If you are looking for something dastardly and dead to toss at your party, check out Savage Encounters latest Villains and Lairs IV: The Dead, Damned, and Decaying for a collection of awesome baddies with rich backstories and tons of utility.
All titles that are part of this series are ones that we think highly of and have found great uses for! And, they’re ones we hope you’ll enjoy too!
Review
The Tavern
I’m a sucker for awesome fantasy art. This cover is striking! Not only is the art in this book aesthetically pleasing, it is also functional. The cover introduces the Lonely Soul Tavern, a fully realized meeting place for the less-than-alive.
The Lonely Soul Tavern is amazing. Jeff Stevens has accomplished something truly incredible: a fresh take on a tried and true quest hub. The Lonely Soul Tavern has everything a DM could ask for. There is a compelling backstory involving an enigmatic, compassionate necromancer. There is a bounty board that features jobs for adventuring parties of all alignments. There is a fighting pit with interesting surprises that allows quibbling creatures to settle their differences.
Most importantly, magic suffuses the tavern allowing the undead to speak Common and mitigating much of their more repellent qualities. Your party will be able to interact with spooks that would ordinarily be out of reach. The tavern is awesome and I’m looking forward to incorporating it into our game.
The Villains
The variety of dead and damned villains is truly staggering. This product features 40 amazing new beings with backstories, motivations, and uses. The various contributors were careful to make certain that these dastardly demons were more than one-dimensional sacks of HP. There are a minimum of three different uses for each villain that range from assassin to target to ally to informant.
This supplement would be worth the price if it only included the stat blocks. For any DM looking to surprise their players with a foe their seasoned players haven’t encountered before, Villains and Lairs IV offers powerful nasties that will provide a challenge to the most prepared of parties.
I am especially excited about Beth’s Green Eater, a fallen paladin consumed by the very natural forces he had sworn to serve. The Green Eater exemplifies many of the best qualities of this collection in that he has a complex backstory and motivations that could put him in league -or- in conflict with your adventuring party.
Don’ t tell my players, but I’m also really excited about The Seventh. A few of the contributors tied their villain’s backstories into the published materials. The Seventh has a connection to Waterdeep that I am super interested in exploring.
The Lairs
Locations factor heavily into many of the villains’ stories. These lairs are wonderfully realized by the incredible Dyson Logos, Elven Tower, and Jean Lorber. Not only do you get 40 villains, you also get 10 little dungeons that provide hours and hours of play!
The lairs are diverse (I’m sure that you are seeing a theme here). They provide a great challenge to parties of level 1 to 20 and beyond. There really is so much good content here that parties of any size will find tons of utility out of this supplement.
In Closing
Pick. This. Up. You get 165+ pages of terrific work from many of DM’s Guild’s biggest names for less than 15 bucks.
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