Treasures & Trinkets: I loot the minion’s body! (system neutral)

This installment of the “I loot the…”-series clocks in at 12 pages, 1 page front cover, 2 pages of advertisement, 1 page ToC/editorial, 1 page SRD, 1 page back cover, leaving us with 6 pages of content, so what do we get?

Well, the first dressing table herein contains keepsakes and sports no less than 100 of them: From small stones taken from invaded and destroyed castles to pointed fangs that ostensibly may have once belonged to a vampire to stuffed kid’s bears and miniature urns…or betrothal tokens, there is a tint of sentimentality and storytelling potential inherent in these, making them fitting and, as a whole, a well-crafted table that can tell little stories and provide hooks to further develop.

Table number two features 100 entries as well. Minions have a hard lot in life and they often live where they work (commuting to evil mastermind’s base of operations tends to be a deadly endeavor with all those hydras, undead and traps…) and thus, their backpacks or chests contain a diverse collection of miscellanea to bring some sort of relaxation to their lives…or hint at ambitions beyond their employ. From engraved pewter tankards to ship’s logs, romance novels, bones sufficient to complete a human skeleton (why?), badly forged writs of safe passage, collections of mismatched forks – from the surreal to the mundane, from the eccentric to the desperate, these are interesting, in that they may actually make the PCs look for a particular minion – if the minion wishes to escape, for example, that may be an angle they can work!

Table number 3 deals with the contents of pouches minions may be carrying around – once again, the total selection is 100 entries strong and allows for some nice characterizations: A poppet with pins stuck inside; vials of squid ink; charms said to enhance fertility, stolen city watch insignia… the table continues the tradition of the previous two ones in that it manages to add depth to the faceless minions, in that it may make them stand out and receive some sketches of a personality. What more could I ask from this?

Conclusion:

Editing and formatting are excellent, I noticed no hiccups. Layout adheres to Raging Swan Press’ elegant two-column b/w-standard and the pdf comes with nice b/w-artworks. The pdf is fully bookmarked for your convenience and in two versions: One optimized for the printer and one for screen-use. Kudos for that!!

Kat Evans delivers big time in this cool, evocative supplement – which is difficult: After all, minions are pretty much defined by being the faceless legions. Any pdf managing to add depth to them with the roll of but a single die deserves applause in my book. Now, this is very much identical to the “PFRPG”-version in that it does not contain crunch or system-specific items, but unlike in my review of said version, I can’t well complain about that here, right?

Well, yeah…but, as it turns out, the series has reached a very high level of quality at this point…and compared to some other installments, this feels like one tiny step below the apex…so I’ll settle for 5 stars for this one as well, just short of my seal of approval.

You can get this pdf here on OBS!

You can directly support Raging Swan Press here on patreon!

Endzeitgeist out.

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