The Dungeoneer's Field Guide to Hazards Review
By Casey Smith, Staff Reviewer
Initiative Round
The Dungeoneer’s Field Guide to Hazards is a recent print release from the author of well over a dozen pdfs, Philip J. Reed. As the title and slime-adorned front cover would indicate, this is a book filled with all sorts of dangerous subterranean things that your player’s won’t be eager to find. The Dungeoneer’s Field Guide to Hazards is a compilation of Mr. Reed’s line of hazard-based pdfs, such as A Dozen Dungeon Hazards, A Dozen Wilderness Hazards, and A Dozen Hazards of the City, as well as some other open game content hazards. The Field Guide is 60 pages in length and goes for $16.95, but I was lucky enough to get the book for $8 with a special pre-order deal.
The hazards in The Dungeoneer’s Field Guide to Hazards encompass a great variety of dangers. Inside are all sorts of plants, grubs, mosses, oozes, mold, fogs, and other troublesome things. Some, like putrid fog or steam vents, can weaken the PCs and make another encounter more challenging. Others, like bark grubs and bone slime, are a lethal threat in their own right. Some hazards, particularly the various molds, function essentially as organic traps. But not all of these hazards are deadly--for example, door moss can merely misdirect careless adventurers, and gold grubs can nibble away at a few of their gold coin. And there are several hazards, like runaway wagons and falling refuse, that are unique to urban areas. A few, like death’s bloom (a corpse-dwelling plant that can be eaten to gain some of the dead creature’s memories) can even make good plot hooks. All in all, there’s a lot of creativity to these hazards and a DM will be able to find one for any occasion.
The Dungeoneer’s Field Guide to Hazards also benefits from a solid presentation, especially for a small press product. The cover design is very simple, but the emphasis on green makes it eye-catching and easy to spot on your book shelf. The book has interior art to spare, too--I counted 20 illustrations, some of which are particularly high-quality. Just flipping though the Field Guide should help you get your gears turning. The only qualms I have with the presentation is that the header font looks a little too sci-fi-ish and that the page border is lifted from The Book of Unusual Feats.
Critical Hit
I’m a fan of these sorts of adventure hazards, and creatively using them can add a lot of character to a dungeon. They’re great for breaking up combat encounters and can require a different set of abilities (and some ingenuity) to overcome. Some, like steam vents or collapsing floors, can also be used to create vivid and memorable set pieces. While PCs are typically focused on defeating or surviving monsters, these mundane hazards can remind them of the variety of dangers that adventurers must face.
Critical Fumble
Unfortunately, The Dungeoneer’s Field Guide to Hazards undermines its solid premise with a mediocre execution. Like in The Book of Unusual Feats, the specter of bad mechanics once again rises to cause the reader unnecessary anguish. Several of these hazards are extremely dangerous, sometimes ridiculously so. Some of the low-CR ones, like bridgeweed, psionic fog, and sewage fog, require a DC 25 (!) saving throw to avoid their effects. A few are comically deadly; for example, a 30 ft. tall falling tree does 35d6 damage to anyone it lands on, and a character who falls into a pool of lava takes a jaw-dropping 100d6 points of damage each round (which, incidentally, contradicts the SRD’s listed lava damage of 20d6). And a couple of hazards are just plain cheap; a creature killed by starfallen slime cannot be returned to life by any means, including miracle and true resurrection. Spell slime (a CR 5 hazard) is in a class of its own, with its abilities to permanently drain spell slots from a spellcaster and to automatically counter any spell cast around it (no dice rolls required). Adding to this issue are other mechanics that are unduly complicated or convoluted. Unfortunately, poor game balance is not the Field Guide’s only problem.
A litany of other minor errors also get in the way of this book’s usability. The Challenge Ratings, for one, don’t do the job in many situations. Some hazards pose no real danger on their own, others are a real danger to a party of almost any level, and the few with variable effects don’t scale properly. Editing is also poor. Among other problems, I noticed several references to “page 00”, spell names that are only occasionally italicized, and that the poison vent’s Challenge Rating is curiously listed as “CR #”. The bar for editing is particularly high for compilation books such as this, where previous mistakes have a chance of being corrected. Though a relatively small point, this book would have benefited from listing any Knowledge check DCs to identify these hazards in some uniform location, rather than doing so sporadically in the text.
The last problem plaguing The Dungeoneer’s Field Guide to Hazards is one of redundancy. Do we really need four different kinds of dragon-related fogs, and two types of sleep-inducing mosses? Many of the slimes, in particular, are practically identical to one another. And at least a quarter of this book’s many hazards do Constitution damage in one form or another, a pattern that PCs will find gets old fast.
Coup de Grace
The Dungeoneer’s Field Guide to Hazards shares many of the strengths and flaws of the author’s earlier work, The Book of Unusual Feats. On one hand, it presents a diverse array of hazards and has plenty of good ideas; on the others, it’s hurt by clunky mechanics and weak game balance. If you’re a DM that’s willing to spend some time rewriting some of its broken hazards, The Dungeoneer’s Field Guide to Hazards can serve as an effective idea book. This book also makes a good companion piece to Dungeonscape. But if you’d rather just open up the Field Guide and use things as-is, you may find your players occasionally baffled, confused, or annoyed. Disappointments aside, I’m reasonably happy with my copy of the book--but then again I got it at the preorder price.
Review Scores
Game Mechanics Rating: 9 (60%)
OGL Open Content Rating: 15 (94%)
Originality Rating: 18 (78%)
Playability Rating: 16 (73%)
Presentation Rating: 28 (88%)
Value Rating: 13 (54%)
Reviewer Opinion: 7 (70%)
Overall Total (Does not include OGL Rating): 91 (72%)
Final Grade: C
