5 Star Review: "The Shadowfey: A Guide to the Fey of Ravenloft"
I purchased this solely off of my personal nostalgia for the “Ravenloft – The Shadow Rift” adventure that was first published in 1998 for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons – 2nd Edition. As a collector of Ravenloft materials, I felt an overwhelming need to have this in my digital library and if it were offered as a physical copy, I would order that as well.
Before I dive into my overall impressions, I’d like to stress that with most indie developers that most do not have a lot of resources to put towards editing teams. I know this from personal experiences. Sometimes, with indie titles, a reader may come across redundancies, sentences that could have flowed smoother, as well as spelling or grammatical errors. I’m not interested in touching on any of those items in this review unless of course its so horrid that it makes the book unreadable. I have yet to see perfection, even major publishing companies make errors sometimes. To expect a small press/writing team to have perfection is an unrealistic expectation. “The Shadowfey – A Guide to the Fey of Ravenloft” is comprehensible and the writing is solid enough for me to encourage others to check it out for themselves.
The artwork is beautiful and appropriately themed to the book. The color schemes added to the ambiance of what the Shadow Rift would be like, as well as gave a clear depiction of the content that was inside the book. Further, the art was appropriately spaced between the pages, making it so you don’t have numerous pages of text before reaching another image. As many publishers tout, a good illustration helps with turning the page and seeing their continued frequency was refreshing.
The information on the shadowfey is extensive! This book is 141 pages all of which focuses on the shadowfey. The original Shadow Rift book was 160 pages, however from pages 118 to 160 was reserved for information about the shadowfey themselves as well as the Shadowrift, with the other 117 pages dedicated to an adventure. This book provides a ton of information any DM will find useful when incorporating the shadowfey into their Ravenloft games. What is perhaps the most impressive part of this book is the Monster Appendix. As one can see from the table of contents, there are 57 monsters to implement into your games. The most exciting of them all for me was the entry on Loht and Maeve who, in my personal opinion, could be considered archfey; their legendary actions give credence to this theory.
Even if not running a campaign aimed at drawing the player characters into the Shadow Rift, the threat that some of its inhabitants’ pose is not something to ignore in any Ravenloft game. I highly recommend picking up this supplement and give kudos to the authors for revisiting and expanding on one of the more classic Domains of Dread.
Check it out here: