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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DM_Jeff" data-source="post: 2008863" data-attributes="member: 3687">The Slayer's Guide to Sahaugin is the latest in the Slayers Series of guides to all things monstrous in d20 fantasy roleplaying.The Slayer's Guide to SahuaginBy Andrew BoswellCover art by Ralph Horsley$9.95 each, 32-page sourcebookISBN: 1-903980-14-3 Introduction: The Slayer's Guide to Sahuagin follows a long stream of slayer's guides from the prolific folks at Mongoose who have delivered a number of quality game items for 3rd edition fantasy. Slayer's guides take an often overlooked monster or race and detail it to expand a campaign, help build more living, exciting encounters and provide DM's with information to make the players sit up and take notice. Review: The Guide to Sahuagin has a dark and dangerous cover painting depicting two of the sea devils closing, a great view of their form. Interior art is all black and white and is fairly consistent. It's all good, with many pieces being very good. Following the familiar Mongoose layout, borders are attractive and fair, and text density is very good. Layout and design are excellent, with sections, headers and rules clearly identified at a glance. Editing appears flawless.The book begins with an introduction to the undersea foes, and sets the tone for the information to be had inside. While many Mongoose books have boxed shaded short fiction detailing the subject from the point of view of various fantasy persona. This book offers the same, but it's all from the point of view of a single adventurer with lots of experience with sahuagin. This helps give the book a focused feel when reading. First up is a good look at sahuagin physiology including their language and body movement and senses. While sahuagin have a language that could be described like a dolphin's, it's unique in it's own, and is often accented by subtle body movement. We get a good look at the sahuagin putting their natural skills to use in a discussion of their stalking and striking techniques. This is also where we learn of the ancient curve-balls that nature throws these people: the mystery of a very small percentage of sahuagin eggs hatching like a sea-elf if within 100 miles of a sea-elf community, and the mutated mighty four-armed sahuagin!Next is a look at the undersea habitat and society structure of this fishfolk. A very helpful sidebar helps DM's writing their campaign figure where to place provinces and kingdoms of the sahuagin on their maps and how to populate them. Sahuagin, as is known to many old-schooler are a lawful evil, tight-society of evil raiders and killers from the deep. This book dives into that exploring their hierarchy, rites of ascention in the pecking order and that which guides all sahuagin: their religion. To sum up, the religion consists of a tri of gods known as It That Is Eaten, She Who Teaches, and He Who Eats. And from this we learn about the race's myth of creation, the hatred against surface dwellers, why and how the females of the society are the teachers and priestesses of the race, and that the strength of warriors proves one superior in all terms. Each of the gods grant listed domains to the priestesses and two new spells are detailed: Natural Presence (allowing sahaugin to swim among other life forms but calming them at the same time) and Threshing, a spell to confuse opponents in underwater combat. After this is a discussion of priestess in society and their relation in order with the King. Two specific prestige classes for sahuagin are presented, the Royal Guard (mighty warriors of the sovereignty) and the Royal High Priestess, most potent cleric of the sahuagin race. Each details five levels of special powers and abilities unique to these professions among the sahuagin. The book gives full details on their methods of warfare answering the who, what, why and how's they employ in their raids, reasons for combat, and methods of attack. This segues easily into the next section on roleplaying sahuagin, because there isn't too much to note: these evil folk are unwilling to negotiate any terms, and they can't be bribed or cajoled into mercy. This is also the section with the only piece of artwork that, while good, is not consistent with the others in terms of how these creatures look.It's also neat to note an ongoing theme within the text reasoning the sahuagin's actions and their ties to their religion. That while the sahuagin may be evil within game definitions, they clearly see themselves as good and all surface-dwellers as evil.As with other guides, they don't leave you with cool toys and no place to play, there are 4 well-thought out adventure scenario hooks and a full village complete with sahuahin character stats and descriptions. Rounding out the book are a collection of sahuagin game stats to help the DM prepare scenarios with different sahuagin with different class levels and the roles they serves the society, enabling you to populate en entire village hierarchy with what's provided. The d20 work is detailed and in good working order.Conclusion: The Slayer's Guide to Sahuagin is a very useful resource to any DM looking to expand her waterborne or shoreline campaign. While the page count is the same as others in the series, this comes off as meatier, more info, and more immediately applicable game rules. It meets the criteria set in this introduction with flying colors and any maritime (or coastal) campaign would do well to keep this in the DM's arsenal. Well done!-Jeff Ibach</blockquote>

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