Guennarr's page

... the service provided by Radiance House and Paizo:
I bought numerous pdfs at Paizo, but so far this is the only pdf I receive updates for!

It's been several months since I purchased it and in the meantime I already received two info mails by Paizo which informed me that I could download updated versions of this fine product.

Really recommended for content, size, usability, and customer friendliness!

Cheers,
Günther

This was my first 3e adventure I DMed.

If you look for a wilderness adventure and a plot with good opportunities for continuing adventures, you will certainly like it. The adventure should require only minor modifications for 3.5e.

It's a classic by now, a good purchase for the clearance sale price of 2$$.

This adventure collection brings back some fond memories of past D&D evenings with my first D&D groups - I even kept on using it during the first days of 3rd edition when good new adventures were scarce and my budget low. ;-)

The collection contains low level adventures which means: ideal for starting parties. A lot of campaigns of mine originated in one of the adventures of this collection.

The conversion effort is quite low - due to the low level structure of the adventures.
Give it a try!

If I didn't already own this book, I'd buy it again - for this price!!!

For those unfamiliar with the book: You won't find any more complete book on a complete good aligned pantheon.

Even if you use different deities, you will find plenty of material to adapt in your campaign.

This is a 320 page monster of a book filled to the brim with information - for 5 dollars!

Absolute buy recommendation!

If you look for an african inspired setting (i.e. non egyptian!), you don't have to look any further.

After its publication very soon a big fan community sprang up. Even though the fan site www.nyambe.com doesn't seem to exist any more, there is still a lot of material which can be found on Atlas Games' site here and on other fan and campaign journal sites like this one here.

Comparing Nyambe to other real world inspired settings, one thing is apparent: In this setting not only classes and arms are re-named, they are re-envisioned! The actual game play mechanisms are modified to provide "african feel".

To put it more bluntly: PF adventures playing in african inspired regions like W2: River into Darkness will not see play in my campaigns without some major Nyambe adaptions.

I wholeheartedly recommend this book for all african inspired campaigns.

It is sad that many of my most often used d20 books just make a prominent appearance now - in the late days of 3.5e. On the other hand this is your great opportunity to now purchase some really good (but expensive) 3.5 books to use in your upcoming PF RPG campaign and still enjoy for many years to come (for a fragment of the original price!).

This book is a hefty tome of monsters: On 366 (!) perfectly bound hard cover pages more than 200 monsters and templates are presented. Apart from my print out version of Necromancer Games' "Tome of Horror revised" this is the only monster book reaching this page count.

The layout is black and white only, but very neat to look at. The illustrations are inspiring, only the fonts used in the side columns might be a bit hard to read for some eyes.

The monster quality ranges from the wildly exotic and rarely used, over "mundane" variations on existing creatures (e.g. War Dragon, Millwork and various Jewel Golems) to some really interesting new concepts like dream creatures ("dreamkind" who enter a PC's dream and cause quite some havoc there). Nice for variation in campaigns is that many monsters come in "monster families" like above mentioned jewel golems, the dream kind, but also the terra-cotta army or the elemental atoms. My favourites as in most alternative monster books are those monsters whose concept and name already inspire an adventure (e.g. dark advocate, cellar dweller).

The book doesn't rely on evocative names for creating adventure names, though. Each monster description contains adventure seeds.

Additionally Fantasy Bestiary has one feature that clearly sets it apart from other monster books. The introduction of "concept icons".
[-> for space reasons continued further below in the product discussion section.]

This review is about both the pdf and the print versions of the book. Some people seem to be interested in a comparision of the Book of Templates deluxe (Botd) and Advanced Bestiary (AB), so I will point out differences between the two books.

Same as Advanced Bestiary this book offers a lot of templates for the buck. Templates enable you to multiply the number of creatures at your disposal.

Both books contain more than 70 templates, both feature one sample creature per template, both use 3.5 rules, both are perfectly bound hardcovers, both feature nice b/w drawing illustrations, and both have an introduction that describes how to apply the templates. The page count differs (AB = 254, Botd = 192 pages), but AB contains some templates which are variants of each other (Dread Ghost, Dread Ghast, Dread Ghoul...).

Quality of templates is quite high in both books, although I prefer those in Botd somewhat. This might be due to the different organisation of entries and personal maybe preference of some templates: While AB uses an alphabetical sequence of entries, Botd sorts by different "application types": Either by creature type (ranging from aberrations to oozes and outsiders) or by "powering up"/ "powering down" (augmenting/ diminishing) of base creatures.

For those interested in both books there is good news: The templates in both books differ enough to rectify purchase of both books. ;-)

Stays the price: The original retail price for Botd was slightly cheaper than AB, but AB offers some more content. All in all both books are pretty much comparable both in quality and usability of contents.

Heavily recommended.

In contrast to other supplements concentrating on "side issues" of the game, this one finds the optimal blend of back ground and rule content.

It offers nice background information on various alternative law systems (from lawless to theocratic societies) and explains what the impacts on your campaign are, if offers rule content, but avoids to offer new rules for rule's sake: New uses of existing skills are explored, "forensic magic" explained.

Finally the second part of the book title is explained and some sample dungeons ranging from the mundane to the exotic are included.

The production value is high, the hard cover is perfectly bound, the interior art is black and white and "medieval looking" and fits nicely to the subject, the lay out is clear.

Heavily recommended (not just because it is a Keith Baker book) like the other two books of this series.

I really like this adventure.

Halloween is nearing and the adventure mood fits nicely to this time.

Apart from the plot line which is very likely to captivate my fellow players, Richard Pett provides tips and additional information:

How to extend the plot line, read hering in order to lead your PCs astray, how to foreshadow future events and how to build upon part 1 of the adventure path while at the same time ensuring that this part can be played on its own, too.

I might be biased, but I see this adventure appealing especially well to my group's "adventure component favourites": A bit of mystery, deep history looming just "beyond the next bend", plenty of challenging encounters, and especially the opportunities for PCs to be tempted by each one's "favourite" weakness (nice step to make the seven sins meaningful for the PCs, too).

This adventure shows that you can create nice challenges for players without access to MM II - V, just by using OGL critters/ templates. As for its predecessor, you just need the core rules and this adventure in order to start playing in a nicely detailled campaign world.

Very nicely done, and I am looking forward to the rest of this AP.

Everything of the previously mentioned merits.

If you want to create your own monsters or modify existing ones and don't shy the math, this is the book for you!

Not much too add: A really nice monster book, usable with small changes in most fantasy settings.

The book is completely b/w, but the quality of the monsters makes the book stand out: All monster stats are completed by "explorer journal style" reports of each monster's ecology/ encounters with them which add much flavour. The monster offer some neat "rule mechanical" surprised for your fellow players, too - surprises which make perfect sense after reading the monster descriptions of their habitat.

The book is rounded out by some quickplates (quickly appliable templates) and a few prestige classes, and gives a first glance at the campaign world "Iron Kingdoms".

In short: absolutely recommendable as a monster book and a nice entry to the "Iron Kingdom" setting.

I agree to what the previous reviewers wrote: If you look for ways to bring some new twists to your existing stock of monsters, this book and maybe "Book of Templates" are the tools of choice.

You should be willing to tinker a bit with monster stats, though. On the other hand you will find nice examples of templated SRD monsters in the book. Not every template will be everyone's cup of tea, but the majority of templates should fit in nicely and can often provide new campaign ideas...

Well feasable as pdf file and outstanding in comparision to the other "advanced" books of Green Ronin Publishing.

Those who know vol. I, will recognize the style of monster entries at once: some of the best designed monsters (in matters of abilities and ecology description) you can find. As in vol. I the monsters are backed up by "quickplates" (quickly appliable templates) and a few prestige classes.

Be warned, though: Only 175 pages of the book are dedicated to monsters, the remaining part is about the (until then) unknown eastern part of the continent and its dominant race, the skorne.

Production quality (240 pages b/w) are the same as in vol. I, two pages are marred by ads, though. On the other hand you receive a fold out full colour map of the continent.

And now the big downer: Although vol. II doesn't offer more quantity or quality than vol. I, it is 33% more expensive than vol. I!!! (39.99 vs. 29.99$$).

In my opinion this makes the book unfeasable for all but the most die hard fands of the setting. :( Newbies to the "Iron Kingdoms" or DMs interested in really good monsters should preferrably buy vol. 1.

Why do I give it only two stars? Because I compare it to the 5 star rated vol. I. The general quality is comparable and vol. II even offers a full colour map, but it falls short in categories like amount of monster content (it is called Monsternomicon, not campaign expansion! Where are encounter tables, CR listings etc?) and price-content-ratio.

While each of the previous books in this "series" (Draconomicon, Fiendish Codices I and II, Book of Aberrations) put emphasis on different topics, I felt that this book is especially well balanced.

Whether you are a true R. A. Salvatore fan and would like to find information on how to make your drow more drowlike, whether you are a DM looking for new inspiration rules- and backgroundwise, or if you are just looking for new rules crunch:
You'll find your share in this book.

I'd think myself to belong to all three of the forementioned groups, and certainly love this book. :-)

Rare the rule supplement I read from cover to cover. This is one of the rare exceptions.

Even if you already own old edition material about Drow you will love this book.

100%ly recommended.

Günther

The comic had been quite funny (if somewhat brief at about 30 pages of content), if scanning quality was not so poor! :( Some pages contain lots of small text. If you zoom in in order to read it you just see illegible pixels. I am not speaking about bad, but illegible scanning quality!

This was an utter waste of money.
Come on, guys, please scan it again or remove it out of your store!

I chime in a bit.
Yes, it's surely historical, but it is just a fragment. Which use to make of a product that is missing pages/ containing illegible pages/ lacking parts of maps...??

Paizo should be honest and hint at the quality of th e scan: then everyone was able to decide on his/ her own if to purchase/ not purchase this product.

Selling a product without warning about its obvious production flaws is not very customer friendly. One star is about the only way to warn others of making the same fault of buying a great product with very poor scanning quality.