An Endzeitgeist.com review

This installment of the Everyman Minis-series clocks in at 6 pages, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 2 pages of SRD, leaving us with 2 pages of content, so let’s take a look!

In case that wasn’t super-obvious, let me spell it out: This occult ritual is basically one that is a representation of the Thanksgiving feast, minus the cultural baggage. It clocks in at 7th level and requires foodstuff and silverware galore and may only be cast during a harvest festival that must contain no less than 80 individuals. All foodstuff used must be locally-sourced within 12 miles of the ritual’s place of casting. The folks that partake in the massive feast get a supreme combination of powerful healing magics, ridding them of diseases and poisons and healing them. Cool: Higehr quality (read: More expensive) components can be used to add further, powerful curative effects to the ritual.

Beyond that, creatures partaking in the ritual get a 1-year lasting +4 morale bonus to saves versus disease, poison, emotion effects dealing with negative emotions (codified properly!). Upon completing the feast, any who partook become briefly and temporarily immune to a whole slew of negative effects. Additionally, the crops are blessed, granting better harvests…but there is a catch to these benefits: Once you have performed the ritual, you are expected to continue to do so! Failure to reproduce it in subsequent years will reverse the bountiful harvest, causing lean times to come, and kami or fey, for example, are liable to be antagonistic towards any participant who failed to attend a subsequent festival, creating a dependency of sorts and putting some serious potential stress on communities. This is clever, as it acts as a means to offset the significant benefits the ritual provides. That being said, I found myself wishing that it came with some variants for more sinister celebrations (wicker man, anyone?) or with a variant for e.g. coastal communities, focusing on fish, perhaps with a deep one-angle. That may just be me, though.

Conclusion:

Editing and formatting are very good, I noticed no significant issues. Layout adheres to Everyman Gaming’s two-column b/W-standard and the pdf sports, as always, a nice artwork by Jacob Blackmon. The pdf has no bookmarks, but needs none at this length.

Scott Beeh’s Bountiful Harvest Ritual is a fun mini-supplement that is worth checking out. The requirement for repetition once established makes for a potent drawback, particularly for adventuring folks, which helps to keep the powerful benefits in check. While it is a tad bit more focused than the concept necessarily warrants, I consider this ritual to be a nice addition to the game. As such, my final verdict will clock in at 4.5 stars, rounded up for the purpose of this platform.

Endzeitgeist out.