E.N. Critters Volume 5 - Interlopers of the Blasted Realm

[John Cooper]

Welcome to the fifth volume in the E.N. Critters series of Open Gaming Content Sourcebooks – Interlopers from the Blasted Realm. If you are seeking an inexpensive monster compendium focused on demons and outsiders, this is the book for you. If having a detailed enviroment to tie all of the monsters together would be useful, even better. Need a reason for extraplanar creatures to be on the Material Plane? The detail on the Blasted Realm provides this as well as an overarching storyline should you wish to use it.

* Detailed descriptions and maps of the Blasted Realm, a pocket plane of chaos and evil!
* 24 new and unique creatures - evil demonic denizens of the Blasted Realm, spanning a wide range of Challenge Ratings!
* Colour counters for each creature!
* Suggested Knowledge Tables, a quick aid in determining what a player’s character will know about each of these creatures with a successful Knowledge check to save the GM time during the game.
* Notes and Game Balance entries for each monster!

A detailed account of the planes properties, history, geography, inhabitants and general plotlines have been provided as well as planar and regional maps. This is however a monster compendium and not intended to be a complete campaign sourcebook. Rather, the plane details have been included to create a framework for the creatures herein as well as to provide the GM with enough information to build adventures in the Blasted Realm and on the Material Plane.

The monsters can certainly be used independently of their Blasted Realm origins - this is a standalone monster book first and foremost. While most of the 24 creatures presented are outsiders, more specifically demons, there are a small number of other types detailed. Among these other types are two constructs, one humanoid, three magical beasts, one template and one undead swarm. Of the 24, there are also three that possess the psionic subtype. The volume’s creatures span a wide range of challenge ratings. Each creature has the usual illustration, stat block and combat section, but an ecology section, knowledge table and a notes and game balance section are also included and have become standard in the E.N. Critters series.

The ecology expands on each creature with a few paragraphs about topics such as its origins, where it is found, what it eats, etc., useful for GMs wishing to add an extra dimension of cohesiveness to their games. The knowledge tables are designed as a quick aid in determining what a player’s character will know about each of these creatures with a successful Knowledge check to save the GM time during the game. The notes and game balance section provides insight into the writer’s concept for the creature as well as the reasoning behind its challenge rating in the game. Each full creature entry is set to make the GM’s job easy to run that creature, including additional information about certain types of abilities to save time having to reference additional books.

If you are familiar with the series, you can expect the quality that you are used to. Each new volume is being improved upon and as time is available, the older volumes in the E.N. Critters series are being updated to the same level (wiuth free updates for owners of E.N. Critters PDFs). If you have never seen our projects before, you can expect to get your moneys-worth and much more. There are also four previous volumes you can explore if this PDF meets and exceeds your needs, which we are expecting it will!

 

[John Cooper]

E.N. CRITTERS VOLUME 5: INTERLOPERS FROM THE BLASTED REALM
By Joshua Courtney, Robert Lajoie, Bill Salloway, and Jim E. Vilandre
EN Publishing product number ENPCR5
64-page PDF, $4.95

Interlopers from the Blasted Realm is the fifth in the series of new monster PDFs by the Bearded Dragon folks (publishing under the EN Publishing banner). This one deals with foul creatures from a demiplane with traits of both the Astral plane and the Abyss.

The cover art is by Matthew Lyons and depicts an argent lord, the first creature detailed in the PDF. It's arguably the best illustration in the whole PDF, if only because it's in full color and large enough to provide some detail. The cover has a "WARNING: GORE ADVISORY" notice along the top of the cover, and it's probably a good idea, because there is a bit of gore on the pages that follow.

The other 22 illustrations are also by Matthew Lyons, and while I think it's a cool idea to have a single artist on a product to give it a unified feel, in this case I don't think it was as successful as it could have been. There's nothing inherently wrong with Matthew's artistic ability, but unfortunately the decision was made to have all of the illustrations done in charcoal, with red as the only color besides the black/white/gray of the charcoal. While that might look cool in a Sin City comic book, here it fails, because the pictures often end up too murky to make out much of what the creature is supposed to look like. (From what I've seen on Sin City, the artwork is very crisp and clean - solid black areas, solid white areas, splotches of one color, but no shaded gray areas. That approach might have worked okay here, with ink work instead of the murky charcoal.) This is particular disappointing at the end of the book, where there are four pages of combat tiles - an E.N. Critters specialty - that unfortunately all kind of blur together into a unified-looking mess. Sure, you can see where to cut out each one, but put them in a pile on the table once you're done and you'll be hard-pressed to find, say, a krebzu without flipping them over and reading the back (where the names are printed).

In addition to the illustrations, there are also 2 full-color maps of the Blasted Realm, by Jeffrey LeBoeuf. These are both rather nice, and add a bit of color to the product as a whole.

As for the Blasted Realm, it's an interesting idea, and a much bigger area to tackle than previous volumes have done. The authors have created a unique demiplane, taking some of the more interesting aspects of the Astral Plane (like the general weightlessness, and the ability to "fall" in whatever direction you want and then stop just by thinking about it) and grafting on some aspects of evil planes (there are sections of the Blasted Realm that spontaneously combust - hence the name) to create a pocket dimension that will provide players with an entire new realm to explore (and try to escape from!).

Naturally, with such an environment, there's quite a preponderance of outsiders in this volume (and most of them are demons). If you're looking for some new demons to throw at your players, you'll find plenty of them in here. If demons aren't really your thing, then this particular volume might not be your favorite. For the record, there are 24 different creatures in Interlopers from the Blasted Realm, broken up as follows:

• Aberrations - 1 (and this is the sample creature of the one template in the PDF)
• Animals - 0
• Constructs - 2
• Dragons - 0
• Elementals - 0
• Fey - 0 (well, the template was applied to a fey, but it's now an aberration)
• Giants - 0
• Humanoids - 1
• Magical Beasts - 3
• Monstrous Humanoids - 0
• Oozes - 0
• Outsiders - 16 (2 of which are also psionic, another two of which are different-sized versions of the same creature, and another two of which are unique beings)
• Plants - 0
• Undead - 1 (and it's a swarm)
• Vermin - 0

As you can see, the outsiders get the lion's share of the creatures this time around - not surprisingly, given the book's focus. New demons/devils aren't really my thing, especially since oftentimes people seem to try too hard to come up with something "really weird" or "really gross" and end up with something that doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. There are a sampling of such creatures in here; I was underimpressed, for instance, with the "snake nest demon" (12 serpents merged into a single, amorphous body that also has 6 tonguelike tentacles sprouting from it), the rehl'har (best described as an inch-tall, winged demon from the waist up and a clawed hand from the waist down, with a hula skirt of long fur along the waist where the two halves meet), and the "spellweaver demon" (take three overweight sorcerers, merge them back-to-back-to-back so they're facing three different ways, transpose the locations of their arms and their legs, and then remove all the flesh from their arms and hands - why? - it'll look "cool").

However, I have to give the authors credit for their monster stats. These guys have made tremendous progress over the last half a year, to the point where their most recent product outshines Wizards of the Coast's most recent product in the "accurate monster stats" department. Here's all I recommend changing as far as the stats go:

• p. 11, Battle Morgoth: AC should be 38, not 34 (-1 size, +7 Dex, +17 natural, +5 breastplate).
• p. 16, Endless Hunger: Since these guys are the "steeds" to the argent lords, there's no need for them to have either ranks in the Ride skill or the Mounted Combat feat - those would be appropriate for the argent lords, who do the riding, not the endless hungers, who are the creatures ridden. I suggest spending those skill points elsewhere, and swapping Mounted Combat out for a more useful feat. Also, their habit of dropping prey from a great height might be somewhat problematic on the Blasted Realm, since once you move away from the floating chunks of rock that make up the "ground," the Astral Plane "move by thinking about it" trait kicks in.
• p. 34, Ravager: I don't always break down a creature's skill points, since even if I find a mistake there's no "correct" solution at hand, but this one caught my eye because of an obvious discrepancy with a synergy bonus. ("Disguise +15 (+12 acting)" - the "acting" is the result of a synergy bonus for having 5 or more ranks in Bluff, and only applies when acting in character to pass yourself off as someone else. Obviously, the "acting" ranks should always be 2 points higher than the number of "normal" Disguise ranks.) In any case, once I did the Skill point math, I discovered that you need to delete the Survival listing, since that's the result of a synergy bonus from Search, which the ravager doesn't have a sufficient number of skill points in to qualify for. Add "Sleight of Hand +3," as it's the result of the same synergy bonus from Bluff that gave the acting modifier to the Disguise skill - which, by the way, should read "Disguise +15 (+17 acting)."
• p. 43, Shokkutsuju: Since this creature "casts spells as a level 9 sorcerer, but with 3 times the allotted spell slots per day for purposes of spellcasting," he should get 18/24/24/21/15 spells/day, not 18/20/20/19/13. (He has a 22 Charisma, and the way the description is written you should apply that to a sorcerer and then triple his spells/day, not triple the spells/day of a 9th-level sorcerer with an 11 Charisma and then add in the bonus spells from having Cha 22 only once afterwards.)
• p. 50, Twisted Dryad: Claw attack should be an option under "Attack" ("or claw +6 melee (1d6+3)"), and under Full Attack, it should be "or claw" instead of "and claw - she shouldn't get both the claw attack and the dagger attack.

And that's it. A pretty short list, no? I congratulate the authors for their diligence in stat-block checking.

Another thing worth pointing out, for those noticing the name of the fourth creature on my "unofficial errata" list above: for no reason given in the PDF, many of the creatures detailed here have Japanese-sounding names. Examples include the konikkosuji, kumosuchikon, shokkutsuju, and tsuinshitakama. I'd be curious to hear if these names actually mean anything in Japanese, and why so many of the monsters in a hellish pocket dimension have such an unusual naming convention.

The proofreading and editing was better than I've seen in previous volumes in this series, but it still could have used some more polishing - I used up both sides of two sheets of paper documenting things that didn't get caught. Most of it fell under poor apostrophe/comma usage or incorrect word usage (coup/coupe, then/than); nothing too difficult to understand, but irritating nonetheless.

While each creature has an associated Knowledge table showing what a PC encountering it might know about it from its appearance - a very good idea, and one which has been incorporated in each of the E.N. Critters volumes to date - I found it somewhat humorous that the second entry in each case was invariably "It is native to a plane of chaos and evil known as the Blasted Realm," considering that most of these creatures are only found in the Blasted Realm. In other words, the PC encountering it would already be in the Blasted Realm himself!

My final quibble with the tiles in the back is that 16 of them are for Diminutive and Fine creatures, and at a quarter-inch square, you're not only probably going to lose them as soon as you cut them out, but they're probably not going to be really easy to use on the battlemat in any case. I appreciate Bearded Dragon's attempts to be accurate and thorough, but I don't think anyone would begrudge them forgoing the Diminutive/Fine tiles in the future.

While I appreciate the strong monster stat blocks in Interlopers from the Blasted Realm, the sub-par artwork and rather high (in my mind at least) number of "tried-to-be-cool-but-ended-up-silly" monsters brings the overall quality of this PDF down to a relatively high "3 (Average)." It's not a bad book, but it's not as strong an entry as some of the previous books in the series.

 

[Capellan]

For the Shokkutsuju's spell allowance, it looks like they are following the pattern set by items such as the ring of wizardry, so I think it is the text that is misleading, rather than the number of spells per day being incorrect.

Though I wonder if it makes much difference when you have that many spells

 

[John Cooper]

That's very possible, Capellan. Whichever way it is, though, one of them needs to change so they at least match. There were a couple of other instances like that, now that you mention it - like a creature that doesn't have to eat in one sentence and can go without eating for as many days as his Constitution a few paragraphs later.

 

[genshou]

E.N. Critters Volume 5: Interlopers from the Blasted Realm

E.N. Critters Volume 5: Interlopers from the Blasted Realm is the fifth (obviously) in a line of theme-specific creature books from E.N. Publishing. This particular volume’s writing team consists of Joshua Courtney, Robert Lajoie, Bill Salloway, and Jim E. Vilandre. Matthew Lyons of Guillotine Studios drew the book’s artwork. I have acquired this product for free (in PDF form) in order to write a review. I chose Interlopers from the Blasted Realm because demons have always been a strong focus in my games, both those I run and those I play in.

At first glance,
this sixty-two page book shows limited promise. I found the cover artwork, a larger and colored image of one of the book’s creatures, to be uninspiring. The gore advisory led me to believe something better was inside, however.
* The book has no chapters, though it can be split into three sections. The general layout is excellent, including bookmarks in the PDF and care taken to place one creature every two pages, so the printed version can show the entire section on one creature with the statistics on the left and the description on the right when the book is open.
* The following are descriptions of each “section” within the book:
* General Information—this first section of the book spends half a page explaining what an E.N. Critters book is. For someone such as myself who is unfamiliar with E.N. Critters, this is an informative if not particularly necessary read.
* Theme Detail—this important section lists the traits of a difficult-to-reach demiplane known as the Blasted Realm. This evil-aligned plane resides pocketed between a commonly known demonic plane and the Astral plane, and shares some attributes of both. Planar travel to and from the Blasted Realm suffers due to unusual fluctuations in planar magic. This causes a great deal of detoured travelers to end up trapped until they are slain by the many creatures within. The section details many attributes of this demiplane and also includes a map. Also included in this section is a detailed account of the history of Zuraz’tik, a balor who found himself trapped within the demiplane after an unsuccessful attack against a rival demon. After finding himself trapped within the Blasted Realm, Zuraz’tik built a base of power there and strove to find a way to return to conquer his native plane. Unfortunately, when attempting a ritual to open a gate back to his plane, he instead opened a permanent rift to the Prime Material plane. The magic backlashed and sent Zuraz’tik into a coma, and his right-hand “man,” Myzar’tak, took over. Zuraz’tik and his demon underlings provide a decent sense of purpose for this demiplane’s inclusion in a game.
* Also in this section detailing the demiplane is the description of a malevolent entity that pervades the demiplane. While the idea of a “living” plane is certainly not original, it is delivered in a unique and interesting way.
* Creature Entries—Having been largely unimpressed with the cover artwork, I found I was no less disappointed by the interior artwork. While I certainly wasn’t expecting drawings on par with those by the staff artists of a bigger publishing company, the black-and-white charcoal effect (with some red thrown in to make it gory) leaves a few things to be desired in detail and in quality of shading. Some of the pictures seem truly childish while others are excellent depictions of things that are horrifying and gruesome, some in extreme ways (they aren’t kidding about the gore advisory, children).
* The entries themselves—naturally—start with a standard statistics block. There may be inconsistencies in the statistics, though I am not one to notice them. After the statistics block is a basic description of the critter coupled with a small colored paragraph that provides a model of how to describe the critter during actual play. As with the standardized monster descriptions found in the 3.0/3.5 D&D Monster Manuals, this section lists typical height and weight as well as languages. After this is a description of combat modes and tactics commonly used by the creature, followed by descriptions of the creatures’ special abilities. I noticed no rule inconsistencies within this text. Summing up each creature’s description are two very useful sections I was pleased to find within this book: Ecology, and Notes and Game Balance. The Ecology section lists details most DMs will be interested in as they use the creatures, such as whether or not the creature can reproduce and how they live within the Blasted Realm. Notes and Game Balance details the design considerations behind the critter; both why it was made and how they settled on its Challenge Rating. Sandwiched between the two sections is a table which lists information players may gain about the creature with the appropriate Knowledge check at varying DCs (the higher the check, the more information they get). The entries on the tables throughout the book follow a standardized format which quickly grows trite, but the DCs seem much better than those normally used for such a system.
* The creatures themselves run the gamut from imaginative and brilliant to hackneyed and ridiculous. Some of them seem to be nothing more than a feeble attempt at making a ‘weird’ creature concept, while others provide something particularly clever or gruesome. Most of the creatures included are outsiders, and some of the creatures that are not outsiders probably should be. Included are the statistics for both Zuraz’tik and Myzar’tak, either of whom could provide a powerful arch-nemesis for the players.
* Last but not least, there are four pages of counters that can be used on the 1-inch scale used as the default in Dungeons and Dragons. While the artwork is grainy and difficult to see at this scale, it’s better than having to make them yourself.
In a broader perspective, the book was mostly free of spelling mistakes, and grammar was mostly related to word choice and punctuation. These did not detract from my ability to read or understand the product, but it does leave the impression of sloppy and hasty editing.

Overall Quality
Layout: *****
Descriptive Text: ***
Spelling and Grammar: **
Creature Entries: ***
Creature Statistics Blocks: ****
Artwork: **
Overall Quality: ***

The Final Word
Despite a number of blemishes (some minor, some major), E.N. Critters Volume 5 succeeds in filling its role as a creative, themed approach to a creature statistics booklet. It is definitely a “niche” booklet, but the creatures therein can be used for general applications at the appropriate Challenge Rating. This is an excellent book to get if you are interested in demons in your games, but I wouldn’t recommend it otherwise.

 

[nolivo]

E.N. Critters Volume 5 - Interlopers from the Blasted Realm

Note: I received a complimentary copy of this pdf for review purposes.

Interlopers from the Blasted Realm is the fifth volume in E.N. Publishing’s E.N. Critters line. This booklet details a demi-plane known as the Blasted Realm and its denizens. While this product does have some shortcomings, it’s a solid piece and I enjoyed reading it.

There’s a warning on the cover that reads “Warning: Gore Advisory,” so I figured the artwork and descriptions of the creatures would be very graphic. While I would give some of the images a PG-13 rating, I didn’t see anything in the product that I really felt warranted this warning.

There is a statement on page 3 which reads “Volume 5 has the standard features -- full color illustrations…” Unfortunately, the only full color illustrations in the booklet are two maps of the Blasted Realm. The maps are well done, and were clean and easy to read; the only thing I’d suggest adding to them would be a scale. The remaining images (all creatures) are done in charcoal and red. While this may have been done to intensify how horrific of an environment Blasted Realm is, the artwork is too dark for some creatures, making it difficult to discern details (especially the Susunakki and Luthrex). When printed out, these pictures are even darker. That being said, all the illustrations do a decent job of representing the creatures.

The booklet starts out detailing the environment of the Blasted Realm (i.e., how magic works, how gravity works, and several environmental hazards). I found all this information quite helpful and useful in determining how I would run an encounter in the Blasted Realm.

The next part of the piece describes recent history in the Blasted Realm, and tells the story of a demon lord named Zuraz’tik, who stumbled into the Blasted Realm by accident. Zuraz’tik and his minions quickly took over the Blasted Realm, and were using it as a place to build forces to conquer their native plane. However, Zuraz’tik became comatose after a freak accident when he tried to open a portal between the Blasted Realm and his home plane, and his minions are vying for power; some of them have even tried invading the Material Plane. I enjoyed the back story, and saw how I could build a mini campaign around Zuraz'tik's minions and ultimately, Zuraz’tik’s revival.

The remainder of the book is devoted to the creatures residing in the Blasted Realm. Each creature has a very detailed description, read aloud text, and a knowledge table indicating how much a player would know about these creatures based on Knowledge (The Planes) checks. I thought all this information was very well detailed, and the Knowledge check table was quite useful. My only issue with the Knowledge table is that the second entry in each table read “It is native to a plane of chaos and evil known as the Blasted Realm.” Since most of the creatures listed are only found on the Blasted Realm, if a player can identify it a) they would know it was from the Blasted Realm, or b) the player would currently be on the Blasted Realm.

Each creature entry also includes design notes from the authors on what inspired the creatures and how they were developed. I thought this was a nice touch and gave some insight into how the creatures evolved.

I did have a few minor gripes with the creature descriptions, mostly due to how the text flowed, and the author’s choice of words. For example, take the Argent Lord’s physical description: “Extending from the upper back are two long tentacles ending in poison coated spiked balls similar to morning stars. Hands and feet both end in charcoal covered claws.” These sentences provide good descriptive information, but they don’t seem to flow very well. Also consider the word choices used on the Ellinal’s description, describing a hole in the creature's chest: “This hole constantly oozes blood and black intestinal goodness, leaving a trail wherever the ellinal goes.” I felt that “black intestinal goodness” took away from an otherwise effective description. There are several other instances like that throughout the book -- they don’t affect the usability of the product in any way, but they do detract slightly from it.

I really liked the entry for the Losian Chattel - they're a race of humanoids who are bred for food and sport. The author really did a good job of making me feel bad for these creatures, and I could see one of my Paladin PCs starting a crusade to free these poor buggers.

One of the creatures described is Myzar'tak, Zuraz’tik's second in command. His description tells of how he's running things while Zuraz’tik is incapacitated. It also talks about how he'll toy with PCs who enter the realm, and that he may pretend to ally himself with the PCs against the other creatures in the realm. It states that he has "several cover stories prepared" for situations like that. I would've liked a suggestion or two on what those stories were.

At the end of the book is a set of printable counters, and while this is a great idea, they suffer from the same artwork problems as the regular illustrations. Add to that the fact that the counters are much smaller than the regular illustrations, so the artwork gets blurry and it’s even harder to discern details.

Overall, this book is quite solid. If you’re looking for new demons to throw at your players, this book will be quite useful to you. It also has the potential to be used as a mini- or ongoing campaign setting. I’m rating this book 3.5 stars (rounded down to 3).

 

[Vurt]

E.N. Critters Volume 5 – Interlopers from the Blasted Realm

By Joshua Courtney, Robert Lajoie, Bill Salloway and Jim E. Vilandre
Published by E.N. Publishing
Pages: 61 + OGL + front & back cover
Fully bookmarked

Disclaimer: This is not a playtest review. I did not buy Interlopers from the Blasted Realm, it was sent to me for review.

For some reason, fiendish antagonists have always resonated well with me. Maybe it’s because I inadvertantly missed the whole Planescape thing when it first came out, having taken a break from D&D at the time, until much later when Planescape Torment was released. Further toss in Sepulchrave’s Tales of Wyre and Shemeska’s Planescape Storyhour and so now I’m left with this vague impression that demons and angels manipulating mortals to further their own unfathomable agendas somehow makes for a cool storyline. I suspect I’m not alone in this. So when I was fortuitously given the opportunity to review E.N. Critters Volume 5 – Interlopers from the Blasted Realm, I jumped at the chance. Cool, I thought to myself, more demons to play with!

Interlopers from the Blasted Realm is the fifth volume in the E.N. Critters series of environmentally-themed monster books. Whereas the previous four volumes have focused mostly on terrestrial locales such as along riverbanks, within jungles, etc., this one takes a little larger leap and lands itself in a demonic pocket-plane. Unfortunately, I have not read any of the other four volumes, and so cannot compare this work to them, or make reference to how the series as a whole is progressing. I can only leave that to other reviewers more familiar with the product line as a whole.

Following the front cover and Table of Contents, what you get is a fairly complete description of a unique demonic demiplane, and twenty-four otherworldly creatures to throw at your players. Not all of them are fiends (that is, “evil outsiders” according to the D&D vernacular), there are also the occasional humanoid, construct, magical beast, abberation and undead thrown in for good measure. One of the creatures is actually a template, which is applied to a fey in the provided sample critter. The creature section is followed by tables listing them all by CR and type, as well as several pages of printable counters (front and back) for use on your battlemat. The PDF ends with the Open Game License and the back cover.

The product is bookmarked, and as well, the Table of Contents entries are all fully hyperlinked. As previously mentioned, towards the end of the document are tables listing the various creatures by CR, type, and author. The creatures by CR table I expect is the most useful of the three, but it would have been even more helpful had it been hyperlinked as was the TOC. There is an almost staggering amount of raw text in this PDF, and for the most part, it is very well edited. Issues that arise are minor, and are easily overlooked.

Interlopers from the Blasted Realm is very well organized, and was designed with printing in mind. The header and footer artwork is reasonably restrained, and in a light grey. In addition, while creature entries take up multiple pages, they are done such that when printed double-sided and hole-punched, the entries tend to start on the left-hand side of the page and end on the right. New critter entries tend to start at the top of their own page, with only one exception towards the end of document. Printing notes for printing out the counters are included as well, giving advice on how to scale them properly to the 1-inch squares typically found on one’s battlemat.

Creature entries are laid out in the standard format introduced by the Monster Manual way back when, breaking down the bonuses for things like AC but not the initiative modifier or skill ranks. A picture of each creature is included. Following a general description, combat tactics are presented, and these in turn are followed by a description of all the creature’s traits and special abilities. For combat tactics, you get general suggestions for how the monster likes to behave, and not the round-by-round tactics as seen in some of the more powerful devil and demon entries introduced by the 3.5 revision of the Monster Manual. In general, however, the tactics presented in Interlopers tends to be a touch more specific. For example, the entry for the Ellinal, a creature with a fear gaze and a 10 ft. reach, explains that the beastie likes to get to within 5 ft. of its target and then level its gaze in order to take advantage of attacks of opportunity incurred when the victim subsequently tries to flee.

After the combat section each monster entry has a couple of paragraphs on ecology, followed by a Knowledge (the planes) skill table. The inclusion of a Knowledge table for each of the entries I think is a good thing. Since these critters are new, but presumably not totally new to everyone’s campaign universe, it’s good to have pre-listed DCs for Knowledge (the planes) skill checks in order to determine what various characters may or may not know about their opponents. The DCs from the skill checks range from about 15 to 50, and it must be noted that the designers have deliberately broken the convention of using 10 + the creature’s HD as the target DC to reveal useful information, in order to keep the tables somewhat standardized. (i.e. The target DCs are all multiples of 5, and increase by 5.)

The final section in the monster entry is where the creature’s author provides some of his notes and his rationale for giving the creature its various abilities and challenge rating. I found this section most helpful in trying to understand how best to consider using the creature, and what kinds of difficulties my players will face if they should happen to encounter it.

I’m happy to observe that the Challenge Ratings for the various critters aren’t all clustered near the high end of the scale. There’s a nice mix, providing plenty of opportunities to throw some of them at lower level adventurers. With CRs ranging from 1 to 22, there are fourteen in the 10-and-under category and eleven in the 11-and-above.

Something I’m not particularly happy with is that the creature artwork has an almost “high-school feel” to it. Some of it I like, while others not so much, but even the ones I do like aren’t always helpful at depicting the creature. For instance, the Myzar’tak’s picture is a close-up head-shot, and while it appears to be suitably ferocious, it leaves me with no idea what the rest of the creature looks like. Which would be fine if the theme of the product wasn’t chaotic demons from an alien realm that could presumably look like bloody anything! In many of the pictures the shading is overstrong, making it difficult to identify details and perceive depth. On the other hand, I thought the use of the colour red, both within the artwork as well as a highlight within some of the text, to be well done across the board. It is not overused, and where it does appear it acts primarily to accent and direct the readers attention to certain features. As well, I love the two provided maps.

One problem I am having difficulty wrapping my head around in trying to write this review is to discuss exactly how good are these new monsters. The problem lies in that the concept of a demon in D&D seems to be something with an utterly unpleasant form that has at its fingertips a set of thematically consistent resistances and special abilities with which to torment your players. Certainly some of these beasties will likely creep out a few players in your group, but for the most part the denizens of the Blasted Realm just don’t seem, well, terrifying enough. Maybe it’s just that too many of the creatures here remind me of monsters I’ve seen elsewhere in movies and on TV. For instance, didn’t I see the Remains of the Fallen, an undead swarm of body parts, in that cult classic, Army of Darkness? Isn’t the Ravager just a fantasy version of the Terminator? Maybe it’s just the artwork, but the Kzixinttra’il I found to be reminiscent of Pinhead, and the Scarrim remind me too much of the Scarren from Farscape. It just doesn’t encourage me to want to throw them at my players. Encountering a new demon should be a powerful experience. To risk breaking the immersion when one of your players realizes that they’ve “seen” the new creature you’re using before somewhere else is just cheating them of their fun.

Another thing that I found frustrating was my inability to pronounce the names of some of these creatures without practice. That, and the decidedly Japanese-sounding names of the some of them seem a little out of place. I suspect that there is a very good reason that none of the fiends with the bizarre-sounding names in the Monster Manual have more than three syllables. On the plus side, the critters herein that do have weird names also have listed secondary, common names. For example, the Tsuinshitakama is also known as the twin-tongue demon, not to be confused with the tongue-twisting demon.

Setting those issues aside, there is relatively little wonkiness in the rules for the creatures’ abilities and statistics themselves. I do have to question why the Endless Hunger, ostensibly a mount for another creature, the Argent Lord, has a Ride skill when it is the thing that is being ridden? Or why is it that the Soul Slayer Sword, an adamantine weapon, has Damage Reduction X/adamantine or good. Trying to think this through, how does a good-aligned weapon overcome the adamantine aspect of the thing’s DR? Is it meant to be illogical or is it a typo? But as rules mechanics issues go, that’s pretty much all that I noticed.

My initial impressions of the PDF were suitably favourable. Much good thought went into its design and layout, and it shows. Ultimately, however, the strength of any monster book depends primarily on its critters. And for me, the mix of creatures just seems to be a touch too haphazard for my tastes. Interlopers from the Blasted Realm is a good product if you’re looking for some new demon-type creatures to throw at your players, or if you tend to like demonic-themed supplements and support material. However, it isn’t actually a “book of fiends”. Rather, it’s a fiend-heavy ecology book. The distinction is that, taken outside of their normal habitat, most of these creatures have no real sense of purpose other than to just kill things. Which is fine for some random monster, but in my opinion, it fails to live up to the potential of what a fiend should be. Fiends are best when they mirror some aspect of human behaviour, and jack it up to the n-th degree. But for every “horror-” style of critter in Interlopers, there are three “hammers”, things used simply to bludgeon your players’ characters. Of course, if overcoming “hammers” is what you and your friends tend to enjoy most during a game session, then this could very well be an advantage to the product. For me this aspect is something of a let-down, and it doesn’t inspire me to actually use any of what is otherwise, creature artwork aside, a very well-done piece of work.

Reviewed by Scott Benoit