The graphics of these floorplans are done in the Campaign Cartographer-style of the early 1990s, making them dated even in 2002 when this came out. Now in 2018, the quality is so far beyond this that the price charged is risible. Whilst the layouts are reasonable (if uninspired), the graphics would make my players' jaws drop - and not in a good way, when they're used to the quality produced by Heroic Maps, for example. These are useful only as inspiration - and pricewise, worth maybe a quarter of the current full price being charged.

Nicely modelled bases, & it's great to have a variety preset to the right sizes - I have some monsters which have been begging for unusual size bases to match them. They're a good shape, & should blend nicely with bases from pretty much any other manufacturer. The only thing that I can think would improve them would be if the top surface were slightly sunk a little, leaving a rim perfect for containing any base modelling - Green Stuff, sand, etc. However, you certainly can't argue with what you get for the price!

Kudos to Rocket Pig Games for a quick response to issues: after obtaining this product I could only see/download the Base_EndCube file. Within hours of being informed, RPG had re-uploaded the file containing all the bases, which I was able to successfully extract & start printing.

Overall, a very nice addition to an impressive new line from this new publisher.

As a long-term player of spellcasters, I have a lot of different spellcards from different publishers, ranging from top-of-the-line commercial packs bought at my FLGS to PDFs bought here & elsewhere. The Spellcards 5e cards rank among my favourites, for being clear, concise, easy-to-use and attractive. My GM was so impressed he wants a set for himself!

The first thing to draw the eye is the legend in the top right, clearly showing at a glance whether the spell has verbal, somatic or material components, if it's a concentration spell (hugely important for 5e wizards!), and even if the material component is consumed. When your GM likes to throw adverse effects at you whilst you're spellcasting, and you have only seconds to pick a spell, the ability to spot one that can be used while restrained or silenced can be a lifesaver!

Highlighting ritual spells with another icon is another great idea, and I now game with a little stack of cards that I don't have to memorise but can cast with ten minutes' preparation (funny how the party's always willing to pause the dungeon crawl while I cast identify...).

Unlike almost every other spell card I've used, the cards don't slavishly copy the (sometimes tortured and convoluted) text of the PHb: instead, they're a clear summation of the rules, with nifty colour-coding for the results of failing & passing saves. Highlighting important words in the spell description (types of saves, durations, etc) means less time spent reading rules, fewer mistakes in the heat of battle, and more time crushing enemies!

Filling empty slots on pages with condition & area of effect rules cards as 'extras' is a wonderful idea, & it's great having these to hand as a quick reference during play. My only problem is that you then have to print multiples of these pages, scattered throughout the set, if you want to issue cards to several players affected by the same condition(s). Of course, by definition, using them as space-fillers means that's going to happen. The only suggestion I can make is that if Myth Merchant chooses to add separate pages to the PDF just for the condition/AoE rules, players & GMs will be very happy.

Lastly, kudos to Myth Merchant Press for continuing to support these cards, quickly correcting the (minor) errors & releasing improvements like variant card backs.

Pros: Clear & attractive art & icons; simple, easy-to-use rules; nice features like colour-coding; important rules are highlighted. Cons: The PDF cards being laid out with a little white space between them is an annoying feature, as it means twice as many cuts. Value for money (PDF): superb. Rating: A solid 4/5, probably edging up to 4.5/5 if the cards were laid out as a single sheet & easier to cut! Overall, an impressive product.

This would be an absolutely superb product at twice the price, except for one major drawback: every handout 'page' image is actually printed inside a border on the actual PDF page, with a PDF page background behind it. This may have been done in an attempt to improve visual appeal inside the product, but it actually significantly impacts the end-use of the images. It means that each image is actually smaller than the PDF page (in some cases by quite a lot), and will have to be cut out before it can be used. To make matters worse, the orientation of several of the images is wrong - wide images have been placed on pages in landscape orientation, meaning the images are actually only half the PDF page or less instead of being rotated to fill the page.

The quality of the images are superb, with an excellent variety and great detail in the background art, and the sheer number of images are amazing for the price. If it hadn't been so badly let down in the layout stage, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend purchasing it, even at a higher price. As-is, caveat emptor: any GM will have to be willing to put in some extra work to be able to use this product, and I suspect the print-quality of some of the mis-oriented images will be lower than preferable after they've been resized to properly use a page.

Pros: Brilliant artwork, great price, excellent variety & sheer number of images Cons: Bad formatting and layout

I was expecting a batch of interesting runic glyphs, perhaps some summoning circles, along the lines of some of the truly excellent free products and Photoshop brushes that have been released over the last few years (some of which have gained wide popularity as the cornerstones of the 'Arcane' series of Firefox personas). Given the price, I expected some high-quality, reasonably professional art.

Instead, I discovered a batch of insipid circles and other shapes (33, not 34 as advertised) with plaintext inscriptions running around them (at least some of the words are in an appropriate font - most is just clear, plain text). These inscriptions ranged from endless repeats of 1s and 0s to one or two words like "magical lyrical" or the repeating phrase "Follow your spirit, and upon this charge Cry 'God for Harry, England and Saint George!'". One doesn't expect to find quotes from 'Henry V' in one's summoning circles...

Several of the 'glyphs' are simply different-coloured versions of the same shape. None are particularly large or high resolution, so they can't be used as centrepieces of large map tiles, only small features.

A handful are actually visually interesting, and with a bit more effort and inspiration could have become worthy inclusions. More along these lines would have significantly improved the overall quality. To give the designer their due, the files are at least PNGs with transparent backgrounds, so they can be easily included in maps - it's just that I wouldn't bother with most of them.

Overall, a great disappointment, and most definitely not worth the price charged.

This excellent album isn't as purely nautically-themed as you might expect from the title. Yes, it can definitely be used for any maritime campaign, with the expected haunting hornpipes and ghostly gallows jigs, but it can also be used as atmosphere for more than just that.

An excellent long (total running time 1:07:12) compilation for DMs who want to add a little salty sea-dog to dockside or oceanic encounters, this also includes tracks of epic or suspenseful music, "Racing the Wind" can be used for epic chases, and "Lords of the Deep" for the advance of a huge enemy army, for example. "Maelstrom" is probably my favourite of the sound-effect tracks that Nox Arcana puts on each of their CDs, being an eerily perfect rendition of a sailing ship fighting through a storm at sea (I know, I've been there!).

I often complain about Nox Arcana's vocal tracks, but these are perfectly suited to the material, being ballads about ghostly pirate ships lost at sea; think "Pirates of the Caribbean" for grown-ups...

Liked: High-quality recordings, great epic music, powerful nautical themes without being narrowly restrictive to sea imagery. Disliked: Lack of downloadable/printable cover art orCD notes. Value for money: excellent. Rating: 1/2 stars

Nox Arcana have done it again, producing another of their excellent albums. The music is creepy, brooding, suspenseful and powerful by turns, and manages to combine some instruments you wouldn't expect to work so well together; music boxes, pipe organs, pianos, church bells, violins, cellos and choirs all make appearances singly and together, combining to produce an album that manages both listening pleasure and usefulness as atmosphere. My players will shortly come to dread the sound of a softly playing music box...

The album can be listened to from beginning to end, although "The Hollow" seems somewhat out of place until you remember Nox Arcana's habit of including a single purely sound-effect track on each CD. It's difficult for me to pick a favourite track, although "Twilight", "Forgotten Path", "Fairly Tale" and "Rise to Destiny" are all contenders for the top spot.

Liked: High-quality recording, excellent atmospheric music, great listening pleasure. Disliked: Lack of downloadable/printable cover art or CD notes. Value for money: Excellent. Rating: 1/2 stars

This album is my favourite of Nox Arcana's productions to date, and it's making repeated appearances in my MP3 queue, both on my computer and MP3 player. It's definitely going to be playing a role in my next D&D campaign, and I'm already writing a scenario where my players will have to follow the minstrel's clues in 'Treasure of the Four Crowns'! Now all I need to do is find some way to work in 'The Mystic's Keep', another favourite track, and I'll be ecstatic. My biggest problem is going to be resisting turning the music up too loud while the players are deliberating...

The music is atmospheric and perfectly suited to the typical D&D game, or indeed any that features powerful battle sequences, epic themes or great victories. In fact, if you include the tracks like "Mist Loch", "Underworld" and "Rogue's Hollow", you have theme music for pretty much any given moment of a dungeon crawl.

In case you haven't guessed, I like this album and can thoroughly recommend it to anybody...

Liked: High-quality recordings, epic music, wide-ranging suitability to virtually any point of a D&D adventure. Disliked: Lack of downloadable/printable cover art or CD notes. Value for money: Superb! Rating: 1/2 stars

This album (total running time 50:05) is composed of Nox Arcana's usual high-quality music. However, it is probably my least favourite of their albums, although that doesn't mean I actually dislike it. The lyric/narrative pieces are... odd, for lack of a better word, and mostly utterly unsuited as atmosphere for any type of campaign other than Cthulhu or possibly Ravenloft.

That said, the purely instrumental pieces are uniformly excellent, and can be used for suspense, drama and fear in a wide variety of situations; or simply for listening pleasure! Probably the most outright gothic/dark of Nox Arcana's music, it definitely can find a niche in the well-equipped DM's arsenal.

Liked: High-quality recordings, excellent atmospheric music. Disliked: Vocal tracks of limited use as atmospheric music, lack of downloadable/printable cover art or CD notes. Rating: * 1/2 stars

This is very high-quality gothic music, perfect for a Cthulhu campaign, a dark-horror-style supernatural campaign (Vampire: Masquerade, Werewolf, or anything similar) or even a supernatural-D&D campaign. Just listening to it and reading the descriptive info for the tracks has given me several ideas for the D&D-horror campaign I'm planning.

However, while the tracks including lyrics are okay to listen to purely for entertainment, I'm not sure they'd be useable as an accompaniment to DMing; they'd likely be too distracting for the players.

Like: High-quality recordings of the tracks, atmospheric music and plenty of it (total running time for this bundle 51:10).

Dislike: Vocal tracks not so useful as atmospheric music, lack of downloadable cover art (other than the small image on this site) and lack of downloadable descriptions of the tracks (a PDF with the colour text that appears on the bundle page would have been great).