OgreCave

Living Imagination has refined their booth display to near perfection, creating a dockside bar in the middle of the exhibit hall. Those who stopped by for a chat couldn’t find a drink, but heard the details of the company’s two newest d20 products. Pirates, a book that sports a classic Clyde Caldwell cover, provides LI’s take on the privateer life. Several prestige classes, feats, magic items, spells, ship plans, and a fully described “pirate haven” round out the package, for $19.95. LI’s second GenCon release, Agents of Faith, introduces a system of divine feats and over 200 feats to test it out with. New cleric domains, spell, rituals, magic items, and prestige classes are in this book as well, also for $19.95. Those at the show also learned of LI’s November release, Charge! Subtitled “The Handbook of Military Adventuring,” the supplement will present a mass combat system, military organizations and how characters interact with them, and, of course, prestige classes, feats, spells, and so on, again for $19.95.

Just in time for GenCon, Skirmisher Publishing rolled out the sequel to their acclaimed d20 supplement on an NPC class, Experts. The new book, Warriors, is 126 pages of the same approach, only focused on the more combat inclined NPC class. Jumping over to the company’s website, I found even more details:

• The book has sixteen military prestige classes, including the Aerial Cavalryman, Charioteer, Combat Engineer, Executioner, Marine, Mechanist Infantry, Mountaineer, and Sheriff.
• More than 30 military subtypes, including archers, artillerists, beast handlers, cavalrymen, infantrymen, medics, pathfinders, peasant levies, provosts, and templars.
• Nine non-military subtypes, including bandits, barkeeps, thugs, and traders.
• New weapons, armor, and equipment, [...] siege engines, balloons and blimps, and guidelines for incorporating high-technology weapons into a fantasy campaign.
• Sixteen new spells, more than 80 new magic items and five new weapon special abilities.

Warriors also provides guidelines for heraldry, large war beasts, combat with chariots, over twenty NPCs, a few monsters, two dozen skills, close to twenty feats… seems like Skirmisher’s all over this NPC class.

More Skirmisher products are waiting in the wings, too. Nuisances will be the company’s flagship product next year, and two adventure-oriented products will round out the catalog: Tests of Skill and a yet-to-be-named book of paladin’s quest ideas. If the quality of d20 rules continues, all three are likely to be strong additions to any D&D campaign.

Darkfuries Publishing had its impressive Masterwork Maps d20 title, Inns & Taverns, in all its print-format glory. The pages were packed with extremely detailed maps for food and lodging establishments of all sizes — damn useful stuff in and of itself. Combine that with authentic, old world recipes in the original olde English, and Inns & Taverns is an outstanding resource for fantasy GMs. Darkfuries was also attempting to bring in sales from the Spelljammer fans with Aether & Flux: Sailing the Traverse, which brings space galleons to D&D once again. Cut out miniature tokens are provided for use with the space combat system, directly extrapolated from d20′s aerial combat rules. A PDF will be along in a month or so that converts all the old Spelljammer ships to d20 stats, making Sailing the Traverse a winner for space fantasy fans.