Now you can join me on my Discord Server for more previews! I hope you're all doing well and staying safe! Enjoy this new Post not marked as liked. It's the first Full Blue Moon on Halloween in decades, so today The Oath of Sorrow is based around the Life of War, lived by those Post not marked as liked 2.
Cleric Preview: Scorn Domain! It also contains over 80 new spells, warlock invocations, 17 familiars, and dozens of magical items.
Carefully designed and balanced by a community of expert content creators, the mechanics presented within will feel right at home at your table. This content was created with one goal: Inspire fun and exciting roleplaying opportunities while providing crunchy, effective rules that will highlight the experiences players are looking for!
Lovingly illustrated by a team of incredible artists, journey into a world created by your own imagination and see how the dice determine your fate.
Whether you decide to build and preserve with the Eternal Citadel, bring ruin with the Accursed Archive, maintain the balance in service to the Warrior-Saint, let it all burn at the Ashen Wolf's side, forget your past through the Weaver of Lies, or make a pact with one of the twelve other Alrisen, you'll find party members to join you on your wild adventures!
Each Alrisen acts as an Otherworldly Patron, granting power to warlocks who join their service. Let me save you the guesswork: it's a compressed file archive, and it works just fine.
Open it with 7-Zip or whatever your favorite file compression utility is and you'll be good to go. I will tell you right now that this lack of a file extension on the download file is my biggest complaint. I'm a fairly technical guy, so this didn't present a challence to me, but other folks might have a worse experience.
If you know what to do it's a trivial hurdle to get over. Inside that compressed archive are a batch of files - there's the current version of the compendium 1.
The PDF is visually-appealing, being nicely laid-out and fairly similar in presentation to the first-party books, though some different font choices for headers and so on give it its own flair. The art is attractive, evocative, and used well. It's a well-made PDF. But the real meat of this product is the content and I've buried the lede long enough. The book opens with a couple of introductory pages that contain some basic advice about implementing the material. The author recommends using no more than four in your game unless you plan to make their interactions and machinations a major part of the setting.
To this I say: good luck. I'll get into that more as we proceed. The book introduces seventeen! For each of these, there is a couple pages of lore, the mechanical details of the warlock subclass that serves or works with the patron, and a unique familiar creature available to a warlock that picks Pact of the Chain at level 3.
This alone is a solid, comprehensive approach to the class, and would be plenty for a GM wishing to integrate one of these patrons into their game. However, that's not all the book includes. Each of the entries also contains a second subclass for different character class.
Cleric and Druid don't get new subclasses here, which makes sense - those classes both represent a different sort of relationship to a more powerful entity, and while sometimes they can be mixed with Warlock under very specific setting circumstances such as the Undying Court in Eberron , these are outliers at best. On top of that, ten of the new patrons also have a new character race associated with them, representing a character that has been transformed by the patron's influence.
The diversity and quality of options on display here is nothing short of breathtaking. Want a character that looks like a beautiful, immortal statue that serves a roaming extradimensional fortress dedicated to preservation? That's the Eternal Citadel. Want to make a sinister villain who has been warped by an evil extraplanar library filled with forbidden lore?
That would be the Accursed Archive. How about a character built around astrological and tarot themes? The Fallen Exile has you covered. A cosmic enforcer of the balance between good and evil, law and chaos? That's the Warrior-Saint. And I'm honestly not even sure those are the highlights. There's an option to essentially play a character based on The Portrait of Dorian Gray, a grove that attracts the hopeless who replace their hearts with a mass of thorns from the grove and gain a new zest for life in the process, a bunch of happy ooze cubes, a sinister conspiracy based around currency, the wild hunt, a terrible leviathan that collects secrets, a spider sitting in the middle of a web of lies, and several more besides.
There's a wide variety of outlooks and implied alignments on display here; some of the Alrisen are pretty straightforwardly good or evil The Eternal Citadel or the Accursed Archive, respectively but most of the others are more ambiguous, wanting specific things and leaving what that looks like for an individual character up to the player controlling them.
There's room for the usual "sinister or dangerous" but that's not all that's here by a long shot. Each of the entries includes a selection of invocations unique to the patron, couple of plot ideas and a few magic items associated with the Alrisen as well.
And of course each has one of those additional subclass options I mentioned back at the start of the review. The alrisen are all very well-realized, mechanically and in terms of lore. They manage to be flavorful, balanced, and full of exciting abilities one is anxious to use in play all at the same time. There are definitely some I'd be more excited to play than others, but it literally comes down to personal taste rather than some clear "correct" choices.
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