 |
| ★★★★☆ |
Hello.
If you are simply here looking for our opinion on or a recommendation for buying this product then here it is; Buy it. It is real value for money. You have 23 jungle encounters for your Dungeons & Dragons 5e game, written by 17 individual creators, all with varying degrees of writing experience. It costs $6.95 as from the 16th December 2017. You can't go wrong.
We're assuming you have a copy now, so let's get on with the meat of this review.
What we liked.
Let's start with what we really liked about Encounters in the Savage Jungles. Oddly enough its greatest strength is also its greatest weakness, and that is diversity.
With 17 authors work here, there is something for everyone to enjoy. Each creator interprets what a classic encounter might look like and injects some of their own personality and wit into it. During the organisation of this project, Jeff created a template for each author to consider whilst coming up with their encounter ideas. Each encounter gets a brief synopsis, a CR value and a type (combat, roleplay/social and exploration). Thee are all very useful for us DMs, as there is a lot of content to get to grips with.
Extra content. The author has not only provided a print friendly version, but also the individual map files so you can enjoy playing this online too. This is not done enough I'm afraid (I'm just as guilty), and trust me you all will appreciate the extra effort by the creator here.
Layout and readability. The layout and artwork I found to be excellent, however the readability was variable - please refer to 'What we didn't like'. All in all this product is put together nicely, and there are enough ideas to spice up your jungle campaign no end. Oo! Is this Chult? Or is it not Chult? Well let's find out shall we..?
What we didn't like.
Due to the fact that there are so many authors of differing levels of writing experience, you will find that some of the encounters are well below par. I would go as far to say that a few encounters are almost unplayable in their complete form. HOWEVER, this doesn't mean that the individual elements or ideas within them are useless, not at all in fact! Every encounter has merits and useful content. If you wish to read our reviews of each encounter (yes, all 23 of them) then please click here or on the link at the bottom of this review.
The other niggle we found was that there are many references to the official Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks, like the Monster Manual (MM) in particular. Unfortunately the page numbers have been deliberately left off due to the many different print versions of the same rulebooks which are available. Yeah we understand; however, the numbers may only be incorrect by 2-5 pages. So why not just do it anyway?
There were also some spelling and grammatical errors, but they did not detract from the enjoyment of this product, so let's not mention them again. Finally, we think this product could have made more effort to segue into the Tomb of Annihilation adventure book. Much has been spoken about how ToA has a shortage of the adventure content required to level PCs up fast enough to take on the tomb of the nine gods. A couple of the encounters make reference to the jungles of Chult or a specific section of ToA, but the rest of them skirt around the idea.
We feel that perhaps this was done so that the product would stand the test of time, so that Encounters in the Savage Jungles would remain relevant long after we have forgotten about ToA. The reality (we feel) is that ToA will probably have a long shelf life, and still be an important part of the 5th edition landscape for many years to come. We'd like to have seen more ways to connect EitSJ with ToA. Just saying, don't be hating on us.
Honourable mentions.
So there are some ideas in this collection which deserve an extra special mention before we go. There are quite a few inventive maps in here, in particular the one from Dam Kobolds. Several NPCs had life artistically breathed into them by their authors, for example Evans from The Butcher and Asad the merchant. The audacity and in-your-face craziness of the Ouroboros was not lost on us either. To count up all the excellent points in this product would probably forge a new review in itself, however before we go, a big thank you to Tony Petrecca for introducing us to his new comical side kick and NPC called TimReh. And of course a multitude of really quite decent tribal arrow variations from Jeff Stevens in No Ordinary Projectile.
OK, so that was our first review! Hope you enjoyed it. As you can see we haven't gotten too lost in the detail, but our 'full monty' review does take a closer look at each encounter though.
Have a fantastic time with this product, and please let us know what you think to our review, and what you might like us to review next. See you next time.
 |
| click here for FULL review ★★★★☆ |
We love D&D. We adore creativity and focus on the language of surprise and awe. Sometimes we may seem overly critical of some writers work. It's not because 'we be hating', so please give us some credit. Pushing writers to grow and consider both the DMs and players perspective is what we live for. Yeah, we can be mean, it's easy to be critical. However we see the beauty in all your work and will continue to bring that to the surface too. Finally, all our links presented here on this page to the DMs Guild are spiked with our affiliate membership code. If you click though to the DMs Guild site from this blog, we own you forever. No! I mean we may see a few cents thrown our way for recommending a title or 2. Show us social media love. Don't troll.
Did you miss all the previous editions of Savage Encounters? Please click on the images below and check them out.
Did you miss all the previous editions of Savage Encounters? Please click on the images below and check them out.
Comments
Post a Comment