pdf comes with full bookmarks for your convenience.
This installment of Rite Publishing’s Pathways continues the tradition of providing excellent content for the most affordable price possible – none. Though something is different here: On OBS, you can actually tip the crew behind this e-zine, if you enjoyed the offering herein via “Pay-what-you-want”. So yeah, this is most definitely worth your HD-space and if you care to, tip the fellows. My final verdict will clock in at 5 stars.
You can get this pdf for any price you’re comfortable with here on OBS!
Endzeitgeist out.
