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Remarkable Races Pathway to Adventure: Compendium of Unusual PC Races
[978-1-62154-213-1]
$19.95
Publisher: Alluria Publishing
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by Shane O. [Featured Reviewer] Date Added: 12/25/2009 23:26:39

There’s an old axiom which says something to the effect of “it’s not who you are that matters, but what you do.” This, I think, nicely sums up the Pathfinder philosophy regarding how important race is compared to class; that is to say, it’s not. After all, the higher your class levels, the less important your race becomes; moreover, this distinction has a damning tendency to bleed over from mechanics to play-style, and it’s not hard to understand why. The core Pathfinder races feel, shall we say, “excessively familiar,” to the point where they seem almost interchangeable – when’s the last time you really role-played the differences between a gnome and a halfling? They just seem the same.

And then Alluria Publishing released Remarkable Races Pathway to Adventure: Compendium of Unusual PC Races, which solved that problem neatly.

Remarkable Races is, as the lengthy title spells out, a book of exotic races suitable for players to use in their Pathfinder game. There are a grand total of fifteen original races here, and none of them are remotely like any of the existing races, or each other for that matter. From the two-headed taddol to the anthropomorphic anumus to the slimy squole, all of these are a far cry from some new sub-type of elf that most books of new races tend to peddle.

One interesting trend that I noticed was that many – though certainly not all – of these races seem to be designed around the idea of wanting to play characters of a different creature type besides Humanoid. Remarkable Races’ answer to this problem is to let the player have his cake and eat it too, making a race that’s thematically of a different type, but for whatever reason is still scaled back to what you’d expect of a 1 Hit Die Humanoid (and thus, on par with the core races in terms of power). For example, the obitu are skeletons, but aren’t undead…rather, they were undead who have been brought to life but still maintain their bony bodies. If that sounds like a tough case to make, rest assured that the writing here makes it work.

It’s not just the writing, either. Remarkable Races has quite possibly the best production values I’ve ever seen in a third-party Pathfinder book. Each piece of interior art is a gorgeous full color illustration, almost always of one of the new races here, and the book doesn’t skimp on the artwork. Pages have light parchment coloring, and there’s even a set of cardstock minis that come in a separate PDF bundled with the product. Likewise, the main book has full, nested bookmarks, which fulfills pretty much everything I like a PDF to do from a technical standpoint. The only thing missing was a printer-friendly version, since this is a large book that has a fair amount of illustrations.

The book has its bases covered on more than just the technical front, though. Each race’s initial presentation gives several pages of flavor text, describing things such as their appearance, attitudes, relations with other races (core and remarkable), names, how to add them to your game, and more. A sidebar covers their racial traits. That’s only the beginning though, as the book then moves on to giving us a full ten-level prestige class for each race, a large feats section with several racial feats per race (the table here helpfully breaks itself into sections based on race, so you can tell at-a-glance what feats go to what race), and their vital statistics (e.g. age, height, weight, etc.), which is something that is too often forgotten. There’s even a couple of new spells.

The last fourth of the book is the section for Game Masters, which has information beyond what PCs’ would normally use. Two new locations are detailed, along with magic items and artifacts, and even new monsters – all of these, of course, relate to the races described earlier in some way. The book ends with appendices for the new monsters based on CR and type.

It’s worth noting that the book sticks very close to Pathfinder design conventions, such as with how the stat blocks are formatted, how the races all have two ability bonuses and one penalty, etc. The only place where Alluria fell down in this regard was that several of the prestige classes didn’t have their BAB and Hit Dice linked, as is the norm for classes now. But that’s a minor problem, and easily forgiven.

Overall, Remarkable Races is not only a great way to add something new and unusual to your Pathfinder game, but it’s also inspirational for how it allows such unusual creatures to be so well-balanced, so interestingly written, and given such diverse support mechanics in terms of feats, prestige classes, and even related monsters. Having an insectoid entobian character that takes a feat to permanently metamorphose into another type of insect-person, for example, is the sort of idea that blew me away when I read this book. Pick this up and add something remarkable to your Pathfinder game.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
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Remarkable Races Pathway to Adventure: Compendium of Unusual PC Races
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