Pathways Issue 10

Roleplaying and board games reviews, podcasts, videos and interviews

97295[1]By Thilo Graf

This installment of Rite Publishing’s free e-zine is 51 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page ToC, 1 page SRD and 20 pages of advertisements, leaving 28 pages of free, high-quality content, so what exactly do we get?

After an informative an aptly-written 1-page editorial on pushing the boundaries of gaming, we get the by now almost obligatory template by Mihael Welham: The Erudite Strangler creature (CR +2) comes with a CR 3 sample creature, a gnoll and a stunning artwork of said gnoll (that can also been seen on the cover) and is based on a sinister symbiote. The template also uses the Garrote Opponent combat maneuver and comes with 2 Garrote-feats and 1 reflecting deeper study of a certain subset of knowledge of a given subject.

T.H.Gulliver has provided some rather creepy sourcebooks during 2011 and his portrayal of Acheflour Bloodgift, master fleshgrafter (Clr 3/Wiz 3/ Mystic Theurge 8) adds another rather disturbing foe to your arsenal and exemplifies how neat the rules from #30 Fleshgrafts actually work.

Creighton Broadhurst, mastermind of Raging Swan Press presents a ready to drop in encounter featuring dark creepers in the quality we’ve come to expect from RSP. Nice.

Ron Lundeen, author of e.g. “The Haunting of Soldragonn Academy” and since recently, head of his own company Run Amok Games (review of the first adventure coming soon!) presents us another Fleshgrafter, a rather neutral one – field-medic/anatomy-enthusiast turned summoner/fleshgrafter. Cool idea! Said fleshgrafter has developed a new graft based on leng spider webs and thus is targeted as an agent of said spiders by other dread denizens of leng and their hunting dogs.

Matt Banach provides us with 3 new epic Renkus that make me anticipate Heroes of the Jade Oath even more.

Next up is an interview with J.P. Chapleau, one of the authors and central movers and shakers of the NeoExodus campaign setting. Nice and informative!

After that, we get reviews by Eric Hinkle, Dark_Mistress, Megan Robertson and yours truly.

Conclusion:

Editing and formatting are top-notch, I didn’t notice significant glitches. Layout adheres to the 2-column, full-color standard we know from RiP. The pdf has no bookmarks. The artworks are top-notch and best of all – the content is completely FREE. The only investment you’ll have to make is the space on your HD. The content is great and in the end, you have nothing to lose – great free content, resulting in a final verdict of 5 stars.

Endzeitgeist out.

Pathways Issue 10 is available from:

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