Amazing Races: Duergar!

By Enzeitgeist

This pdf is 4 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page SRD, leaving us with 2 pages of content for the duergar, so let’s take a look!

The pdf kicks off with 3 new feats for the grey dwarves:

• Grey Craftsman: +2 to a Craft-skill to a craft-skill you have at least one rank. Ranks count as caster level for the purpose of Craft Magic Arms and Armor and only increase the DC by +2 for every spell requirement you don’t have. It also counts as the Master Craftsman feat, Awesome feat!
• Labor and Toil: Create magic items, spending 1 day for every 2K gold instead of the normal 1k per day.
• Slave Taker: +1 damage with spiked chains and whips. When tying up pinned foes, you may use manacles instead of ropes.

We get 2 new traits for duergar:

• Dour Pessimist: +2 to saves versus spell with the [emotion]-descriptor. (The pdf lacks the brackets of the descriptor.)
• Duergar Slave Master: Choose any language as starting language, even secret languages.

We also get 5 alternate racial traits:

• Armorsmith: -1 armor penalty when wearing self-crafted armor.
• Blacksmith: +2 to Craft & Profession skill checks related to metal.
• Locksmith: Gain disable device and use it to disable magical traps.
• Toiling Spirit: Unseen Servant 1/day
• Vanisher: Vanish 1/day, +1/day at 6th and 12th level.

The Duergar also get the Tormentor Inquisitor-archetype, who exchanges solotactics, monster lore and teamwork feats for access to torments. At 3rd level and every 3 levels thereafter, the inquisitor learns one of 9 torments. They range from gaining weapon focus (spiked chain and whip), demoralizing as a move action etc. to overpowered ones like preventing verbal casting via grapples (no check!!) and cursing others to detect as evil and hamper their spellcasting of [good] spells. or hobble foes. All in all, I like the idea of the archetype, but the archetype feels too limited in the scarce few lines allotted – why not make e.g. cruelties available as torments?

Conclusion:

Editing and formatting are very good, but not excellent – I noticed some minor glitches here and there. Layout adheres to Abandoned Art’s 2-column no-frills standard and the pdf features no bookmarks, but needs none at this length.

This is a solid addition to the Amazing Races-line, mostly courtesy to the well-crafted crafting-feats – the traits and racial traits and the archetype didn’t convince me, though – they are ok, I guess, but nothing that would make me yell in excitement. Especially the archetype falls behind what it could easily have been and thus, I’ll settle for a final verdict of 3.5 stars, rounded down to 3 for the purpose of this platform.

Endzeitgeist out.

Amazing Races: Duergar! is available from: