A Review of the Role Playing Game Supplement Your Whispering Homunculus

Your Whispering Homunculus by Richard Pett, Greg Vaughan and Michael Kortes is a role playing game supplement for use with Paizo Publishing‘s Pathfinder system and published by Kobold Press. The supplement is covered by the Open Game License and, as such, some of the material is Open Game Content.

The supplement is available as a watermarked PDF from RPGNow for $9.99, although it was purchased at an offer price of $4.00, which was the one reviewed, and can also be picked up as a printed softcover edition. The PDF has 169 pages, two of which are the full colour front and back covers, two pages are the front matter, two pages are the Table of Contents, two pages are What’s in a Name, effectively the introduction and one page is the Open Game License. There are also sixteen blank pages.

The rest of the book is a collection, 34 in total, of short articles on a number of subjects. Most of these are fairly similar, and all start with a discussion between the master and his homunculus on the topic in question followed by an introductory few paragraphs discussing the content from a GameMaster’s point of view, then the actual tables, or other content, itself. Thirty four article titles are too many to go into here, but the subjects covered are mainly random tables, from d12 to d100, covering anything from local delicacies, daft bets and dares, treasures, random encounters, non-player characters, rumours and topics of conversation.

There are also some more meatier articles, which include stats for the master and his homunculus, some adventure seeds, for both short adventures and entire adventure paths, and some monster variations and templates.

Your Whispering Homunculus in Review

The Table of Contents lists every section, as do the bookmarks in the PDF. It does the job required, although perhaps a bit more depth in some sections, those that aren’t just tables, would have been appreciated. Apart from the colour covers, all the other illustrations are in black and white. The interior illustrations are page fillers, nothing more, and tend to have little relevance to the text at hand.

There are, as mentioned, a substantial number of blank pages – just under 10% of the total pages in the PDF. These blank pages are all even numbered, and all arranged so that the next section begins on what would be the facing page in a printed book. The layout of the PDF is simply the book layout produced electronically, which doesn’t translate quite as well as it should.

There is rather less text to most pages than would be normally expected, and the format may seem a bit odd, but this is basically because the supplement is a collection of tables, and a few other things, that were former magazine articles, which have been combined and added with some new content to make this supplement.

Although this is nominally a supplement for the Pathfinder system, and any game stats given are for that system, a large proportion of the content is stat-free, and therefore more generic. Even for those tables that contain some actual game stats, these are quite short and tend to be simply information on skill checks, and could be easily converted. The game stats that would be hardest to convert are those related to monsters and specific items, and these only take up a small portion of the supplement. This is therefore a supplement that is easily adaptable to any fantasy game system.

At full price, given that the actual word count is quite low, it may seem a bit pricey, especially with the amount of blank pages. However, if you were purchasing these as individual supplements, the cost would probably be more, even though most individual lists of this type tend to have 50 or 100 entries, whilst these are generally shorter. Your Whispering Homunculus is a great source of inspiration and fillers for any GameMaster running a fantasy campaign.