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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Messageboard Golem" data-source="post: 2009528" data-attributes="member: 18387">By Steve Creech, Exec. Chairman, d20 Magazine RackThis review is for e-Villains, a 25-page campaign supplement to the forthcoming book Villains by Bastion Press. e-Villains is written by James Jacobs and is available in .pdf downloadable format for $3.99 directly from the Bastion Press website (www.bastionpress.com). e-Villains contains the statistics, descriptions, histories, and motivations of four different potential bad guys that can be used in your campaign. The first of these villains is a half-celestial/half-human woman named Bryn Amanthys Weslock. Lady Weslock, the sole survivor of a family massacre, is a lawful good woman who blames adventurers for the fate of her family. She has vowed to bring the “hobby” of adventuring under control once and for all by taxing them to death in the lands she controls. Caeseara Willowmane, a 169-year-old female elf, is the next entry. Another victim of the callous actions of adventurers, this once beautiful and loving elf is now a loyal follower of the goddess of vengeance. Like Lady Weslock, Willowmane now seeks to end the stupidity of adventurers by putting them on trial for their crimes and promptly pronouncing sentence (usually death). Sara Anamander is a Fox Maiden (from e-Minions by Bastion Press), a shapechanger, who uses her levels of bard and assassin to eliminate key political leaders in hopes of plunging the civilized world into chaos. Her ultimate goal is the destruction of all humanity and the return of nature to its rightful place in the scheme of things. Like each of the previous villains, Sara has sustained great personal loss and tragedy which has altered how she views the world. The final villain is Xanderwhal Drukin, a former Halfling paladin whose soul has been corrupted by evil. Xanderwhal is now a diabolical, calculating individual that has amassed an army of monsters capable of laying waste to all the lands. e-Villains has some very good points in its design and layout. Each villain presented comes with a fully developed background history that explains why they have become villains and what their existing motivations and tactics are. Each entry also comes with suggestions on how to use this character for a low, mid, and/or high-level campaign. The framework is even laid down to make each of these characters an arch nemesis that plagues the party through their entire career. The technical problems are few with only a reference made to a missing appendix, which I assume is included in the forthcoming book Villains. The amount of ink used to print out this book is dramatically reduced compared to the last .pdf Bastion Press released. This is due largely in part to reducing the border to one side only rather than on all four sides. Overall, e-Villains is a decent compilation of plot devices designed to vex your characters and is a good indication of what is to come with Villains. Each listing is filled with enough information that the character can take on a life of its own after only a few minutes of study and preparation. If you plan on buying Villains when it is released, I would definitely recommend e-Villains to complement it. If you’re just looking for a couple of completely designed bad guys that you can use without spending hours to roll up and develop, then e-Villains fits the bill quite nicely.To see the graded evaluation of this product, go to The Critic's Corner at <a href="http://www.d20zines.com" target="_blank">www.d20zines.com.</a></blockquote>

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