Gone is the creative but somewhat meandering efforts of Fire on the Velvet Horizon. It has long been my contention that nothing serves to define a campaign setting so much as the creatures that inhabit it and Stuart & Scrap deliver for us 150 pages worth of monstrosities of the Utter Depths. Where to begin? The first and arguably most important part of VotE is its Bestiary. Deep time, fringe biology, paleontology and science-fiction are mixed with the distilled essences of D&D to produce an alloy of strange and wondrous property. Stripped of familiar trappings, Stuart and Scrapprincess endaevour to show us the essence of the Underdark, the platonic ideal, in a way that the traditional Underdark, burdened by decades of familarity, metaplot and pop-culture, no longer can. Veins of the Earth is the Underdark, extrapolated, distilled and recast. Now at last I am ready to grapple with their sublime achievement. I have witnessed boredom and banality that would scar your sensibilities.

I have seen wonders that would not believe. For years I have waded through all the creations, terrible and sublime, that Lotfp could throw at me. The ultimate craft meets its ultimate practitioner. Patrick Stuart & Scrapprincess (Lamentations of the Flame Princess)

Veins of the earth roguelike