“If you're going to be a big damn hero, you'd better dress like one.”
In the realm of Dreams, mice can become men, and even a lowly leech can become rich and powerful. Vhulgus Sangrevorro is a haberdasher and clothier to the heroes and hopefuls of the Coliseum Morpheuon, constantly at the feet of titans as he makes their hems just so. Enchanted blades and eldritch armor aren't the only essential equipment for gladiators who hope to win the legendary Damnation Epoch—they also need to look the part. Sangrevorro can make that happen.
This product provides Game Masters with details on a lordly leech found amongst the Faces of the Tarnished Souk, ready for immediate use in any campaign - but especially for use within the Coliseum Morpheuon. Each entry features ingenious stat-blocks from multiple OGL sources, history, motivation, secrets, and insight into the NPC’s most carefully guarded dreams, along with complete game statistics for low, middle, and high levels of play.
Within you will find: Vhulgus Sangrevorro, a venerable vermin with threads that roll heads
The latest installment of the FoTS-series is 25 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 2 pages of advertisement and 1 page SRD, leaving us with 20 pages of content - quite a bunch, so let's check this out!
Adhering to my format for reviews of this series, I'll kick off with telling you something about the supplemental information for this NPC, to be precise, first the templates. The Verminoid-template allows you to create humanoid beings from vermin via a template and also provides a sample spell to create further verminoids. The trickster-creature template and rune-carved creature template are also used in the builds of Vhulgus and finally, we get the rather complex eternal creature template , but the supplemental material doesn't stop there:
A total of 6 magic weapon qualities and 6 general magic items are provided to ensure you have everything to run the NPC in one book and we also get Vhulgus custom magic items and oh boy, they are interesting: While e.g. his amulet is a nice enhancer/stealth-item to prevent scrying, his belt not only enhances str and dex, but also teleports unused weapons of yours back into the respective loops. He also sports a unique circlet, a cloak that allows the casting of a ridiculous amount of spells, arrow-snatching enhanced gloves, a superb headband, two unique rings, a robe that helps with casting expensive spells, slippers that help versus falling and difficult terrain and a vest that can store potions. Better yet, his weapon is the bane of style-less clothing and armors and is not for nothing called "Stripper". This can lead to some rather cool scenes indeed...
We also get 3 feats to enhance crafting, caster-levels and metamagic to trip foes as well as the Bloody Raiment-spells (included in a regular and a greater version): This spell allows bloodstains of raiments to be soaked and teleported to predetermined containers to be used/consumed by e.g. blood-drinking creatures.
If verminoid, product description etc. were not ample hint, then let me tell you about the character behind the stats: Vhulgus is the fashion-mogul of the Colisuem Morpheuon - winning is not enough, it also requires panache and style and champions need to look good - that's where the immortal humanoid giant leech dandy ((!!!!) comes in: Armed with extensive spellbooks (the high-level one taking up a whole page!) for each iteration as well as an alternate version, each of the three incarnations of Vhulgus is interesting. The character's concept, though, and its implications are smart: Born from the lowest of the low, Vhulgus is a consummate trickster and combines his ample capabilities of potential foppish behavior with the intelligence and panache to properly back up his facade of superficiality. Beyond that, the product also constitutes a smart take on the term "dandy", which is per se defined as an androgynous existence that parasitically lives on other people, having them sin/experience things by proxy. As such, a dandy is sine nobilitate and leeches off the nobility. See what the character does there? Brilliant! Dreamburning information and tipps for the DM are of course included as well.
Conclusion:
Editing and formatting are top-notch, I didn't notice any glitches. Layout adheres to RiP's old rune-covered two-column standard and the artwork is disturbing and sophisticated and also provides some neat pieces for some of Vhulgus' items. The pdf comes fully bookmarked.
The FoTS-series has turned into one of my favorite, if not the favorite NPC-book by any publisher - while other pdfs provide one-shot NPCs, statblocks etc, FoTS goes further and provides you creatures beyond what you could create on the fly: Highly complex, smart and full of options, these characters blend Justin Sluder's excellence in the crunch-crafting department with Matt Banach's gift of creating truly evocative character-background serves the series well and Vhulgus is yet another clever, interesting character I'll love to introduce into my game. Speaking of Matt Banach: If you want more of his writing, I'd like to point you to Rite Publishing's Adventure Quarterly #3, where he provides a stellar module as well as the kickstarter for a novel set in dream currently running.
I forgot my final verdict? 5 stars + seal of approval - one of the best in the series, this installment has " nothing to declare, but its genius."
And reviewed here, on DTRPG and sent to GMS magazine.
Thanks, End, and thanks for the shout-outs!
My own shameless plug: If you love Faces of the Tarnished Souk and would like to read more about the wild realm of Dream and the bizarre characters who (I think) inhabit it, please check out our Kickstarter for a full-length novel Lost in Dream based on the brilliant Coliseum Morpheuon and its offshoots.
