Beware! This review contains major spoilers.
This is not a playtest review.
Price: $11.95
Pages: 72
Price Per Page: About 16 cents per page, much lower than average for this type of product.
External Artwork: A good piece of colour artwork, showing one of the monsters from the book leaping at you, jaws agape.
Additional Page Use: The back cover contains an overview of the sourcebook and a good background drawing of an undead creature. Both inside covers are blank. The first page contains credits, the last page contains OGL.
Internal Artwork: The black and white art ranges from average to superb, with most pieces being good. The image generally matches the text well.
Page Layout: Text density is poor, there are regular chunks of white space, fonts and font sizes vary, margins are fairly average. On the whole, each creature is given two pages, although information relating to one creature is occasionally placed several pages away where they had space. On the whole, very poor page design, though the OGC is marked clearly.
Style: The style of writing is engaging and imaginative, the monster information concise and clear. The editing seems excellent.
Whats Inside:
28 monsters, each given a two-page spread, and 4 templates (zombie, chupacabra, mycobeast and exoskeleton). Each creature has a picture, standard statistics, a description and combat information.
In addition, two sections, one called 'Nightmare/Dream' and the other 'Elsewhere...' give some flavour text and are present for most creatures. The Nightmare/Dream flavour text seems to relate to 'The Hunt: Rise of Evil' setting and seems to be set in modern-day whilst the 'Elsewhere...' flavour text is more fantasy-based.
For most creatures, there is also some further rules-related information, such as a new spell, new magic item, adventure hook, rules for creation, etc.
The final page has three ideas for expanding on monsters presented in the book. At the beginning, a table summarising CRs for the monsters presented in the book is given along with any special rules given.
The monsters in this book are heavily weighted towards undead (10 + 3 templates) and outsiders (5) with no elementals, oozes, giants, animals, shapechangers or vermin.
High Points: There were quite a few monsters that I felt were usable, the best of which was the Zombie template (with examples of zombie types such as arcane, assembled, burned and diseased) but several others such as the Breas (ex-fey knight undead guardian), dream weaver (ethereal spider that spins webs to catch dreamers), grove guardian (a druidic construct made of poisonous flowers and thorny vines), and putredryad (undead dryad) all caught and held my attention. The flavour text was well-written, and the additional rules (such as the use of the Exoskeleton template for undead armour) were often original and imaginative. Despite their designed use for the 'Hunt: Rise of Evil' setting, I did not feel that any of them were particularly limited to this setting, and could easily be used in either a modern-day or fantasy setting.
Low Points: The layout was probably the worst aspect of this book, although several of the monsters were either tedious (graffiti demon, deadwood tree) or faintly ridiculous (tooth fairy, cluricaun, celestial head, oogie boogie) as well as often having simplistic names (the assembled, grotesque devourer, man-fisher, wrecker beast) which I found a bit annoying. The Nightmare/Dream sections are practically useless for a mediaeval fantasy setting. What with this (unless you're running a TH:RoE adventure), and the space problems, it was lucky that the price per page was so low, as there is a great deal of wasted space in the book.
Conclusion: As with any monster book, not all the monsters here are going to be interesting or useful to you but those that are, have been presented in an engaging and interesting manner and can be used outside the setting they were designed for. There is a strong tendency towards undead and outsiders, and a range of monster types are missing. Despite the positive aspect of 2 pages being dedicated to each monster, the poor layout design and flavour text negates any benefits that might have accrued from this stance. Nevertheless, the art and text are both good and there was enough here to keep my interest fired up.
