Matthew Trent's page

Beautiful mini and a beautiful sculpt. I highly recomend this guy for everyone who's running part 6 of Kingmaker. It also makes a great gift for the GM who's running it for you.

Beautiful sculpts that are painted and ready to drop down on the gaming table to rumble. I ordered a case an nearly had a complete set by the time I opened the thrid brick leaving me one brick to gift to a lucky friend.

The ogre is currently my favorite model, though Seelah (the iconic paladin) has amazing detail.

Classes and archetypes: I was disappointed to see that the gunslinger is the only sort of combatant who has to deal with his weapon exploding in his hand on a regular basis. The samurai and ninja classes are fine though of limited interest to most players. As for the new archetypes I found them singularly unexciting. The only standouts being the Armored Hulk barbarian and the Armored Master fighter. Most others seemed to be excessively penalizing or simply dull.

Feets: The clear highlight here is the different Monk style feats. However, many feets seem somewhat half-baked. Especially odd to me were the dozen or so feets designed to aid in multiclassing monks. Naturally there were the couple of feets that will massively increase the power of archer type characters despite those characters not needing any boost at all.

Mastering combat: This section opens up with a slew of new weapons and armor focused on Asian, Primitive, and Gladiatorial styles. Mostly very good, though I was left wondering why a katana was especially good at murdering helpless foes. I don't recall samurais cutting bound or unconscious enemies as a key part of that genre. Rules for duels, performance combat, and siege engines will all be useful to the DM those rare times that they come up.

Vehicles: This chapter seems like a lot of fun and could tie in nicely with the caravans in the recent Jade Regent Adventure Path.

Spells: There are actually a lot of useful and good spells for any class that can cast magic here. So much good stuff that I'm left wondering if the extras from Ultimate Magic didn't wind up here.

Final thoughts, the book is useful to DMs but players who don't care for gun or asian foo can probably give it a pass as it does very little for most classes.

This module is a blast. Unfortunately most of the villans will roll over and die a bit easy for my taste. All the swamp encounters are CRed for a group of about 7th level, which seems odd for a 10th level adventure.

Fortunately my group had so much fun wading through the much, charging the castle, and exploring an ancient tomb that we didn't mind face-rolling the actual encounters.

Again I would have liked more of the scripted kingdom events (though the invasion of Tatzleford was a step in the right direction).

A good dungeon crawl can be a nice break form the daily grind of administering a kingdom. And the lair of this lich is a top notch adventure site.

My main complaint is that the encounters seem a bit easy. I frequently found myself applying the advanced template to almost everything in a struggle to keep players entertained. Also the final encounter would be much improved by the presence of a few zombie minions to tie the party up for a round or two. Watching your big bad go ka-splat in less than two rounds is a bit disheartening as a DM.

It would have been nice if the scripted kingdom events from part two had continued to appear as well.

The adventure portion of this mod is top notch. Wel laid out and easy to run for the DM while suitably challenging for the group.

Unfortunately I feel that the city building rules could have used some extra attention. Its almost trivially easy to get to the point where you only fail a city roll on a 1. Also only about three of my five players we interested in the city building so several players spent many hours bored.

A fun, but not perfect story of exploring the wild edges of the map. The narrative suffers a bit due to the sandbox nature but the challenges are spot on and the goals clear. Its easily adapted to any region where bandits lurk on the fringes of civilization, and I recommend it for most playgroups.

This mod would be virtually impossible for a party of four like it suggests.

It also makes frequent use of the ability damage mechanics - possibly the most annoying way to interact with PCs.

Also, the only scary part comes from fear that you will be ability drained to death not from any Horror aspects of the adventure.

These simple yet useful cards are printed on high quality card stock and feature fabulous goblins in all their glorious conditions.

Every DM should have a set.

This is my idea of a good mod. The encounters are interesting with a reasonable amount of role-play but not neglecting to visit interesting locations or fight fun creature. A bit on the easy side of the challenge scale, but not so much as to be boring.

A murder mystery. How quaint.

I spent most of this adventure bored to tears as we slowly interrogated he whole crew of the ship. The setting of being on a ship was somewhat novel, but I found myself wondering just how it was possible to run said ship with so few crew members. Combine with anything but a 5 star DM and you have a recipe for disaster. Avoid unless you really love to chat for hours.

Oh yes. Storm mechanics. Nice to see that adventurers are needed to run a ship and that the normal crew are completely unable to do their job which is I suppose fair since there's only about six of them.

This mod features nothing but gemmic encounters that make sense to the GM while reading it but which the PCs have no real way of understanding. This makes the tone of the mod to be more of a 'Gotcha!' than is in any way fun.

I will never run this event again.

So starting at first level you have essentially no opportunity to get gear that isn't written in.

Significant gear that isn't in the module includes small armor of any kind or Full Plate.

Then if you play the side adventure in the haunted monastery you get to fight the most stupidly under CRed lychantrhope I've ever seen. Never mind that you haven't been able to get any silvered weapons.