The following review was originally posted at Roleplayers Chronicle and can be read in its entirety at http://roleplayerschronicle.com/?p=32532.

Looking for a new way of dealing with pits? Or even make the pits worse by adding additional items? This is the product for you! This is straight forward, no fuss, supplement that will make pits even more deadly and fun to have in your adventures!

RATINGS

Publication Quality: 10 out of 10 Presentation of Layout: As always, it is done in the traditional Raging Press Style of minimalist black and white. Which if fine and acceptable especially for supplements. The layout of information is rather easy to read and done in the traditional style.

Ease of Mobility: The nice thing about Raging Swan Press, is that they have dual formats for those who wish to print, and carry mobile. It’s nice and keeps the files light and readable.

Mechanics: 10 out of 10 Mechanically it’s sound, and I learned a few new things about Pits that I can use on my players in my personal campaigns. But I wouldn’t pass this on to a few others because then I know for a fact, I would get hit and die with one of these pits. Which is a good thing in the supplement’s case.

Value Add: 10 out of 10 If you are looking for something that adds flavor to the infamously boring pit, is definitely something you should purchase. With a two dollar price tag, it’s hard to not buy it.

Overall: 10 out of 10 If you are looking for something to expand your pits for your trap-filled lair, this is one of the supplements for you. The price is right, you learn new things about pits that you didn’t know before. It’s awesome and you want to take advantage of the low price.

Dungeon Dressing: Pits, from Raging Swan Press weighs in at 13 pages, with the standard assortment of covers, OGL, credits and checklist eating up 6 pages total, leaving us with 7 pages to cover those often overlooked and under-designed classic dungeon difficulties, the pit trap. We've all fallen in one or two, or at least plagued a playgroup or two with them, but how many of us have actually taken the time to truly design one, beyond “trap opens, you fall in”. Continuing the series of dungeon dressings, this installment gives us random charts for pit trap characteristics, as well as interesting features (The words “Tell Adosan, I love her” are scratched into the pit's floor.). A full list of traps broken down by CR for your more basic “standard” pit traps, as well as four more complex pit traps detailed in more depth.

The entire Dungeon Dressing series can be summed up with one basic sentence in my opinion, and that is simply, Buy them! Yes, they are essentially a collection of random charts that require you to do some rolling, with a few well done examples of how easy brilliant design can be, but that is the beauty of this series, as it is the quintessential GM time saver, without overtaking your design time. No GM wants to run something that has no personal touches, but so many of us simply don't have the time to delve to deep into true design. That's where products of this nature come in handy, and save the day. Trust me, a pit, 10' to the side and height, filled with six inches of brackish water and infested with a cloud of flies swarming over the last victim's bloated corpse is so much more impact-full on your players than simply saying your in a 10'x10'pit.

A happily given 5 star for Creighton and Raging Swan Press, cant wait to see the next installment of the Dungeon Dressing series.

This pdf is 13 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page advertisement, 2 pages editorial, 1 page ToC/foreword, 1 page SRD, 1 page back cover, leaving a total of 6 pages of content, so let's check this out!

If you're like me, you like pits - not only because they make decent traps with cool dramatic scenes, but also because they can hide oh so many glorious secrets - from the pit's previous victims to secret tunnels halfway down - my players tend to activate pits and then climb down, searching the walls - because they know - once in a while there's something there. In Raging Swan's latest Dungeon Dressing release, we get tables to provide details, details, details for the pits.

The pdf kicks off by providing a one-page comprehensive table of sample climbing-DCs and standard pit traps listed from CR 1 to 13, including all necessary DCs to spot, disable etc. them. The first of the tables provides us with an array of potential characteristics like insect-holes (or ones to let acid/water etc. flow) in the floor, foul air that smothers potential victims, chutes that deliver debris and even some rather devious mini-traps that e.g. can send the lid tumbling down. And if you're bored of e.g. spikes, why not use caltrop-equivalent broken pottery?

The second table spans two pages and provides even further details to add to your pits - from unnaturally cold air to brackish water to a company of white ants and even a flea-infested corpse of a dire-rat, the details herein are rather nice - however, I also feel I should mention that e.g. brackish water serves as a kind of cop-out: 4 different heights of it are part of the table. While there still are 96 points that have nothing to do with said water, I considered this repetition a slight tarnish.

The last two pages of the pdf deal with 4 sample traps for pits, ranging from the ever-classic crushing pit, to a pit that further collapses down into a cavern, a pit that buries you alive in a deluge of soil that turns into quicksand - devious and nice! The final pit trap is one of my favorites in wizard-towers - the sliding pit trap that crushes PCs with multiple hits on the floors, These final pages also provide comprehensive tables for falling into acid, magma, water, soft surfaces and sample creature-suggestions to populate the pits.

Conclusion: Editing and formatting are top-notch, as I've come to expect from Raging Swan Press. Layout adheres to RSP's printer-friendly two-column standard and the pdf comes in two versions, one optimized for printing and one for screen-use. The pdfs are bookmarked extensively. The additional content and tables herein are rather useful and make running pit traps and generating them on the fly much easier. However, I do have things to complain about - instead of the reroll-twice entry on the 100 on a d%, we have them on both 100 (roll thrice) and 99 (roll twice) in both tables and the accumulation of brackish water of different heights in the second table is another blemish in my book - there are enough interesting things to put into pits besides stale water. The additional traps and pieces of information are useful, concise and cool and the price is low, though. Due to these minor gripes, I'll settle for a final verdict of "only" 4.5 stars, but will still round up to 5 since the pdf remains a useful, cool little tool.

Endzeitgeist out.