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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Messageboard Golem" data-source="post: 2010238" data-attributes="member: 18387">By Glenn Dean, Staff Reviewer d20 Magazine RackSizing up the TargetThe Slayer’s Guide to Medusas, the 12th book in Mongoose Publishing’s Slayer's series, is a 32-page softbound supplement written by Ian Sturrock and retailing for $9.95.First BloodAt some point in time, every adventuring party has probably come across the “lone, hooded woman in the dungeon” – and promptly pulled out their mirrors and butchered her. Mongoose’s Slayer's Guide to Medusas aim to give Games Masters some clever ideas to make their medusa opponents more interesting, while giving players some hints to aid in the butchering.Medusas goes into great depth about these mysterious and maleficent women of the dark. It describes their physiology – long-lived, warm-blooded reptiles who lay eggs after a mysterious and obscene ritual involving human males; society – well-ordered coveys who pursue secret aims under the control of evil geniuses; and mind set – psychopaths who have a love-hate relationship with things of beauty. Suggestions for their combat tactics include a predilection for bows and daggers as well as deceptive hit-and-run tactics.Medusas gives the Games Master a wealth of hints about roleplaying a medusa as an evil adversary worthy of great heroes. Two medusa prestige classes can provide quite a surprise for an adventuring party expecting a run-of-the-mill snake woman: the Guiser (a jack-of-all-trades who disappears into human society by using a number of gaze powers) and the Serpentine (a melee-oriented fighter-type). Six specific feats can give the medusa some new options for poison use, snake attacks, and gaze powers – imagine not turning her foe to stone, but doing so over the course of a week! The rules summary at the back of the book also provides a few other medusa options ready-to-run, like a fiendish variant.If you need an excuse to use these fearsome women in your game, there are a number of great adventure ideas and plot hooks provided, along with a fully-fleshed covey of medusas and their temple lair. This is the most useful bit in the entire book in my opinion – that covey of villains could provide a number of ongoing schemes to fuel your campaign for some time, and all the mirrors in the world won’t protect your players.Critical HitsThe included lair and its inhabitants are great – a useful demonstration of the rest of the book. The prestige class options for the medusa are pretty useful as well; they fit the monster perfectly and will definitely upset the average adventuring party’s assumptions. It’s not likely they’ll expect a beguiling gaze or melee attack from a monster that might otherwise be a real pushover. Medusas can really spice up a monster that’s fairly standard fare otherwise.Critical MissesThe prestige classes aside, not much of Medusas really breaks new ground. While the Slayer’s Guides as a whole excel by hanging an entire framework of society and psychology on the bare bones of the Core Rulebook III description, enhancing the given monster’s stereotype, I don’t feel that Medusas quite does the others in the series justice – you’d get most of the flavor text watching reruns of Clash of the Titans. Coup de GraceThe Slayer’s Guide to Medusas provides all its rules mechanics as Open Content, reserving its art and flavor text. A well-designed and balanced supplement that GMs will perhaps find slightly more useful than players, Medusas lacks a little in the originality department, coming across a bit blander than some of the other works in the series.To see the graded evaluation of this product and to leave comments that the reviewer will respond to, go to Fast Tracks at <a href="http://www.d20zines.com/html/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=index&catid=&topic=4" target="_blank">www.d20zines.com.</a></blockquote>

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