Class Acts: Clerics

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PZOPDFAAGCA402E_180[1]By Thilo Graf

This pdf is 5 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page SRD, leaving 3 pages of content, so let’s check this out!

The pdf kicks off with a recap on domains and subdomains and a total of 18 new subdomains are presented. Thankfully, a concise table of domains, subdomains, granted powers, what they replace and even deific portfolios are provided as well.

To give you a couple of examples of what to expect from this pdf, let’s take a look at the armour subdomain, associated with the War domain. The replacement spells are shield of faith, shield other, stoneskin and wall of iron and at 8th level, you gain heavy armour proficiency.

The beggar-subdomain of the trickery domain is rather interesting, granting you access to 1 charm monster and demand and more interestingly, lets you forage in urban environments via the survival skill. Great concept, but unfortunately neither the trickery domain, not the standard cleric-list grant you access to survival as a class-skill, making it doubtful that this one will see much use – an addition that for example eliminates Bluff from the class-skill-list would help here.

Among the coolest of the subdomains herein is the Chance subdomain – flip a coin and if you win, get double cha-mod on cha-based skills and cha-mod to your AC – but only for a round. As soon as you lose the toss, you can’t use this ability until 24 hours have passed. However, the write-up does not specify whether the bonus to AC is a luck-bonus or an unspecified bonus – quite crucial for stacking purposes…

Another subdomain with an interesting mechanic is the fellowship subdomain, with its “All for One”-ability that lets you combine all ally’s HD in 30 ft with regards to spells that cause fear and are HD-dependant and also treat all as one entity when intimidating foes. Great due to the restrictions that would otherwise have made this the end of power word spells. Two thumbs up!

Great for Undead-slayers is the mortality subdomain, which lets you pronounce a curse lasting one round that eliminates for this short duration all undead immunities from a foe.

It should be noted that among the 18 subdomains herein, only three (Armour, Spell & Starlight) go the easy way and grant you access to a feat, whereas the others come with some exclusive mechanic that should make the cleric feel more distinct. Have I mentioned the mist subdomain that makes mist-spells (and the concealment they provide) temporarily cling to you, decreasing only slowly after you’ve left the spell’s area? (And no, damage incurred from e.g. acid fog etc. does not cling.)

Conclusion:

Editing and formatting are top-notch, I didn’t notice any typos/glitches. Layout adheres to an easy to read 2-column format, there is no artwork but at this length the pdf needs none. The subdomains in this pdf are mostly solid, especially taking into account the low price at the range of a BP-product of SGG. While not all of the subdomains in this pdf are 100% solid, the abilities attempted by them are mostly do work and even use some rather interesting mechanics that could be further developed. Seeing that we get quite a bunch of these sub-domains for the low price and the clearly laid-out presentation, I’ll settle for a final verdict of 3.5 stars, rounded down to 3 for the purpose of this platform.

Endzeitgeist out.

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