Wilderness Dressing: Travellers

This pdf is 14 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page advertisement, 2 pages editorial, 1 page ToC/foreword, 1 page SRD, 1 page back cover, leaving us with 7 pages of content, so let’s take a look, shall we?

Since full statblocks would blow the page-count out of all proportions (and most likely wouldn’t be required), this pdf opts for fluff-only tables that mention the respective classes and levels of the people encountered, but not more – to get right out of the way what kind of information you get. The first table deals with peddlers, merchants and traders and covers  25 entries over  2 pages, wherein we find the whole gamut,. mostly focused on low-level peddlers, dealing in everything from kind gnomes trading clockwork toys to shady information/poison-brokers and even a tiefling who wants to buy…your soul.

The second table, covering bards, minstrels and troubadours, also spanning 25 entries over 2 pages, feature elven twins (one dances, one plays), seamstresses with ambitions for hackneyed and problematic plays, professional half-orc pugilists and incognito spies even.

The third table covers mercenaries, spellswords and freebooters, again sporting 25 entries – and I like that warriors get some love in the respective entries, making a difference between professional fighters and warriors. Beyond that, there also is a gnomish security expert, a questing paladin, professional safe-crackers and finally one hilarious, garish tengu-thief who doesn’t understand why you left your valuables in that chest locked in the vault beyond those traps where he could so easily get it… Great one!

The final page is taken up by a massive 1-page b/w-artwork of an elven maiden sitting on a tree in the forest – nice one!

Conclusion:

Editing and formatting are top-notch, I didn’t notice any glitches. Layout adheres to RSP’S 2-column b/w-standard and the pdf comes fully bookmarked and with two different versions, one optimized for screen-use and one for print. The artwork is nice indeed.

Greg Marks has a nice array of different fluffy encounters here for your perusal and the respective travelers should add some nice color for your overland travels and I really like the respective entries – and hope we’ll see one such installment for e.g. deserts, jungles, the far north etc. – since the characters in here are mostly looking like they fit best in a default fantasy environment. All in all, a very good supplement with nothing to complain about, though personally, I would have loved more entries like the respective last ones of the tables – for these tend to be the weird, really cool ones.

My final verdict will hence clock in at a solid 5 stars.

You can get this neat array of travellers to enrich your roads here on OBS and here on d20pfsrd.com’s shop!

Endzeitgeist out.

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