Category: D&D Reviews (Page 4 of 5)

Tim Bannock provides in-depth reviews of the entire range of Dungeons & Dragons releases, from the old school to the latest campaigns to the community content and OGL releases!

Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide
Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide

Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide Review

12/27/2018 / / 0 Comments

This review originally appeared on neuronphaser.com, and has been moved here for archival purposes.

Unsure of who the target audience is, Wizards of the Coast makes its first critical fumble with the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide, a slim book featuring some real diamonds in terms of character creation (Backgrounds, Races, and Classes), but ultimately covering the Realms (not just the Sword Coast) in weak, vague terms. With over 100 pages geared mainly towards providing information useful strictly for filling out a Player Character’s backstory, this is the type of release that can easily be skipped unless you need the crunchy bits, in which case you’re better off finding it on a steep discount for the (at best) 50 pages you will end up using.

Rating: Content 2/5 and Form 3/5.

Buy the hardcover at Amazon or pick it up digitally at D&D Beyond.

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Out of the Abyss
Out of the Abyss

Out of the Abyss Review

12/27/2018 / / 0 Comments

This review originally appeared on neuronphaser.com, and has been moved here for archival purposes.

If you’re looking for material to loot for your home game, this book is solid gold: evocative NPCs, a great variety of locations and plot threads, a superb mixture of railroady adventure path-style and wide-open exploration, and some incredibly iconic villains are the bread and butter of Out of the Abyss. But if you’re looking for a campaign to run from start to finish, the organization of topics and internal referencing is atrocious, and the adventure kicks in without preamble. DMs will be forced to put a lot of elbow grease into running this thing; expect a lot of note-taking, index-writing, and on-the-fly page-flipping. Luckily, it’s a great adventure, so it’s worth the work if you enjoy the prep phase of DMing. Even better, other folks have already put in the work for enterprising DMs, and that kicks this over the fence from Meh to Thumbs Up!

Rating: Content 3/5 and Form 4/5.

Buy the hardcover at Amazon or get it digitally at D&D Beyond.

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Elemental Evil Player's Companion
Elemental Evil Player's Companion

Elemental Evil Player’s Companion Review

12/26/2018 / / 0 Comments

This review originally appeared on neuronphaser.com, and has been moved here for archival purposes.

It’s simple, it’s focused, and it packs a mean punch! The Elemental Evil Player’s Companion is a free PDF (and cheap print-on-demand product via Dungeon Masters Guild) that covers 4 vaguely elementally-inclined races and 43 new elementally-infused spells, providing players in just about any D&D campaign with some fun, well-balanced new options to play with.

Rating: Content 4/5 and Form 5/5.

Get the PDF for free or buy the Print-On-Demand versions at Dungeon Masters Guild.

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Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set

Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Starter Set Review

12/25/2018 / / 0 Comments

This review originally appeared on neuronphaser.com, and has been moved here for archival purposes.

When “lacks character creation” is your only argument against a starter set for a game that features free online Basic Rules (with character creation, no less!) in multiple formats and happens to be the premiere RPG on the market since the ’70s, all you can really do is say, “yeah, okay: this thing is perfect!” I’m a notoriously nitpicky critic, but I found the D&D Starter Set to be the perfect gateway not only for Dungeons & Dragon’s 5th edition, but also for D&D as a whole. Featuring a stellar, streamlined rule booklet perfect for referencing even after you’ve moved on to the full game, a beautifully executed introductory adventure that doubles as a mini-campaign, well-developed pregenerated characters that can advance up to level 5, and a set of nice-looking dice, this boxed set is a real treasure for new and experienced gamers alike.

Rating: Content 5/5 and Form 5/5.

Buy the box set on Amazon or pick up the adventure Lost Mine of Phandelver digitally on D&D Beyond.

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Monster Manual
Monster Manual

Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Monster Manual Review

12/24/2018 / / 0 Comments

This review originally appeared on neuronphaser.com, and has been moved here for archival purposes.

The D&D 5th Edition Monster Manual is not 100% perfect, but it’s one-thousand percent totally f%$^ing gorgeous! Wizards really did bring the art budget to bear on this book, providing more than just snazzy profile pix of all the monsters, but also neat pre-finalized artwork and concept sketches that often show the creatures in cool stances or doing interesting (sometimes downright silly) things, which helps make them come alive. Honestly, it’s so very, very close to 100% perfect. There’s a couple things missing — better indexing of the monsters by various things (Challenge, Terrain), ecology “stat blocks” like previous editions (organization, morale) — but some of these exist in the Dungeon Master’s Guide or in electronic form, so at worse we’re looking at a couple small missteps.

Rating: Content 4/5 and Form 5/5.

Buy the hardcover on Amazon or pick it up digitally at D&D Beyond.

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