I wrote a review/overview on my website, Zargo Games, but I'll share it here too!

Brief Summary: Increase your pool of goblin threats with thirteen new variations.

Overview: Right off the bat I'm struck with how visually impressive this product is. There's a cover page with a full-page illustration that makes it look like an official Wizards product, and then a subsequent title page that's laid out nicely. After that there's a short table of contents and then it gets straight to the goblins.

The first goblin is the goblin sneak, which is a trap-laying ambusher that has an adjustable CR based on the kinds of traps it has. The next is the goblin pyro, which, as the name suggests, is a volatile flame-wielder that can explode on death. Third is the goblin ratlord along with its giant rats. It's a straightforward beast tamer with its own company of beasts. Fourth is the goblin wolfrider, which rides wolves into battle and can hamper a party's progress with nets as well as more lethal weapons. Fifth is the goblin firecaller, a mage goblin with fire spells like fire bolt and scorching ray. Sixth is the goblin psycho, which is essentially a goblin barbarian, as hilarious as that sounds, though it can deal significant damage and take hits that most goblins couldn't. Seventh is the goblin shaman, which is a support spellcaster with some healing abilities. Eighth is the goblin sniper, a simple long-ranged skirmisher. Ninth is the goblin lasher, both a whip-wielder and a spellcaster, with some profane spells like animate dead and bestow curse. Tenth is the goblin firelord, another spellcaster with more powerful spells, such as the dreaded fireball. Eleventh is the goblin mastermind, a deadly goblin rogue with sneak attack powers. Twelfth is the goblin warboss, a powerful fighter with the action surge ability. Last is the goblin warpriest, another support caster with stronger combat capabilities and healing features.

After that all that's left is the back cover, which has two small paragraphs describing the document.

Verdict: I was blown away by how professional this document looks and how much thought and effort was put into the variety of goblins. If you're running a game that prominently features goblins, this is a must-have document, and it's free so there's no reason to not download it!

I wrote a review/overview on my website, Zargo Games, but I'll share it here too!

Brief Summary: Add an inventory slot system that's more in-depth but less cumbersome than the existing weight-based carrying system.

Overview: While I'm the kind of DM that prefers to handwave any kind of encumbrance in my games, I understand that there's a time and a place for that kind of mechanic. With that in mind, this product does a lot to streamline those rules and make them both easy to understand and adjustable to your preference.

While I wouldn't exactly say that the document is pretty, it's clearly laid-out and easy to read. It serves its purpose without trying to be too fancy, and I can certainly appreciate that over some products I've read that are overly decorated to the point of being illegible. The document begins by explaining why you should worry about inventory restrictions, and agrees that while inventory management is never added to increase fun, it can add to the realism of a game and that these rules streamline the system to make it less cumbersome (which I agree). The basic rules are simple: a character has a number of inventory slots equal to their strength (plus or minus some if they're not medium-sized). Items take up inventory slots, and if you go over your capacity, your speed is decreased, all the way to 0 if you're greatly encumbered. Next, it explains how you can expand your inventory space with bags, pockets, and more, and how different storage items might impede your quick access to the item (if an item's in a bag, it takes longer to access than if it's in your pockets). Then, it addresses other kinds of containers that you wouldn't take with you, like wagons and chests. Finally, it gives examples of different items and how many inventory slots they would take, making it easier to understand how much an average person could hold.

Verdict: As a rule set, this is a phenomenal work, though I think personally I will continue to just handwave encumbrance unless I end up running a hexcrawl or something like that. Personally, I'd increase the average carrying capacity by a little bit, but otherwise this is a great set of rules that I could see getting heavy use by many DMs.

I wrote a review/overview on my website and Patreon, Zargo Games, but I'll share it here too!

Brief Summary: Create a playable gnoll race based off wolves instead of hyenas.

Overview: This product has a surprisingly high production value for such a short product. There’s an illustration, a cover (with the same illustration), a title page, a legal page, and a back cover. However, the core of the product feels lacking.

The flavor and illustration makes the gnolls feel more like werewolves stuck in the wolf form rather than a monstrous humanoid. The names section is rather small and has pretty on the nose names such as “Snarl” and “Flesh-Carver.” Past that, the traits are a mess. The race is ridiculously underpowered by the fact that all three of the mental stats are decreased by two but only two of the physical stats are increased by two, and one of them by one. The rest of the features feel a little ridiculous, such as the ability to go into a bloodlust and continuously decrease your AC to increase your attack bonus and damage, the ability to essentially echolocate the topography, and the choice of extra hit points, improved intelligence, improved bloodlust (which is already crazy), or improved experience point gain. It’s a mess.

Verdict: Despite a few decent ideas, this product is slim and contains very little of use to players of DMs. Still, it has a price tag of free, so it might be worth checking out.

I wrote a review/overview on my website and Patreon, Zargo Games, but I'll share it here too!

Brief Summary: A short product that provides an unusual take on gnolls.

Overview: This product make it clear that this is a setting-agnostic take on gnolls, which is obvious when you read that “gnolls are… evolved from canines such as jackals and wolves” rather than hyenas. Still, a gnoll is a gnoll, and as far as gnolls go these are interesting. These gnolls are often chaotic good, can move on all fours, and come from forests. This leads to the document clarifying brief rules for moving on all fours, which could be a useful tool for people wanting to make their own quadrupedal races. However, the product is very clearly made on the Homebrewery by someone who has very little understanding of how to use it, and as such its formatting is very poor and the choice to make all the text centered is baffling and obnoxious.

Verdict: This product seems to have very little effort put into it, but it provides an interesting alternate take on gnolls that is worth the free price tag.

I wrote a review/overview on my website and Patreon, Zargo Games, but I'll share it here too!

Brief Summary: Play as a gnoll with three subraces to choose from.

Overview: This product is light on fluff, though it has enough to give players a rough idea of how a gnoll should act. The names section is also light on detail, and only provides two samples of last names. The trait section is the meat of the product, and the core racial features seem pretty solid, despite a few formatting errors. The subraces are more divisive. While each does a decent job of connecting the flavor with the abilities, they all feel very combat-focused, with nothing of use to a roleplayer. They also seem both unbalanced and unfinished, with many key details left out that I feel the author simply forgot to include or didn’t realize that they were needed. After the subclasses there’s a table of gnoll flaws, with the disclaimer that it’s taken from Out of the Abyss.

As mentioned earlier there are numerous formatting errors, and coupled with the background image that is sometimes too dark over the text, this product can be difficult to look at. I recommend using the printer-friendly version, which the author thankfully includes in the base product.

Verdict: This product is a solid core for running gnolls, but it falls apart with the subraces. It’s sometimes a mess visually, but for a free product that’s forgivable. Check it out if you want to see one person’s take on gnolls.

I wrote a review/overview on my website and Patreon, Zargo Games, but I'll share it here too!

Brief Summary: Create a playable gnoll race with three subraces while remaining as faithful to the current lore as possible.

Overview: The document is plain but very readable, so I consider that a positive. The formatting is great throughout the document. It opens with the author explaining his experience with playing gnolls in past editions and his desire to create playable gnolls for 5th. Then he provides a disclaimer that this has not been thoroughly playtested.
Past that there is a lengthy section that details the lore, ecology, and behavior of gnolls. This adheres strongly to the existing lore from the Monster Manual and Volo’s Guide but adds small touches that I appreciate. There’s a meaty list of sample names, great for people like me that have trouble coming up with names. Then finally there’s the traits section.
My problem with this is that it seems like gnolls are overloaded with traits. Individually, each trait is interesting and fits with gnolls well. However, the base gnoll feels like a full race on its own, but then it gets a choice of three subraces, each of which are also quite meaty. The core race contains a negative feature that penalizes the gnolls in certain roleplaying scenarios, but I don’t feel like this is enough to maintain balance. The subraces are distinct and flavorful. The mystic gives the gnoll innate magic, the scout makes the gnoll fast and skilled with ranged weapons, and the warrior makes the gnoll an all-around killing machine. The features work well with the flavor, but from just eyeballing it the race seems overpowered. Stripping out one or two features would probably bring the race more in line with the other races.

Verdict: A very well-written product that has a few balance issues that are easily addressable by a competent DM. Well worth the free price tag.

I wrote a review/overview on my website and Patreon, Zargo Games, but I'll share it here too!

Brief Summary: Add some variety to your doors with ten new magical doors of varying danger and creativity.

Overview: The product starts with a short anecdote describing an encounter with the first door. While there’s additional meta-text in the document, the rest of the meta-text are notes by the narrator, Tomaz of Candlekeep. After this little anecdote, it begins detailing all the doors.

Each door includes a name, an illustration (with very good art for the most part, though The Musical Door looks pretty tacky), a note by Tomaz, dimensions, weight, materials, destruction stats (ac, hp, vulnerabilities/resistances, and damage threshold), identify (what spell effects the door has), perception (DC of checks needed to notice particular features), a lengthy description, how to remove the door, and what the other side of the door looks like. The meat of the product is in the descriptions, as it explains what the door looks like as well as any effects or other special details, like how to open the door if it is locked. Some of these doors are very imaginative, while others are pretty simple. The most disappointing doors to me are the doors that are meant to be deadly. They are certainly deadly at low levels, but past level 3 they’re barely even a threat, so DMs running higher level campaigns should consider beefing up the damage the doors do. However, the wealth of ideas makes this hardly a concern, as there are all sorts of doors to work in your campaign.

Verdict: While I doubt I’ll use much from this product, it does what it sets out to do very well, and if you need to add flavorful magic doors to your campaign, you can’t go wrong with one of the doors from here.

I wrote a review/overview on my website and Patreon, Zargo Games, but I'll share it here too!

Brief Summary: Make magic item crafting more engaging with expanded crafting rules.

Overview: This is a meaty product. It’s listed at 30 pages on the DMs Guild but the pdf is actually 36 pages. There’s a lot of information provided, and I think this is definitely a good base for adding magic item crafting in your game, but it could do with occasional clarification. The table of contents is useful for finding what you need. Dividing the magic items by level is a useful way to help keep your game balanced even while including so many magic items.

The document begins with potion crafting. This includes all one-use consumable items that aren’t scrolls or wondrous items. The rules are pretty simple once you understand them, but they’re presented in a way that feels a little rambling. To make matters worse, a lot of the information presented in this section is repeated later, so it feels a little excessive. That said, none of this seems particularly unbalanced, and the method adds flavor to the generic crafting process presented in the DMG. One thing I can praise easily about this product is its descriptions of ingredients and how they function in the crafting process or the final product. This isn’t limited to the potions section, but the first example of that is in it.

After potions, rules for scribing scrolls are presented. These are a bit easier, though I would personally tweak them some if I used it in my campaign. There’s not much to say about this section that doesn’t apply to the other sections.

The third section is about researching, particularly recipes and instructions for creating potions, scrolls, and magic items. There’s some fun flavor in here, but I think the rules are a little excessive for simply doing some research.

The fourth section is about crafting magic items, which are divided into weapons/armor, wands/rods/staves, and wondrous items. I feel like this is the most excessive section, with far too many words to cover what should take much less space. However, I like a lot of the ideas presented here, and it contains a wealth of optional rules to tailor this system to your personal style.

The final section is about additional optional rules, like racial restrictions, additional crafting steps, and variant item level restrictions.

Verdict: This product provides a strong base for crafting items in your campaign, but I would personally suggest streamlining the process so it takes less time to explain and to run. For a pay-what-you-want product, it’s a great value.

I wrote a review/overview on my tumblr and Patreon, Zargo Games, but I'll share it here too!

Brief Summary: Ideas for running werewolves in your game I guess?

Overview: This isn’t the most pressing issue with this release, but it’s really annoying when a two-page product is listed as four pages because there’s a cover and a legal page. With that out of my system, on to the meat of the product.
There’s not much meat. The document is divided into three tiny sections. The first section gives information about werewolves, with a focus on pack mentality and alpha werewolves. The second section provides a few light plot hooks for werewolves in your campaigns. The only one that caught my eye was the idea that a werewolf curse can be removed if a cure is found before the first full moon. Other than that they’re a bit bland. The last section is a statblock for a variant werewolf, the werewolf alpha. It has legendary actions and more hit points so it’s more of a threat, but other than that it doesn’t feel very distinct from the original werewolf.

Verdict: There’s nothing bad about this product, but it provides very little that I found useful. The statblock is nice, so I’d say that alone is worth a pay-what-you-want download at the very least.

I wrote a review/overview on my tumblr and Patreon, Zargo Games, but I'll share it here too!

Brief Summary: Brew alcoholic beverages with a fairly straightforward brewing system.

Overview: This product won’t drastically change your game in any way, and besides a few special ingredients and the ability to mix pre-existing potions into your alcohol, provides little mechanical benefit to the party, but it’s simple, flavorful, and feels like something that would fit into any fantasy world.
The first section details the very basic mechanics of brewing in 5e. You simply need a brewing kit (a new tool introduced in the product) and the basic ingredients: grains, fruits, or honey depending on the variety of alcohol you wish to produce. You make a brewing kit check, and if you succeed you make alcohol in a certain amount of time, unless it’s a distilled alcohol, which takes two checks and more time. Very simple, but it provides a chart of what ingredients make what alcohol and a few flavorful details to make it seem grounded in your world.
The next section details the special rules required for making special brews. Special brews all require unique ingredients, but in return they provide a mechanical benefit, such as sped-up brewing, increased Charisma, limited telepathy, and more. Adding these ingredients to your brews raises the DC of the brewing kit check, so adding multiple ingredients can quickly add up to a potentially impossible brew.
The final section involves adding potions into your brews. This allows you to stretch your potions into more servings, but at the risk of messing up the brew, and it’s something that I’d imagine lots of alcohol-consuming adventurers would enjoy.

Verdict: This won’t radically change your game, but it’s a mechanically solid and flavorful addition to any fantasy world.

I wrote a review/overview on my tumblr and Patreon, Zargo Games, but I'll share it here too!

Brief Summary: Expand your fighter options with three new archetypes: the element-themed arboreal vanguard, the dragon raider, and the vile plaguebearer.

Overview: The document appears to be made in Homebrewery, so while it is certainly not bad to look at, it seems pretty barebones, with little effort put into formatting and no illustrations. However, the new archetypes sounded intriguing, if a bit overcomplicated.
Starting with the arboreal vanguard, I was intrigued by the element-themed spellcasting. Some of the choices for the elemental spells baffled me a bit (cure wounds is a fire spell?), but I liked the idea of being able to switch elements on a long rest and adapting your available spells as needed. Past the basic features, though, the archetype is a bit of a mess. One feature randomly grants you the ability to speak with animals, with no other animal-themed features in the rest of the class. The other features are elements-themed, but only in name. Finally, I think the author misunderstands what “arboreal” means, because I found nothing about trees in the archetype.
The next archetype, the dragon raider, is much more cohesive flavor-wise. You’re a warrior with dragon powers, simple. Also, for the most part the archetype is cohesive mechanically too. Not to say that it is balanced, but I can see that there was effort put into making this archetype seem like it fit together. However, it needs serious rebalancing, as some of the features seem pretty useless while others are insanely overpowered (one ability lets you add your Charisma modifier to your AC while wearing heavy armor!!!). With some work, this could be an interesting class, but only allow it in your games with serious effort put into rebalancing it.
The final archetype, the plaguebearer, has some interesting flavor and some really cool mechanics, but it suffers from trying to do too much, and is overly complicated because of it. A particular feature I love, unfeeling hulk, is essentially evasion, but for Constitution instead of Dexterity. Overall, this archetype doesn’t feel like it fits with the fighter class, and would be better suited for sorcerer or warlock (the flavor at the beginning would actually fit both classes quite well!). It also suffers balance issues.

Verdict: Check this out if you want to find some good ideas without much cohesion. I would not recommend using any of the archetypes from the product directly, but it could be fun to rework some of them to be better balanced or cohesive. At a price of pay-what-you-want, there’s nothing to lose but your time.

I wrote a review/overview on my tumblr and Patreon, Zargo Games, but I'll share it here too!

Brief Summary: Inject sci-fi into your fantasy with a new space-themed warlock patron, advanced equipment, and rules for surviving in space.

Overview: While skimming through the document, I was delighted by how slick everything looked, especially for a free document. It is seriously a delight to look at; whoever formatted it clearly possesses a great deal of skill. On a closer reading I found a few nitpicks, but overall I am very happy with the product. The document opens with a new warlock patron, the traveler between the stars. The nebulous concept represents any entity, being, or civilization capable of space travel, and as such warlocks that choose this patron gain access to advanced technology. The document has a nice side-bar explaining how to handle the science-fiction elements of the subclass without detracting from the fantasy setting. My one complaint is that the capstone ability, orbital strike, while flavorfully awesome, seems very weak mechanically. One thing I particularly love about this section is the ability to pick a repair drone as a familiar, should you choose pact of the chain. After the warlock patron the document details advanced technological gadgets. The gadgets integrate directly with the warlock patron’s features, but they can also be used by anyone that finds them (the function similarly to magic items but with a different cooldown mechanic to represent the technological aspect). While a few of the magic items could do with clearer descriptions, both mechanical and flavor-wise, overall the gadgets are interesting and well-made. The final section details the hazards of space exploration. Radiation and the vacuum of space get codified rules, which I am grateful for as a DM about to run a game that partially takes place in space. The radiation rules are fairly straightforward, though it adds a bit of bookkeeping for DMs and players, so if you’d rather keep things low-maintenance, I’d suggest handwaving radiation or finding a new way to deal with it. The dangers of vacuum are even simpler, with players able to survive a set number of rounds, based on their Constitution modifier (I’m assuming there’s a minimum of one round but the document doesn’t clarify) before you die. No death saves, space is too deadly for things like that. You also suffer negative effects if you survive the vacuum, but those can be cleared up easily through rest or magic.

Verdict: Overall this is a fantastic product that is aesthetically pleasing as well as flavorful and mechanically sound. My few issues can easily be addressed by a creative dungeon master. With a pay-what-you-want price, there’s no reason to ignore this product unless you simply despise adding sci-fi to your fantasy.