Game: e-Minions
Publisher: Bastion Press
Series: d20
Reviewer: Wyrdmaster
Review Dated: 7th, January 2002
Reviewer’s Rating: 8/10 [ Really good ]
Total Score: 10
Average Score: 5.00
Okay. I’ll admit it. If you had asked me half way through 2001 whether I would be keying in my credit card details to pay for someone’s downloadable collection of Dungeons and Dragon monsters then I might have laughed at you. However, paying for 16 colourful monsters in pdf format is just what I did… and, surprisingly, I don’t regret it.
Why would you pay for a collection of monsters that you could easily make up yourself? You might do it for the same reason why you’d buy a pre-written adventure or even a rules supplement. It makes your life as a busy GM a darn site easier. I doubt anyone could really ask for much more from a download either, e-Minions presents a nice range of scary monsters in terms of power, style, tactics and setting. The fox maiden loans herself easily to an Oriental Adventures game, as the brain weed might snuggle with spooky efficiency into the woodlands of a Ravenloft game and the Amber Golem provides, I thought, enough surprises to keep the thrills in your high powered fantasy game.
Don’t get me wrong though. I think e-Minions was a lucky choice, it could so easily have been a total disaster. I would have been annoyed if had paid even a couple of bucks for a wash of tiny black and white text that was only worth picking through if you had a thing for clichés. Instead, e-Minions is bright, colourful, easy to read and has great typesetting. Whereas some small publishers struggle to segregate their Open License content from their protected copyrights, you’ll not even notice the highlighting of the open content in e-Minions until you read how they do it. The artwork is simply superb too. Given the success of the Monster Manual with its almost encyclopaedic style entries any monster only supplements will have to do more than grey boxes of stats that accompany interesting sounding names. E-Minion succeeds, the descriptive text and the nitty-gritty of game mechanics wrap cleverly around the crystal clear colour art. There’s more than that too, the “pages” of the virtual document are decorated with a baroque margin that alternates seamlessly from left to right and flares into a “title tab” on the side to provide addition space to name the cunning creature you’re currently reading about. You don’t have to squint at the sides of the pages to workout where you are in the document though; bold red titles keep you from getting lost among scrolling-text.
In order to ensure the value for money that is so important from the smaller companies (compared to the might Wizards) the writers at Bastion Press have put together the more outlandish creatures for the e-supplement. Rather than just producing wild men orc variants or yet another ‘taur the monsters in minions are more exotic and perhaps more rare. The down side of this is that you’re less likely to make heavy use of these critters, I see them more as something strange to dumbfound your annoying rules lawyer of a player. The advantage of this, though, is that many of the beasties have a whole range of special and unusual powers. I felt that the paragraphs did these extra abilities justice and provided more information than just “this ability is similar to power X from book Y”. I thought usual twists like the Groundling’s “Undead Cloak” showed that more thought had been put into the creation of the monsters than just simple sword-bait for your players. The suggested ideas of how to integrate the beasts into your campaign were an even better idea, in some cases I thought the despicable situation was created first and then a monster dreamed up as something particularly suited to the scene. That’s all right too, that’s perhaps how all monsters should be introduced to your scenario. Lets see an end to having to gnolls inexplicably sitting, waiting for years, in tiny under ground cave complexes.
