Player’s Options – Aasimar, Tieflings and elemental Templates

By Thilo Graf

This pdf from 4 Winds Fantasy Gaming is 14 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial and 1 page SRD, leaving 11 pages of content, so let’s check them out, shall we?

There is a distinct lack in planar player races in PFRPG as I write this, a lack 4 Winds Fantasy Gaming seeks to remedy by providing a plethora of different racial options to create your very own aasimars, tieflings and genasi. Some general characteristics are provided for every group and the pdf also provides templates to further customize your planar character with different lineages, thus ensuring that Hound Archon-spawned aasimar are different from e.g. Lillend-spawned ones.

In addition to the afore-mentioned two aasimar-bloodlines, we also get one for the Movanic Deva. The respective templates come with attribute-modifier’s skill-bonuses, spell-like abilities and physical characteristics, all of which come with a list of 6 options to choose from. Additionally, the templates all provide some kind of special ability that includes abilities like lesser scent and smite evil.

Each of the classic 4 elements gets 3 templates that include templates for e.g. the azer-born, marid-folk etc. and even people descended from ice and sand-creatures.

Tieflings also get 3 templates, the succubus tiefling being one rather interesting example, as they get +4 to Cha and -4 to Wis – that’s quite a substantial bonus and makes this the only template that adds more than +2 to a given attribute and succubae-spawned tieflings deadly sorcerers indeed.

The pdf closes by providing 16 feats, among which you may find a feat that grants wings, a feat to ignore critical hits/sneak attacks 50% of the time and a feat to roll two dice when saving against gaze attacks.

Conclusion:

Editing and formatting in the revised edition is top-notch, I noticed no glitches. Layout adheres to a 2-column standard and features b/w-artworks and the pdf comes with extensive bookmarks. The artworks are neat and the templates per se are cool, especially the physical characteristics that go beyond rules and provide neat fluff. On the rules-side, I enjoyed the unique abilities of the respective templates, but I’m not entirely sure about some of their balances – +4 to an attribute, access to smite evil or bardic performances via racial abilities seems to be rather powerful. Additionally, I’m not entirely sure whether the racial abilities provided herein are supposed to replace any existing racial information for e.g. dwarves – some combinations might be prone to being unbalancing. While this means that some DM-discretion is advised and that some options may prove to be rather powerful. The feat that grants you fortification and the one that lets you roll twice against gaze attacks is also rather powerful. Due to these minor concerns, my final verdict for these player’s options will be a 4.5 star-rating rounded down to 4 – a neat, cheap little product that is a bit too high on the power-scale for my tastes.

Endzeitgeist out.

Player’s Options – Aasimar, Tieflings and elemental Templates is available from: