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Adding new races to an existing game world is a proposition that’s tricky at best. It requires an in-game explanation for why a particular race was never seen before, and is suddenly there now. One of the standard tropes is that a new land has been discovered, with that race being one of the more common inhabitants of said new place. This is the implicit assumption behind Caged Dragon Games’ Races of the New World: Coyotel.
A twelve-page book, RotNW: Coyotel takes a very minimalist presentation. It has no bookmarks (to which I say boo), and while the copy-and-paste option is enabled, every time I pasted the material it put each word on its own line, instead of preserving the paragraph formatting.
The graphic presentation is similarly stark. Other than the (admittedly somewhat evocative) image on the cover, and a small picture of a coyotel howling on the second page, there are no illustrations here. Each page has a single, plain black border surrounding the text on all four sides.
The book’s presentation is brief and somewhat workmanlike. We get a brief author’s foreword in which he tells us that this race is based off of the Coyote of Native American legend, followed by three paragraphs of descriptive text about the coyotel as a people, before we move towards the stats.
This, right here, is my major complaint about the book: there’s far too little exposition about the coyotel as a race. Leaving aside the implications that this race is from a “new world” (something which is likely to be campaign-specific), there three paragraphs we’re given don’t do nearly enough to tell us about the coyotel. We know that they’re chaotic, live in small groups on the edges of settlements of other races, and love playing pranks. There’s nothing about their religion, their psychology, their relations with other races in particular. It would have been cool, I think, if there had been a write-up on Coyote as their racial god, along with some information on his religion amongst other races, but that’s far beyond what’s here.
The racial write-up for the coyotel is fairly well-balanced, albeit on the stronger side. There’s no write-up given using the Advanced Race Guide point-buy rules, but if there were this race would be roughly on the same level as gnomes (their closest equivalent, in terms of their powers and abilities).
The book does present a fairly well-rounded set of alternate coyotel racial traits, several feats (many of which build on those racial traits, which is pretty cool), and favored class bonuses. Unfortunately, the tables regarding their height, weight, and age are all eschewed, which again deprives us of some of the flavor surrounding this race.
It’s here that we see another slight oddity in the book, which is the occasional presence of words that are in blue print (rather than black) and underlined. These have, in other words, the appearance of hyperlinks, except that they aren’t. Clicking on them produces nothing – insofar as I can tell, these were copy-and-pasted into the document from elsewhere, and the hyperlink imaging was preserved even though the links themselves weren’t. It’s slightly sloppy presentation.
The book ends with two coyotel-specific archetypes, the hashtaa (a bard archetype) and the wild druid (a druid archetype, naturally). Both are presented rather well, and have a paragraph of flavor text that nicely, if briefly, helps to tell us how these are the coyotel-versions of these classes, e.g. a racial spin on the bards and druids of other races (it would have been better, I think, if there’d been a sidebar expressly stating that these are the “standard” versions of these classes for coyotels, and that barring some deviants, they always use these archetypes for those classes).
All of this brings us to page seven of the book; the last five pages are taken up by the OGL, due to a huge list of Section 15 declarations. I’m frankly surprised by just how much is here, though I suspect that it’s copied wholesale from the d20pfsrd website. This is not incorrect, though I suspect that the author could have saved a few pages by going to the source for his material instead of citing the website as a whole – if nothing else, that would have saved people from expecting twelve pages of usable content when there’s really about half that much.
Overall, Races of the New World: Coyotel is a book that has potential, but needs some polishing to reach it. Hopefully an improved version will be released at some point in the future. As it is, the technical issues, combined with the sparse presentation make this a book about a race that can be inspirational and evocative, but only if the GM is willing to put some work in to fill in the gaps left here.
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