Min/Max Boards

Savage Worlds is extremely limited on powers (spells) known. A starting character knows only 2 or 3 powers, and getting another 2 (3 for Wizard) requires blowing a precious edge on Extra Powers or to multiclass caster. The Advanced Players Guide bring back an old solution to this problem by (re)introducing the powers summon monster, summon nature's ally, and planar ally (which appears to just be a summoning spell now), This, the equally limited PP count, and the fact that spells don't scale by CL (Savage Worlds progression tends to make characters wider in power, not taller, as they advance) makes the ability to have some spells cast by summoned monsters even more useful than it is in normal Pathfinder.

Monsters with only self only powers won’t be listed, unless that power can still benefit a PC directly (detection, fly on something big enough to carry a human). Note that the restrictions on summoned monsters seen in normal Pathfinder (no summoning other monsters, no wishes) do not appear to exist in Savage Pathfinder.

It's worth noting the increased trait modifier can boost a summoned monster's arcane skill by one step per power point, without caring about the linked attribute. For non Wild Cards:
d8 to d10 adds 7.5% to odds of success, 12.5% to the chance of 6 (odds of success with a -2 penalty, such as from multiaction) and 17.5% to chance of raise
d10 to d12 adds 5% to success, 8.33% to the chance of 6, and 11.67% to chance of raise.

For Wild Cards monsters (Trumpet Archon, Balor, Pit Fiend, Night Hag), who benefit from the wild dice the impact is lower:
d8 to d10 adds 3.75% to odds of success, 10.41% to a 6, and 16.07% to raise
d10 to d12 add 2.5% to success, 6.95% to a 6, and 10.05% to raise.
If you spend the extra PP to increase the casting of one of these monsters, they should always be using multiaction to cast twice, be taking penalties to cast, or seeking a raise as the minor increase isn't really worth a PP otherwise.


Format

Name (WC indicates wild card)
RR:rank required to cast, PPR: Power Points Cost, ASD: arcane skill dice (MP indicates Mystic Powers, SLO indicates all powers are innate), PP: Monster’s PP .
Powers: List powers
IP: List innate abilities. For simplicity, this section also includes abilities that are effectively unique spells. These are always listed last.
(FD) after power indicates a power has a fixed descriptor, + indicates major innate.

Summon Monster

Lantern Archon
RR:N, PPC:  5, ASD: SLO, PP: SLO
IP: Bolt (FD, SL), detect evil, light (SL), speak language (SL), minor teleport (SL, greater, self)

Trumpet Archon (WC)
RR: V, PPC: 10, ASD: d10, PP: 25
banish, boost Trait, detect arcana, healing, planar travel, protection, resurrection, trumpet
IP: detect evil, light, relief, mind link, speak language (self only), teleport (greater, self)

Glabrezu
RR: V, PPC: 10, ASD: SLO, PP: SLO
Powers: Confusion, dispel, illusion (duplicate self only), teleport (greater, self), grant wish, reverse gravity

Succubus
RR: S, PPC: 6, ASD: SLO, PP: SLO
IP: Disguise+, empathy (Charm, duration of one week; Persuasion), puppet+, speak language+ (self), teleport (Greater, self), Profane Gift

Vrock
RR: S, PPC: 7, ASD: SLO, PP: SLO
IP: Illusion (duplicate self only), teleport (greater, self)

Bone Devil
RR: V, PPC, 8, ASD:d8, PP: 15
Powers: Barrier, illusion, invisibility
IP: Mind link, teleport (greater, self)

Ice Devil
RR: V, PPC: 8, ASD: d8, PP: 15
Powers: Barrier (FD), blast (FD), burst (FD), illusion
IP: mind link, teleport (greater, self)

Mephit
RR: N, PPC: 3, ASD: d8, PP:5
Powers:
Air: Deflection
Earth: Elemental Manipulation (earth only), growth
Fire: Bolt (FD), elemental manipulation (fire only)
Water: Bolt (FD)
IP: Mephit Summon (same type, once per day.), breath weapon

Summon Nature’s Ally

Cloud Giant
RR: V, PPC: 10, ASD: SLO, PP: SLO
IP: Fly (levitate, self), obscuring mist

Storm Giant
RR: V, PPC: 10, ASD: SLO, PP: SLO
IP: Fly (levitate, self), control weather (maintaining power long enough to activate requires 9 extra PP with concentration, 18 without)

Mephit
See Summon Monster

Pixie
RR: S, PPC: 6, ASD: d8, PP: 15
Powers: Confusion, dispel, entagle, light, protection
IP: Invisibility (self)

Satyr
RR: S, PPC: 5, ASD: d8, PP: 10
Powers: fear, summon ally (!)
IP: Puppet, slumber, sound,

Planar Ally

Hound Archon
RR:S, PPC: 6, ASD: SLO, PP: SLO
IP: Detect evil, light, mind link, speak language (self), shape change (dire wolf only, self), teleport (Greater, self)

Lantern Archon, Trumpet Archon: See Summon Monster

Asimar: Not a monster? (On possible list of summons, but no bestiary entity)

Balor (WC)
RR: H, PPC: 12, ASD: d10, PP: 20
Powers: Burst (FD), puppet, stun, telekinesis
IP: Dispel+, mind link, teleport (Great, Self), Summon (any demon besides Balor)

Glabrezu, Succubus, Vroc, Bone Devil, Ice Devil: See Summon Monster

Pit Fiend (WC)
RR: H, PPC: 13, ASD: d10, PP: 15
Powers: Barrier, blast (FD), deflection, illusion, invisibility, scrying
IP: Dispel+ (area, multiple powers), link link, teleport (Greater, self), wish+ (once per year), zombie+ (Permanent, five per day, no more than 20 at once), Summon (any devil, once per day)

Mephit: See Summon Monster

Night Hag (WC)
RR: H, PPC: 9, ASD: d8, PP: 10
Powers: Bolt, lower Trait
IP: Detect arcana+ (self, all Modifiers), disguise+ (self), intangibility, invisibility+ (self), slumber+, shape change+ (self, humanoid only), Dream haunting, sound bind
If 3+ hags are 4 yards of eachother, Arcane Mastery, and PP becomes 20 while following powers are gained

As a special case, Hags form a coven automatically when three are next to each other, each gaining benifits.
Night Hag (trio)
RR: H, PPC: 18, ASD: d10, PP:30
Powers: Arcane protection, baleful polymorph, bolt, curse, dispel, divination, elemental manipulation, lower trait, mind wipe, puppet, resurrection, scrying, zombie
Note: Arcane Mastery

Nightmare
RR: S, PPC: 6, ASD: SLO, PP: SLO
IP: Plane Shift (self plus rider)

Ogre Mage
RR: V, PP: 8, ASD: d8, PP: 10
Powers: Intangibility, puppet
IP: Darkness+, invisibility (self), Change Shape (needs spellcasting roll)

Rakshasa
RR: V, PP: 7, ASD: d10, PP: 20
Powers: Bolt, dispel, illusion, invisibility, puppet, protection
IP: Disguise (humanoid only, self), light, mind reading+ (arcane skill required), sound

Tiefling: Not a monster? (On possible list of summons, but no bestiary entity)

Going through Living Greyhawk material and I see Bag of Tricks was not only banned, but even banned from AR rewards that granted one's pick of any normally off limit item. I'd think it's the per week use limit (which would make it per adventure), or the ability to slow play by summoning a bunch of fodder, but neither of those is unique to Bag of Tricks. Organized play makes some pretty weird, but the way this item is singled out makes me sure there's some kind of story behind it. Anyone know?

Shape Stone would do a pretty good job of destroying a bridge (destroy the supports, destroy one end entirely ect.), but I'm wondering if there's anything lower level that could do the job.

A question elsewhere led me to look at the truenamer prestige classes. I noticed Fiendbinder's requirements

Alignment: Any nongood
Skills: Knowledge (the planes) 10 ranks, Speak Language
(Abyssal), Speak Language (Infernal), Truespeak 10 ranks
Spells: Ability to cast summon monster IV

The writing on typical entry indicates this is indeed not for Truenamers, but for casters with Truespeak ranks, so that's not jank (even if it wouldn't be out of character for 2/3rds of Tome of Magic...). What looks like jank to me is it's a full length prestige class you can't qualify for till level 9 (8 if there's some way to get truespeak as a class skill without a dip). Is there a non-epic prestige class that takes as long or longer to qualify for and has 10(+?) levels?

For the sake of simplicity we’ll exclude adventures, since those are often published for multiple systems and only need one person (the GM) agree to use 3PP stuff.

I think DSP, Drop Dead Studios, Radiance House (Binder port), Legendary Games, and Lost Spheres Publishing seem to have well established reps for their material. Is there anything else you think is excellent and worth including in your game?

Was reviewing a new release from Lost Spheres Codex of Blood: Parasites & Paragons. The new class in there can grab this ability at second level.

Alien Form (Ex): Choose a creature type other than your own. A parasite with this mutation is treated as this type rather than their original type whenever it would be beneficial (for example, harmful spells which target only humanoids such as Charm Person or Hold Person will automatically fail on a humanoid parasite who selected aberration with this ability unless they specifically chooses otherwise). A parasite can select this mutation any number of times, each time selecting a new type to be treated as.

Are there any particular uses for this ability, assuming it doesn't give immunities, proficiency, lack of bodily needs, or racial HD properties of the new type? I recall PF plugged the big advantages of counting as another type in 3.5 and can't think of anything particularly impressive, but I'm sure there's something interesting to do with it.

Anyone else read this? Curious what thoughts others had on it.

Firstly, I have to give the team behind this praise for working around the setting restrictions of GMs Guild by remembering Gothic Earth was, officially, part of Ravenloft instead of its own setting (even though it was in practice).

The book opens with a lecture on social boundries. I really dislike modern RPGs feeling the need to include these instead of expecting the target audience to be adults, especially so when it's a historical horror setting (the target audience for which being people who already know the past had a lot of terrible things) and a supplement that requires a group already have serious effort investment into RPGs already (The hypothetical reader has already worked with at least the core three and CoS, but only now needs to learn not to be a dick to other players? The warning list includes poverty, violence and serious injury, because apparently those doesn't exist in normal D&D.). There's later on a section where it leads to the book giving recommendations that had already been proven to be actually harmful.

After that waste of a page and terrible start, the book actually opens with the new universal mechanics. I really like the bit on how a character's bonds help improve recovery during downtime. It's a minor thing that encourages backstories that aren't friendless orphans. Resolve Points are yet another hero point variant, of which half refresh after a long rest. While that would seem at odds with the despair of the setting, you have to burn these to activate more powerful abilities. That and MotRD has always been more optimistic than standard Ravenloft anyways: Every version treated defeating the Red Death as arduous and requiring high levels of knowledge/resources but physically possible, with the RPGA version even ending on that successfully happening, something that would never happen with any other Dark Power. MotRD's signature long casting times are back, this time making all castings of non-cantrips rituals by default. This is mitigated by 5e's unlimited cantrips (which don't provoke dark powers checks anymore!) and the ability to burn resolve to complete spells quickly.

On classes, the book has an interesting idea that's effectively mandatory dual classing/gestalt: When you take your first level in one of the five classes, you also take one of the sixteen archetypes (any class can take any archetype) which gives a second set of class features and abilities equivalent to standard 5E's background abilities. This means you can have a sleuth (rogue-lite) that can be a crackshot (gunslinger), martial artist (pugilist), know some magic (adept) or have a signature gimmick item (treasure hunter). I think it would be more at home in a higher fantasy setting (or, at least, interwar pulp instead of pre-war Gothic Horror), but at my initial read through it appears to work fine for creating a variety of character concepts without being as much a straightjacket as classes in the three previous incarnations of MotRD were. All classes and archetypes use a system of gaining player selected talents from a class specific list at odd levels (as seen in d20 Modern, Saga Edition, some Pathfinder classes, and some 5e classes at a much slower rate), which nicely avoids 5e's big problem of minimal customization.

Of note is that Adept and the casting based archetypes aren't Vancian casters, a tradition MotR had previously kept from normal D&D. Instead . There's no given way to obtain an evocation cantrip (though with feats and variant human explicitly being compatible, Magical Initiate could do it). While this may be due to thematics (MotR isn't exactly a setting where wizards shoot fire at eachother) or the powers check penalty on evocation (which doesn't actually apply since cantrips don't provoke them) but you can still blast all you want with  Acid Splash, Create Bonfire, Infestation, Produce Flame, Sword Burst (all conjuration), Vicious Mockery (enchantment), Primal Savagery and Thorn Whip (both transmutation), with one ability even explicitly gives Produce Flame. These will generally do less damage than even a derringer though, so it's really only a thing if you need to get past security or want to be quiet (5e leaves the volume needed for verbal components undefined, but even 3e's "strong voice" is still far less than a gun shot and is less suspicious too).

The remaining parts of backgrounds are replaced with a single sliding scale of wealth. This is essentially a choice between extra skill proficiencies or more money. Bland but functional, since there's way to many trades in the industrial world to use anything more specific.

On equipment, now's the time to note that this incarnation has taken Living Death's approach of money, even though it technically came up in backgrounds: The characters have off-screen day-jobs and living, rather than expect the PCs to murder hobo to afford fighting evil. It's a good choice. On the subject of stuff they took from Living Death, I'm quite disappointed they didn't include the part of looking at (now public domain) period mail order catalogs to expand the equipment list. They're way more accessible now than they were back when Living Death was running, literally just being a trip to archive.org away (maybe Google Books too, but I can't figure out how to make the search for that give the actual catalogs instead of court cases referencing the catalogs). Curiously absent from the equipment listing are bicycles (present in all previous versions) and mess kits (though those are also missing).

While the broad gun classes (three types of handgun, sorted by size, four types of rifle, the choice between full length/carbine and cheaper single shot/expensive repeater, and two types of shotgun) that have been used in all past incarnations are still how guns should be handled, it's a shame they didn't clear up the listing for what ammo they take and still only vaguely list diameter. I admit, the 1890s are one of the harder periods to list "standard" cartridge types for with everyone switching to smokeless and lots of new cartridges (many of which will vanish by the first World War) being thrown around, but it's by no means impossible. I may put together such a list at some point. That aside, "repeating" ought to have been used instead of "lever action" for the rifle class, as bolt actions are widespread in this era (Commonwealth, France, Germany, United States, Russia all have them), plus an odd handful of pump/slide action rifles (Colt Lightning) that can all use the same status.

I have to question the PF style gun malfunctions on low rolls, using the term "fouled" and referencing need for cleaning. Aside from total non-support for how magic can clean guns in 6 seconds, in the 1890s, smokeless powder is quickly replacing black, in large part because it doesn't foul yet there's no mention of smokeless powder in the book. The distinction between the two powders could have been a good way to make some guns deadlier than others since black powder reaches much lower velocities (A 250 grain .45 LC bullet propelled by 30 grains of black powder will reach 775 FPS, but 8 grains of smokeless will send it over 900 FPS. Remember in the formula for energy of a projectile the effect of speed is squared, so 116% speed is a lot more.), give some equipment progression, and also be another step against murder hoboing (if the gangsters are all carrying cheap black powder revolvers made by a bicycle company, their value as guns will be closer to their valuable as scrap). The current prices look to be in-line purely with black powder arms (at least according to the period mail order catalogs I can find), so it could be expanded in a future supplement.

Next are Qabals (organizations in on the supernatural that the PCs might be part of). This is largely a lore thing, with some relatively minor game mechanics implications for certain talent choices. Of note here is there's actually some explicit references to events of Living Death here. The description of the White Rose is a bit awkward in tense, as it both talks about it as a current modern organization and as one nobody has seen since 1889.

The Dungeon Master's Primer in chapter 7 is good and something the previous incarnations of this setting sorely lacked. Both the 2E and White Wolf 3E versions of MotRD suffered from being lore dumps without really telling you what the PCs are actually supposed to do in the setting and required prewritten adventures to make things click. There doesn't appear any way to lower Dark Powers stage given.

I notice there's a lack of information on life in the 1890s in previous versions that was not reproduced here. An acceptable loss given how easy it is the research this nowadays.

Overall like it, despite some issues here and there. Curious to see what future supplements (one of which was explicitly announced in the book itself) from this team will hold.

Edit:

Cartridges

Any Intelligence-based arcane spellcaster who makes a successful check to learn one of the spells from this book can immediately learn a second “reflected” spell at the same time. Thus, the time required to master these spells is halved because of the way they overlap for wizards and other arcane casters whose spellcasting is based on Intelligence.

It's nice to see them actually bother to support non-core casters, but uh... To my knowledge there's a grand total of four "Intelligence-based arcane spellcaster" base classes in the entire edition: Wizard, Wu Jen, Beguiler and Magewright. Wu Jen doesn't get any of the listed spells on their list, and Beguiler+Magewright can't learn any spells outside of their class features to do so. The three prestige classes with such I know off, with Assassin and Avenger being spontaneous casters while Chameleon doesn't need the line since they work like a wizard. Even that feat for rangers/paladins doesn't matter because they function as a wizard for that. This wouldn't be so bad if it was future proofing, but this was a pretty late release.

Is there anything that this line actually applies to? Would need an intelligence based arcane caster that isn't Wizard, learns spells outside of its class features, doesn't say they learn spells like a Wizard, and gets any two of Enlarge Person, Mirror Image, Simulacrum or Spell Turning on its list (or pulls spells from the Cleric or Bard list because this spell book has some unique spells and some Spell Compendium spells beyond those core spells).

Is there any option in the system for something with True Seeing that can be conjured with Lesser Planar Binding or a Summon Monster/Nature's Ally spell of 5th level or less? I know Avoral can be called with Planar Binding, but its HD is too high for the lesser version.

Link

I think this should have come out 5 years ago (Yes, it has been that long: 3E turns 20 next year). This late in the game it will never be properly supported.