Sorcerer’s Options: Beyond Bloodlines

By Thilo Graf

This pdf from Super Genius Games is 11 pages long, 2/3 of a page front cover, 1 page editorial & SRD, leaving 9 1/3 pages of content for the sorcerer.

Sorcerers have become much more iconic in PFRPG than in the 3.5 days of old, thanks to a massive support of their bloodline-class features. Unfortunately, most of the support centred on providing only these. This genius guide seeks to bring more diverse options for the sorcerer and begins by introducing a new concept, so-called arcane endowments. These can be taken instead of feats and correspond roughly in power to a feat or oracle revelation. 18 arcane endowments are presented and mostly cover quite interesting and iconic options: From sacrificing spell slots to heal yourself and end detrimental conditions to using your Cha-mod instead of Int for knowledge skills, adding spells from other spell-lists and limited, albeit more versatile uses of metamagic spell forming to a limited sideboard of additional spells that are somewhat reminiscent of a DIY-domain, the options are versatile, iconic and ooze sorcerer flair and panache.

Much to my excitement, we also get 10 new spells exclusive for the sorcerer. I think that with the 3 arcane base-classes, we desperately need more class-specific spells to make them more distinct and Beyond Bloodlines delivers with the sanguine spells that prematurely and temporarily unlock bloodline powers or even lend them to others, a symbol-spell based on your bloodline bonus spells and the very powerful and cool transfiguration that changes your spellcaster-list and lets you draw from another kind of spellcaster. Very cool!

The pdf does not stop there, but instead provides us with three alternate classes/archetypes, one of which is simple, one medium in complexity and one quite complex: The Bedreven is the complex one and offers us a variant of the sorcerer that casts via a spell-pool and is more versatile than the sorcerer, but at the cost of some raw power. If you’ve read my review of “New Arcane Discoveries” and my praise for the Zauberer-archetype therein, you can imagine that my praise for this one is no less pronounced. To make it short, the Bedreven is worth the price of the pdf alone. The Scourge is a kind of sorcerous bard that does not use the bard’s spell-list, but the sorcerer’s and pays for this advantage with less skills. It’s another take on the gish-type and not a bad one. Not one I’d recommend either, though. The Strega, the final archetype, is rather simple and gains limited access to some hexes, which blurs the class-lines and does not appeal to me that much, but oh well.

Conclusion:

Editing and formatting are very good – although I did notice minor punctuation errors, nothing grievous caught my attention. The pdf comes with neat artworks (some of which stock as far as I could tell), no bookmarks and layout adheres to the 3-column standard by SGG. Sorcerer’s Options is what I cherish about Super Genius Games in a nutshell – while they mostly lack fluff, they often produce awesome crunch, concisely presented for an affordable price. Beyond Bloodlines enriches the sorcerer beyond its usual support and I’m sincerely hoping we’ll get to see more pdfs like this one for other classes. My final verdict for this excellent little supplement will be 5 stars.

Endzeitgeist out.

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