This 8th installment of the Faces of the Tarnished Souk series is 21 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 1 page SRD and 2 pages advertisements, leaving a whopping 16 pages of content - nice! Let's check it out!
As with all installments of the FoTS-series, we start off with a one-page introduction to the character, including information on dream-burning, a lore-section and a how-to-use sidebox for DMs looking to use the witch in their campaigns. Witch? Yep, we get full APG-support in this installment, further establishing this line to use more than just the relatively common core-rules. Just take a look at the cover. She looks mad, yes. And crazy. And boy, she is. Not in the nice mad-hatter kind of way, but rather in the potentially extremely deadly, unpleasant kind of way.She is truly a dastardly, drunken, mean-spirited proprietor of a place where the worst of the worse the Coliseum has to offer go to drink, battle and, perhaps even, die horribly.
Potential SPOILERS abound, thus I'd encourage potential players to skip to the conclusion.
Still here? All right.
Maelgatryx is actually the descendant of a VERY important major player of the coliseum and secretly wants to be accepted by this dreadful entity. Once again, her CR 20 incarnation is a beauty to behold (even when the coarse witch isn't) and gets two templates and a cool level that ensures that her drinking habit reflects heavily into her fighting style. She also gets a full stat-block for her cacodaemon familiar and a minor artifact weapon. Ready for some stroke of genius? There you go: Her signature weapon are the shrunken heads (!!!!) of a half-fiendish ettin (!!!) with whom she talks and which she uses as both a bola (!!!) AND a dire-flail. (!!!) Do I have to say more? I was cackling with diabolical glee all the time while reading this. We also get 8 new feats, centering on "witchy" stuff like creating shrunken heads and her familiar. That's not where the additional content stops, though: We also get a new witch's patron, "Dreams" and two new dream-traits, as per the Coliseum rules. Moreover, we get a new incantation (and I love incantations, especially when they're about adding insult to injury and consuming souls of fallen enemies!), 3 spells and 2 magical bodices for all the ladies, who, like mine, think that oxygen is for wusses.
Her mid-level incarnation also rocks, but, in contrast to other FoTS-installments, my favorite one is actually the low-level version, possibly due to her familiar at this level, "Mistah Eatey-Eye", an albino raven. Great and iconic idea. But that's not where this pdf stops: Rather, we get the rune-carved template and, more importantly, rules for variant tieflings: You can choose from 10 basic ability sets, depending on your fiendish ancestry, and yes, qlippoths and even onis are included. More importantly, you can roll (or choose if you take a feat) on a list of a whopping 100 abilities to customize the hell out of your tiefling.
Conclusion:
Editing and formatting are top-notch, I didn't notice any glitches. Layout adheres to the tried-and-true b/w-two-column standard and the B/w-artworks are nice. Writing adheres to the high and evocative quality we've come to expect from Rite Publishing and the amount of content for this price is rather unprecedented - we get so much more out of this installment than in even any of the other, chock-full pdfs of this series and the selection of e.g. cool items and support for incantations just rocks. Try as I might, I can't with any good conscience nit-pick at any part of this file. It's just a great little pdf and subsequently deserves ANOTHER 5-star-rating, which makes this the 3rd 5-star-verdict in a row for this series. Which is by the way the record for any rpg-product line I've reviewed so far. Congratulations!
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