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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="nolivo" data-source="post: 2588071" data-attributes="member: 25944">E.N. Critters Volume 5 - Interlopers from the Blasted RealmNote: 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).</blockquote>

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