This is an excellent, well written supplement with excellent layout and content. It presents a neat deity along with magic items, a monster and worshippers. Highly Recommended.

A short adventure in which the PCs must explore a network of submerged lava tubes on the seabed to rescue a locathah prince. It's well written, and the while the scenario itself is, perhaps nothing extraordinary, the underwater setting gives it a fresh and original feel. Indeed, the background to the scenario suggests many more plot hooks for continued aquatic adventuring.

The artwork and map are top notch, and the writing and layout are very good, bringing the unusual setting to life. The scenario also includes a monster template, and a couple of spells that can apply it to existing creatures. (One minor point: aberrations aren't included in the template description, yet they were obviously supposed to be, judging from the example provided).

On the whole, well thought out, and an interesting change of setting.

Nice 5-page supplement. It provides 5 new weapons (from cup-hilt rapier to swept- hilt dagger), each with some new weapon abilities. Also provides is a new special attack - bind - that allows a PC to lock down an enemy's weapon rather than merely disarm. Finally, 11 feats are provided from, Challenge to a Duel & Cloaked Duelist to Riposte & Stop-Thrust. A small but power-packed supplement. I bought this product looking for a way to flesh out a Dumas style character's combat abilities.

I give this a 4 out of 5 only because of the small page count.

Mr. Logue does it again with another well thought out, incredibly dangerous and unique villainous NPC. If you are play a sea based setting this would be a great add-on to your campaign.

As much as I am into Dungeons and Dragons, I have never been the kind of people who idolized everyone in the industry. I did not know who Dave Arneson was until I worked for Blackmoor and still do not remember the third guy outside of Monte and Skip who wrote the 3.5 PHB. I read a dozen D&D adventures a week and could not tell you the writer of many of them.

However, there are three writers whose works have always inspired me and whose names I have etched in my head. I know if their name is on a work, it is going to introduce some interesting new mechanic or awesome story idea I had yet to think of. Nick Logueis one of those names. After all without the Iron Dungeon Master tournament he started, I would not be Iron DM. Wolfgang Baur is the other.

So it bares little surprise that when I heard that Logue was starting his own publishing company, Sinister Adventures, and that Baur was writing some of the first few products, I could barely hold my enthusiasm in getting my hands on the release “Death Beneath the Waves”.

Death Beneath the Waves is an adventurous supplement that tackles one of D&Ds dirty little surprises that most writers and DMs like to ignore, underwater combat. To expand, 3d combat in general is just something that has been so difficult with current and former rules that it many either attempt to fuddle through the current rules using rudimentary ways to track every feet the player is in the air or some just bypass it all together and pretend it’s the same as 2 dimensions. One way is too tedious and the other way is not satisfying enough.

Death Beneath is a severe overachiever considering it only has 4 pages of substance. The first part covers techniques for how to both prepare PCs for underwater combat and how to lure them into it. There is strong advice on thinking outside of the box with both techniques.

The latter part of the PDF introduces the most important part, how to run underwater combats. The PDF simplifies the bookkeeping by introducing a more functional way to keep track of individuals. The rules are so simple that I redesigned an area of my campaign just so I can try it out and it worked. You can even use these same techniques for air combat. It both satisfies the number crunchers and pleases the “I’m just here to role play” guy. The PDF tops off with a draconic dragon very much Asian influenced and gives you a detailed integration of how to create it into a reoccurring creature in your campaign.

For the DM I Love the 3-D combat rules. Its one of those rules that you kind of slap yourself for not thinking of earlier. As a DM always trying to improve my craft, Baur gives really good advice for preparing the party for underwater combat.

The Iron Word: Even if you are not interested in Underwater Combat, Death Beneath the Waves does a terrific job of letting you inside the thinking process of one of the best D&D writers in the game. The simplification concept for handling the bookkeeping of 3-d combat works and the sea dragon provides a nice manageable danger. I could have stood for another 2 or 3 pages as I would liked to have seen more examples. I am anxious to see more following these rules.

Underwater adventuring has always been the “sticky wicket” of d20 gaming. Most GMs seem to go out of their way to avoid having to run any scenarios where the characters are fighting in the water, opting to ignore the plethora of rules that goes along with aquatic adventuring. Others just make sure to outfit the PCs with enough magic gear that fighting in the water is no different than fighting on land. Either way, it’s a venue of adventuring that doesn’t really get its due. “Death Beneath the Waves,” however, does its best to change that.

About a megabyte in size, “Death Beneath the Waves” is a six-page product (with one of those pages being for the OGL) from Sinister Adventures. The book has no bookmarks, but those are hardly necessary in a product of this length. Despite its brevity, it has two full color pieces of artwork. There’s also a thin green border along the top and bottom of each page. Despite this, printing the book out shouldn’t be too difficult for anyone.

For a book so short, DBtW really packs a lot into its pages. Functioning as a combination essay and sourcebook, the product opens with a discussion of how to introduce underwater adventuring to the party in the first place. This quickly leads to it going over the most common answers players have to sending their characters underwater, the strengths and weaknesses of those tactics, and what GMs should do about them. It then gives us two new spells to address the questions of temperature and water pressure as characters venture beneath the waves.

Amazingly, there’s still more. The book offers a fairly simple but workable solution to trying to map characters in a three-dimensional environment (the solution it presents would work just fine with aerial characters also). It then introduces a new monster, and a series of campaign hooks where the PCs can see the monster several times over the course of a campaign, to let them get familiar with it before fighting it on its home turf.

Death Beneath the Waves is a great supplement, being incredibly evocative in just a few short pages. Reading this over once made me hungry to run an underwater adventure, and I’d bet that anyone else who reads this will have the same reaction. The one complaint I had about the book isn’t what’s written, but rather what’s not written in it. Several times the book refers to the existing rules for underwater adventuring, but doesn’t reprint them. While I usually dislike reprinting rules, it would have been helpful here. If only things like the drowning rules were reproduced in this book, it could have been a one-stop source for everything a GM needs for underwater adventuring. However, for whatever reason, it doesn’t do that, meaning that you’ll likely be flipping between this product and the DMG when running such a scenario. It’s a shame, since it would only have taken an extra page or two here to make this the be-all end-all of underwater rulebooks. Still, that aside, this is an invaluable purchase if you want to run a game set under the sea.