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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Cooper" data-source="post: 2578210" data-attributes="member: 24255">E.N. CRITTERS VOLUME 5: INTERLOPERS FROM THE BLASTED REALMBy Joshua Courtney, Robert Lajoie, Bill Salloway, and Jim E. VilandreEN Publishing product number ENPCR564-page PDF, $4.95Interlopers 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: <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Aberrations - 1 (and this is the sample creature of the one template in the PDF)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Animals - 0</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Constructs - 2</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Dragons - 0</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Elementals - 0</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Fey - 0 (well, the template was applied to a fey, but it's now an aberration)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Giants - 0</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Humanoids - 1</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Magical Beasts - 3</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Monstrous Humanoids - 0</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Oozes - 0</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">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)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Plants - 0</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Undead - 1 (and it's a swarm)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Vermin - 0</li> </ul>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: <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">p. 11, Battle Morgoth: AC should be 38, not 34 (-1 size, +7 Dex, +17 natural, +5 breastplate).</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">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.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">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)."</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">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.)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">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.</li> </ul>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.</blockquote>

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