An Endzietgeist.com review

This Everyman Mini clocks in at 9 pages, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 1 page advertisement, 4 pages of SRD, leaving us with 2 pages of content, so let’s take a look!

All righty! As always, we begin this Everyman mini with a brief introduction and on the same page, we can find the Verdant Spell feat, which is a metamagic feat that increases the spell slot used by 2 levels and makes the targeted plant creatures susceptible to mind-affecting effects.

After this, we move on to the main meat of the mini, which would be the spring mystery. This one nets Handle Animal, Heal, Knowledge (nature) and Survival as class skills. The bonus spells granted range from goodberry over grove of respite to control plants. But what do the revelations offer? Well, animate plants lets you animate branches as a standard action, duplicating arboreal hammer, with high levels instead providing the ability to animate trees as treants (nice catch: Sans the animate trees ability of treants). Some of the revelations are drawn from the nature mystery, like spirit of nature or friend to the animals – sans taking up wordcount, mind you.

We can also find the option to clad the character in a scaling plant armor enhancement. Really cool: rejuvenation lets you render the target a Child or Youth (as per Childhood Adventures), though you do not explicitly need that book for the revelation to work properly – a mechanic effect is provided, including means to detect the target. Renewal represents a serious upgrade to the potency of the Heal skill’s treat deadly wounds option (Nice!) and yes, the obligatory speak with plants and verdant shape SP can be found as well. I was particularly smitten with springtime respite, which infuses an area with sustaining life, providing food and, at later levels, daylight (alas, not properly italicized) and a save bonus versus death effects, negative energy, etc. as well as sunbeams versus undead entering it. Cool! The final revelation ios pretty hardcore – it provides immunity versus ability damage and drain, exhaustion, etc., 3/day animal/plant growth (not properly italicized) and when you die, you rapidly decompose – only to come back to life as a plant blooms, bears fruit and spits out a young version of yourself that rapidly grows to full age. There’s an interesting adventure angle here – defend the returning oracle!

Conclusion:

Editing and formatting are very good on a formal and rules-language level, though I did notice some italicization glitches. Layout adheres to Everyman Gaming’s two-column standard with a white background, making this relatively printer-friendly. The pdf sports a nice full-color artwork and has no bookmarks, but needs none at this length.

Margherita Tramontano’s spring mystery represents a thematically-concise, interesting option. The mystery features some unique revelations, has a concise leitmotif and some really cool visuals. In short: Not much to complain about. At the same time, I don’t consider the pdf to be perfect in all regards – there are some really cool revelations here, though, which makes my final verdict clock in at 4.5 stars, rounded down for the purpose of this platform.

Endzeitgeist out.