Anachronistic Adventurers: The Enforcer

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90824[1]By Thilo Graf

This pdf from Super Genius Games is 19 pages long, 2/3 of a page front cover, 1 page SRD and editorial, leaving 17 1/3 pages of content for adventurers out of time, so let’s check the enforcer out!

The enforcer is a new base-class representing a cherished and yet unrepresented trope of fantasy literature in PFRPG: The modern-day warrior, who, by time travel or magic was whisked away to another world/land/time to combat foes in a traditional setting via wits and his knowledge. Harking back to the classic planetary romance novels of old, I have a soft spot, but also high expectations for this new line by SGG. Let’s start with the mechanics:

The Enforcer gets 3+ Int skills per level, can choose two skills freely to act as class-skills, d10, full BAB, a good fort-save and up to 5 enforcer talents and can choose a archetype. An archetype? Yep, at first level, the enforcer, representing a huge plethora of possible roles, is customized via one of 4 archetypes that range from the mafia’s bone-breaker and prize fighter to the World War’s Devil Dogs and SWAT combatants. Each archetype lends itself to quite different styles of play, while a selection of 14 enforcer talents help to further customize your modern PC stranded in a very strange place, indeed!

Of course, when we’re talking about anachronistic adventurers, we also have to take their equipment into account, namely modern firearms ranging from cowboy six-shooters to assault rifles and sniper rifles with laser-scopes. 13 weapons, special ammo and 2 sights are included. Modern firearms work different from classic firearms as e.g. employed by the gunslinger – Ballistic critical firearm rules, unload and burst fire combat manoeuvres, capacity and even the kick weapons have get their rules-representations and, even better, master of crunch Owen K.C. Stephens manages to keep the rules compatible with the basic rules of weapon usage. If your campaign setting sees more interlopers from our modern world, you’ll also have the GP-values to judge the relative power of the weapons and/or have the players buy more.

There’s another problem that is also addressed by this pdf – most warriors from our world don’t wear armour and thus, we get a new avoidance-feat-tree, which lets you add a bonus to your dexterity-bonus equal to half your BAB from a maximum of +4 to +12 to your AC – a godsend for unarmoured combatants, but granted, one that has to be carefully looked after, even though I don’t consider them op. Burst fire can also be improved via feats.

Finally, there’s the concept of “getting used to” a new world and its required skill-sets and the final portion of the pdf, detailing progress levels and respective proficiencies serves as a great way to handle different eras in play.

Conclusion:

Editing and formatting are top-notch, I didn’t notice any glitches. Layout adheres to the 3-column b/w-SGG standard and the artworks are nice. The pdf has no bookmarks. I personally enjoy the planetary romances and the plethora of sideboxes do an awesome job of providing explanations of the new rules – from the base-class, the equipment with its distinct approach the serves complementary to the classic firearms rules without being overpowered and the cool introduction of progress levels, I don’t have much to complain apart from the fact that I would have loved a finer grading of progress levels – as written, there are only 8 and 3 of them are in the future. When all is said and done, you get a lot of very high quality content, a cool class and reliable, neat rules. Barring anything negative to say, I’ll rate this 5 stars and look forward to seeing more releases from this line.

Endzeitgeist out.

Random Woodland Encounters II is available from:

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