Kaptain_Kantrip
First Post
As you may have noticed, I have been running around the ENB praising the holy heck out of Arms & Armor from Bastion Press. No, I am not on Jim Butler's payroll. 
Arms & Armor is a great resource for anyone who wants more weapons and armor and magic versions of same. A great value, crammed full of crunchy goodness. Go buy it! If you still want more goodies, Mongoose's The Quintessential Fighter delivers more fun stuff to kill things with.
Now that the plug is out of the way, I would like to address some problems I have with their other main products: Villains and Minions.
Minions delivers a handful of cool new monsters and way too many weird ones likely to see little use. For the record, I had this same problem with Mystic Eye's two monster books and S&S's Creature Collections. Mystic Eye's books are $10 cheaper though not as slick and not in color (and have horrible layout to boot). CC 1 and 2 are hardcover and deliver way more monsters in over twice as many pages for the same $25 that Minions charges. Ouch.
Minions is the same price at the same page count as WoTC's book, Monsters of Faerun, but MoF has far more useful creatures in it, and better artwork (except for the terrible Bullywug pic by Mike Kaluta, who I know is capable of much better work--shame on you, Mikey!). I did not buy any monster books except MM and MoF. Anything else I get from the online Creature Catalog or make up myself. I probably won't buy any new third party monster books regardless of publisher.
Villains (also 96 pages for $25, full color) has the same problem as Minions: too many weirdos and not enough cool baddies. The Wise and the Wicked HC from S&S gives much more for your money (same price), but is possibly too setting-specific to be useful outside of a Scarred Lands campaign without major tweaking.
I read both books rather thoroughly and could not justify spending $25 each for what amounted to a small handful of useful bits. YMMV. Arms & Armor, as I've said before, delivers the crunchy goods for your $25 and is one of the best third party accessories produced thus far, in terms of overall utility, IMO.
My main complaint with all Bastion Press products is the generally poor artwork of their main artist and his bizarre, garish use of color. His style is too cartoonish, his characters and creatures are always emaciated, and I find his art to just be plain weird-looking and distracting/detracting from the flow of the text. He seems fine at drawing most anything that isn't alive (weapons, armor), but as soon as anything that isn't insectoid or undead enters the picture, forget it!
So, there you have it: my opinions, for what they're worth. Now, Jim, about that payroll idea...
Arms & Armor is a great resource for anyone who wants more weapons and armor and magic versions of same. A great value, crammed full of crunchy goodness. Go buy it! If you still want more goodies, Mongoose's The Quintessential Fighter delivers more fun stuff to kill things with.
Now that the plug is out of the way, I would like to address some problems I have with their other main products: Villains and Minions.
Minions delivers a handful of cool new monsters and way too many weird ones likely to see little use. For the record, I had this same problem with Mystic Eye's two monster books and S&S's Creature Collections. Mystic Eye's books are $10 cheaper though not as slick and not in color (and have horrible layout to boot). CC 1 and 2 are hardcover and deliver way more monsters in over twice as many pages for the same $25 that Minions charges. Ouch.
Minions is the same price at the same page count as WoTC's book, Monsters of Faerun, but MoF has far more useful creatures in it, and better artwork (except for the terrible Bullywug pic by Mike Kaluta, who I know is capable of much better work--shame on you, Mikey!). I did not buy any monster books except MM and MoF. Anything else I get from the online Creature Catalog or make up myself. I probably won't buy any new third party monster books regardless of publisher.Villains (also 96 pages for $25, full color) has the same problem as Minions: too many weirdos and not enough cool baddies. The Wise and the Wicked HC from S&S gives much more for your money (same price), but is possibly too setting-specific to be useful outside of a Scarred Lands campaign without major tweaking.
I read both books rather thoroughly and could not justify spending $25 each for what amounted to a small handful of useful bits. YMMV. Arms & Armor, as I've said before, delivers the crunchy goods for your $25 and is one of the best third party accessories produced thus far, in terms of overall utility, IMO.
My main complaint with all Bastion Press products is the generally poor artwork of their main artist and his bizarre, garish use of color. His style is too cartoonish, his characters and creatures are always emaciated, and I find his art to just be plain weird-looking and distracting/detracting from the flow of the text. He seems fine at drawing most anything that isn't alive (weapons, armor), but as soon as anything that isn't insectoid or undead enters the picture, forget it!
So, there you have it: my opinions, for what they're worth. Now, Jim, about that payroll idea...
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i was just going to propose a group purchase this friday to my group.
