By Endzeitgeist
You know the drill by now – 4 pages of content, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 2 pages of content, this time for the Tengu-race, so let’s take a look, shall we?
As always, we kick this pdf off with new racial feats, this time a whopping 8 of them:
- Carrion Feaster: Improved Carrion Feeder; Immunity versus 1-save ingested poisons and 1 save less to cure; also bonuses are increased to +4.
- Carrion Beak: Don’t take ability score damage or negative conditions from diseases, but still spread them. Appropriate and since it requires some serious feat-investment to unlock, still ok, if powerful.
- Glider: Get lateral movement of 5 ft. when falling for every 15 ft. of falling.
- Glittering Greed: Appraise the most valuable object on a foe – fast, and get a bonus to CMB for attempts to disarm or steal it.
- Ki Screech: Spend two ki points to emit a 15 ft. screech that deals remaining ki pool points damage. Quite weak.
- Shrill Screech: Potentially deafen victims of your screech for 1 round.
- Tengu Nightwing: When changing into giant raven form, you get +4 to perception and darkvision 60 ft.
- Tengu Terrorwing: Gain the grab quality when in raven form.
We also get two new traits, with one offering +1 to Knowledge (history) and linguistics and one becomes a class skill and the other allows for +2 to disarm and steal in a surprise round.
We also get two new alternate racial traits: One nets +1 to natural weapon damage and treat your HD as BAB for gaining the Improved Natural Attack feat, whereas the second reduces your weight, improves the fleet-feat by +5 ft if you have it and nets you +2 to acrobatics – especially the latter is rather cool – weight and height feature all too rarely in crunch like this.
The issue’s archetype would be the Kenjin Lorekeeper, a tengu wizard archetype with some uncommon premises. The Kenjin Lorekeeper may replace arcane bond and add a massive bonus to Knowledge-checks, potentially stacking with bardic knowledge and furthermore eliminating a couple of prerequisites for the loremaster PrC. Also rather interesting – in lieu of wizard’s bonus spells, these tengu can get either style feats or ninja tricks (but NOT rogue talents!) – that makes for a surprisingly versatile and iconic archetype in such a small allotted space.
Conclusion:
Editing and formatting re very good, I didn’t notice any significant glitches. Layout adheres to Abandoned Art’s two-column no-frills standard and the pdf has no bookmarks, but needs none at this length.
So…Tengu. I expected this pdf to be redundant when compared to e.g. Rite’s “In the Company of Tengu”, but it isn’t – instead, we get some rather cool options, unique feats and alternate traits rock and the archetype is neat as well. While not all pieces are glorious, generally, you’ll definitely get some awesome pieces of content herein for a more than fair price. My final verdict will hence clock in at 5 stars.
Endzeitgeist out.
Amazing Races: Tengu! is available from:
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