Monsters of NeoExodus–Fleshweaver

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88776[1]By Thilo Graf

 

This pdf from Louis Porter Design is 8 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page SRD, 2 pages mini-monster sheets and 1 page initiative counters, leaving 3 pages for the Fleshweaver.

 

The fleshweavers are terrible centaur-like aberrations with insect-like heads and the lower body of a spider. We get 3 incarnations of the creature.

  • Fleshweaver (CR 7)
  • Fleshweaver Paragon (Fleshweaver Paragon 3, CR 10)
  • Gloambristle Fleshweaver (CR 10)

Fleshweavers have some buffing spell-casting capabilities, fight with two weapons, can poison their attacks and make nice hit-and-run-scare-the-players critters.

I like the idea and execution of the critter, however, there are some minor mechanical inconsistencies: Fleshweavers cast “spells as a 6th-level cleric, sorcerer, or wizard,” – which makes it difficult to handle the creature. Do they cast spontaneous? What is the key-ability modifier governing their spell-casting? Is it divine magic or arcane magic? From the creature description I gather the latter, but I’m not entirely sure.

Additionally, the Fleshweaver Paragon (which is, I guess, an advanced, amped up version of the fleshweaver) mentions “Fleshweaver Paragon 3” in the brackets, which, while nice, doesn’t really help me – I’m not entirely sure whether this refers to a paragon template or a class. The line should probably just be deleted, leaving this creature standing as a more bad-ass version of its kind. Also, the section explaining how they poison their weapons in the Paragon’s section is not written in italics as with the other two statblocks. On the nitpicky side, the skills in the racial modifier section are written in all lower caps and not with a capital letter in the beginning, but this is a minor glitch that does not really impede enjoyment of the creature.

Conclusion:

Layout and artwork are beautiful, especially for the low price. As mentioned above, editing is not perfect, but passable. The mechanics seem to be solid enough, although I would have loved to see the Gloambristle Fleshweavers get some unique ability apart from being bigger and more bad-ass than the normal weavers. Their artwork rocks but they felt like something was missing. Quite frankly, I would have loved to see them get something more far-out as far as abilities go, something beyond some spells, arachnid abilities and poison. They are called Fleshweavers, after all, why don’t they get a cool fleshweaving ability? Due to the editing glitches and the fact that these critters have a lot of potential that is not entirely realized, I’m going to look at my other reviews: Bilecrawlers got 3 stars and I didn’t notice as many glitches there. However, we get one more statblock, so I’m going to settle for 2.5 stars, rounded up to 3.

Monsters of NeoExodus–Fleshweaver is available from:

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