Mundane No More: Texts and Tomes III – Psionic Repositories

The third installment in Rich Howard’s Mundane No More-series clocks in at 11 pages, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 1 page ToC, 1.5 pages of SRD, 3 pages of advertisement, leaving us with 3.5 pages of content, so let’s take a look, shall we?

After getting massive information on research, recipes and making dungeon guides in the superb first book, adding concise rules for special material in book 2 , now we tackle the psionic component – or don’t. For yes, this pdf has information on how to *not* use the repositories herein with psionics, so even those disliking psionics have something to enjoy.

First of all – my hat’s off regarding the creativity of the sample psionic repositories – far from being bland tomes, they come in the shapes of e.g. bound Shedu, crystalline boats etc. – now if that isn’t cool, I don’t know what is! Now since, unlike books, they can come in nearly all shapes and sizes, they also can become a pretty complex motivator – but you will have already found that out.

Unlike the previous books, 3 of the 5 sample repositories comes with a neat full color artwork, which is an additional plus. For everyone who doesn’t like Dreamscarred Press’ superb psionics, references towards Green Ronin’s excellent 3.X Psychic Handbook and advice for using these with horror/modern or scifi settings provide a round experience.

Conclusion:

Editing and formatting are very good, I noticed no significant glitches. Layout adheres to a printer-friendly 2-column no-frills standard and the pdf comes fully bookmarked for your convenience, in spite of its short size. Nice! Hyperlinks also help, mind you.

I *adore* Rich Howard’s Mundane No More-series…the big issue here being that the psionic repositories remain “simple” books. Yes, they’re cosmetically tied to psionics and allow multiple people to study them at once, they still remain a pretty minor modification of the base system, one that would have been better served by closer synergy with the psionics-rules – where is the special rule for psionic focus? For studying with linked minds? Psionics offer a lot that magic isn’t as adept at providing and this pdf would have been *the* chance to further cement that. It’s not hard, but a pretty significant lost opportunity, especially when the pdf wastes space with quoting various suggestions for sanity in a short paragraph. And yes, I’ve used *A LOT* sanity-rules in my campaigns; rest assured that you *should* use ones that are more concise if you tackle the topic. And yes, I know the official PFRPG-sanity rules. Forget them.

Don’t get me wrong – I *like* that this pdf has done its homework, so to speak; I just feel that properly tackling research/sanity would have been better off as its own tome, as opposed to a footnote, especially when the topic of psionic books is anything but exhausted in this pdf. Over all, in spite of the very fair price-point, I felt pretty underwhelmed by this installment and closed it with the feeling that it had wasted potential galore for tackling psionics within the cool Mundane No More-framework. My final verdict will hence clock in at 3.5 stars, rounded down by a margin to 3: The easily expandable content may be great, but it simply feels less pronounced than it ought to be.

You can get this solid, inexpensive expansion here on OBS!

Endzeitgeist out.

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