And now for something completely different...
What if you took the generic fantasy archetypes of gaming: dwarves, elves,
halflings and gnomes for instance, and translated them into the mythic realms of ancient Greece?
Incongruous as this sounds, Sword & Sorcery Studios pulls it off - brilliantly
- in Olympus, the third volume of their Relics & Rituals series.
In addition to the nuts-and-bolts necessities we've come to expect from
d20 Sourcebooks: new Skills, Feats, Spells, themed Items and so forth (and Olympus generously delivers
on these), this tome treats us to a series of mythic plausibilities that grant tremendous creative freedom to a DM planning
a Hellenic Campaign.
You can actually come to see, merely by reading through this volume, how
half-orcs and half-elves, far from being clunky transplants, actually fit in (quite well I must add) into the holistic
ecology of Greco-Roman fantasy. This volume doesn't provide a game-world for you to adventure in, but it gives you enough
of the elements (and mechanics) to create such a world for yourself and your players.
In addition to humans, and the fantasy races mentioned above, there
are fauns (kin to satyrs) and Spartes (descendants of the dragon-tooth warriors). New Prestige Classes include Feral Maenad,
Sacred Huntress, Master Pankratiast and Promethean Magos.
There are seventeen Olympian Monsters in the tome, and though these are
familiar beasties to gamers from other D&D/d20 offerings, Sword & Sorcery Studios has given each of them a unique
twist or two to keep your players on their toes.
My favorite portions of this sourcebook, besides those which masterfully
Grecianized the Northern European fantasy races, were those which dealt with the mechanics of divine favor and divine
wrath.
I will definitely be using Olympus in my upcoming
mythical campaign and look forward to reviewing more Sword & Sorcery Studio releases.
Review by Thor the Barbarian
