John Cooper
Explorer
The Slayer's Guide to Minotaurs
Mongoose Publishing product number MGP0096
Shawn McKee
24 pages, listed at $9.95, but free with Signs & Portents #1
The Slayer's Guide to Minotaurs is somewhat of an anomaly in the "Slayer's Guide" series. At only 24 pages, it's the smallest of the series to see print, yet it carries the same price - $9.95 - as the standard 32-page "Slayer's Guides," yet it really doesn't cost anything because it comes free with the first issue of Mongoose's new monthly magazine, Signs & Portents. Confused? Just be aware that with the smaller page count you probably don't want to be buying this (from Ebay or wherever) at its full listed price.
How does it stack up against the others in the series? I'd say it stands as a good example of the maxim, "You get what you pay for." Not that The Slayer's Guide to Minotaurs is worth nothing (despite the fact that, as a freebie bonus add-on to boost magazine sales, it actually costs nothing) - far from it, it does an adequate job at covering its topic, but "adequate" is about as far as I'd go.
Let's start with the cover, by Mongoose veteran artist Brent Chumley. Brent's done some excellent work in the past - most notably, the covers to The Slayer's Guide to Trolls and The Slayer's Guide to Winter Wolves - but this is far from his best work. For one thing, the minotaur's horns seem somewhat off-kilter. I am also unimpressed with his "hairiness" - he really looks like he's got a human body with fake hair glued on in places. Really, I would expect a minotaur to be covered in hair (if not fur) all over its body, not going from "no hair" to "incredibly thick, long hair" in the space of an inch. In addition, the shading of the minotaur's lower body (from the waist down) makes it look like he's wearing a pair of trousers. This looks especially silly since you can see part of his tail - forcing a vision of "Mickey Mouse pants" to the forefront of the viewer's brain is probably not a good idea when you want to make the monster in question look frightening. Finally, the minotaur depicted is apparently a "bearded" minotaur, one of the racial variants described in the work. This may have been chosen to intrigue the reader into picking up the book, but I would think it would have been better to go with the "standard" minotaur for the book's cover so it wouldn't look so different from what you'd expect. Plus, the reader isn't going to be able to pick up the book and flip through it after spotting the intriguing cover in the gaming section of his local shop, as it's shrinkwrap-bundled with Signs & Portents #1.
The inside front cover is the standard "Slayer's Guide" anatomical drawing. Sadly, this is the first "Slayer's Guide" I can think of where the artist doing this drawing was not Chris Quilliams. Gillian Pearce does a fair job at the task but she's certainly no Chris Quilliams. Gillian is also responsible for the 8 black and white illustrations and lair map sprinkled throughout the rest of the book, but these range from poor to fair: the minotaur on page 10 looks like it's holding a pointed stick because the double-ax heads blend into the stone background she's chosen, and I can't tell if the creatures at the minotaur's feet on page 16 are supposed to be rats or cats (both of which, according to the text, one can expect to find in a minotaur's labyrinth). They have rat tails, but cat faces (complete with vertical pupils). You make the call.
I was similarly unimpressed with the fiction this time around. Pages 3 and 23 are both devoted entirely to the same storyline that runs throughout the work, and just scream "filler." The characters are uninteresting for the most part and there's really not much action going on. I would have thought that if you're going to cram a 32-page "Slayer's Guide" into a mere 24 pages, the fiction would be the first thing on the chopping block to give the more important bits as much room as they need.
However, there are some very nice touches in here. I particularly enjoyed the fact that to a minotaur, having its horns broken off is a fate worse than death. (Remember that, the next time you need to humiliate a minotaur in your campaign!) I also appreciate that the suggested strategies for fighting minotaurs (you're safest in the water or on a steep slope) include combat penalties that the minotaur suffers when in those environments - useful bits you can use in your game.
As far as breaking new ground goes, Shawn creates some new subspecies of minotaur, but there's nothing all that unusual here. Besides the "brown" (or standard Monster Manual minotaur), there are now also the "shaggy," "bearded," and "noble" minotaurs, but the differences all pretty much break down to different amounts of hair, slightly different horns, and differing levels of size and strength. However, Shawn does some interesting things with the minotaur's bone altar to the Horned One (the minotaur god), allowing it to grant spell effects to the minotaur channeling its power or those viewing the altar. Unfortunately, he stops at a modified confusion effect to those viewing the altar or the boosting of the minotaur's physical stats or caster level. In a larger book (or one with less wasted pages of poor fiction), I'm sure there is much more that could have been done with this concept. Still, he does recover somewhat by coming up with two minotaur skills and five minotaur feats, which for some reason (contrary to other books in the "Slayer's Guide" line) show up in the "Reference List" section.
The sample lair is very simplistic for a labyrinth, especially one belonging to a minotaur that has already advanced to his third such maze (each one supposedly more complex than the latter). As far as mazes go there's not much too it, the main difficulty being that it's laced with various traps every so often (like many "Slayer's Guide" maps, this one has no scale, but at least it's been drawn on a square grid system, so it's pretty easy to assume each square is 5 feet). It also wasn't laid out very intelligently, as the only source of water is way at the other end of the labyrinth, about as far away from the minotaur's sleeping chambers as possible. I also find it difficult to believe that the minotaur is unaware that there's a black dragon lairing in his subterranean lake, especially after the text mentions how keen a minotaur's senses are.
All in all, this is one of my least favorite "Slayer's Guides," not because the material in it was particularly bad but because so much more could have been done with it. I understand that it was basically a promotional gimmick, and the extra 8 pages to make it "standard sized" were probably deemed unnecessary, but I think they really would have helped. Still, given that The Slayer's Guide to Minotaurs is essentially free when you pay the $4.95 for the 72-page first issue of Signs & Portents magazine, I can definitely recommend it as money well spent. After all, there are some good things you can pull out of it.
Overall rating: three stars (average).
Mongoose Publishing product number MGP0096
Shawn McKee
24 pages, listed at $9.95, but free with Signs & Portents #1
The Slayer's Guide to Minotaurs is somewhat of an anomaly in the "Slayer's Guide" series. At only 24 pages, it's the smallest of the series to see print, yet it carries the same price - $9.95 - as the standard 32-page "Slayer's Guides," yet it really doesn't cost anything because it comes free with the first issue of Mongoose's new monthly magazine, Signs & Portents. Confused? Just be aware that with the smaller page count you probably don't want to be buying this (from Ebay or wherever) at its full listed price.
How does it stack up against the others in the series? I'd say it stands as a good example of the maxim, "You get what you pay for." Not that The Slayer's Guide to Minotaurs is worth nothing (despite the fact that, as a freebie bonus add-on to boost magazine sales, it actually costs nothing) - far from it, it does an adequate job at covering its topic, but "adequate" is about as far as I'd go.
Let's start with the cover, by Mongoose veteran artist Brent Chumley. Brent's done some excellent work in the past - most notably, the covers to The Slayer's Guide to Trolls and The Slayer's Guide to Winter Wolves - but this is far from his best work. For one thing, the minotaur's horns seem somewhat off-kilter. I am also unimpressed with his "hairiness" - he really looks like he's got a human body with fake hair glued on in places. Really, I would expect a minotaur to be covered in hair (if not fur) all over its body, not going from "no hair" to "incredibly thick, long hair" in the space of an inch. In addition, the shading of the minotaur's lower body (from the waist down) makes it look like he's wearing a pair of trousers. This looks especially silly since you can see part of his tail - forcing a vision of "Mickey Mouse pants" to the forefront of the viewer's brain is probably not a good idea when you want to make the monster in question look frightening. Finally, the minotaur depicted is apparently a "bearded" minotaur, one of the racial variants described in the work. This may have been chosen to intrigue the reader into picking up the book, but I would think it would have been better to go with the "standard" minotaur for the book's cover so it wouldn't look so different from what you'd expect. Plus, the reader isn't going to be able to pick up the book and flip through it after spotting the intriguing cover in the gaming section of his local shop, as it's shrinkwrap-bundled with Signs & Portents #1.
The inside front cover is the standard "Slayer's Guide" anatomical drawing. Sadly, this is the first "Slayer's Guide" I can think of where the artist doing this drawing was not Chris Quilliams. Gillian Pearce does a fair job at the task but she's certainly no Chris Quilliams. Gillian is also responsible for the 8 black and white illustrations and lair map sprinkled throughout the rest of the book, but these range from poor to fair: the minotaur on page 10 looks like it's holding a pointed stick because the double-ax heads blend into the stone background she's chosen, and I can't tell if the creatures at the minotaur's feet on page 16 are supposed to be rats or cats (both of which, according to the text, one can expect to find in a minotaur's labyrinth). They have rat tails, but cat faces (complete with vertical pupils). You make the call.
I was similarly unimpressed with the fiction this time around. Pages 3 and 23 are both devoted entirely to the same storyline that runs throughout the work, and just scream "filler." The characters are uninteresting for the most part and there's really not much action going on. I would have thought that if you're going to cram a 32-page "Slayer's Guide" into a mere 24 pages, the fiction would be the first thing on the chopping block to give the more important bits as much room as they need.
However, there are some very nice touches in here. I particularly enjoyed the fact that to a minotaur, having its horns broken off is a fate worse than death. (Remember that, the next time you need to humiliate a minotaur in your campaign!) I also appreciate that the suggested strategies for fighting minotaurs (you're safest in the water or on a steep slope) include combat penalties that the minotaur suffers when in those environments - useful bits you can use in your game.
As far as breaking new ground goes, Shawn creates some new subspecies of minotaur, but there's nothing all that unusual here. Besides the "brown" (or standard Monster Manual minotaur), there are now also the "shaggy," "bearded," and "noble" minotaurs, but the differences all pretty much break down to different amounts of hair, slightly different horns, and differing levels of size and strength. However, Shawn does some interesting things with the minotaur's bone altar to the Horned One (the minotaur god), allowing it to grant spell effects to the minotaur channeling its power or those viewing the altar. Unfortunately, he stops at a modified confusion effect to those viewing the altar or the boosting of the minotaur's physical stats or caster level. In a larger book (or one with less wasted pages of poor fiction), I'm sure there is much more that could have been done with this concept. Still, he does recover somewhat by coming up with two minotaur skills and five minotaur feats, which for some reason (contrary to other books in the "Slayer's Guide" line) show up in the "Reference List" section.
The sample lair is very simplistic for a labyrinth, especially one belonging to a minotaur that has already advanced to his third such maze (each one supposedly more complex than the latter). As far as mazes go there's not much too it, the main difficulty being that it's laced with various traps every so often (like many "Slayer's Guide" maps, this one has no scale, but at least it's been drawn on a square grid system, so it's pretty easy to assume each square is 5 feet). It also wasn't laid out very intelligently, as the only source of water is way at the other end of the labyrinth, about as far away from the minotaur's sleeping chambers as possible. I also find it difficult to believe that the minotaur is unaware that there's a black dragon lairing in his subterranean lake, especially after the text mentions how keen a minotaur's senses are.
All in all, this is one of my least favorite "Slayer's Guides," not because the material in it was particularly bad but because so much more could have been done with it. I understand that it was basically a promotional gimmick, and the extra 8 pages to make it "standard sized" were probably deemed unnecessary, but I think they really would have helped. Still, given that The Slayer's Guide to Minotaurs is essentially free when you pay the $4.95 for the 72-page first issue of Signs & Portents magazine, I can definitely recommend it as money well spent. After all, there are some good things you can pull out of it.
Overall rating: three stars (average).
