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At 128 pages, it’s a beefy book and fairly priced at $24.95. The cover lacks a striking illustration that will draw attention to it among other d20 products on store shelves, but is easily identifiable as a FFE product by the familiar red cover designed to look like an arcane tome. Jim Holloway provides the b+w interior artwork. Thankfully, there is one piece per entry, and Holloway generally does a great job of conveying the essence of the classes in his work. I haven’t liked his work this much in years.
Most notable is the near flawless editing. Anyone who remembers earlier FFE products like Demons and Devils II, where horrendous errors undermined otherwise solid products, will instantly recognize and appreciate the great strides made in this regards. Reading the Encyclopedia of Prestige Classes is a pleasure.
Before jumping into the prestige classes themselves we get a useful compilation of skills and feats gathered from several previous FFE books. There are eleven new skills in total (among them artillerist, city lore, tactics, and tunneling) and more than sixty feats, including many with an aerial bent obviously culled from Cloud Warriors. These are truly useful resources that will be welcome additions to any campaign. The range of classes presented herein is impressive, including appropriate entries for almost all of the core classes and races, as well as a host of evil ones perfect for bedeviling upstart PCs. Highlights include the Artillerist (with three pages of rules for operating siege artillery), the frightening Blood-Drinker and Spine Rippers, and the Time Touched, individuals whose unique perceptions of time allowed them to see past, present, and future all at once. Some are more mundane, but equally useful---the Slaver, Guildsman, King’s Questioner (read “torturer”), and Security Watchman. A good many, appearing originally in Devils and Demons, are designed for the worshippers of evil deities.
Of the fifty-one classes, almost a third are designed principally for evil humanoid races. Obviously this is a boon for GMs, but doesn’t this limit the books use by players, who after all are the primary audience of prestige classes? Hardly, actually. Buffalo Riders, elite hobgoblin warriors who ride buffalo into war, could easily be adapted to suit a barbarian culture reminiscent of the plains Indians. Similarly, the kobold Trap-Layers make suitable guerrilla warriors for nearly any race.
A few entries disappointed me greatly with the seeming lack of thought or creativity put into them. For class features Dragon Trappers, who specialize in capturing or killing wyrms, have nothing more than Dragon Lore, a bonus to save against breath weapon, and a series of bonus feats. With a class as unique as this, couldn’t the author have come up with a few more original benefits? This sort of thing---especially the ad nauseum offering of bonus feats in the stead of more original ideas---undermines several classes.
But such disappointment is alleviated once you begin to realize the host of applications this book has. Clearly it’s an invaluable D&D resource, but it has uses in many other settings/genres as well. For example Charnelers, assassins who kill and harvest the organs of priests belonging to good-aligned churches, make great Jedi assassins in a Star Wars campaign, while those in need of witch doctors for a pulp or pirate campaign need look no further than the Bone Shaker.
The Encyclopedia of Prestige Classes is among the more useful and well-designed books released by Fast Forward Entertainment to date. While the range of classes lean a bit heavily towards evil, the book nonetheless represents a worthwhile addition to a game resource library, especially for GMs looking for new challenges to present their players. And one shouldn’t overlook the nice collection of skills and feats.
Unless you own the complete FFE library, in which case this book will be largely redundant, it’s easy to recommend adding Encyclopedia of Prestige Classes to your collection.
