So I feel pretty stupid. I said last week that we were on Aberrant Rules #20, but then I realized my numbering system had no 11, so this is actually #20. Just wanted to clear that up.

This week, we’re blitzing through Alluria Publishing, home to Jared’s five classes, the Explorer, Jester, (laser, jawharp) and (foghorn)*! Oh.. wait, he gets this recording first so.. I bet he just edited out the last three, didn’t he? While I can’t say much about them right now, I’ll cryptically comment that I think any 4E D&D player will like at least two of the five though not everyone will like the same two. The rest, well, you’ll find out soon enough. In the meantime, Alluria has many more products to discuss and is one of the more prolific third-party sources for 4E. I can find 15 entries in the Remarkable Races line, five of which are featured in Jared’s upcoming Game Day since WotC prohibited the use of any of their races. Jerks. Yeah, you heard me, WotC, that was a (beep) move. Oh… uh, sorry about that.. I’ll catch that in post-production.. but you get the idea.

Now I’ll be honest. A lot of these races are mediocre at best. Many of them are just kinda generic humanoid variants. The Oakling are tree-people, Obitu are skeleton people, Magogol are frog people, Boggles are a goblin variant, Entobians are humanoid insects, Zif are snailfolk and the Anumus, despite having a better backstory than I expected, are thinly-veiled furry fanservice. Of the seven, I like the Entobians best for their Spiderman-like qualities, but there are much better options available.

First, there’s the Taddol – a cross between eladrin and ettins, if you can believe it. That’s right, you can play feyborn Siamese twins in 4th edition. The rules for running them are more than a little complex and like the Linotaur, I like the race better as an NPC. Still, it’s unique and I appreciate that. On the other side of the spectrum are the Kval, who might as well be made of cheese. They’re Tiny – and yes I do mean actually Tiny – imps with gigantic hands who can wield weapons as if they were Small. They get bonuses to Athletics and Acrobatics (also Stealth by sort of an underhanded route), can flank from within an opponent’s square and are immortal, like Devas. They also deal autodamage when bloodied as if that all weren’t enough already. Despite being less than a foot tall, they weight over 100 lbs so are apparently composed of whatever it is that makes black holes and have deep sinister, James Earl Jones type voices. I want to play one desperately but would have to go to confession afterward, I’m sure. You also have the Relluks which are sort of a conceptual mix of a warforged, a goliath and a shardmind. They have really juicy flavor text and an amusingly bizarre armor mechanic that would be great for Eberron or Planescape, but will be entirely out of place in the Realms, Dragonlance or most generic D&D settings.

This brings us to my Top 5 – the five races I would suggest are most mechanically balanced and have a tight, meaningful background. The Mahrog are a pre-human race, like the real-world Neanderthal. They have feats that work especially well with Primal and Martial classes, are utterly perfect for Dark Sun and even get access to the occasional human feat. If anything they’re a bit mechanically underpowered, so I might allow them a 3rd At-Will but otherwise well-designed. The Xax are humanoid-loving aberrant creatures, so obviously I like them, and to represent their chaotic nature they roll an elemental resistance and another race’s racial power at the beginning of each encounter like a sorcerer. You would think this overpowers the race but as it turns out, you can never plan for which power you’ll have and so you can’t take feats to improve it. The Xax also pick up superior weapon proficiency as a bonus feat, so this race excels at exactly what you think it should – bizarre class builds.

Next up, the Numistians who take up much of the tinkering and mercantile space left open by the gnomes. Their only real quirk is that they eat and bleed coins and have no internal organs. If you can get past that, the Numistian race is ideal for urban adventuring and social interactions as well as social commentary on rampant consumerism if you’re into that sort of thing. The Squole may have been designed by Ted as they are oozes from the Elemental Planes who decided to take on humanoid shapes and live in the natural world. They are functionally blind, though they have blindsight 8, but their senses of sound, taste and smell are exceptional. Squole take no penalties to squeezing, gain a small damage bonus to melee basic attacks based on their elemental type, and like their mindless kin are excellent grapplers. There’s just a ton of roleplaying and fiddly mechanical potential here and if it weren’t for the last race here, the Squole would be my top pick. That honor, however, goes to the Muse – a race I would use a picture of Selma Hayek as a token for. The Muse look like Zora from the Legend of Zelda series, but with wings and hail from the realm of dreams. They have two of my favorite class features – granting a +1 skill bonus to all allies within 10 in which the Muse is trained and the ability, as an encounter power, to recharge another character’s second wind or racial encounter power. Obvious the Muse make great bards or any other leader for that matter and are probably the simplest and most intuitive to integrate into any setting as inspiring dream creatures are common across many real-world stories and mythologies.

Alluria has since produced a supplement covering the vast majority of their races and a campaign guide for their particular multi-planar setting. All in all, Alluria’s races are pretty solid and offer many opportunities to make your home campaign setting feel unique with the addition of a race or two, though I wouldn’t recommend throwing in all of them together. Next week, the now defunct One Bad Egg publishing.

*Now that the Game Day is over, the classes are Vigilante, Truenamer and Knight. Go here.

So by my reckoning, this is Aberrant Rules #20 and would you believe I’m out of ideas? (Note: This should be obvious from the title. I correct it next post.) Well, don’t, ’cause I’m not! It’s just that the mechanic I had planned for this week isn’t exactly ready yet. Needs some more tweaking and more honest-to-goodness playtesting so I’ve gotta create or dig up something else for y’all this go ’round. Also, since I’m preparing for the Power Source Campaign, Jared’s Game Day, Jeff Griener’s home campaign and another one shot for a surprise friend from high school back in Ohio on top of all that – I’m a little out of creative steam. What I’m going to do for the next few weeks to take a little break and also celebrate the upcoming Alluria Game Day is do a quick review of some other 3rd party material. Each week, I’ll talk about a different publisher and what they have to offer in terms of races, classes and other rule-based material. I may mention adventures, but I want to hit the other stuff harder. This week, we’re looking at Adamant Entertainment.

Early in 4E’s lifecycle, Adamant produced a line of alternate pacts for the Warlock class, including the Vermin Lords, Dragon Lords, Blood, Ghosts and Angelic Choirs. Each pact has at most 2 powers per level, meaning all you hardcore mechanical types are going to be a bit underwhelmed, but the concepts behind them are fairly ingenious. The Vermin Lord pact is a controller – it has a lot of poison damage, ongoing damage, slow and an interesting mechanic that punishes enemies for taking multiple actions per turn. There’s also a weird class feature that lets you communicate with vermin that’s interesting but not terribly useful. The Pact of the Angelic Choirs is highly reminiscent of the Invoker even though that class had not been introduced at this point. If you’ve ever thought of multiclassing or hybridizing Warlock and Invoker, see if your DM will let you use this pact instead and save yourself the effort. A Warlock using the Pact of the Dragon Lords is all striker, focusing on dealing lots of damage and is the only pact I’ve seen so far that has an at-will close blast. It also treads a little into the Star Pact’s territory but who doesn’t want a couple extra to hit, eh? The Pact of Blood is really bizzare and includes a lot of self-mutilation. The powers sound like those from WoTC’s Dark Pact but FAR too many of them have Hit, Effect, Special AND Pact lines, putting this pact clearly in the realms of cheese in my estimation. It’s going to take a special kind of DM to allow this pact and I’m not sure I’d even want to play in that game for both story and mechanical reasons. Finally, the Pact of Ghosts which is my ‘if you can only get one’ recommendation. It’s a build clearly focused on disruption and ‘screw you’ effects, my personal favorite, and fills a niche in the world still missing in the core game – mainly that of necromancy. You won’t be raising undead minions with this pact, but the powers you do get are solid and match the Warlock’s general role. RPGNow has each of these 10-15 page pdfs available for a mere $2 a pop so if you love Warlocks, grab a couple.

Later, Adamant produced a playable PC race, the Linotaur and while I liked their Warlock Pacts a lot in general, I can’t recommend this race. Admittedly, the idea is unusual and quirky. Linotaurs are like centaurs in general build but are feline, so imagine taking a normal lion, stretching its upper torso and having it held upright. It’s a little Napoleon Dynamite, but I’ve certainly seen stranger ideas. Heck, my wife might even want to play this just for the cat-people angle. But it has many problems mechanically. First, it occupies a 1×2 square area which makes it technically Large and has a Speed of 7. It’s also packing racial bonuses to Reflex, initative, a d6 unarmed melee basic and a racial power that gives it extra damage on a charge. It’s not a terrible product, but clunky and while I try not to be a slave to balance, this is just a little bit outside my comfort zone as a designed and DM. It would make a heck of an NPC and might not be bad for a new player who needs a little extra help to keep up with more advanced players, but I wouldn’t necessarily make it an open option all the time. Adamant also has a few published adventures and a couple supplements like a Monster Maker (obsolete as of DMG2 and MM2) and a random fantasy adventure generator but I don’t know much else about them.

So that’s it for Adamant. Next week, we visit a familiar face – Alluria Publishing!