Each release for Crawthorne's Catalog of Creatures for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game presents a single, new creature for your Pathfinder Roleplaying Game game, as presented by the famous and retired monster hunter and adventurer, Lord Crawthorne. Each release presents game stats for the new creature, as well as three adventure ideas to help insert them into your game.
As part of their variation on fey religion, the Treeshadow believe they have been charged with protecting their kin from outsiders, whether they like it or not. These dark fey do so with violent and intent and means, making best use of their ability to merge with trees to enhance their strength and hide from unwary intruders until the time is right to spring their ambush.
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This installment of the Crawthorne's Catalog of Creatures series clocks in at 5 pages - the front cover containing the header, creature artwork and the social media icons/homepage of misfit studios. The SRD takes up 1 1/3 pages and the editorial is in a sidebar - to get all the material you thus have to print out the cover with the icons as well.
What is a treeshadow? The simple response would be that it is a particularly nasty CR 4 fey - dubbed dkar'thu in their own language, the resemble dark-skinned, fanged elves that generally choose to live their days as a kind of ambush predator: They merge with trees along well-traveled paths and then burst forth from them to slice mortals to ribbons with their claws, believing themselves to be guardians of feykind...a task entwined with their quasi-religious fervor. When they begin their turn in a tree, they get DR 10/adamantine or cold iron and inflict +2d6 with all attacks; additionally, they do not provoke AoOs from leaving threatened squares when emerging from a tree. Tree merging is a bit of an oddity, ability-wise, since it does not explicitly state an action - this is due to it happening basically at will when the treeshadow ends his movement next to a Large or n$*+$* inanimate (nice catch!) living tree. While thus merged, they retain their flexibility and may still move - but the tree is visually twisted...though this twisting is lessened via prolonged habitation; the longer they wait, the better their camouflage becomes. It should be noted that the base damage (2d6) of their claws is non-standard for their size, which is something purists may scoff at; personally, I can live with that.
As always, we get 3 solid adventure hooks to supplement the critter presented here.
Conclusion:
Editing and formatting are very good on both a formal and rules-language level. Layout adheres to the 2-column full-color standard of the series and while I'm not big on the social icons and dispersal of non-gaming parts through the pdf, from an aesthetic point of view, there is not much to complain about. The pdf comes with the classic Crawthorne-artwork as well as the treeshadow artwork, which is okay, if nothing special The pdf comes with a second, more printer-friendly iteration, which is nice to see. The book has no bookmarks, but needs none at this length.
Emily Brumfield's treeshadow is an impressive little build: Fey are pretty fragile and making a good skirmishing fey based on melee attacks is a pretty nice feat in itself. The abilities of the monster are connected well internally and leave me, frankly, not with a lot to complain about. For a buck, this is worth getting. 4.5 stars, rounded up.
