This book, Mad Monks of Kwantoom is a tabletop rpg book that is not only for the usual group tabletop games, but also for solo gaming experience. You can play this game by yourself when you are feeling the gaming mood, but it is not time for the session or you don’t have enough players. In that solo gaming form, Mad Monks is an excellent primer and how to manual. It is my first experience with solo gaming and the book not only is tailor made for it, but it also teaches you how to play solo, step by step, throughout the book. The book itself is a superb introduction to solo gaming and taught me how solo gaming works. I feel confident that I could use the techniques presented in the book to have a smooth solo gaming experience with another game or system rather than starting from utter ignorance and not knowing what to do. Although I might not be a fan of solo tabletop-gaming, I would actually recommend giving this book to a young bookworm interested in Dungeons and Dragons. Although I myself do not know what is or isn’t appropriate for a younger person, so perhaps there are some things in this book you wouldn’t want your child to be reading if you are a parent. The Wah Tung monster manual is marvelous, possibly the best thing in the whole book. The Wah Tung monsters are based off of illustrations of the Wah Tung matchbox company, so I assume that the illustrations appeared on matchboxes. The illustrations themselves are gonzo bizarre, like Mars Attacks bubblegum cards filtered through Chinese people having fever dreams. The descriptions speculating on the nature of the monsters are astounding, perfect enough to give you an idea of the monster and be evocative, yet giving you just a tiny bit to still make them mysterious and unknown. The author seems to know his Chinese myth because the monsters feel like things out of Chinese mythology through the lens of old school Dungeons and Dragons, or rather, they also feel like monsters from old school D&D through the lens of Chinese mythology. You can use them in Kwantoom or plunk them into a typical western medieval setting, though I think they could work great in warhammer, being something that could make Chaos-spawn freak out and feel uneasy. Some people have pointed out that the Pagodas of Doom suffer a lack of distinct identity; I honestly don’t see where that criticism is coming from. Maybe the Pagodas are based off of the author’s previous work, Ruins of the Undercity, which I haven’t played. Perhaps they are complaining about that. However, my experience has been fantastic. I am a little worried about how it may go with a group, but I have been able to use the Pagodas of Doom procedure rules to create fantastic dungeons, and to my surprise, dungeon-Pagodas that make sense. For example, in a solo game, my characters met and befriended a group of brigands brewing healing potions and the entire dungeon became themed around the brewing potions brigands.
Maybe it’s the way I approach dungeons. For instance, I use monster reaction tables a lot because I assume that not every monster in the dungeon is utterly hostile to the players and I subscribe to the idea of the Dungeon as Mythic Underworld because if it is an alternate mythical plane, it doesn’t have to make sense. In fact, I had an amazing naturally occurring encounter in my solo-game where my players stumbled into a pitch-black room filled with treasure. Yet the treasure was guarded by otherworldly snake-folk and their giant serpents who kicked my characters’ butts in the first round and made them run screaming out of that doom pagoda, creating a very dream-like feeling of a chamber filled with gold and deadly serpent-monsters. That is something straight out of a Sinbad the sailor story or a creepy medieval folk-tale. What more could you want from a dungeon creation procedure? The only criticisms I have with this book is that the shops and areas of the city work well as a solo experience, however it might lack flavor for groups, such as NPCs or NPC generators. The book only gives you the shops’ names and the items they sell. However, with a bit of imagination, a creative GM could figure out the character of the shops and shopkeepers from their names and things they sell. However, that does involve legwork. There is no name generator for the setting. That is not a big deal though because you can simply find an Asian name to use for your character. Another criticism is that I am not a fan of special classes for Asian character archetypes and the options in the book are rather persnickety. I prefer just using the usual classes and making the archetypes from Asian stories work out of them. “You want to play a ninja? Alright, make a thief and put them in a ninja outfit.” Although I do love that you can play a Kabuki as a class. The Kabuki class in itself makes this book amazing. I guess that’s a matter of taste with me preferring character creation to be quick - - - 5 to 15 minutes at the most.

Disclaimer: I have only read this module. I have had the misfortune of not having the time nor situation of running this brilliant piece of work.

Flower Liches of the Dragon-Boat Festival is an amazing piece of RPG work for those of you who love Bizarro Martial Arts and Asian Witch-Craft Horror like The Boxer’s Omen or films like Spirited Away. Even if you are not into those kinds of things, (you don’t like Spirited Away?) you can still use the material here to throw curveballs at your group.

The plot is that there is a deathmatch Dragon-Boat Festival held by the mysterious Flower Liches in an unnamed Asianic-esque city, allowing you to make the city be wherever you want for your own setting. The city is weird, coming out of fevered myths and fairy tales from all around Asia, and full of marvelous encounters, monsters, objects, mythical locations, and more. Events that will shake things up and plots are being formulated, but the PCs can be dragged into those things if they like or not, the module is set up like a sandbox for your PCs to just explore. The Flower Liches are just the tip of the iceberg with this module’s weirdness and creativity. I’ll let you find out that weird stuff for yourself.

It is jam-packed with fantastic ideas for you to run as is or to mine for concepts to slam into your own setting or game. Even if you are not into Asianic milieu rpgs, you can grab the ideas and mechanics introduced in this module. I used, for example, the dragon-boat race mini-game rules for a car-chase scene, changing the vehicle from dragon-boats to cars and it worked perfectly and was a wonderful rush for our group.

The art in this is really something, the perfect kind for me. Vibrant and impressionistic, allowing you and your group to get an idea of what you are looking at yet providing room to make your own version of what the person or creature looks like.

The module provides a character and notes for solo-roleplaying which I have not used, so you can use Flower Liches as a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel if you don’t have a group to play with.

For criticisms, there are a few kinks in this module, but nothing that pulls it down. I’m not a fan of the dungeon and location descriptions being long paragraphs that require the referee or GM or whatever to do some more legwork. I would have preferred the standard room/key way of things. Another big problem is that a lot of the clues and hooks for events going down and locations to be found are only able to be psychically discovered because the character for solo gaming is a psychic detective. The problem is: what if you are running a game that doesn’t have psychic powers or the characters your group is playing don’t have the right psychic powers. A simple remedy for this is to either make those clues available to non-psychics, which requires more referee legwork, or have the solo gaming psychic detective being a henchwoman (the detective is female) for the PCs. Another problem is that it feels that the module would have benefited from one more draft, which most of the other problems, I feel, arise fron. The only thing else I would say is that this module probably isn’t for the first time referee or GM.

Yet don’t let those minor blemishes dissuade you from buying this product. With the PDF being so cheap and the amazing, rich stuff you get packed full within this module, you will be a fool not to grab this PDF.