Dennis Baker's page

When I first picked up this book I struggled to get into the story. The first chapter is a very painful read-though of a really long, boring letter with no action. Then it transitions to some court intrigue which nearly made me put the book down...

I am glad I pushed through the frustrating bits, the book overall is an excellent read with lots of likeable characters and a good bit of well exciting, cinematic action sequences. There is also just the perfect amount of romance in the book as far as I'm concerned (which is to say enough where it drives plot in fun ways without getting sloppy).

This is somewhere between 3-4 stars for me due largely to the slow start. Radovan and some of the secondary characters really bring this story alive.

Everything about this module is designed around the idea of crazy fun and encourages players to act like GOBLINS! It's filled with zany acts characters launching fireworks at each other and just making general mayhem.

Really fun to play and GM, I wish there were more modules like this.

This first book is definitely in my top three adventure books of the 3.5/ PFRPG era. I loved the mystery aspect of it and there were a ton of hooks for GMs to glomp onto. My wife GMed this with my assistance and it was a blast to work with. The NPCs are evocative, the adventure hooks are appealing, and the monsters are fun.

I got this map as part of my Colosseum Morpheum Patronage and it's a really excellent piece. The detail is fantastic and it's well laid out.

The only downside is it's a very specific location. Unless you need a big area with a river of fire it's a little limiting.

I suggest people who have any illusions that PFS is a place where heroic characters are welcome avoid this module. There are some interesting fights and some potentially fun role-playing opportunities but the bulk of this module is pure thuggery.

Using the highly swapable wagons and horse tiles you can pretty much find any wagon, cart, or carriage you ever need.

Good quality artwork that plays to the strengths of the card based map packs.

I've waited a long time to write a review of this one largely because I don't like writing negative reviews. There is little about this map that I find appealing and personally I don't find these even very elfin... where are the trees?

Lots of nearly identical odd shaped buildings which can't be used for much of anything.

By far the least useful of the map packs or flip mats I own.

I was looking for a mini for my alchemist character and this was spot on. I've already purchased a few other Malifaux minis and I'm very impressed with the line and this one is no exception. Excellent detail, excellent concept.

A couple minor nits:
I don't particularly like that the arm has to be glued on, seems like it's unneeded on a mini that has just a simple arm. The glasses don't really excite me either and are a bit tough to paint well, I'd rather just have eyes.

Don't let those nits make you think I don't love the mini though, Two thumbs up!

The story in this scenario is a lot of fun and the scenario does a great job bringing it to life. There are a few mechanical issues which made the final encounters a bit of an anti-climax, some due to the encounter design and some due to our party mix.

Overall, I highly recommend the module, particularly if you can play the higher tier which I think offers more challenge and a more interesting final encounter.

I got these for the awesome and amusing goblin art and fell in love with the usefulness of the product.

Truly one of the best game accessories in my kit, it's a nice colorful and obvious indicator of status effects along with a summary of the effects from that status. The cute goblin art makes this perfect.

The artwork on this is amazing and it goes perfectly with the Dockside Tavern but the map packs seem to work best with small scenes like the campsites or dungeon rooms. This would have been absolutely amazing on the backside of the tavern map, making it a must buy 2 parter. As it is it is quite good for small dockside scenes and I use it for ship encounters or dock encounters.

As it is it's incredibly useful but it would be 5 stars if it were a flip mat, it would be six stars if it were the reverse side of the tavern map (I would buy 2 so I could combine them).

I had a great time both playing and running this module but (and it's a big BUT) it's quite a long shot from the typical PFS hack and slash. Lots of role playing and it can seem pretty sandboxy.

As a GM you really need to focus on prep and nail the NPCs before you sit down at the table. If you pick up the module and try to run it cold this module is going to be very rough to pull off. This module is going to really stretch your improvisation skills to their limit even if you are prepped.

Be prepared for this module to run long. In a convention or shop situation be ready to steer the party a bit and there is a good chance you will have to ditch the optional storm encounter (or more).

Also, there is a significant chance smart players can derail this adventure early on so be alert (there are some ideas in the discussion thread) and try to head them off early.

This book exceeded my expectations by a good margin.

Fluff in the book is good, you have a good idea of where the halflings 'fit' in Golarion and if you are trying to build a character there are a lot of hooks to bring a lot of characters alive.

Crunch wise the jinx racial ability is great and the feats that go along with it are awesome, something for nearly every class. The racial traits are better thought out than most and do an excellent job with fleshing out the race.

This is my favorite of the race Companion books and one of the best RP supplement books I've read.

First the disclaimer, this adventure was my first ever PFS character death and (near) TPK so that certainly colors my opinion.

The railroad tracks on dungeon crawl are obvious and clichéd. The introduction makes it sound like this is a problem solving/ mystery type adventure but then once you solve one fairly mundane puzzle or make a skill check all the discovery is over. For the rest of the adventure there is no question what you were doing next because there was only one way to proceed through a gauntlet of puzzles and contrived feeling challenges.

The story here is largely absent which is quite disappointing since part one was interesting and hinted that the second and third parts of the adventure would be tied in. There are some slim additional ties but in the GMs flavor text but as players we were left wondering why they bothered to call it part II. You can certainly play this without having played part I or even out of order if you change the names of a couple NPCs.

The creatures felt... metagamed. Like they were built to maximize how nasty they were per CR rather than around an interesting concept and it took a fairly high DC check for a characters to figure out their 'gimmick' which in our case wound up killing our party since we were had no clue what the creature was or what it's vulnerabilities were.

The only reason I rated it two stars is because I thought the riddles and puzzle were fairly interesting which is pretty rare for me.

I don't play Hordes but I love Privateer Press' line of products for table top gaming. I use the Raek as an eidolon for my character and as a standin for Bullette or some other big monsters when I'm GMing. The detail on these is great making them super easy to make look good.

I love the feel of the whole Wyrd mini line and this one is no exception. The level of detail on her is amazing and it's a really fun miniature.

The arms are not attached so you will need to glue them on, don't cut off the part which is designed to insert into the socket like I did.

A bit frustrated after spending some time editing this to have it get eaten :( Maybe I'll come back and post a full review later but for now the quick and dirty.

This was a decent adventure, pretty straight forward, mostly just a dungeon crawl. The whole creepy dead children vibe did give it some edge but ultimately it suffered.

My feeling is this adventure is much better if you have a group that really enjoys role playing. My PFS group tend to be more down to business so they really kind of blew through some of the interesting role-play/ plot elements in the game which pretty much killed the plot twist.

This is a good die, I like busting it out for critical rolls when I'm GMing or sometimes for init. The thing is it's GIANT. Why the description says "Lightweight" is beyond be it's easily 5 times the weight of a typical d20. Perhaps it's light for it's size but since it's so much bigger it hits the table with an authority that no other die in my arsenal has.

Attractive looking, yes, east to read, attractive coloring, all around great. Lightweight? No way. Somewhere tribes of halflings use these as slingstones.

This is a solid product but left me feeling a little uninspired, like I could have created the items in here. It's worth the $1.50 I paid for it so I'm not disappointed but my expectations were pretty high after reading the "pretty rings" PDF.

I picked these up on a killer deal during the Black Friday sale and I love them. Being able to pass out the cards is a hoot. My only concern with these is the value... Fortunately I have enough it's unlikely I will need to buy for for some time.

I was skeptical at first but I picked some of these at Paizocon and they are a lot of fun. The players really enjoy the interplay with the cards and being able to 'handle' their treasure.

That said... The campaign specific ones make sense because you are going to use almost all of them. These random decks you wind up using only 1/4 of the cards so it's tough to see it as a good value for the money.

I really want to like these but ultimately they are not a player favorite. The effects on the cards are more often than not status effects which effect the players much more than the creatures they are fighting.

If a creature gets hit for 1d4 dex damage it is a minor penalty for the 1-5 rounds it has left before the players kill it. If a player draws the same card the player is out of luck or has to burn a spell to recover In one case a low level character had to pay for a regenerate spell from an out of party caster to replace a hand which was very costly at the time.

It's hard for me to bring a supplemental item to the table which the players don't like so mine just sits and collects dust now.

The item is exactly what it claims, a solid mix of inexpensive rings. The layout and art is fairly plain in a utilitarian way.

As for the items, they are all solid. I don't anticipate using most of these but I will probably slip at least a couple into my current low level campaign. My players are always looking for magic items, this will keep them quiet for a bit :)

With a product like this and the pricepoint the rating is very much based on value per dollar. You could likely make a lot of these items yourself but this will save you the time. There are also some nice designer notes to help you extend what is in here.

One final comment, don't expect anything extremely flavorful in here, the items are solid but fairly plain. This isn't a complaint, more the nature of inexpensive items.

This is a ridiculously cheap product, I figured if I could pull one decent concept out of here it was a win. There are some items I wouldn't use in my game but at least half of the items are things I can see adding to my campaign at one point or another.

The artwork is good if a little vanilla but appropriate for the subject and not distracting. The cover in particular I like.

If you are looking to some new armor perks this is a solid product and amazing for the price.

The detail on this map is great. I managed to snag a high res version and split it for printing on inexpensive 4x6 photo paper (from snapfish). Here is a photo of the partially assembled result and you can see the excellent quality. The irregular coloring between panels is due to poor printing from snapfish and is not in the original.

As you can see the map is huge. I split the tiles up so that I can use the caves separate from the huge lava room and figure I will get quite a bit of use out of this.

This is a great map, the graphics are excellent and the detail is good.

The only reason I gave this 4 stars instead of 5 is because it's a fairly limited use item, there just aren't a lot of tree crossing scenarios out there.

This is a really fun mat to use for tactical gaming. The vegetation and rocks are just sparse enough that they are really fun tactically.

I tend to use this mat for much more than just desert encounters because it's the only mat that has the sort of low density scrubby feel this one has. It works fine for any terrain that doesn't have a lot of vegetation on it. As a big bonus the back side is just as usable as the front.

This is a very nice map pack. The well, farmhouse, and barn probably get used the most but I plug in almost all of these at various times. The contrast on these is excellent and the details are very nice. You can rearrange these in a variety of ways and they mix and match quite well with many of the other map packs.

We are about 1/3 the way through Burnt Offerings and I am looking forward to dropping these tiles on the players when they get to... well no spoilers here :D

The only downside I see on these products is the fact that some of them are a bit repetitive and don't mesh well. The yellow fields look a bit strange next to the green grass and feel sort of cut off at the edge.

The quality on this is amazing. I've used this a few times and it's not disappointed. One downside is it is situational but then most groups have river crossing encounters at some point in time.

If you were just getting one forest flip mat you probably want the 'woodlands' map, if are getting a few this one is top notch.

These tiles are so dark it's hard to use markers on them. I also don't particularly care for the colors here, I've spend a lot of time outdoors and this just doesn't really conjure up any forest I've been in. The tiles also don't tie together well. You are limited to building a fairly small scale encounter or resorting to a map that has jarring edges that don't match. It would be nice if there were some way to tie them. The farm tiles and the marketplace tiles (and quite a few others) can both be used to make larger maps, for an outdoors encounter this is a little disappointing.

The blighted forest glen is also Ok but the other Fairy Ring and the Briar patch will almost certainly never see use at my table.

The overgrown ruins and the druid glade are both good pieces and will likely see some use at my table but since they don't match any of my other tiles it's tough to just drop them onto the table.

edit: A few quick comments about the previous post. All of the general criticisms of the map packs are valid but easily worked around. I find them easier to deal with than the dungeon tiles I got from Wizards though. I use a little tape to hold the tiles together and just happened to have a small box which fits them perfectly. I've heard you can find card holders at office depot that fit them quite well also.

Overall I like the map packs because they let you have premade sections that you can piece into a larger area as you want to design it. This pack is kind of a poor example of that.

My first thought was this product was going to be essentially a reprint of the 3.5 monster manual with the Paizo rules changes and the awesome Paizo design work. As such my expectations were pretty moderate for this book.

I am happy to say that my expectations were greatly exceeded. The book is indeed an amazing piece of design (art!) which I expected from paizo, but it goes a lot further than that. The monsters are rebalanced and often completely reworked. Common abilities are standardized and put in a "common monster ability" section in the back of the book which means the pages are dedicated to strategy, ecology, and generally awesome flavor text.

The artwork is exceptional, there are a few outliers that look out of place in there but in general it's amazing stuff. In a really nice touch the illustrator's names are on the side of each page.

Overall the book is amazingly well organized, it's easy to find what you need and the book is simply the best looking RPG source book I have ever seen.

All the flip maps are great but this is one of the better ones. The pictures are pretty representative but the resolution and quality on the finished product is great. Forst encounters are so common this is probably the most frequently used map I have.

I love the Paizo flip mats and this is one of the better ones. This works great with the waterfront map packs also, it's the same exact pattern.

I didn't like the fact that these folded when I first got one but once you get used to it it's a lot more convenient than carrying a rolled up battlemat. I'm not sure how durable these are over the long term but the fact that you can write on them even using permanent market is a big plus.

Note: I would much prefer the back of this map have something a little more than just plain blue tiles. The single side I use on this is well worth the cost but the maps with 2 useful sides are the ALL Stars of the Flip Mats. (Desert, Forest, River Crossing...)

If you like class features and don't mind a bit of overall power creep then you are likely to really enjoy this book. All of the classes got upgraded, with the weaker classes getting the most upgrades. Overall the game is more balanced than 3.5 but the cost is increased complexity in almost all the classes and increasing power relative to it's predecessor. While you can use 3.5 material the PfRPG classes are more powerful, in particular the ones that were weak in the past so anything you have designed for 3.5 should be ramped up a bit.

What is a bit frustrating to me is that many of these changes make the game even less accessible to beginning players. Almost all the classes, including the fighter are more complicated and tougher to learn than their predecessors.

So overall a great product but a questionable direction for the game.

Before there were adventure paths... Loong before there were adventure paths. There was the Temple of Elemental Evil.

This is an amazing resource for DMs and even 20+ years after it was published is still awesome.

Overall this is a good solid offering, the biggest disappointment for me was in the value department. Much of this book seriously overlaps what is in the Gazetteer and almost all of the mechanical 'crunchy' bits do overlap. I expected a little bit more here.

I do recommend this product but suggest people choose whether they want the abridged version or the full version and buy either this or the Gazetteer.

#13 was my first AP, I expected this to be similar... this module greatly exceeded my expectations. It's not that 13 was bad, it was quite good, but #14 is pure RPG awesomeness.

I'm going to try and keep spoiler free here:
The main adventure is excellent, there are plenty of straight-forward encounters, some nice role play options and right smack in the middle is an awesome Indiana Jones style action cut-piece which blew me away. I don't want to say more but it is awesome.

There is a section on the planets which by Sutter which is quite good, and the bestiary has some great new stuff as well. I am also a big fan of the Cayden Cailean based PrC.

This is awesome as part of the AP or would make a very good stand alone module for running your 4-7th level players through.

I've never DMed an adventure path before, I did run Red Hand of Doom which is close but not quite it. I found that for the money this is a very rich source book. I would give it 5 stars but as someone pointed out I'm not sure the storyline is compelling enough to engage my players directly. The good news is that the individual pieces look like a blast, it's just the main storyline I'm not entirely certain about. My plan is to see how they react. If they don't play by the plan them I think there is enough source material here I can use the parts and play the adventure piecemeal and still have a great time.

I don't particularly care for the set piece but it might grow on me. I'm more likely to use it if the players fail to take the main hook in the adventure.

Other notable "really cool" stuff. The Player's Guide is great (you only get this with the subscription though), my players love it and it's a great way to get them engaged in the gameplay. The beastiary is filled with some great critters and very well presented. The magic items in the players guide and in the main adventure are also very nice.

Overall an easy 5 stars on the value front.

Overall this is a great module, very challenging for a 5th level party with lots of undead and a few creepy critters. There are a few issues I have with the module though. First, the number of 'regulators' sent with the party is never mentioned and this can be critical in the end of the module. Second, and perhaps the most concerning is that the treasure in this module is all focused on a few high powered magic items near the end. Also, almost all of the good "martial" themed items are size small while which leave fighters a bit short changed by the end of the campaign. Finally, the barrows are cramped. The rooms are small for the number of enemies in them and the rooms are so close together it doesn't make sense that the king doesn't pool his resources a bit and just overwhelm the party.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed DMing the module and found it very easy to DM and loved the feel of it. The vermin and undead worked well together. I'm just going to have to spend a little time customizing the treasure a bit more sort of post fact.

I have upgraded my review from 3 to 4 stars because I just enjoy these cards a lot. The fixed size format makes them immensely more usable that the irregularly sized tiles and in general the art work is quite nice. The Market area is the perfect sort of confused jumble of stalls, it's great for a lot of townie type settings.

At this point my 2 quibbles are:

This is a great piece of work. It's a fabulous look at some of the most iconic D&D creatures. My favorite is the Goblins. My only small gripe is I like to see a little more crunch.

Download this now.

If this is a reflection of the quality of work in the rest of the series then I am sold. Very well written module with an excellent, compelling story. Sidesteps the 15 minute adventuring day because there are consequences for delay.

One thing missing is I would prefer to see full stat blocks for all monsters rather than "refer to MM page XXX".