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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Simon Collins" data-source="post: 2008795" data-attributes="member: 9860">Beware! This review contains major spoilers.This is not a playtest review.Price: $24.95Pages: 96Price Per Page: About 26 cents per page, only slightly above average for this type of product.External Artwork: A black vellum-effect design with a horse-like jewelled skull in the centre, and incongruous bright red writing for the title.Additional Page Use: The back page uses the same effect and has an overview of the style of the monsters within, with an intent to be generic. The first page contains credits and contents, the last page has the OGL. The inside covers are both blank.Internal Artwork: All the pictures of the monsters are in colour. Unfortunately, I don't like the style of the eight artists, who all seem to portray most of the monsters as emaciated. The pictures of insects and the like therefore work the best, whereas the humanoids tend to have an insect-like quality to them. The use of colour is vibrant, at times overdoing it. Texture can also be odd at times. There is a hint of 1st Edition Monster Manuals to some of the art.Page Layout: As with the 3rd Edition Monster Manual, monsters are not set on their own page. This means that sometimes pictures are not with their titles but on the next page, which can cause some initial confusion, although this quickly dissipates. Margins are small, chunks of white space are limited, and text density is fairly good.Style: In the same way as the monsters themselves are generic, so too is the writing style. There is nothing here to get excited about, and little to complain about either. Information is given in a basic, concise manner. There are a few typo's.Whats Inside:Well, essentially 92 monsters in much the same format as the Monster Manual. However, each monster comes with an additional section entitled 'Campaign' which offers up ideas for adventures and campaign integration for each creature. The monsters are designed to be "world-neutral, allowing easy placement into any campaign setting". There is a section at the end which ranks the monsters by Challenge Rating (from 1/8 to 20) with most being CR 12 or under. There are also four templates (The Crowd, The Fallen and Half-Troll, as well as a guide to designing Inner Planar Creatures, and their use as familiars). Several of the monsters can be used as PC races if desired, and there are rules included for doing so.In terms of Type, the monsters tend to be mainly magical beasts (19), monstrous humanoids (11) aberrations (9), and outsiders (10), with some of the types severely under-represented, such as giant (1), dragon (2), fey (2) and shapechanger (1), or not at all (elemental, ooze). There is no table showing creature by type and subtype. High Points: I liked the idea of the world-neutral monsters and the 'campaign' section. The language used lived up to this promise and did not specify religions, lands, etc. that would have precluded use without amendment. There are a few monsters in here which interested me: The Fallen template (a fallen celestial) has potential, I liked the idea of the Death's Bloom fungus (a fungus that grows on dead bodies and ingesting it gives visions of the dead person's life), Hearth Horror (a sentient haunted place), Shock Beetle, and Ebon Spider (a spider whose poison gives recurring nightmares) amongst others. The long list of playtesters imply that the CRs and playability of the monsters has been well tested.Low Points: I found that although the idea of genericism seems a good one, the monsters often seemed quite weird and able to be used in very limited situations. I found the generic style of writing to be lacking atmosphere and interest most of the time. I did not like the style of art and found that the art regularly did not match aspects of the text description. I found the naming of the creatures to be a bit stupid or simplistic at times (e.g. blue spitter, cavernivore, chortler, glacier beast, grumpet, gutwrench, secret eater, silencer, tar beast and void monster) and many of the monsters failed to grab my attention for more than half a minute.Conclusion: Overall, I personally felt that $25 for these monsters wasn't justified. Despite the adventure ideas and the few decent monsters in here, the style of writing and the artwork was mediocre. In addition, the regular incongruity between art and text was frustrating and there were many monsters in this selection that I found to be weird, limited, or tedious. However, the appeal of monsters is perhaps more in the eye of the beholder (excuse the pun) than most other aspects of RPGs so if you need more monsters for your campaign, and like a touch of weirdness, then this might be worth a second look - there are links to several much more positive reviews on the Bastion Press website at http://www.bastionpress.com/Products/Minions.htmso what do I know?</blockquote>

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