Game: Forgotten Heroes: Paladin
Publisher: Malladin’s Gate PRess
Series: Forgotten Heroes
Reviewer: dhind
Review Dated: 27th, September 2002
Reviewer’s Rating: 10/10 [ Breathtaking ]
Total Score: 35
Average Score: 7.00
Forgotten Heroes: Paladin (henceforth referred to as FH:P) is a d20 system class book for the paladin class, by Malladin’s Gate Press – a company I’ve not heard of before I saw this product but, from their website, seem a very professional company. You always take a chance when you buy something from an unknown, but in this case it was well worth the risk! FH:P is a fantastic product and one of the best, if not the best, d20 system class book I’ve read.
FH:P is a pdf product on sale at RPG now and can downloaded for the mere price of $5 (I think that works out at about £3.40 in ‘proper’ money :o) ). If you’ve not had a look at rpgnow.com I’d seriously recommend it. The pdf format is not only cheaper but also has some advantages over print books, such as the ability to print our multiple copies and cut and paste together quick reference docs. I was first made aware of RPG now following a review for a book called Beyond Monks (also a quality product) and have bought a number of other products since. Sometimes they’re appalling, but it’s an acceptable risk when you can dig out products like this!
Anyway, enough waffle, I’ll get down to the point.
HOW IT LOOKS:
The very first impressions of this book aren’t great. It’s all black and white with absolutely zero artistic content. However, the book is well laid out with a nice dense text, relatively small headers and small amounts of white space. The font is quite attractive and they break up the text with plenty of flavourful fiction, so it’s not too hard on the eye. Following Joes book of Enchantment, it appears that there is definitely place for text-only pdf products, and FH:P manages to pull it off nicely by a better consideration of fonts and layouts than many products that make it into print! On one note the class tables have a nice alternating pale-grey background that makes them look absolutely beautiful!
BASIC LAYOUT
This product is split into four basic chapters (after the introduction), but each has a number of different sub-sections. For example; the first chapter, ‘Paths of the Righteous’, contains both a section on new basic classes and the obligatory prestige classes. There is no index, but the contents page is well broken down (to the individual feats, classes and spells). Unfortunately there are no bookmarks to navigate around by, but due to the text density and lack of pictures it’s only about 50 pages of actual text and so paging through with the page buttons on acrobat reader is not too big a chore.
INTRODUCTION:
This is a basic introduction, similar to that in many products. It sets out the stall for the rest of the book to come and includes a full-page piece of fiction. The introduction is simple and clearly written and serves its purpose. The story is surprisingly good for an RPG supplement (most I’ve read are a bit irrelevant or just plain bad). This one tells the story of a girl who is saved after being caught stealing by a paladin but ends up unable to thank him before he dies. It’s perhaps a little trite in concept, but its well written and the romantic element adds to the flavour of the whole book.
PATHS OF THE RIGHTEOUS
This first chapter proper of the book considers the different classes. This is split into two sections: Sub-Classes and Prestige classes. Sub-Classes are full 20 level basic classes. There is s short introduction explaining the general concept behind the sub-class system – it is a class that is derived from one of the core classes (in this case Paladin) but specialises in certain themes or flavours of the class. At first I wasn’t too sure about this. I was expecting something similar to the character concepts of the Quintessential series from Mongoose, but stretched out over a full class description. However, the classes themselves are all different enough from the basic paladin class and have enough new powers to warrant this approach. The classes are as follows:
Crusader: A combat specialist who gains bonus smites. They loose the spells and some other abilities, but turn into a smiting machine. This class is a nice simple concept and seems well balanced (If anything slightly weaker than a basic Paladin, but as a primary fighting class it needs to be not quite as good as the Fighter, which I think it succeeds at).
Defender: A class that specialises in protecting the weak. They get some extra spells and a whole lot of extra feats. However they’re knocked down to d8 hp and the secondary base attack progression of clerics. They are described as being ‘formidable warriors’ in their description, and do get a health amount of bonus feats, but is it enough to make them ‘formidable’? This class is perhaps the best flavoured of these basic classes (about three or four character ideas sprung into my head as I read the descriptions), but I have reservations as to its implementations. However not enough doubts to stop me from playing one. I’ve already genned up my new character and will be playing it this weekend!
Horse Knight: This class specialises with the mount, which they get from 1st level. Hence the rest of their powers are slightly weaker than a basic paladin. This class didn’t massively inspire me (although I’m not particularly interested in the equestrian side of paladins anyway), so I’ll not go into to much depth. One nice point to mention is that their horse actually becomes a celestial creature when they get to 20th level, which I thought was a very nice little system.
Lord: This class represents the paladin who devotes their life to their king and country rather than a God. As such they are lacking in the divine powers but gain bonus feats – it’s a nice selection too, with some combat feats and lots of leadership type feats. A nice idea for the right campaign.
Warrior Monk: The final class represents a character that is a knight of the church, rather than a servant of their god – it’s a small difference, but this classes abilities real emphasise it quite nicely.
Prestige classes:
This is jam-packed with PrCs. I’ve had a read through them all and I can’t see anything that seems imbalanced. They seem to fit with my basic idea of these general prestige classes, in that they should be a lot more specialised and a little bit more powerful than the basic class they are based upon. I’ll give a quick account of most of the classes:
Avenger: Not the old basic D&D evil paladin but a vigilante type who goes after nobles who think themselves above the law.
Champion: A brick with a sword and shield and an inspirational leader.
Chevalier: A brick on a horse and an inspirational leader.
Dauntless Hero: A tough, relentless, warrior and defender of the weak.
Devout: A spell specialist paladin. Some nice systems for paladins who want to get extra spells.
Gallant: A swashbuckling paladin – nice idea, VERY well thought out powers.
Holy Dragoon: A horse knight with a musket.
Judicial Champion: A really well thought out man-to-man fighter who is designed to fight in judicial combat. A text box discusses the use of judicial combat in the campaign.
Justicar: A paladin employed by the king to go and execute justice. I wonder if the writers are Vampire fans :o). Not sure about the class itself, but the law enforcement powers are very good and designed to be flexible.
Musketeer: Based on Aremis, a renaissance paladin with pistol skills.
Peacekeeper: A bit of a wet lettuce who brings about peace and calm. A hippy paladin, but it is nicely executed.
Road Knight: A paladin who protects the roads from bandits.
Seeker: A paladin who becomes a monk… a strange idea but nicely designed. They seek their inner divinity and gain bonus ability score points. This is the only 10 level class (the others are 5) It seems designed to allow 10th level paladins to take it and so get to the end of the class at 19th level.
Slayer: A hunter of evil things. Reasonable idea, but not sure how ‘paladin’ the class is.
METHODS OF THE JUST
This is quite a short chapter. There are new skill uses for each of the Paladin’s class skills, a selection of feats and a new system: ‘tests of faith’.
The skill uses presented are fairly simple ideas. I’ve not read this area in detail as my DM is very open-handed with the use of skills anyway, but for those who are not these will be useful.
There is a good selection of feats in this book, and most of them are things I didn’t expect. There are paladin specific feats, such as the ‘heart of’ range, which give a small bonus to certain abilities, such as skills or certain rolls. These seem a great way to add a little bit of individuality to your paladin. There are a number of divine feats which work by using various ‘holy’ powers to fuel their effects. Finally there are some basic feats which emphasise the typical fighting and personalities of paladins. Examples of these include Shield Expertise for the sword-and-shield-paladin and Battle Cry: Courage which inspires your allies.
Tests of Faith is one of the real gems of this book. It’s a nice system whereby the paladin gets to shake off mental spell effects and the like. It’s a really nicely balanced system that costs you XP to do, so you’re not going to use it lightly.
POWERS OF THE FAITHFUL
This chapter is the real nuts and bolts of the book. This includes new systems for just about every paladin power.
First up are the spells. Spells are spells. I’ll not bother detailing them here, just safe to say that none of them seem badly worked out or imbalanced. There’s a nice summary list at the start which includes all the spells from PHB and Relics and Rituals.
Next to get a turn is Smite Evil. This has a good deal of discussion of the nature of this power, which is all well considered and well enough written to get its points across clearly. Not only that, but you also get five new ways to smite your enemy, each with a basic system for low level characters and an advanced system for characters who meet certain requirements. I’ve checked out the mechanics and I recon you’re looking at 7th level before you can start doing advanced smites if you go all out to get one of them, but then you’ll be unlikely to be able to do the other as early. This seems about right for the power level of the abilities. There are also rules for mixing multiple effects in together, but not until very high levels.
Next up Channelling. This concentrates on the channelling of positive energy through turn undead attempts. You burn X number of turn undead attempts to get a certain effect. This is nothing new and has been considered in many other supplements. However FH:P goes about it very differently. They present a system whereby a character has an ‘Inner Focus’ which determines how they can channel positive energy. This focus is tied in to the character’s personality and concept. This section gives you four inner foci, each with a path of powers with a DC to achieve and a number of turn attempts that must be burned to use it. The powers aren’t too over powered for their effects and the paths are reasonably well flavoured. The really good thing about this system, though is the potential to design your own channelling paths for clerics and other turners, as well as new ones for Paladins.
Now we get to see Soul weapons, which to me are similar to the class ability of Samurai in OA to invest in their weapon and let it grow in power as they advance levels. This is a simple system to build a weapon, and uses the basic magic weapon creation rules from DMG to balance itself nicely. The paladin also has to sacrifice some class features to get the soul weapon in the first place, so it seems balanced and I like the idea of personalising my sword, rather than being stuck with whatever falls out of the Dragon’s treasure chest…
Finally there is a system of Vow Quests which allows the paladin to make a pact with their god to achieve a certain task in a set time. They can plea with their god for additional help in the form of special powers, but their god will likely place certain restrictions on them while they perform their quest. This is, IMO, the best new system in the book. It’s even persuaded me to take rare plunge into running a game, based on a questing paladin and their friends (I’m even toying with the idea of making them a single class party and make them all choose one of the subclasses).
GM’S SECTION
The final chapter of FH:P is a discussion for DMs on how to integrate it all into your game. As a player I’ve only given this a cursory glance, but the writing is in a nice discursive style and I expect it will prove helpful to GMs (Like mine when I show him my Defender :o) ). This is a nice idea, most class books are so strongly sold to players rather than GMs that they don’t even consider this.
The book finishes off with some character sheets. Firstly there is a basic character sheet. The fist page is for skills and is interestingly organised with each Ability score as a ‘header’ to a list of skills that use that stat (str and con look particularly sparse!). This is a brave approach and I’m interested to see how it performs during a session. The next character sheets are designed to help you organise your spells. There’s a nice summary sheet for each spell level that list all the spells of that level and details a short spell effect description, range, target and other such important stats. There’s also a tally and check off box (more evidence of a white wolf influence) to keep track of spells memorised and cast. Given the amount of time spent paging through spell books during gaming sessions I think this will be an invaluable tool.
CONCLUSION
To summarise this what has become gargantuan review I’ll be quick. This is a fantastic product. I’d give it full marks out of ten or five and perhaps a 98%. The lack of art and bookmarks are the only problems with the product, but there’s more than enough ‘stuff’ of true quality to more than make up for this. As one of the customer comments on RPG Now states: I would be very surprised not to see this in print. I can only echo those sentiments and wait until I can get my hands on a copy of it with lots of lovely pictures and full colour cover! For $5 you will not be disappointed.
Cheers,
Damian Hind.
