Deadly Gardens: Stiletto Palm
This installment of the Deadly Gardens-series clocks in at 5 pages, 1 page front cover, 1/2 page of SRD, leaving us with 3.5 pages of content, so let’s take a look!
The pdf begins with two new magic items, with the first being alluring rawhide, which may be thrown up to 20 ft. – the animals closest to the item will then be compelled to chew the magic item – which is pretty cool and reasonable, perhaps even a bit highly, priced. The second magic item would be the daisy bandolier, which is pretty cool: It nets a bonus to AC via daisies attached to the bandolier; the item grows these flowers and allows you to pluck them as magical shuriken – if they have stuck long enough to the bandolier before being plucked, these shurikens are more potent. Oh, and the bandolier requires sufficient sunlight. An awesome item…however, I do think that the petal-shurikens should have a caveat that they decay and can’t be sold, to avoid GP-cheesing.
The pdf also contains a total of 7 natural alchemical items. These include an aranea brain that can be consumed to temporarily gain access to one of the spells of the aranea as an SP. Giant bee saliva is intriguing – it lets you capture spores etc. and make them into a drug-like honey from such deadly spores. Really cool! Catoblepas musk glands can be either used as an insect-repellent or be thrown as a horrible stench-bomb. Choker tentacles can be used to make whips to add the grappling condition to whips and prevent the casting of verbal spells of those hit by the subpar whip weapon thus modified. So yeah, I’m good with that. Death Worm Bile deals acid and electricity explosions, while otyugh liver may be disgusting, but if you can swallow the disgusting treat, you’ll temporarily be safe from diseases. Finally, stiletto palm seed-spikes acts as a nice stake substitute.
Finally, obviously, there would be the eponymous creature – the CR 9 stiletto palm, a Huge predatory palm tree that not only can grab you, but can also implant its seeds via the at-range seed-spikes they can fire. The base attack deals both bludgeoning and piercing damage – which can be potentially a bit confusing regarding DRs. And yes, I am aware of the precedence, but considering how that case isn’t perfect, consider this a nitpick. Apart from this, we have a pretty cool critter here.
Conclusion:
Editing and formatting are very good, I noticed no serious issues. Layout adheres to a 2-column full-color standard and the pdf sports a really nice artwork in b/w for the critter in question. Also really cool: The pdf comes fully bookmarked with nested bookmarks -kudos for going the extra mile there!
Joe Kondrak, Matthew Carroll and Mike Welham deliver a fun, well-written little pdf here – the stiletto palm is a deadly, fun adversary and the supplemental material is fun as well. While this installment didn’t blow me completely away, the low asking price for this pdf does make it a nice purchase. Still, the critter itself is pretty conservative, which is why my final verdict will clock in at 4.5 stars, rounded down for the purpose of this platform.
You can get this nice, inexpensive pdf here on OBS!
Endzeitgeist out.
