Class Acts: Oracles

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106236[1]By Thilo Graf

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

This pdf kicks off by providing us with 4 new curses for your oracle: The first being amnesiac, which makes you susceptible to mind-affecting effects, but hardened vs. other magic and resulting in remembering feats at higher levels. The second curse marks you as damned, which makes others react negatively to the taint of your doomed soul and adds some spells to the oracle’s spell-list. The third curse is the curse of the idiot-savant, which reduces your int by 4 point and makes it impossible for you to make skill-checks based on the 3 mental attributes untrained. However, you use your wis-modifier instead of int to determine your skills per level and to use Knowledge and linguistics. At higher levels, an oracle with this curse may take 10 in chosen skills even when under duress. The final curse strikes you with a chronic illness that reduces your life expectancy and are susceptible to diseases, but hardened against other fortitude-effects and learn to remove diseases from others.

Beyond these curses, we are also introduced to two new mysteries and their associated 10 revelations, the first being the Mystery of Dreams, which grants you the option to retry failed knowledge-checks by sleeping over it, may act normally while sleeping (but under the staggered condition) by sleepwalking, remain alert while sleeping and conjure forth your dreams as creatures and even the hallucinatory terrain of your dreams. Neat! The second mystery and its 10 associated revelations are all devoted to the theme of riddles, allowing you to pose curse-laden riddles (mechanics are given, but if you want to roleplay it – Raging Swan has just released “So what’s that Riddle like, anyways?” for a rather affordable price) and use a rather cool ability: By contemplating the divine conundrums of the universe for a minute, you can take 20 on a single knowledge-check or retry a failed knowledge check, but at the cost of 1d4 points of Int-damage due to the mind-boggling nature of the things you contemplate. The Mnemonic concentration is another cool ability, allowing you to cast a lower level spell as a reaction to failing a concentration check to cast a spell as long as your initial concentration result would allow you to cast that one. Interesting indeed! As is the riddler-style ability to ask your enemies riddles and gains scaling bonuses as long as they fail to answer your riddles. I LOVE this mystery and its associated revelations – it’s just so full of awesome roleplaying potential!

Conclusion:

Editing and formatting are top-notch – I didn’t notice any glitches. Layout adheres to Abandoned Art’s 2-column, no-frills standard and the pdf comes with neither bookmarks, nor artworks, but needs none at this length and price-point. All right – the curses are neat with especially the idiot-savant being rife with roleplaying potential and something I’d definitely love to play! The dream-mystery is the so far best take on the topic and the riddle-mystery with its associated revelations is just plain, utter, brilliant win and makes up for the minor dislike I have against the rather bland amnesiac curse and the very bland damned curse. In the end, this pdf is a very good file that simply does not deserve being graded down – especially since my problems with the aforementioned contents are based on personal preference and not on mechanical gripes. Thus, my final verdict will be 4.5 stars, rounded up to 5 for the purpose of this platform – the riddle mystery + revelations alone are worth the price of admission.

Endzeitgeist out.

Class Acts: Oracles is available from:

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