DriveThruRPG.com
Browse Categories
$ to $















Back
pixel_trans.gif
Other comments left for this publisher:
You must be logged in to rate this
pixel_trans.gif
Cerberus Royalty Free Clip Art Pack
by Nick S. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 06/21/2022 12:22:48

Maybe the star rating got my hopes up, but I was disappointed by what I found inside. They say it's either quantity or quality and it's clear quantity was sought after here. To be blunt, I would not recommend this for anyone shopping around for professional quality illustrations. Prospective buyers should take a long hard look at the full size preview and know that this represents some of the higher quality pieces to be found within.

Firstly the art itself is VERY amateur, it seems to be a collection of high schooler level portfolios featuring a mix of crude photoshop drawings with shading so blurry it hurts the eyes, and pencil sketches in a mish-mash of styles and quality. Every page is a random assortment of genres and subjects with a random assortment of post production effects. The pencil sketches that have been blown up in size give away the reality that these are small doodles from a sketchbook rather than full size pieces, and the photoshop illustrations overly smooth and blurry shading displays the lack of experience in the artists behind them.

While the technical skill is obviously low, there are a handful of pieces which might actually qualify as useful, it's unfortunate then that these pieces are poorly collated with no attempt at organisation, or ease of use. There is no transparency meaning the aformentioned post production light flares, shadows, and fades various pieces have are there to stay and if you want to use them on anything but a white background you're out of luck. Some of the art is also mysteriously overlapped with a white glow effect from other pieces that leaves bits of them missing, and some are seemingly cropped from a larger piece, and the backgrounds provided are reminiscent of the early 90's straight-to-print boom (think early Vampire the Masquerade and third party d20 system products).

In spite of the above, this work clearly shows the up-and-coming work of a variety of artists, but if anything the document is premature. Some peices would make for a fine deviant art portfolio, but sadly help little as $20 pack of illustrations for fantasy RPG's. Given the royalty free artwork available across the internet, this document is simply not competitive with a free google search.

My recommendation would be to properly organise the book, remove the layer styles, show pieces at the correct resolution, and then - and only then - take $15 off the price tag and maybe it would be worth it for amateur writers looking for simple cheap illustrations.



Rating:
[2 of 5 Stars!]
Cerberus Royalty Free Clip Art Pack
Click to show product description

Add to DriveThruRPG.com Order

pixel_trans.gif
Cerberus Royalty Free Clip Art Pack
by David R. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 02/12/2016 01:08:43

This is a nice and generous collection of artwork. In particular, I appreciate the variety and creative choices used for the sketchs. I am looking forward to the ways in which I'll be able to incorporate this artwork with my rpg storylines in the future.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
pixel_trans.gif
The Ruins of Tenkuhran
by Richard K. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 02/19/2014 19:43:39

This module shows promise. The background story is good, but there really isnt a reason for the players to involve themselves in this. This poses a problem to groups that demand more story than killing and treasure hunting. Also, the descriptions are quite long and with no boxed in (or highlighted) text to read to the players. It has some nice B/W artwork and maps - the maps are absolutely amazing.. textured and 3D-looking. The adventure has a rumor table, pre-generated characters and some nice challenges which I will not spoil here. With a more involved story that gave reasons for the characters to go adventuring and a more friendly DMing text, this module would rank 5 stars easily. I'll go with 3 stars plus 1 extra star for some of the best B/W maps I've seen here.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
The Ruins of Tenkuhran
Click to show product description

Add to DriveThruRPG.com Order

pixel_trans.gif
Creator Reply:
Thank you Richard!
pixel_trans.gif
Cerberus Stock Art - The Next Decade of Fantasy: Volume 1
by Jim W. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 07/05/2013 19:46:46

Once again, another fantastic product. Tons of great pictures, predominantly fantasy themed with a couple of modern zombie related ones. And who doesn't love Zombies!!!!! Braaaaaaaains!



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Cerberus Stock Art - The Next Decade of Fantasy: Volume 1
Click to show product description

Add to DriveThruRPG.com Order

pixel_trans.gif
Cerberus Stock Art: A Decade Of Fantasy
by Jim W. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 06/28/2013 19:37:20

Fantastic buy! The artwork is very high quality, mostly fantasy themed with some sci-fi. Each picture is a full page spread in full colour, with smaller greyscale images of same reduced to 4 on a page at the end. As a publisher I found this art pack to be of excellent value and am very pleased with the purchase. Mr Calkins was easily contactable and a pleasure to deal with and I look forward to see what else he can put up on the site :)



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Cerberus Stock Art: A Decade Of Fantasy
Click to show product description

Add to DriveThruRPG.com Order

pixel_trans.gif
Cerberus Stock Art - Winter Warlord
by Thomas C. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 05/31/2013 12:25:52

Fantastic art. Dead Goblin games is glad to have included this in our module "The Jackal Lord of Baruth". Well done..this is an awesome illustration.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
Cerberus Stock Art - Winter Warlord
Click to show product description

Add to DriveThruRPG.com Order

pixel_trans.gif
Cerberus Stock Art: Zero One Three
by Timothy B. [Featured Reviewer] Date Added: 05/02/2013 13:20:37

20 high-quality, high-res images (about $1 an image). Great a variety of projects, heavy on the on the fantasy (though I'd love to find use for the 3rd Reich cyber-zombie).

Images look like paintings and not overtly like computer images. I like that.

There are a couple demons I have a use for already, so that made it worth it to me. The rest is icing on the cake.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Cerberus Stock Art: Zero One Three
Click to show product description

Add to DriveThruRPG.com Order

pixel_trans.gif
Creator Reply:
Thanks for the review Timothy! Joe J. Calkins www.cerberusart.com
pixel_trans.gif
The Talisman of Gorshan
by Alexander L. [Featured Reviewer] Date Added: 01/16/2013 08:04:42

Originally posted at: http://diehardgamefan.com/2013/01/16/tabletop-review-the-talisman-of-gorshan-pc/

The Talisman of Gorshan is what equates to a 30 page adventure but in an online format done with HTML and lots of very nice graphics and hyper-linking to make it easy to run with just a computer, even going as so far as to provide reliable links to a dice-roller and the SRD pages for Dungeons & Dragons 3.0/3.5 and Pathfinder as well as Osric. While it strives to be an online only adventure, there are a few snags. You can’t beat the price as it is free and is especially easy on the eyes, but in the end there’s little pay off except through GM or DM depending on your game choice, intervention. While this can spur off into a whole other set of adventures I would have liked to see a little bit more closure here as a standalone but could work nicely into an ongoing campaign.

The story is pretty simple, almost a standard fetch quest attached to a dungeon crawl, especially in that you can’t stop at just one place and things get overly complicated at the places you do go. The party is enjoying themselves at an inn when a mysterious group enters, sizes them up and then proceeds to offer them a job. It seems that Gorshan, a mage of apparently some wealth, has decided that he wants to retrieve a talisman that used to be his that was taken by Orcs and has been broken into three pieces and scattered, the pieces of which there’s a map already made for the party with locations, although not exact. From there it’s up to the party to decide where to go first and last, and what they’ll check out when they get there. Travel time alone will take a group roughly two weeks game time on foot not including exploring the locations, which to be honest, aren’t very big in and of themselves.

This is a decent interim adventure for the prescribed level of eight-ten and four to five players. It’s easily a productive group’s four hour session, or a non-productive group two of those sessions. I actually rolled up four Pathfinder characters at level eight to run through this using the medium experience leveling table and the Pathfinder SRD. I went with a mostly ‘classic’ group, with two humans, a Paladin and a Cleric, a Half-Elf Sorcerer, and an Elven Rogue, so I had my basics covered at least. While I ran through the adventure one of the big snags I ran into was the inclusion of an Umber Hulk. While this wouldn’t have been a problem for a party at eighth level, the Umber Hulk is not included in the SRD as it ties into Dungeons and Dragons specifically, so no stats are available through the OGL, legally, online. A quick Google search did pull up a questionable stat block for one, but I opted instead to dig further and some very helpful people years ago recommended a Grey Render in place of the Umber Hulk, so I used that instead.

For a group of four players starting at level eight, this is guaranteed to at least give them enough experience to level them at least once if they’re thorough, so if you’re in need of a leveling adventure to boost your players a bit before throwing them into something else, this’ll do for that. I found the loot you can acquire through the adventure isn’t terribly game-breaking either and is level appropriate for the most part. You shouldn’t be cringing later from anything your players pick up here, but don’t go in blind. One of the named swords you can pick up looks pretty potent so adjusting to your group might be necessary as always.

As a GM tool, this adventure being online like this functions much the same as a bookmarked PDF would, with a nice dice roller and links to the appropriate SRD’s and stat links for the standard D20 D&D SRD included. Took me a little more work with the Pathfinder SRD, but it’s minimal, and it’s organized fairly well, almost to the point where it’s just as easy as cracking open a book. It still took me longer than cracking my books but more from familiarity than anything else. Aside from not having stats available, technically, for one of the monsters, the adventure works pretty well. It manages to provide a decent mix of monsters which isn’t something that a lot of main supplements would do instead throwing the same mobs at you time and time again. The variety is nice and breaks things up, and even within the same areas it changes them up often enough so your players hopefully won’t be making slaying songs for a particular creature. I had one Fourth Edition adventure I’d converted to Pathfinder that I’d just grabbed real quick and did a quick and dirty monster conversion by simply looking it up in the Bestiary and every fight for almost half the adventure was freaking zombies. Yeah, boring as hell for both me and the players. That was the first and only time I’d pulled a random adventure off the shelf. I’m glad to see a variety here and some new critters to slay as well including an Assassin Golem, a Dragonhawk, and the Nightmare Dragon.

Using this with a players group is going to be problematic, however. While there is a player map provided, and there are decently detailed maps of the dungeons, everything is completely accessible to anyone looking at the site, meaning there is no real surprise for the players who happen to click through the links. There aren’t any print friendly versions of any of the maps either, which means any non-tech savvy GMs are going to have to muddle through with this for their players. You can just view the images, and then print that way, but I feel the quality would suffer and defeat the whole purpose of having an adventure where you need no books. Now you could pull the images to a separate device for viewing, but again you’re running into more prep work. This isn’t a huge downside as you can work around it, but a version for the players alone without any links would have been great.

Overall it’s a standard dungeon crawl affair with some very well done maps, a good selection of bad guys to throw at your players, and in the future, an evil and corrupt mage that they can take down if you take the time to stat him out for future use. It’s good if you need some filler around levels eight to ten and for a level eight group of four will definitely earn them at least a level. While I think it has a few issues, it’s definitely worth a look as it is free, and with a few tweaks, it’s a format I think more GMs at the table with a laptop, tablet or running over the internet through a voice chat program, could embrace if handled correctly, which for the most part it is here. The artwork is fantastic, and if this were a printed adventure I’d give it a thumbs up for purchase.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
The Talisman of Gorshan
Click to show product description

Add to DriveThruRPG.com Order

pixel_trans.gif
The Talisman of Gorshan
by Romwald B. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 12/29/2012 13:42:49

I don't see the need to make all the buying process when it can be done with a simple link.



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
pixel_trans.gif
Creator Reply:
Thank you for your question Romwald. While the product is in fact nothing more than a link, in order for me to share my work with RPGNow customers it must be posted as a FREE product. I apologize for any inconvenience. Thanks and have a great day! Joe J. Calkins Cerberus Art
pixel_trans.gif
The Talisman of Gorshan
by Megan R. [Featured Reviewer] Date Added: 12/29/2012 08:36:47

This is an interesting concept, a true fusion of classic tabletop role-playing and computer technology... and a much more beautiful rendition of something that I - as a computer professional and enthusiastic GM - have been doing for quite some time.

Imagine, if you will, having all your notes and maps (and more) set out as hyperlinked documents (that's like web pages, folks) so that everything is at your fingertips when you are running your game. No more ferreting through notebooks for that elusive detail that's a vital clue, or opening a monster book when the players don't actually know that there is one around...

Stop imagining and go to have a play!

The hyperlinked GM's map is a real treat. I recall how some years ago I taught a night school class in web page design, and one of my students happened to be my DM... and his project was pretty much this sort of thing. In some ways, if you happen to be a competent webhead, there isn't much new... but it is so well done that it is worth bringing to your attention.

I think the one change I'd make is to have a downloadable stand-alone version for those of us who game in places that you cannot get a reliable internet connection. Whilst there is a 'player map' it's not clear how you give them access to it apart from turning your screen to face them momentarily, unless they are also on the site and so have access to the things they shouldn't see... likewise, it would be nice to have a separate image to flash up for the monsters - "You see this coming towards you, growling" - as the pictures are nice but embedded in the text complete with handy stat-block.

Although it's billed as being for 'D&D (older editions)' you have access to the D20 SRD, the Pathfinder SRD and to OSRIC (and a few more bits and bobs) so you may run it using the ruleset of your choice.

It's really rather fun, and very lush to look at.... maybe not quite so good on a laptop as on my big screen that I use for reviewing - fiddling with text size in the browser has no effect and there is no way to change colours if light text on a dark, faintly textured background doesn't suit you - but overall a magnificent effort.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
pixel_trans.gif
Creator Reply:
Thanks for the great review Megan!
pixel_trans.gif
www.facebook.com/TheArtOfJoeJCalkins
pixel_trans.gif
Cerberus Stock Art - The Next Decade of Fantasy: Volume 1
by Jamie W. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 12/07/2012 23:07:36

A collection worth having for any professional looking for quality material or anyone that just appreciates good artwork.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Cerberus Stock Art - The Next Decade of Fantasy: Volume 1
Click to show product description

Add to DriveThruRPG.com Order

pixel_trans.gif
Cerberus Stock Art: A Decade Of Fantasy
by Jamie W. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 12/07/2012 23:06:41

A wonderful collection to be sure. The fact that so much of his work has been put together into a single package shows a varying progression in both style and proficiency and in all cases, they are, well they're just great.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Cerberus Stock Art: A Decade Of Fantasy
Click to show product description

Add to DriveThruRPG.com Order

pixel_trans.gif
Monsters of the Game Mat: Supermetro
by David W. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 08/18/2012 07:24:14

CERBERUS ILLUSTRATION does what they do best in this set... Offer high quality figures in droves, for a decent price.

There is a shortage of front/back sided heroes out there. This set was warmly welcomed. Most hero sets offer a great image on the front, and a "silhouette" on the back, and come in "tent" form. These are actual figures, and enhance game play!

I was a little disappointed, however, with the fact that the figures in the front cover weren't anywhere in the set. It seems to me that including figures in the cover artwork should be the "best" figures in the set, and to feature these kind of let me down.

There were several images (about a dozen) that are offered in many color options (and in the case of the females, there are some that have wings, and some without). There are also "generic" figures that can be thugs, hirelings and gang memebers... they are also recolored to be police and guards. This is a very good use of these figures.

I personally would have rather seen less of the dogs (there are roughly 20 in the set), and would have liked to seen another "hero" in various colors worked into the set. A dozen police officers are fine. A dozen guards are fine. A dozen thugs are fine. A couple dozen guard dogs... a bit much.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Monsters of the Game Mat: Supermetro
Click to show product description

Add to DriveThruRPG.com Order

pixel_trans.gif
Cerberus Stock Art - The Next Decade of Fantasy: Volume 1
by Timothy B. [Featured Reviewer] Date Added: 07/26/2012 14:58:19

44 pages of art (and some ads). All come in both color and grey scale. Excellent images really.

Includes an easy to read and understand license.
The PDF format is bit more cumbersome, but the art is great.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
Cerberus Stock Art - The Next Decade of Fantasy: Volume 1
Click to show product description

Add to DriveThruRPG.com Order

pixel_trans.gif
Cerberus Stock Art - The Next Decade of Fantasy: Volume 1
by Joshua G. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 05/24/2012 04:46:05

Exactly the type of artwork small publishers need, with an easy to work within license and an even easier to work with artist, Joe Calkins collections are a must have for small publishers when it comes to stock art packages whose value highly exceeds their price.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
pixel_trans.gif
Displaying 1 to 15 (of 53 reviews) Result Pages:  1  2  3  4  [Next >>] 
pixel_trans.gif
0 items
 Hottest Titles
 Gift Certificates