It's an exceptional book filled with enough concepts to fuel years of adventures. I've never encountered a monster compendium quite like this before.

This book uses the OSR "Lamentations of the Flame Princess" system, but attempts to remain as system agnostic as possible. If you are a DM, GM, Referee, ST, Keeper, whatever.. if you are looking to take a party into the Underworld, then I cannot reccomend this book enough. It describes an underworld that is Hostile, Alien, and Frightening. The Bestiary (pp 12-180) is full of strange creatures and societies. Some beasts are like the "Sonic Pigs!" (pp 115) and are hillarious and strange, "The Rapture" (pp 107) is psychologically terrifying, and the disturbing skin-eating Eigengrau (pp 50). I would highly reccomend GMs think hard about the tone of their game when selecting from this section. My group were scarred of the Gigaferret (pp 30) and the Tachyon Troll (pp 131), I did not introduce the Spectre of the Brocken (pp 116) or Arachnopolis Rex (pp 24) as the disturbing nature would be too much horror for my group. Scarred is good, revolted is not. The setting advice is fantastic, really thinking deeply about the effects of light and darkness (pp 186), and a really stellar discussion on climbing and how to use it in your game (pp 210-219). The undrground map generation section (pp 222-278) is thick with information about a unique and nuanced way to create cave systems that underscores the alien 3 dimensional way these spaces operate. There are excellent tables to generate Cave Systems (pp 234-235) and encounters (pp 258-259 and 260) in the Generating the Veins section (pp 221-280), and if you want to add a particularly nasty enviromental challenge to your encounters Twelve Kinds of Dark (pp 332-335) is a great place to think.

My personal experiance with this book has inspired me to create an underdark for my D&D 5e game that is much darker. My players know that when they go into that dark, that anything can happen to them, and there is no chance that their characters will be the same if they return. They still tell stories about that time the Gigaferret grabbed the theif and dragged them into the dark where no one else could find them. They always do double-watches now, and no one ever leaves the radius of the light. The bard got lost down there and never returned. The monk lost their ability to identify themselves by their ancestry ("I'm not a goblin, are you crazy?" they say), the fighter can't stay in a quiet place because they just hear the screaming in their mind, and the human wizard developed a penchant for cannibalism (a secret she keeps from the rest of the party to this day). This book is directly responsible for the dark, dangerous and terrifying underdark that I created and that I think was one of the most successful portions of my game that I have ever run.

One of the best books out there for OSR! Would highly recommend it for some dark and original flavour

Easiest way to improve the underdark, a better way to describe familiar creatues so they are instantly recognized but more evocative.

This is a great supplament for an underdark campaign. It has great potential for world building and encounter building. It doesn't contain a plot point campaign or specific adventures, but if you are doing an OSR game with heavy cave exploration, it is pretty useful. The useful thing about it is being able to come up with a playable encounter in moments with the handy tables. New monsters, weird civilizations, and differant types of darkness are well worth the purchase price.

The art by Scrap Princess is a love or hate thing. It has a very distinct style and it has the impression the creatures there in are what the adventurers actully see jumping out of the darkenss at them. That give is a indistict look, that I like, but some of my players felt was underwealming. Art is a personal thing, so no accounting for taste.

I purchased this product simply for the monsters, which I had heard were all very original. I would agree that many of them are, and I definitely found a number of very interesting things which I can either build off of or use in a game of my own. However, I besides the gripes some may have about the art (I don't really care for it, but it isn't extremely important. I get the idea of what the monster is) the problem I found with many of them was the heavy meta-narrative tied to them, as well as many descriptions used relying on modern equivalents. To me, these sorts of things would be very immersion breaking to a group, telling them in a Medieval fantasy game that "the monster sounds like a car engine that just won't turn over no matter how many times you turn the key" and so on.

I also personally didn't care much for the general prose of the writing, but again, that is a personal sort of thing. I would say that these sorts of things can work for the right group, but that I do have such a group.

Fuck. Yeah.

This is one of those books. I'd rate it alongside other great RPG books like the Guide to Glorantha and the Temple of Elemental Evil. It makes you itch to start playing a game.

Well written and full of superb ideas that you can use in any underground campaign. There's a good dose of revulsion and body horror.

It includes useful mechanics for climbing that feel like the person who wrote the rules has climbed up a rock face. Then distilled that knowledge down into a quick flavourful sub system.

The verticality and variety of the map generation system will keep you and your players well entertained. Some of the locations are truly strange.

The monsters are similarly varied and some of them will leave your players thinking "What was that?"

If you're thinking of running an underground campaign, buy this book.

This book is well written and very entertaining. It has lots of material that a DM/GM/Referee can draw upon to generate some very memorable campaign moments; it is clear the author spent a great deal of time considering the psychology of creatures and societies that exist in darkness.

For the writing, I give this book a full 5 stars. However, and this is a big one, the art in this book is a hair north of atrocious. Quite literally, it's the worst art I've seen in an RPG book ever. So much so, in fact, that I found it quite jarring when compared to the quality of the writing. I understand what the artist was trying to accomplish with the style, but it failed miserably. There are better ways to convey a sense of dread, fear and the unknown than resorting to senseless scribbles. Art that can be outshone by my 5 year old has no place in a book with prose of this quality.

3 stars.

It's hard to talk about this book without descending (no pun intended) into hyperbole. This is the best RPG book I have ever read, hands down, and I've read a lot. This book is so dense and richly layered that it's hard to consume any one part of the book. You have to take it in in peices and then go back and look at the bits you already read with fresh eyes.

About half the book is a monster manual, but it's nothing like what you get from a popular magic-user that lives on the edge of the ocean. Each monster is a just that, a monster: a horrific, terrifying, and unique abberation. There are no large crocodiles. There are crocodiles that have a symbiotic relationship with an intelligent fungi that uses them as an emissary between civilizations. There are no golems. There is a creature that is patchwork of stone and clay who has been wandering the veins, replacing bits and pieces of themselves, for millenia, with a random table that gives you descriptions like the Nightmare Lord of the ancient Demi-Kaz, the City on the border of Dawn, who survived the Great Flood and learned her art from the gods, and now quests for her heart, lost in a box on a sunken ship in the pits of the deepest ocean so she can destroy it and die. After reading this, you'll never want to say "and you see an owlbear" again.

After that is a section on the cultures of the veins. Again, these are reskinned human cultures. These are completely alien people with alien thoughts. Each one is singular and unique. They will be a challenge to roleplay, but done well, could be amazing.

After that is sections on how to build the veins and run encounters in them. The sections on how to run food and light are well-written, and they strike a delicate balance between handwaving away an important aspect and turning your players into accountants at spreadsheets. The section on how to generate the veins though is absolute gold. It's incredibly easy to do, and it gives you caves like nothing I've seen in an rpg. These are realistic caves. These aren't a leisurely jaunt through 10 by 10 halls that lead to big rooms perfect for manuvering around animated skeletons. These are small, cramped places in the dark, where you can get lost and die without ever seeing an enemy. One description goes like this:

"They can expect to be enfolded by stone on all sides and must go in darkness or push a light ahead of them. Often the only way to get through is by deliberately relaxing the muscles so that the volume of the body becomes more liquid and pliable. If the user becomes afraid, they may tense up and become trapped."

If you are taking your players below ground, you need Veins of the Earth.

This is top notch stuff. It offers a take on the underdark that is more original and thought-provoking than any similar supplement. It also contains new seemingly-very-useful rules systems for encumbrance, starvation, lighting, and climbing. DISCLAIMER: I have not yet used it in actual play.

This book is rad as hell.

Some content is a little too silly for my campaign, but might not be for yours.

It can all be tweaked anyway.

And the art is fantastic.

A++ would buy again.

Veins of the Earth puts all other "underdark" themed sourcebooks to shame.

I would recommend this book to anyone considering a game in a subterranean realm. Veins of the Earth provides the tools and inspiration to make such a place as alien and scary as it really should be, and to test your players and their characters with challenges they might not have considered before.

It's clear that the author either has experience in real-world caving, or else has done a great deal of research into caving. I've done it myself and the writing in this book quickly dredged up my experiences with uncanny precision. Letterboxes, sumps, crawlways, chimneys, flowstone... the absolute darkness. It's all here.

The crowning glories of Veins of the Earth are the Rapture; the cave generation and mapping system; light, lamps, and "lumes"; and the expanded climbing and exploration mechanics. I also really enjoyed the entry on the dErO. These alone are worth the price of admission.

If I were to offer any constructive criticism (I have a physical copy too - which is of astounding quality), I'd suggest settlements and quests. There is some information on a few cultures in the Veins, but information on living spaces is almost non-existent. I wouldn't expect a detailed account of an unlikely underground metropolis, but some guidelines on where the PCs can expect to buy food, light, equipment, hirelings, etc. (without being enslaved or otherwise betrayed) would be extremely valuable. The Veins are also presented as an extremely dangerous and uncomfortable place to venture. It is clearly the GM's function to come up with quests and macguffins for the PCs to look for underground, but a few suggestions would have been very welcome. I'm pretty sure my players would just say "nope" after a few days in the Veins unless there was something extremely important or valuable keeping them down there.

In conclusion, this is an excellent supplement and successfully captures the foreboding darkness and alien architecture of a massive underground space. GMs should buy it and read it, at least for the four topics I mentioned above. Your caves will never be the same again.

Everything Patrick makes is amazing. He's a wordy bastard who is needlessly obtuse with some descriptions or ideas but he's also endlessly imaginative and qutie clever in his handling of the mechanics of caving and underground exploration.

Get this, get Deep carbon observatory, get maze of the blue medusa. Get it all.

This book is excellent. It is designed to be hacked into any game. The monsters are interesting and usable. I love the art style. This is the Underdark supplement I never knew that I wanted and so much more.

I am using it with Macchiato Monsters instead of LotFP and having a lot of fun watching my PC's slowly dwindle their food and light supplies.