Master Tiles 2 - Perilous Passages is a short 6 page pdf product from SkeletonKey Games, offering, as the name suggests, several extremely useful passage and corridor tiles riddled with an impressive selection of traps and puzzles. This product is the second product in SkeletonKey Games' Master Tiles series of products. Each product in the series presents a small number of highly customizable tiles, using Adobe's layers function to increase the versatility of the product quite significantly. Perilous Passages introduces mundane and magical traps to catch characters unawares, although the tiles can be used for non-trap purposes as well and should fit in nicely with SkeletonKey Games' other tilesets. This product requires Adobe Acrobat Reader 6 or higher to use the layers.

SkeletonKey Games have long set the standard for quality and versatility in their 2D terrain tiles, and this product is no exception. It's very well presented, impressively illustrated, and the tiles are highly detailed and of high quality. Despite the fact that this product only contains 5 pages of tiles, it can produce endless more using Adobe's layers feature. A short but useful introduction gives a brief overview of the product, and an overview sketch of the tiles is provided to give a useful imaginative nudge to your creativity when using these tiles. Overall, a top quality presentation.

The variety of different traps in the 10 ft. wide passages of this product include arcane traps, pit traps, energy barriers, meatgrinders, spikes, otherworldly tentacles, acid pools, and sharp blades. In most instances, these traps can either be configured to be singular, or if you wish to spring more elaborate traps you can use two or more traps on each tile depending on which tile and which traps are available. One of the useful things about the layers here is that you can put a tile down that doesn't include the trap, but place the tile with the trap down once the PCs have sprung it or circumvented it. The nature of the traps and their lethality is naturally entirely up to the GM and the game system, but there's a really good variety of traps here and a large number of useful configurations.

The tiles also include a number of other features that can be turned on or off, such as the wall shape and colour, rubble on the floors, the floor tiles themselves, and various platforms and shelves. This allows you to change the décor of the passageway tiles to create different combinations. The passageways themselves also contain a good mix of junctions, corridors and corners so that you can easily design some sort of trap gauntlet that needs to be run. Tiles, all suitable to a 1-inch scale grid, can also be rotated to create alternative configurations. Basically, with only a set of five tiles, you can create a large number of configurations and tile options that can readily be combined with other tilesets.

I was impressed with this product. It offers great artwork, good versatility, and surprising options with such a small number of pages. And, as the series continues to build and more products are added, I suspect the older products will become even more useful. Combining products in this series is hopefully something that will be done in the future. While the first two products in this series focus on very specific areas (traps and vampire hideouts), and generic set of tiles that is fully customizable would not go amiss. Overall, a splendid product that lives up to SkeletonKey Games' reputation.

This selection originally looks a little thin for the $4.99 price, but it actually is a great value once you start tinkering with it. The multiple layers on the PDF allows the basic tiles to be created and modified in numberous ways. I recently picked up all three of the original oferings from this series and am very glad I did. In the past I've accumulated a number of the regular tiles which I enjoy, but for some reason I decided to try this set out.

I initially downloaded the sampler and played with it to get a feel. After a few minutes of playing with it I went back and got theother two sets. This set has your standard corriders, 10ft across with right angles, t intersection, crossroads, straight, and a corner room conecction. This is only five tiles, but since each can be printed in an endless variety using the layers and mirror image printing, it is more valuable than 3-4 regular sets from skeletal key. I have a feeling that as newer versions come out, they will have a lot more varriety and options. This is a series to keep your eye on.

Liked: The variety of possibilites and use of layering to make great tiles. This meshes with the Innfinite-Chamber very well as well as the Vampires Den set.

Disliked: Not much, it could have used a tile with a single room enterance, but I assume that will come in add on packs.

Satisfaction: Very high, I almost wish I was running D&D or another dungeon crawl again. But I'll find a similar use for Savage Worlds.

Respectfully, Skipper