This Post Does Not Contain Wolfgang Baur

No seriously, this isn’t a trick title or anything, it really does not contain anything Wolfgang Baur-related. What it does have a lot of are anthropormophic things, from trees to frogs to…skeletons?

There’s been a lot of little one-page materials for D&D 4e cropping up so I thought I’d do a Turbulent Thoughts style review of ones which peaked my eye. At least it’s not about Wolfgang Baur so maybe you can appreciate the variety. I don’t know. I’m not you and not psychic, which as we’ve discussed before is one of my numerous faults.

To begin with I never really enjoyed the idea of an open license in the first place, I thought letting other people make money off your game was a slippery slope idea at best (for which we are seeing the results right now, poor Wizard’s of the Coast). A non-commercial agreement would have been cool, and supportable, if you look at RPG forums all over the internet you can see the absolute masses of homebrew people have been doing since before time and space. Whether or not it’d have generated any money is dubious at best but at least there was no possibility of you giving birth to your competition like the explosive vaginal push which created Pathfinder at the tail end of 3.5 edition (dear god the imagery disturbs even me and I feel I should apologize for it).

That’s why I liked the GSL, because I felt nobody would want to publish anything with it. Being sick as I am of D20 conversions (did we seriously need a D20 World of Darkness, as if the Storyteller World of Darkness’ suck could not be contained in one area and had to leap over its boundaries like a rampaging pig?) from which there are now absolutely no escape, I thought I would be safe. But nowhere is safe from the licensing monster.

The rage with 4e profiteering right now from third party companies seems to be to publish pamphlet-length PDFs detailing two or three monsters or one race and a few NPCs and so forth. Or maybe this has always been all the rage with third party publishing, and I just never noticed it until now. I was prepared to like anything worth a dollar or two for 13 pages but somehow I can’t get over a lot of these things. The ones that are most conspicuous to me are the “Remarkable Races” series, which are indeed very remarkable in all the wrong ways. These are also the only ones I really own so that’s what the post will be about.

A lot of these races have bonuses that are dubious at best. There’s the Obitu, some walking skeleton thing with a +4 bonus to Dexterity, free action encounter power to get attack bonuses and extra scaling damage on opportunity attacks, necrotic resistance that scales too, darkvision, fortitude defense bonuses. I’m all for pushing homebrew to its limits and doing new things, but I think raping the limits dry in a back alley and savoring their screams of agony is going a little far.

There are also some Obitu feats that are rather weirdly worded, like adding a “+1 bonus to fortitude saves.” I think you have your editions crossed good sir, or perhaps you were just unclear on how these things are worded nowadays. There’s also the one that lets you punch people to heal yourself, which I’m not against on principle but just seems shoddily tested.

Then there are some that just seem like a cosmic joke, like the Oakling. It’s an anthropomorphic tree, not the usual anime-antropomorph thing where you stick a flower on the head of a human and make the skin green and call it done, but a tree-person taking more genetically to its tree parent (this is not the origin story, thankfully), which is disturbing in that I can’t find a furry subclassification to put it under. Barkies? They even have oaky boobs, my god.

Nevertheless, some things here also seem to be taking steps backwards, like having fire vulnerability as a balance for…what? The encounter power seems like a glorified second wind that adds your level to the healing and only works in bright light, so I’ve no idea what has to be balanced here by a fire vulnerability. It also takes constant five minute rests to reuse, unlike just blowing surges.

The rest of the features aren’t remarkable, like not having to sleep but still being vulnerable to sleep effects, normal vision, normal bonuses to ability scores, and being able to make a saving throw against being knocked prone, and learning plant language…right. The racial feats are wonky again – there’s one to grow a size and another to be treated as a larger size category for push, pull and slide effects. I feel a distinct unfamiliarity with the 4e rules emanating from this work. I may be wrong and it could just be a number of very athletic typos and there’s a better version somewhere than the ones I have.

Then we have the god damn battletoads, and this is basically where I draw the line. The goblins who go insane as an incurable racial disease, the oakwomen with oak boobs, the unbalanced walking skeleton with magic items that go into its “heart slot”, they were okay in comparison. I’m the guy who made a race with a schtick that everyone is sexy and effeminate and then made another race where everyone is an effeminate matriarchal alien, and a race of animu sharkpeople, and I’m drawing the line at battletoads.

These again have the same glaring flaws (or perhaps they are strengths, I don’t know anymore it’s so bizarre) like having a +4 bonus to constitution, an alignment restriction (IT’S LIKE I’M REALLY PLAYING 3.5 AGAIN), variable size at character creation, more made-up languages like “Bog Bully”, and vague power wordings like “grab and pull 3 squares” and gaining Free Will as an epic feat– wait, the fuck? This is just surreal. Oh god that battletoad has a steel eyepatch. I’m getting the motherfuck out of here.

Now, I just want to make one thing clear. In all the jest, I’m really not trying to disparage third party publishing or anybody’s hard work and livelihood. I personally never bought into it much, but a lot of people love it and I know that hard work and love were put into making these…battletoads and oakwomen…into lovable and cheap products for people. They only cost a few bucks. The sentiment is great – as a homebrewer myself, who tries to do his best to add to the fun of my favorite D&D edition thus far and give people good variant options, and as a consumer, I think cheap material is nice. And the drive to actually jump into the GSL now takes some huge balls.

But a lot of this Remarkable Races stuff at the same time smacks of not really knowing the edition or just shoveling whatever out the door to turn a quick profit. And that’s the stereotype I’ve (ignorantly, I know) had about third party publishing for the longest time. There are good people who’s quality one can attest to, like Goodman Games. But as a whole, it seems to be digging for gold in a dwarf fortress – at some point your dwarfs will go into fey moods, kill themselves, and the roof will fall on your head. And this kind of stuff just is not helping me out here.

Unfortunately, I cannot give any of the remarkable races I’ve seen so far a recommendation as I find them ridiculously unbalanced one way or another or holding on to outdated notions that the game outgrew since 3.5 edition, though I give them a “nice try” smile. They’re by Alluria Publishing, and if you want to check them out yourself, they’re just a few bucks. Ultimately you are the final arbitrator of what goes into your game.

Now to prepare for the invariable flood of Alluria Publishing fanboys (…do they have any?) and angry developers flooding my blog and typing mean things on my facebook, myspace, email and leaving mean reviews of my sloppy fanfiction. This is the way RPG Blogging goes these days I suppose. Poor poor D7, I will join you in Valhalla!

(This is also the debut of my new avatar, drawn from a picture of Kuroi Nanako that I used for my old Professor Salazar posts.)