The Echoes of Heaven Bestiary/The Tainted Tears (OGL version) is a combination of adventure and accessory from Final Redoubt Press. The zipped file is over twenty megabytes in size, and contains two separate PDFs, along with a PDF readme and Campaign Cartographer files. The Bestiary is ninety-five pages long, while the adventure is fifty-eight. Both PDFs contain full bookmarks.

Both PDFs have full color covers, with those being (the adventure maps notwithstanding) the only instances of color artwork. There is plenty of black and white interior art in both products (notably, the Bestiary has artwork for most of the creatures it gives), and no borders along the page edges.

Reviewing this product is a tad more difficult than with most books, since this is actually two products in one. On the one hand is The Tainted Tears, the fourth adventure in The Moving Shadow campaign. One the other is The Echoes of Heaven Bestiary, filled with new monsters for this setting. I’ll cover the adventure first, followed by the supplement.

The Tainted Tears follows where the last adventure left off, as the PCs continue to investigate (and become entangled in) a diabolic plot to allow an Ulcer (a place where Hell seeps into the mortal world) to grow and become permanent. As with the previous adventures, this actually begins with a mini-adventure where the characters “remember” themselves from ten thousand years ago, during the war in heaven. After this, the main saga continues as the characters chase Morthon, a duke of Hell, while he uses his new unholy relic to create new Ulcers in the world. When he creates one in a slaughtered village, the PCs have to put the nightmares of the slain inhabitants to rest before they can close the portal.

The adventure flows very well, both in narrative function and as part of the overarching campaign. No corners have been cut, as it covers everything from running the adventure in another campaign world, to a section detailing what happens if the PCs fail. There’s really nothing here that’s poorly done.

The Echoes of Heaven Bestiary is also a good product, but doesn’t quite live up to the same standard as its companion adventure. To be sure, the Bestiary also has a high premium placed on completeness. It begins with over a dozen pages explaining how various monster types work in The Echoes of Heaven, as well as the role of monsters in the campaign world. After this, it begins to showcase new monsters, the majority of which fall under large banners (e.g. angels, demons, nephilim, etc.). Each monster has a section (usually about a paragraph) dedicated to their appearance, motivation, and campaign use.

If this all sounds too good to be true for the Bestiary, it is, to a degree. While the monsters are very evocative in how they’re described and showcased, this seems to come at the expense of mechanical uniqueness. While the stat blocks here seem solid, it’s sort of expected that new monsters will have some degree of unique abilities to help set them apart. While all of the angels share a common suite of powers, beyond that they just have individualized spell lists; there are no supernatural or extraordinary abilities unique to each kind of angel, which makes them seem somewhat bland, particularly if you want to cherry-pick from this monster book for other campaign worlds. Moreover, there are a number of epic-level creatures here, but they pale in comparison to epic monsters from other sources. Moruloth, the Demon of Pride, is a CR 34 monster, but has an anemic 346 hit points (and no supernatural abilities beyond what all demons have). Clearly, this guy would be eaten alive by a group of level 34 PCs.

Those are really the only failings in these products. If not for the fact that the monsters lack uniquely inspired powers (and some oomph at the higher levels), the Bestiary is a good resource, and the adventure serves very well as the next step in a dramatic campaign. The Bestiary and The Tainted Tears are great resources for an Echoes of Heaven campaign, but you may need to do some tweaking to use them in any other OGL game.

OK guys, first thing to get straight is that I bought this product at a discount on condition that I review it. I had downloaded the freebie adventures which I thought were pretty impressive, and wanted to see how good the real product was. The limits to this review is that I have not spent the full time it would take to read the product completely as at this point I was taking advantage of the discount opportunity offered to see if I would buy the complete campaign in the future, and for the small price you get a lot of pages to review.

So will I buy the rest? Most definitely. I am a GM who likes most things outlined for me, so prep time can be minimised in those really busy weeks. The module comes with commentary on how to use the product in either the full campaign or in your own world, and is broken down quite nicely into logical sections each with their own outlines of what the section will achieve, goal of the action - including how to start, text that you can just read out to the players, and even commentary on how to cope with failure of players to obtain the correct goals. There appears to be a nice balance between action events and puzzle solving events - if you are after a dungeon bash this is probably not the product.for you. For me the ease with which I can pick up and run the campaign is a great attraction - however if you like to add your own twists there is plenty of scope to do that also.

This is the fourth in a series of ten - each comes with an extra sourcebook. Included with this is a bestiary. It contains great detail on all of the creatures and monsters and includes a lot of illustrations. It is divided into a number of sections, including how to use the monsters in the game, the rules for using them, and the detailed bestiary entry itself. I was impressed by the detail and quality of whole package.

Overall I think that while this product can be run on its own, the full benefits of the detailed commentaries, the strength of the detail, will only be realised by running this as part of the greater campaign where the linked plots build into the full story design. Again the breadth of the scope of the complete series is pretty impressive.

One of the features of the product is that it is available in different rules versions but I'm not sure how useful that is to the average GM. I've never changed rulesets mid campaign, so being able to buy the product ready for 4 different rules is not that useful to me. I only play with 2 of the different rules versions myself, and the different versions have slight differences in mechanics tailored to the specific rules versions, which is nice and shows some care in putting together the different versions. The bestiary entries also look to be tailored nicely for each ruleset. But ultimately I think I will decide with my players on the ruleset we want to use, and stick with that for the whole campaign.

overall I was pretty impressed!

Product Review: Defendi, Robert J. 2007. The Echoes of Heaven “The Tainted Tears” & “The Bestiary”. Salt Lake City: Final Redoubt Press. 58pp. Stock# 1004DB $9.99

Robert Defendi’s, The Tainted Tears is a complex cohesion of metaphors and riddles. He creates a module with a Christian-base myth, developed in such a way as to accommodate both the thinking and combat needs of the players and allowing the GM to manipulate the players through their own knowledge of Christianity, or lack there of.

The overview and history tying directly to what the GM needs to this particular module (and) in his series is a nice touch. Defendi gives his GMs a step–by–step description of the game flow and the thought processes going into the module’s designing, coupled with a writer’s definition of terms, the processes used and how each is to be used and interpreted allows the GM to interpret the author and run the game in the way Defendi sees it, perhaps even leaning (or relearning) something. Still though, it is written to definitely allow for individual flavoring by the GM.

This is not a print–n–go, hack–n–slash, there are a number of points the GM must familiarize himself with prior to running this module. Hence, I suggest printing it in its entirety and giving the GM the ability to prepare and make notes as well. Tailoring to the players, the GM will then have a game his players will talk about for some time.

The only real down I found in the module itself, was the strength differences between the templates for the players and the villains during the designed combats. I would recommend bringing some of them down a little. The design allows for both fight and flight but players may get discourage unable to win any but the easiest of encounters. Bringing down the combat strengths of the opponents will mix the results. In my opinion giving some to run from, some to fight and win, and some to fight and have to flee from; thus keeping the players on edge.

The Bestiary’s composition includes unique angles, demons and undead; some more than a bit interesting. With creatures, insertable into any campaign, that gives the players an encounter that they have never seen and in the dark on how to just walk through the encounter.

It will take the GM a little time to prepare and some coaxing to keep the players snaking along the course for the game, but is well worth it. Written in all four of the major gaming systems, so no matter what you play, get yourself a pen and sit with this module in hand for an evening or two. Introduce your players to Robert Defendi’s Tainted Tears, they will love and regret that you did!

Written by: Eric Sheppard