Into the Dark Den is a straightforward, fun adventure if you're looking to start playing Pathfinder or just need a quick pick-up adventure to play. It relies on the classic premise of "adventurers take shelter in a location, only to find out it goes deeper and something is wrong!"

The "something wrong" in Into the Dark Den leads to an interesting variety of NPCs and challenges, and despite the adventure's brevity and simplicity, the backgrounds of both the story and the characters involved are given care and attention. Is it likely to come up in session? It depends on the group, but having it there makes reading and prepping the adventure more interesting for a GM, and an extra bonus if the players engage with it.

I sort of "co-GMed" this adventure with a friend who wanted to try her hand at being a Pathfinder GM, and it was a great time!

I love this so much. The premise is so good, the prose is enchanting, the sisters play off each other so well, and I would defend the grand disaster Jelica no matter the cost. Why are you still reading this review when you could be reading Vellum & Lace?

I like classes that can evoke a mood without being heavyhanded, and the muse class presented here does a great job of that. It's a promising class for your OSR game if it involves any reasonable amount of intrigue or navigating social encounters. They're definitely a "face" class, helping out their party members by defusing tense situations or offering protection when it comes to blows. Calm emotions is a fantastic spell for that reason, and I really like dream, which I might even level down for my own games...

There are two lovely pieces of artwork in this 6-page product: the image of a lovely muse gives you a good idea what you're getting into with the class, and the art of the magic sword Kerzenleuchter is phenomenal. Actually the sword as whole, art and text, is pretty great. Intelligent weapons are cool but always seem like they're waiting for epic situations, and Kerzenleuchter is a much more subtle piece that you can introduce early on.

It's short, sweet, and to the point and I like it. If your campaign is about bleeding down in the muck and fighting tooth and nail for survival, the muse might be a bit out-of-tune, but if you're in a lot of civilized areas evading the monarch's enchanted assassins, or even a particularly social dungeon filled with medusa triunes and kobold cults competing for dark power, then I recommend it!

Merrybears, A Pathfinder Ancestry is an adorable book with art that evokes fond memories of the childhood cartoons from which it draws its inspiration.

As far as the lore and mechanics, Calder CaDavid does a wonderful job of having the work take itself seriously. We know the references, we know what the ancestry alludes to, but Merrybears is not overstuffed with winking self-referential humor. You can genuinely use this in a Pathfinder game, and you and your group could play it for laughs, or you could have a group of mysterious yet adorable bouncy bears who are just having a real hard time with trolls like any other people of Golarion. Effort and care is put into offering some lore to integrate the merrybears into the world of Golarion at large

For me at least, that's what makes a work like this worthwhile and not just a throwaway joke you paid a few dollars for. Is this going to be for every gaming group? Probably not. But is it worth a look? Definitely! It shows a lot of love (as you might suspect from a bunch of bears who care), and is still a fun read with cute but useful ancestry feats such as "Bear Hug", "Bottom Bouncer", and "Silly Little Merrybear".

I love it. I'll probably squeeze some merrybears in my game somewhere.

The sixteen new warlock patrons found in these pages are a great source of character ideas not just for PCs, but DMs as well.

Players will want to work closely with their DM at the outset of the campaign (or when integrating a new warlock into the party) when using these patrons. Each one comes with their own intriguing twists and agendas, but that means this is not a book of 16 one-size-fits-all patrons. Eledos, Tree Horn is a pretty cool unicorn, but you might have some issues using him as your patron if the campaign is going to deal with courtly intrigue or crawling through sewers. The flipside to that is you can easily come up with great character motivations from what you'll find here, and expect the patron to put some unexpected demands on your PC down the road...

I'm usually a DM, and this book is a treasure trove of inspiration in that regard. Need an interesting warlock NPC? You won't find any specific ones here, but the patron write-ups are robust enough to give you clear ideas of who would serve these beings. The adventures practically write themselves: the PCs try to liberate a town from being used as psychic fuel for the One Mind, or are locked in a game of deadly cat-and-mouse with a servant of the Lord of Broken Horns. There are some sparks of campaign-spanning villain ideas in here as well, but those will take a lot of personal effort on the DM's part as that is a bit beyond the scope of what the guide sets out to provide.

You won't find new spells or feats inside, but that's fine. The DistractedElf's Guide to Otherworldly Patrons promises options to enrich your role-playing experience, and it more than delivers on that.

Beowulf: Age of Heroes is an adaptation of 5E designed for two players: 1 PC and 1 GM. It takes its inspiration from the epic Old English poem Beowulf, as well as Anglo-Saxon history, but it is not tethered to either of those things. Here, the player is a Hero, coming from near or far and traveling the great Whale Road to hunt Monsters. You can certainly hit the books and brush up on the Roman occupation of the lands that are now Great Britain, for example, or medieval trade routes with kingdoms in northern Africa, but you don't need to. You can pile on the fantasy (and there is plenty to pile on), and shroud it all in the mysterious trappings of pure legend.

To help the Hero on their quest, they are accompanied by Followers, and here Beowulf shines with simple, clean mechanics to represent the aid of other characters assisting the Hero. Although they are emphasized as background characters in the text, it is difficult to play a session of Beowulf and not get wrapped up in the lives of your companions, which can become a game in its own right--at least the way most people I've talked to play it.

Hero creation is straightforward, as characters are assumed to be human, their place of origin does not matter mechanically, and instead they have a Hero class, with six potential subclasses each based on one of the six Ability Scores. For example, my Frankish Hero, Lindru, is what's called a Council-Caller by the game: she is wise and insightful above all else, sensing the hidden motivations of the Monsters and the people harrassed by them, but able to hold her own in a melee with the help of her Followers.

While the game is ultimately about monster hunting, there are solid, easy-to-use mechanics to represent social intrigue. It is hard not to populate a Mead Hall with sinister secrets all their own that the Hero must deal with on their way to victory.

I love this game. It is incredibly easy to pick up and play, because scheduling a game with one other person is degrees of magnitude easier than getting a whole group together, and you can often reuse the same prep-work with different players for entirely different results. The artwork is gorgeous and inspiring, and working on my own adventures has (happily) taken up a lot of my time since this released!