Book of the Faithful II Review

Roleplaying and board games reviews, podcasts, videos and interviews

78594[1]By Thilo Graf

This pdf consists of 14 pages, 1 page front cover, 1 page back cover, 1 page credits and OGL and 1 page ad.

The second instalment of the Book of the Faithful series contains powerful magical weapons, all infused with the soul of a former believer or trapped within.

The artwork is full colour and every one of the nine weapons gets its own picture that makes it hard for the weapon to be confused with any other one. Nice! This should be standard.

The formatting is also good: 1 column text and powers while the other half of a given page is taken up with the image of the weapon.

The main part of the pdf consists of 10 pages, 1 per sword and a small paragraph of designer’s notes (that leaves the rest of the page unfortunately painfully blank).

The weapons themselves are powerful and intelligent, ranging from 55K to over 500K in price and thus constituting quite a formidable arsenal in itself and are best-suited for mid-to high-level gaming.

I personally would change the abilities of the swords so that they have to be activated like legacy weapons (without the feats and the penalties), just to hand them out sooner, but that is my preference. I only mention this, because of some very powerful at-will-abilities of some of the blades.

The neutral 220K blade can e.g. create an anti-magic field at will.

The crunch is nice and while I’m too lazy to do the math for every weapon, I didn’t get the impression that there was a problem somewhere.

I’ve got some downsides to report, too:

The fluff is generic, follows the path of “And then the god put the mortal soul in the weapon” and…well. Boring. I know it’s part of the product’s premise, I just think it could have been executed with more different approaches than those already known. Sorry. As cool as the weapons are, as nice as the abilities are, apart from the Orcus-reference in the CE-weapon, none of the stories really put a smile on my face (The Barrister-sword had potential…) and, if I use one of these weapons, I’m going to have to write my own stories.

Conclusion:

It’s a nice little book. Not a glorious book, but not a bad one either. If you’re looking for some cool unique weapons for your group or for a recurring villain, you might want to check it out. Just don’t expect too much from the stories. The weapons will make you think of enough of your own, so don’t let that deter you too much.

 

Leave a Reply