I received this as part of a discounted bundle, and I'm letting that impact my review posiitively. I likely would not have purchased it at full price on its own (read on).

However, that is NOT a reflection of the material, which is excellent! Well produced, good art choices, and some great monsters make this a great addition to your collection if you can grab it at a discount, or if you just have a different opinion on what a few more monsters is worth. :)

Sure, you can make up your own new backgrounds, but I'm going to pull up this PDF when my players make characters and offer these instead of working that hard!

There isn't a single one of these backgrounds that I wouldn't allow, though there are a few that I would consider tweaking just a little bit. On top of that, they all make good sense in terms of equipment and feature choices.

The only thing keeping it from being a 5 star for me is that a few of the features contain elements that could be just a touch more powerful than others. This comes in the form of certain granted abilities being "automatic" as in "you can just do this thing" where I feel like they should convey advantage on the activity in question. You may not have that issue so it could very well be your next 5 star addition to your game.

In terms of production and what it offers to your players, this is an easy yes for adding to your game.

Star off beause several of these are dramatically more powerful than the others, and for being very nearly as powerful as some official class features rather than the purported "fluffy additions for character fun" that they are presented as.

Second star off for elitist, snarky writing that I feel like has no place in paid publications; some scattered typos and the like as well, some mild formatting issues like a ribbon's title being on one page only to have the description on the following page.

Overall, some of these could be fun additions to characters in your games. Just be aware that you're going to have to carefully consider all of them due to the range of "power" levels and the fact that some of them double or replace the character features of other classes directly, which is usually a no-go in D&D 5.

Absolutely does what it says on the tin. A well organized and useful index of magical items from the core books for easy browsing and lookup. And you can't beat the price!

This is a really, really cool and fun expansion to one of my absolute favorite aspects of equipment shopping in D&D 5e: Packs!

Now I have a lot more options for my characters and my players' characters. This supplement contains both "expanded" versions of some of the basic packs found in the PHB, but also gives you a bunch more profession-based, background-based, and even race-based packs to further customize your character. The packs are well thought out, flavorful, and contain really good sets of items that really seem to convey their uses.

In addition to all the new packs, you get a bunch of equally cool "bundles" that basically are the same idea as packs, as far as "character type X would maybe have this stuff," but applied to weapons and armor.

I can't wait to have some new players make characters using these options as opposed to the (great, but now a little routine feeling) PHB equipment sets!

This is a really nifty addition to any D&D game. If you've ever thrown Alchemist's Fire and thought "That was awesome!," you're going to love this nice bunch of new potions and flasks. They seem really well balanced and nothing jumps out as game breaking. Best of all is the return of a few great 3.x items that were strangely missing from the core books.

For the price, you get a nicely laid out document that gives you a lot of new "tossable" items grouped by rarity, with prices for each and well written descriptions of each (with one exception, below).

Minor: six items Moderate: seven items Major: three items Legendary: three items

The one item that just didn't land for me is the Black Egg under Legendary items. It just seems to have a fairly weak effect given its price and rarity.

This supplement also adds a new feat to go along with all of your new throwable things: Bomb Thrower. The idea is great, but it seems to be a touch powerful compared to some of the PHB feats. With some adjustment (I'd do away with one or maybe even two of its perks) I could see allowing it in my games, but as-written it's just too much.

One star off for the oddly underpowered legendary item and the slightly OP feat. All in all well worth the price and I can't wait to use it in my games.

Can't say enough positive things about this sheet/generator! I've toyed around with javascript and automation of character sheets just enough to know the MASSIVE amount of work and time that has gone into MPMB's sheet, and I bow before MPMB for it.

I'd spend a bunch of keystrokes telling you what it does, but there are ample descriptions, previews, and other reviews that do it better and quicker. I mean, it's pay what you want! Throw money at MPMB, because this thing is worth every cent and then some.

So I initially wasn't going to get these for HotDQ because my group is already at Episode 8, but as I was prepping this afternoon and leafing through pages of stat blocks, I realized just how many potential NPCs and combatants could be involved, so I went ahead and picked these up.

The quality and layout is outstanding! They are definitely going to make running these last few sessions way easier. There's a "DM Screen Topper" initiative tracker for each monster card, and each one has a spot at the bottom for writing in any conditions and notes, and for tracking init and HP if you want to. They're really superb, and I can't wait for them to come out for Rise of Tiamat!

Only a few things kept me from rating them five stars:

• I wish you could turn off the background. Printer ink is stupidly expensive, and while the cream colored background looks nice, I would rather have the option to leave it out and save ink.
• I wish that they were presented in the order they "arrive" in the adventure. As I'm only prepping for Episode 8, there were several pages where I had to print out the cards for stuff I don't need because they appeared way earlier in the adventure. Super common stuff that you can use throughout the adventure could be first, but then "important" and one off NPCs and monsters should be in order they're needed.
• And finally, one small thing, it would be nice if the little Initiative Tents had the monster or NPCs name printed on them already. (I don't personally track initiative on the DM screen top like some folks do, but if I did, it would be nice not to have to fill each little card out by hand.

Overall, very, very happy with this product and will definitely be keeping an eye out for more from this publisher, especially the Rise of Tiamat Monster/NPC cards! (Hopefully with some improvements. ;) )

(Also, man, I feel like I underpaid for these. Gonna have to find another product and toss a little more coin at the publisher. Heh.)

A great little collection of devious dangers to toss at your players. Sure, some of the ideas are far from the most novel of all creation, but I feel like that's a good thing! The DMG woefully leaves out many of the tried-and-true stand by traps, and this little product means I don't have to stat them out myself! Awesome.

Also, major kudos for the publisher's attitude of showing it all and letting the consumer decide it its worth the money. I really do believe that people will pay for content if you prove its worth the money. It worked on me! I grabbed the diseases supplement, too!

A very good, but fairly basic, aid to playing D&D 5e. I definitely think it would be helpful for the new player, and foresee that this would be the most effective use. A lot of the concepts covered are going to be old hat to a more experienced player, however, so longevity may not be a strong point for this aid.

Still, as a "pay what you want," you could definitely find worse ways to toss a fellow gamer some coin, particularly if you are the type of DM that routinely runs for new players. In such a case, this is definitely worth picking up.

Disclaimer: I have read the adventure in detail, but have not gotten to run it yet.

All in all, a fun adventure with some neat stuff that could easily be moved into your other games. The production value is quite good, with nice art and maps. It's well laid out and easy to follow and reference.

I have a couple of minor quibbles with a couple of aspects, namely how the "disease" that is plaguing the town is described and its cure, which I'll avoid here for spoiler prevention, but those things are easy enough to alter as you see fit. I also agree, at least at first blush, with the other reviewer that the suggested level seems a tad high for what your adventurer's will actually be up against, but you can adjust that easily as well.

Well worth the purchase price.

Overall a very cool "micro-setting." I can easily see running entire stories just in the city and guild as they are presented here.

The additional character options really give a lot of good flavor to building a group of thieves that would be hard to accomplish just using the core SWD rules. The Hindrances are great, and most of the Edges are pretty sweet as well (with a few exceptions detailed below).

Likewise, the Minions section gives you a more detailed framework for creating allies for your characters (something granted by various Edges in the setting), and is a great addition to the SWD Ally rules in this or any setting.

The setting itself is super detailed and will make it easy to write and run lots of thief-ly adventures. The art and maps are great, and help flesh the ideas presented out very well.

That said, there are a few things that jumped out as needing improvement or just not quite "there," and I'll go over them below. However, the takeaway I want to give is that this is definitely worth picking up if you want to run a campaign centered on a thieves' guild or even if you just have a thief in your fantasy(ish) games and need a guild for them to belong to. The guild could also be a great "enemy faction" in a game. Super cool stuff.

Now, on with the nit-picking! (likely of more interest to the designer than the average reader/user, but you might find my "gripes" useful)

• Typos and missing punctuation.

Page 3, A Note About Race heading

missing period at end of last sentence "...feel free to create an elf character"

Page 5, Hinderances [sic] header

misspelled, should be Hindrances

• Edges:

The perspective of the Edges jumps around a lot. The switch from first to second to third is somewhat clunky, in my opinion.

A couple of the combat related edges stray away from Fast, Furious, and Fun, adding a lot of minutely detailed "if-then" conditions to various aspects of combat. This isn't necessarily bad if you want a little more crunch, but it could slow things down somewhat. For example, see the Mobile Defense edge. It feels a little more like d20 style play than SW to me with its conditions and various bonus states depending on them.

The Document Forger professional edge requires the input of 3 Attribute points and at least 4 skill points as well as taking up an Edge, but gives you no bonuses to forging documents (which is handled with the Repair skill per the setting). Rather, it gives penalties to the Notice roll of the viewer of the document to recognize it as fake if they are "unfamiliar with the type of document" or "only glance at it." How often are you bothering to forge a document just to show it to someone that isn't familiar with it or won't bother looking at it? Most professional Edges grant bonuses to the character for performing an action. This Edge is just convoluted in its current form, and doesn't seem to grant much for the amount of character building resources it requires.

The Forgettable Face background edge is a good idea, but is marred by its wording. It gives a +2 bonus to all rolls related to disguise. Okay, cool. But it also gives a +2 bonus on all rolls related to being recognized...wait. Huh? It works if you assume that the meaning is "inflicts a -2 penalty to Notice rolls to recognize the character," but that's not explicitly stated. The wording could use some cleanup.

GM Section:

This whole section is rife with small formatting issues that, while they could be argued as merely stylistic choices, just don't present the material as well as they could. For example, although all of the important Wild Card NPCs are appropriately marked with the guild symbol, their names are just in the same font as the rest of the text and underlined. In most other supplements and settings, key NPCs are much more loudly announced.

Likewise the names of locations. Just a simple underline, with headers in the same font but larger. It leaves me with the feeling that I'm reading a Word document with art scattered in rather than a fully designed book.

As another example, there is a really sudden and poorly "called out" jump from notable guild figures to guild services that doesn't suit the change in the material's focus. Small header, no spacing to differentiate the sections, just straight from a NPC's stats to guild services all the sudden at the bottom of pg 31. Could use a much larger header and some space.

So yeah. Design aesthetics and a few rules quibbles aside, the whole setting is really cool and I can't wait to get some mileage out of it!