I wish I could give this product 4.5 stars, as there's some typos and one or two balance issues. But overall, this is really, really good. What I really appreciate about this book is how candid it is. The author isn't out to create a setting book or get you absorbed in a world. This stuff is meant to be used how you like and the frank approaching to explaining engenders me to figuring it out and pulling over it. The extra rules for making monsters more interesting is of particular use to me, as they're fast and interesting. It's remarkable to me how the simple suggestion of letting a monster regenerate and it being stopped by something other than fire, for a flavorful reason, hadn't crossed my mind before, but this book not only suggests it, but gives a SUPER useful chart to making it work for each CR.

Also, the suggestions for tunning games is just great. The idea for running elemental weapons is superb, and I'll be making use of that. Thanks, ForeverGM, from another forever GM.

As I write this it's for the Version 2 of the book. I helped kickstart this setting because the idea sounds amazing. For the most part it's executed amazingly. While certainly not always feeling like a professional level book, the artwork and ideas presented are fabulous in flavor and design. In particular, I like the approach to armor. Instead of being made directly of metal, armor are 'modules' that you wear, up to your strength score. This increases your AC based on the material, but gives a penalty to dexterity saving throws, making armor an interesting tradeoff.

While I have great praise for the setting and mechanics, there's a definitely sense that the makers don't have the best grasp of 5th editions systems, nor a solid grasp of the wording used. For example, one interesting quirk of the setting of Farwood is that there are these 4 cantrips that anyone who has the spellcasting feature can cast. Each cantrip, known as a "song" in-setting, represents one of the 4 gods. So far so good. Then, for some reason, two of the cantrips have the 'ritual' property. Anyone who knows how ritual casting works knows this makes no sense. Ritual casting is a feature spellcasters us to cast utility spells without expending spell slots. But cantrips do not expend spell slots. So there's absolutely no explanation for this.

Then there's the new class, the Spirit Chanter. This class makes use of an important aspect of the setting, that the 'spirit' of creatures can be bound to objects to make quick and simple magic items. They require attunement to work, so even at their best they aren't game breaking. This system is quick and easy, though it's limitations aren't entirely well explained. The class, instead of being neccesarily focused on making a huge amounts of these objects, focuses on having a personal vessel they can bind spirits to. What isn't very clear is that this vessel doesn't directly have these bonuses, and instead you can spend points to give allies bonuses from these objects temporarily. In theory this allows for some versatility, but the bonus only applies until the start of your next turn. This means any bonus is quite small and very temporary at a resource that the spirit chanter can get quick from just killing stuff, but sadly lacks the wide range of versatility spellcasting has for, I feel, not much reward. The class has 1d10 sized hit dice and gains extra attack at 5th level, but its features don't all support it as a martial class except in vague ways, and the class doesn't even have access to martial weapons or medium or heavy armor, instead gaining light armor and shields. I think I see what they're going for, a sort of spiritual wildsman, but the biggest issue is how it spends spirit points. I think the biggest hit to the class is not being able to give the bonuses to yourself in any easy way or an extended period of time without just crafting the items, and any spellcaster can do that pretty easily with some monster hunting.

The class also regains its resource at a rate of 1d6 after a long rest, instead of using the main ability of the class, Wisdom. The document is full of weird not-quite-contradictory stuff, like how the two skills needed to craft stone and wood armor use constitution, but then you just learn a cantrip that auto-succeeds what you want to do anyway. Oh, and that isn't even getting into the fact that one of its first level featires RAW is basically useless until second level. And then there's a 5th level feature for one of the subclasses that gives proficiency in a new skill, hunting, when anyone can gain proficiency in the skill by making three successful checks without proficiency. So if you've already got proficiency, it's a bit of a dead feature compared to the other ones.

Having said that, if you're willing to put up with all the jank, there's a cool system and a REALLY good setting. This simple 'wild' setting puts wanderlust in me. I can't say I regret helping kickstart this, but if you're going to play with this take it with a handful of salt as you look through everything and be ready to houserule some stuff. I'm going to be trying to redesign the Spirit Chanter, because it's such a neat idea that none of my players want to play.

I helped kickstart both this and the original 'Touch of Class' document when they were revealed. The classes within her certainly interesting and fun, but are lacking in some key places that makes this hard to recomend. I wouldn't call any of them outright bad, but there's some small hiccups one might need to wrap their head around.

My personaly favorite class of the bunch, the Bloodweaver, has some fascinating choices. The classes uses 'Resevoir Points', points a replacement for spell slots. Instead of using spells, it uses its own thing called disciplines, which are the Bloodweaver's form of spells. They're very, very powerful. I wouldn't say the power level is all over the place, but I would say the level of a discipline is probably about +2 levels stronger than a spell of the same 'level' (the available blood disciplines go from 1-5). These powers are, at higher levels, total nukes that can obliterate battlefields and towns. The way they balance this is by making the class have few resevoir points. If a wizard used spell points instead instead of spell slots (if you're aware of that optional rule), they'd have around 120 points at level 20; a bloodweaver would have 27 resevoir. It's a valiant attempt, but I find this exasperates a problem DMs already have to face with wizards, being that this encourages the Bloodweaver to save all their points until the boss fight or else risk having little to do against the boss, meaning they aren't doing the fun things they picked the class to do until the end of the dungeon. In a game with the normal amount of fights a day, a low level Bloodweaver will run out of power fast, and some of the higher level abilities are all or nothing endeavors. If the target succeeds their saving throw, a lot of disciplines just don't do anything and your resevoir is drained anyway, vs most damage dealing spells at least doing half damage on a failed save. Lower level disciplines don't suffer this problem so much, but at around 10th level you naturally want to use the cool abilities, of which you'll be able to use twice, at best.

Aside from that, the class can gain regain a resevoir point by spending a hit dice. They get 1 resevoir for this, but can only do this a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus before needing to do a long rest to do it agains (of which you'll only get half your class's level in hit dice back). This is an incredibly low amount that would narely be enough to cast 3rd level disciplines in the best case scenario of having a proficiency bonus of +6. Resevoir is regained to your maximum as well, of course, when you finish a long rest, but I find the hit-dice based system so small it's hardly worth bothering.

On that note, a weird quirk of the class is that you can only spend a certain amount of resevoir to activate a discipline. You can only spend resevoir up to half your class level, rounded up. At level 10, then, you can spend 5 points. Despite all being 3rd level disciplines, though, 4 of them are completely unusable to you because you can only spend 5 points when certain 3rd level discimplines require 6. I find this restriction incredibly odd given most of these powers don't seem that much strong than the others, again due to that 'all or nothing' nature of most of them. Don't get me wrong; they are powerful, in theory. But if they fail, they fail hard. This is made stranger by a lot of discimplines having the cost of being able to target a second creature with many discimplines locked behind the activation of spending most than half the intial cost. But you can't spend those points because you're not high enough level, and by the time you are you could spend those points to turn into a cloud of acid that takes half damage and melts a whole battlefield, or some other amazing thing. Why would you bother? Each level of discimpline blows the last out of the water spectacularly, with the cheapness of 1st level discimplines being their big saving grace. Everything else is a bit wishy washy in terms of cost and what happens if you fail to cast some potent blood magic. I also feel some costs are strange, as the healing spell costs 1 resevoir to heal 1d10+your constitution modifier and then 1 point for an additional 1d10. Meanwhile, another ability of the same level ends a condition (blinded, deafened, paralyzed, or poisoned) for 2 points, but can end another condition as well for 10 points. A later ability can end all those conditions at once for 5 points. Maybe I'm just not usiong the monster manual correctly, but I've never had a player have more than 2 of those conditions on them at once, and the randomness of dice usually ends the conditions quickly.

Finally, perhaps most frustrating, is the class has a limited about of disciplines they can know, almost no qay to change them. It seems a strange oversight, but you have to change a whole cantrip level ability in order to be able to swap around disciplines as these cantrips are prerequisites to what disciplines you can pick. Fairly, perhaps, you're locked out of certain paths if you don't pick the right one. But the utter lack of a way to change otherwise, not even on a level up, seems strange given just how few the class learns. By the time you've picked you've likely settled on your paths if you go RAW. I persoanlly allow players to just change out which ones they know (except for the cantrip ones) on a long rest. I prefer versatility, and one flavor of nuke doesn't change too much of another when they need to have it prepared in advance anyway and can only do it so many times.

Expect to deal with weirdness like that for every class. Do I think this is worth 10 bucks? I think so. But you might have to change a lot of things, or prepare to scratch your head a few times.

I was part of the kickstarter that brought this product to fruition, and have been using this for a while. The classes inside are, for the most part, fun and interesting to play with. There are a couple balance issues. The carcaster's YuGiOh archetype is a bit of a mess and requires what feels like a fair amount of DM fiat to be playable in a long term scenario. The Moorph suffers a fair amont, as well. The saving throws disobey the 'strong and weak' rule that some homebrwers might be aware of. But aside from that, there aren't a lot of beasts to actually transform into, making it's greatest strength, the ability to turn into higher CR monsters than a druid, difficult to work with. I've allowed the use of monstrocities, which are basically beasts with elemental powers, and this has worked well, though may be too powerful like that without some serious planning on the DM's part.

I haven't playtested with every class, yet, but for the most part these are spectaular and I do not regret my purchase in the least.

It's good, it's cool, it's worth checking out. Give it a look.

It's good, it's cool, it's worth checking out. Give it a look.

It's good, it's cool, it's worth at least checking out.

This game is grand, but you qall know that. It's a creative system that stresses imagination and freedom, with enough rules to guide players on how to go about it. It's a good grand time. For the price, it's absolutely worth it.