Vanuslux
Explorer
On the Hoof: D20 Riding Beasts is the first product by Cognizant Chance. I picked it up because it was cheap and I never get enough of interesting animals to use as mounts. I also like to give newbies to the d20 e-publishing game a chance to impress me. In this case, I was far from impressed.
Appearances - The first strike against On the Hoof is that it's formatted to landscaped pages rather than portrait. As someone who prints pretty much anything that he actually intends on using, I despise this layout choice. The text layout is competent enough and all but one of the new mounts has a drawing of it. However, the artwork is bland in the extreme.
Content - This pdf contains 11 creatures for use as mounts. Aside from a brief introduction and the usual OGL page, there's nothing else in the book. The mounts themselves range from boring to somewhat interesting but for the most part the writing is like the art...functional but bland. In this book we get the following mounts:
Autumn Mound (CR3): A medium-size plant that creeps along at a speed of 20ft. It's kind of cool but mostly useless to anyone other than a 1st level character of Small size and even then is of questionable value.
Calvary Bison (CR2): Essentially a Large bison raised for battle military use. Very unexciting.
Equinecron (CR7): A horselike construct made from dead horse parts and necromantic magic. Not a horrible original idea but cool none-the-less.
Giant Horseshoe Crab (CR6): Just as it says, they're giant horseshoe crabs. Kind of cool for adventuring under the ocean, but it's a little less cool for simple being an Huge size version of a normal animal.
Giant Riding Wasp (CR2): Oh joy, another normal critter that has been super-sized to make a decent mount. No explanation should be needed.
Hellbender (CR6): A Medium-sized Magical Beast, the Hellbender is definitely not an ordinary mount. In appearance, it's just a giant salamander (the animal, not the monster) but it has a fiery tongue attack that does some nasty damage, some spell-like abilities, and immunity to fire. One of the better creatures in the book, though that's not saying much.
Iron Horse (CR7): Another horselike construct, though this one distinctly less interesting than the Equinecron.
Ixlapians (CR4): Two-headed carnivorous hairless horses. Nothing too special here.
Orsh Devil (CR2): Mountain goats with exceptionally foul tempers. I'm so very underwhelmed.
War Ostrich (CR1): Nothing more than what can be deduced by their name. They're ostriches trained for combat.
Wizzeltop’s Demiphant (CR3): This creature goes against the trend in this book of taking regular animals and making them bigger. The Demiphants are basically elephants that have been bred down to Medium-size to be mounts for gnomes.
In Conclusion - Though not a complete waste of my time and money, I am deeply disappointed with this product. I don't see much imagination happening here. Over half the mounts are just slightly altered normal animals. I will probably milk a little use out of it...the Autumn Mound, the Equinecron, and the Hellbender just barely save this product from a one star rating but even these are only slightly better than mediocre.
Appearances - The first strike against On the Hoof is that it's formatted to landscaped pages rather than portrait. As someone who prints pretty much anything that he actually intends on using, I despise this layout choice. The text layout is competent enough and all but one of the new mounts has a drawing of it. However, the artwork is bland in the extreme.
Content - This pdf contains 11 creatures for use as mounts. Aside from a brief introduction and the usual OGL page, there's nothing else in the book. The mounts themselves range from boring to somewhat interesting but for the most part the writing is like the art...functional but bland. In this book we get the following mounts:
Autumn Mound (CR3): A medium-size plant that creeps along at a speed of 20ft. It's kind of cool but mostly useless to anyone other than a 1st level character of Small size and even then is of questionable value.
Calvary Bison (CR2): Essentially a Large bison raised for battle military use. Very unexciting.
Equinecron (CR7): A horselike construct made from dead horse parts and necromantic magic. Not a horrible original idea but cool none-the-less.
Giant Horseshoe Crab (CR6): Just as it says, they're giant horseshoe crabs. Kind of cool for adventuring under the ocean, but it's a little less cool for simple being an Huge size version of a normal animal.
Giant Riding Wasp (CR2): Oh joy, another normal critter that has been super-sized to make a decent mount. No explanation should be needed.
Hellbender (CR6): A Medium-sized Magical Beast, the Hellbender is definitely not an ordinary mount. In appearance, it's just a giant salamander (the animal, not the monster) but it has a fiery tongue attack that does some nasty damage, some spell-like abilities, and immunity to fire. One of the better creatures in the book, though that's not saying much.
Iron Horse (CR7): Another horselike construct, though this one distinctly less interesting than the Equinecron.
Ixlapians (CR4): Two-headed carnivorous hairless horses. Nothing too special here.
Orsh Devil (CR2): Mountain goats with exceptionally foul tempers. I'm so very underwhelmed.
War Ostrich (CR1): Nothing more than what can be deduced by their name. They're ostriches trained for combat.
Wizzeltop’s Demiphant (CR3): This creature goes against the trend in this book of taking regular animals and making them bigger. The Demiphants are basically elephants that have been bred down to Medium-size to be mounts for gnomes.
In Conclusion - Though not a complete waste of my time and money, I am deeply disappointed with this product. I don't see much imagination happening here. Over half the mounts are just slightly altered normal animals. I will probably milk a little use out of it...the Autumn Mound, the Equinecron, and the Hellbender just barely save this product from a one star rating but even these are only slightly better than mediocre.
