| I?ve always liked the idea of swarms in D&D. Basically, a single centipede, or beetle, or mosquito isn?t going to make much of a challenge, even for a single first-level character. Pack a bunch of them together into a writhing, hungry, ten-by-ten mass, and you?ve got yourself a party, though. And that?s a swarm: a group of small, usually mindless, creatures acting as one, much larger, creature. Notebook Essentials: Swarms, Stampedes and Skirmishes, by Throwing Dice Games, takes that idea and expands it in the most logical of ways: by applying it to larger creatures.
The product starts off by going over the basics of swarms and giving a few examples. It goes on to offer feats for swarms and special abilities that multiple swarms can gain when they join together. Then it moves on to stampedes. A stampede is, basically, a swarm of large quadrupeds, like horses or bison. The book also covers skirmishes, which are a way to treat an out-of-control melee of humanoids (or other, similar, creatures) as a single creature, rather than tracking each creature?s initiative and actions. Both new ?creature? types offer ways to run different, very hectic encounters with a lot less bookkeeping and headache on the part of the GM. I even got to run an encounter with a skirmish just last night (a barroom brawl, specifically), and it did a good job of capturing the flavor that I wanted for the encounter, while allowing me to minimize the number of individual creatures that I had to keep track of. Definitely a plus in my book. The book also offers some spells for dealing with swarms (or creating them), and even offers a sample epic swarm: the skull swarm, which is a swarm of demiliches. Nasty stuff, trust me.
Overall, I?m pretty pleased with this product. It?s definitely a no-frills affair, weighing it at only ten pages (including the OGL declaration), with very little art. However, it does have the advantage of getting right to the point. The book gives you useful, balanced rules in a clear, straightforward, and easy-to-follow manner, which is more than I can say for a lot of fancier products. It?s not without its problems, but most of those are minor. There are a few editing mistakes, the worst of which is an apparent copy-paste error (a new spell, greater summon swarm, seems to have been copied from the SRD?s summon swarm; however, while the statistical information was changed, the body text seems to have been left the same).
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<b>LIKED</b>: This product expanded on a useful and evocative creature type in a very logical way, giving us two new very useful creature types. The rules are clear and seemingly well-balanced.<br><br><b>DISLIKED</b>: Not a whole lot. There were some editing mistakes, but nothing major. The skull swarm isn?t really suitable for characters below, say, level 60 or so, and so it?s probably not that useful, but I imagine it was probably included as a gag, anyway.<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Very Good<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Very Satisfied<br>
Rating: [4 of 5 Stars!] |
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