20 Things: Goblin Lair (system neutral)
20 Things: Goblin Lair (system neutral)
This installment of Raging Swan Press’ system-neutral #20-series clocks in at 12 pages, 1 page front cover, 2 pages of advertisement, 1 page editorial, 1 page SRD, 1 page back cover, leaving us with 5 pages of content, so let’s take a look!
All righty, we begin with 10 sample goblin personalities: From matron Ghalga Many-whelps to long-armed Fongoa Strangelsgood, these are pretty cool gobo-ideas – I know they made me want to generate stats for them, which is always a good sign regarding dressing.
After these, we take a look at 10 looting entries – goblin common room and goblin chieftain’s room each get 10 entries. The former can e.g. sport rickety pseudo-thrones, curtains of small bones…pretty cool. The commoner rooms can sport black cauldrons, barrels of spirits – all in all, both lists are cool. However, there are 10 more such entries for goblin guard rooms and 10 things that can be found outside a goblin lair.
The former may contain piles of firewood rigged to collapse, crude carpets, etc. – and, rather cool: There are some suggestions to add traps to the dressing pieces – big kudos. Outside of goblin lairs, tracks, trees with observation platforms – some of these dressing bits can actually make for cool complications to spontaneously insert into modules that are too easy on the PCs.
There also are 20 things to be found in a goblin’s pouch – including snacks from toasted scorpion on a stick to pickles in string. They also contain crude jewelry, teeth – weird stuff, appropriate for goblins. Sounds familiar? Well, that’s because this table uses entries from Dungeon Dressing: Goblin’s Pockets. Finally, we have a page featuring 10 basic descriptions, 10 combats and tactics and 10 sample treasures, allowing for an easy generator to create a vast diversity of goblins – including some hilarious peculiarities.
The final page of the pdf is devoted to goblin past times: 20 general activities and 10 minor encounter-set-ups complement the pdf. The general activities are solid, but not necessarily inspired – it’s more of a basic series of entries for spontaneous use at the table. Entries contain e.g. “loitering” or “arguing” – I wished this was a bit more evocative.
Conclusion:
Editing and formatting are top-notch, I noticed no significant glitches. Layout adheres to Raging Swan Press’ elegant two-column b/w-standard and the pdf comes fully bookmarked for your convenience. The b/w-artworks are really nice. Additionally, the pdf comes in two versions, one optimized for the printer and one for screen-use – kudos for going the extra mile there! The pdf sports several pieces of nice b/w-artworks.
Creighton Broadhurst, Eric Hindley and Alex Riggs deliver a solid dressing file here. The entries are diverse and cool, generally well-written and cover a broad spectrum of fun entries. At the same time, I couldn’t help myself and felt that the book didn’t exactly reach genius-levels. It’s well-made and worth getting, if not necessarily brilliant. My final verdict will hence clock in at 4.5 stars, rounded down for the purpose of this platform.
You can get this nice dressing-book here on OBS!
You can directly support Raging Swan Press here on patreon!
Endzeitgeist out.
