This adventure is a mixed bag. It's a nice plot with some fun artwork, but there are definitely some good and bad parts.

Some of the highlights:

• Page 3 has a great encounter breakdown. Each encounter lists XP, there's even an XP line for non-combat rescue!
• Various encounter locations drawings are a great idea! NPC house in the woods, entrance to the Kobold, it's nice to be able to show this to the PCs.
• Layouts for the major encounters are also nice. It should be easy to draw out encounter maps.
• The quest does have 4 or 5 significant NPCs and those NPCs actually have some drawings you can use to show the PC.
• All of the magic items have custom drawings. Meaning you can print them out and hand a nice piece of paper to the PCs.
• The layout is clean and easy to follow.
• Rumours have a good chance of actually being false!
• Some neat random encounters.
• There is a fun story here.

However, where this falls down is really on polish, editing and details.

• First off, there are typos and basic editing / grammar issues throughout the book. This is pretty common in DM's Guild products, but it is significant.
• The NPC introductions are all in-line with the quest. In fact, the quest is kind of "in-line" with itself. Page 3 has an encounter breakdown, but page 4 is not dedicated to an explanation of what's really going on or who all of the players are. Instead it's up to you as the reader to piece together the whole story as you read through the adventure. There's a dragon at the end, but it's not mentioned until page 25 or so when it appears at the bottom of the dungeon.
• The power level is just wrong. The bosses are back-to-back CR2 monsters, but the cumulative experience to that point is less than required for level 2, so 4 players at 1st level will still be 1st level when they reach a boss with a 6d6 breath weapon. To have a hope of surviving this encounter, they need to be level 2.
• Way too many magic items. If the players surive the quest and make it to 2nd level, they have three or four Uncommon items + left-overs from 4 potions of healing and a potion of Poison Resistance. This is far beyond the normal recommendations. It also assumes that the boss wielding one of those three items is going to use is incorrectly. There's a sword listed at "Uncommon", but it's clearly rare, so again, the power level is off.
• Female NPCs are significantly lacking.
• Maps & NPC photos are all in-line, but not included as separate images, so you have to extract them manually if you want to use an on-line table top or similar.

Some samples of editing / game problems:

• Overland map on page 5 has no scale. It also doesn't detail the encounter locations. There's a river crossing but no river. Then dungeon is clearly in the mountains, but that doesn't seem to correlate. And the river is important because it's poisoning the town.
• The "witches cottage" is supposedly on the edge of town, but somehow didn't make the map of the town.
• Sz'thess, one of the bosses, is actually detailed twice. Once in-line and once at the back of the book.
• Faeden, a ranger who may actually join you on the quest, has no stat block at all!
• Encounter breakdown on page 3 is wrong, listed XP for SZ'thess is incorrect.
• A bed at the inn runs 5gp / night / player, which is well beyond the normal lifestyle expenses in 5e. Especially for some small town.
• The "captured person" you're looking for is a 4th level Druid. It's really unclear how she was captured by a couple of kobolds. Especially when she's going to be rescued by a bunch of first level PCs.
• The other prisoner is listed as Guard who apparently survived a fight with a real dragon, not the wyrmling in the book, despite having 11hp! It's not even clear why he's even a prisoner after two years. He should just be dead.

At the end of the day, I expect an adventure like this to make my job easy and this thing really leaves me with a lot of work to do.

Nice depth of content.

If you add up all of the PHB pages dedicated to race, you get 25 pages across 9 races. And those PHB pages are heavy in pictures. This one is about a dozen pages for 4 races (Hagborn, Samsaran, Tengu and Catfolk). With limited art, there is a serious amount of content here.

I really love the core structure of how the races are detailed. Each race has sections like "Love & Mating", "Alignment & Religion", "Clans & Families" and "Aging & Death". These are all thought through quite carefully, the races go well beyond just a simple stats list.

From a design side, all of the races are reasonable and seem pretty balanced. The Catfolk grant +2/+2 instead of the usual +2/+1, which is a little odd, but the overall design is still solid.

There are some extra sub-races at the end, but these are really just a bonus. The list price is worth the while.

The key spots for future are the one that are hard to do on a small budget. More artwork would definitely be nice, especially for the Catfolk where the two distinct sub-races look very different but we only have a picture of one. The book could also really use a designer's touch. Page numbers are hard to read. The core racial stats are "cut into" the descriptive text about each race, so you have two columns bleeding into one column without so much as a horizontal rule to cut them up. The text is all straight black, no color variation, almost no font variation, it's all a little hard on the eyes.

Overall though, I'm impressed. There are lots of "freebie" races out in the wilds of the internet, but very few of them have as much detail as these ones.

This is a book of "ideas" rather than a book of "things".

It's good for what it is. It's nice to have all of these ideas available in a single place. If you want to build a new campaign world, where magic "works differently", this would definitely be a launchpad.

But if you're playing with something fundamental like magic, you need a lot more than two sentences to really make it work. All of these ideas need more skin on their bones.

Bonus points for the page layout being really nice.

This is neat idea with an overall sloppy execution.

The adventure is 8 pages: cover, one area map, one random Balor picture. The first page provides a great introductory idea, but it fails to even summarize the overall adventure. It doesn't talk about "the band" or the werewolves or the timelines or anything really. The whole quest feels like an awkward railroad.

The sloppy parts are everywhere.

• page 2 is a map with no scale and no cardinal indicator
• page 4 tells you to roll 2d6 for information. It then provides an outcome for what happens when you roll at 1 along with two outcomes for the value 2.
• NPC stat blocks are just giant walls of unformatted, hard to read text. This is a PDF document, adding extra pages is free and makes everyone's experience better.
• There are a few "railroad contingencies" of the sort of "if the PCs don't comply, bad things happen".
• Some of the checks seem wrong. Tracking down a werewolf camp requires a DC 20 Int (Investigation) check, but somehow doesn't allow for Survival check? Suceeding the check is actually a death trap whose description takes up a full 1/8 of the text of the adventure.
• There are "uncertain" numbers of people in various parts of the adventure where knowing that number is kind of important.

I generally like to buy these little sidequests in order to have something clean, complete and coherent to "drop-in". This side quest has none of those traits.

Well-formatted document with some nice art. Introduces a couple of new magic item, but a dungeon that is really random and purposeless.

First off, watch his video where he puts up a real tile version of the map! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMPtHR8KJHk

There are little design issues here and there, it's definitely "advanced amateur" rather than "pro".

But the core issue is really the dungeon itself. It is filled with cool traps, but who knows why the traps are even there? The BBEG is a Bone Naga who is supposed to be an incredibly intelligent, immortal creature that apparently just paces around between a couple of rooms all day. Neither of which are the library. Even though he's supposed to be searching for a way to become a regular Naga again.

The dungeon has two uncommon and one rare magic item scattered around, but they're not really connected. There's also an Artifact from a God which forms the centerpiece of the room in which the Naga does not actually rest. We're not really clear why these items are in the dungeon, let alone why one of them is conveniently stored in a chest?

The Naga has a pair of minions: a water elemental and a yellow mold, but there's no real clue why they are present. There's a Cambion trapped in a room for reasons unknown. Another room has a petrified orc, again, not clear why he was petrified and then transported through the desert to rest in a random dungeon room. Both the Cambion and the Orc have possible story ties outside of the dungeon, but neither of them has an NPC stat block or even a list of gear they are carrying.

I might one day borrow a few trap ideas, but I don't think I'll ever run this dungeon. There's just too little substance and story.

Very good quality supplement at an amazing price.

Apart from a few awkward wordings, the overall content is clean and clear. Each Archetype has a nice piece of complementary artwork. There are several magic items that also have their own artwork. They've also added a few spells, particularly Necromancy spells to help round out the classes.

I would allow most or all of this material in a campaign that I ran.

This class is basically the Arcane Trickster that uses the Warlock spell list (minus Eldritch Blast) along with some weapon mods and a shadow Monk feature. It's a reasonable idea with nice flavour.

It's listed at 5 pages which, but after the cover and SRD page, it's really about 500 words of content spread over 3 pages with 2" margins. The formatting is clean and legible.

All in all, it's a fair supplement.

Some good ideas, some bad ones some complicated ones.

I like the premise of Racial Feats and some types of Weapon Mastery feats. I also like some explicit "Alchemy" definitions, but I feel like the feat is really trying to make up for an existing problem of missing rules.

I would probably allow about 35% to 50% of this material into my campaign, but for an inexpensive book, that's a fine ratio.

Contains 5 magic items, one of each rarity.

Overall the ideas are reasonable and mostly in-line with the expected power of 5E items. 25%+ of the 2 pages of text are dedicated to the one Legendary Artifact but there's no relevant artwork.

This was a perfectly fine use of a dollar, but that's about the right price.

A great variety of options for building Alchemists.

Alchemists kind of live in a nebulous space in current D&D (May 2016). The last Unearthed Arcana has them as a Wizard tradition, which serves well as a small twist on Wizard and kind of feels like 4e, but it's not very open in terms of options.

This book instead tackles the very hard problem of designing a whole new class and then dives into a several very different Archetypes within that class. There's a neat side effect from this design decision, the Alchemist could act as the Caster in your world. It's a full caster class with a reasonable selection of base spells as well as things specific to each Archetype. If you wanted to run an "old west" campaign or a "victorian steampunk" campaign, this is the perfect way to get magic into your world.

In fact a quick look at the Archetypes reveals a Dr. Frankenstein, a Jekyll/Hyde, a maker of clockwork trinkets, a Poisoner and an Herbwarden which covers a lot of ground. This provides a pretty clear flavour for the types of campaigns that would benefit from such a class.

The ovearll text editing was good, but the page layout of this (and all Tribality products) really annoys me. A page is 11" high and the top 2" are just a giant black stripe with a Tribality logo. They have not bothered to include the document title or even some type of useful contextual header, it's just 2" of black. The images are mostly just stock photography props pasted into the bottom right hand corner of the page. None of them contain actual people which means there's no real "face of the class". The whole layout is acceptable but not top-notch.

At the end of the day, this is definitely worth the money and it will likely be lots of fun for players.

My biggest litmus test for new Archetypes is "would I allow this in my campaign"? In that respect this book succeeds. The Archetypes are all quite flavourful ranger ideas: A combat Trapper, a Lantern bearer that uses the lantern for combat and party protection, a master of lightning.

That stated, the Archetypes do suffer from a weird "good for NPC" feel. The Lantern-Bearer really feels like that NPC who helps you through the dangerous woods more than a PC you run for 15 levels. The combat Trapper suffers from a similar limitation.

I'm also not a big fan of the general Tribality layout featuring the giant black stripe at the top of the page and the spattering stock art pictures. The book kind of lacks a feel or flavour.

Small issues aside, the book is still well worth the price of entry. If you have a PC who wants to play a different type of ranger, this should definitely spark some ideas.

Top quality. Not just races with background, but racial Feats and "exotic weapons" from Kara-Tur.

The exotic weapons alone are worth the sticker price. They are well-designed and fit in with the existing set of weapons. A Sai is different from a Dagger in material ways, a Nunchuk is not just a Club, a Katana is not just an over-powered Longsword. Everything has neat trade-offs and a good exotic flair.

The first book provided Feats with a racial pre-requisite. Those feats covered each of the new races along with the existing races. This book provides a racial feat for each race presented along with a few "regular" feats based on specific stat pre-requisites.

Of the races, I think the Hobgoblin is the stand-out for me with a neat Leadership feature that really sets them apart from the other goblinoids & half-orcs. It's also nice to see a good variant of the Thri-Kreen, as an old Dark Sun player, these were one of my favorites and this is a good treatment.

Oddly, my biggest quibble with this book is actually the Shardmind. To me, the Shardmind is really a Construct like the Warforged and really deserves the "sub-race" treatment along with them. The telepathic communication feature likely needs a little more descriptive text on limitations, but the resistance to Psychic damage is a good Psionics touch in a world that doesn't yet have formal psionics. Overall, the Shardmind thing is likely beyond the author's control given the current status of Warforged and Psionics with are both in pre-release via Unearthed Arcana.

Overall, these are tiny quibbles on an excellent product.

Lots of reasonable ideas, reads like it was written by a translation app.

The overall feel of the book is very straightforward. Simple formatting, lots of text, no illustrations. It's a $1 product, I understand why there's no art. But it's pretty weird that there are no page numbers, let alone a standard header footer.

The ideas are pretty reasonable. Most of them stem pretty directly from the "bloodlines" in Pathfinder (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/core-classes/sorcerer/bloodlines). In many ways, this feels like a "fill in the blanks" exercise.

Some things are off the chart powerful or possibly unplayable, others are quite ingenious. The "Blood Magic" uses a mechanism that is way too powerful and skips the "spending HD" method that other have used cleanly. The "Ghostly Origin" is either really powerful or impossible to use as a PC. Or maybe both, it's not really clear how it plays out because the wording is so bad.

And the wording is the core reason this book is rated so low. 5E has lots of "boilerplate text" for abilities and this book just tramples all over those boilerplates. Whole paragraphs read like they were written in French and then run through Google Translate with no editors in between.

In some cases this is just annoying:

"At 5th level, you add the fear spell to your sorcerer spells known. Such spells doesn’t count on the number of sorcerer spells known you have."

In other cases this is almost unreadable

As such children grow with its scary companion, its bonds with this creature strengthen and the creatures starts to live inside the children’s body.

Here's a part that just invents a status effect (hassled):

At 1st level, you emanate an aura that let living beings uncomfortable. As an action, you can emanate a 30-feet radius aura that cause discomfort for 1 minute. Any living creature hostile toward you within the area or that enter the area for the first time, must be successful in a Wisdom saving throw or being hassled. A hassled creature suffer disadvantage on attack rolls and ability checks while remain in the aura.

With better editing and some professional polish, this could be a 3 or 4-star rating. But as it stands, there are just too many issues for a dozen pages.

Pro presentation. Good ideas, but too powerful.

As written I wouldn't allow this in my campaign.

This is book is really a book of Archetypes. It features a good variety and balance of ideas, with at least one for most of the major classes.

Often, when reviewing Archetypes, I find that independent designers go over the top. Dan Coleman does a really fair job of balancing out these options. It most cases these are "borrowed" abilities that are very similar to other things in official material. Most Archetypes simply won't make it into my game, but this book is filled with Archetypes that I would be happy to allow.

Please throw a few bucks the author's way, this supplement is well worth it!