Product Analysis: MacrAbeesus, Mother of Manticores

We will be doing these Product Analysis posts the last Sat of every month from now on (fingers crossed) so keep an eye out for more reviews!

Our first crack at the old review game is 'MacrAbeesus, Mother of Manticores' by Underground Oracle Publishing. The company is made up of two hard-hitting, hard-working people who churn out many a game supplement. Honestly, the amount of content they put out is impressive and the vast majority of it is free. This product seems to be their first leap into a paid item on the DMs Guild and frankly, I think they are way underselling themselves but I'll get to that later.

To keep these posts consistent across the board we will be using a few categories to gauge where the product lands at the end of the day.

• Aesthetic - art, layout, font, etc.
• Writing - lore, adventure, etc.
• Design - monsters, encounters, NPCs, etc.
• Accessibility - ease of picking up and go, accommodations for disabilities, etc.
• Complete package - do all of the elements fit well together and lead you down the lane to a fun game?

Aesthetic

I do think that any product over 2 - 3 pages long should have a cover as just a general rule. It makes promotional easier on the publisher and keeps things clean looking on the store when potential buyers are scrolling through. This supplement does take on a very classic two-column layout with stylized headers like we are used to seeing in the majority of our D&D supplements. This makes it easily recognizable, quick for DMs to digest and navigate, and easy for most to use.

For the art pieces themselves, I feel like the choice to go black and white on most of the monsters actually worked out really well. Taking the Crowned Soul as an example you can really see the emotion of anguish the creature has but the added layer of being in black and white enhances that, where a colored version might have lost some of the visceral emotion in the process. I think the opposite would have been true when it came to the main creature in this conflict - the manticore. Having it in color not only put it in stark contrast to the others making it obvious how important it was, but it also allowed there to be a lot more personality in it then would have been possible otherwise. Color allowed some real personality to be shown in the amount of jewelry adorning them and the fact their mouth and jowls were dripping in fresh red blood. Being in color also lets you lock onto their eyes and notice something is immediately different for this creature, they are blind. So not only will the tactics they employ against the players be different then most manticores but how the possibilities the players have to tackle the encounter opens up as well.

Writing

So wow there is a lot of lore presented in this supplement. It is honestly a gold mine for that if nothing else. For practiced DMs out there having some deeply established location lore is very useful and supplements like this can provide some lovely gardens for you to pick through and keep in your back pocket. You could even use all of this as the lore of a land like an ancient greek story about why they hold a celebration on a certain day or why the sign of the manticore is seen as a great evil etc. Though I did have the question of how our dear MacrAbeesus produces children since you know things have to happen I'm assuming. I'm not an expert in manticore biology but~... Should you want to crank up the creep and fiend factor in your encounter you can easily explain it away as children of MacrAbeesus and her demonic patron. Outside of that most questions are answered and the team does a great job laying out groundwork and providing tools for DMs to use, making the lore flexible (because players do what they want) and useful.

A really useful thing you see happen here that I think all DMs should take for the BBEG, even minor ones, is the use of traits when filling out the lore and background for an encounter. It is a quick and easy way to handle over the core of the BBEG to the DM so that they have a compass to go by when the players go off the rails and into the wilderness. As long as the decisions the BBEG makes sticks to those traits that make up who they are then everything else is flexible.

One small thing that I have to pick on though - commas. It's not just UO Publishing but all TTRPG supplements seem to have this problem, and its a back and forth I have alot when I'm editing as well. Please stop using a sea of commas. Honestly, if you are using so many of them that you can't get through a single sentence without it please instead rework it into separate sentences. You need to look at the context of your comma use not just in the single sentence in which it occurs but in the great environment of the paragraph. Also for the record if you will be reading it versus if someone will be speaking it also has a different comma context as well. That is totally a different type of rant though but I just wanted to say it.

Design

I was a little confused by what the suggested level of the players should be for this adventure until I saw the CR gap between the Crowned Soul (CR 5) and our dear MacrAbeesus (CR 16). Really should be stated upfront that players of Tier 3 or 4 are best suited. Now from most things, it seems like they are trying to allow for this to be used anywhere in anyone's campaign. If that is the case then it really needs more hand-holding when it comes to suggested encounters at locations. We really need the encounters to be a little more laid out in how many of each creature the DM should run there AND if my previous thought is correct how to scale each encounter for the different tiers of play. Since that is lacking altogether it makes a plug and play approach to this for a DM alot harder to pull off.

The huge gap in the CRs is another problem that DMs using the supplement can run into quickly. To try and manage this situation I suggest using the Trapped Soul template to generate some creatures along the curve between CR 5 and CR 16. That solution being said really keep an eye on what creature you use the template with. It seems like a quick CR buff for most creatures but there is the possibility of it creating unbalanced encounters with some of the abilities. Be ready to make on the fly adjustments as needed. Having said that I personally love providing a harder fight for my players so have some experience with mid-encounter adjustments, not all DMs are comfortable doing this. It really lends itself as playing better for an experienced DM.

Each of the creatures in this supplement are honestly really well tied into the lore and the setting very well. I think they are amazingly creative and I'll probably have them feature in some future encounters with my own players. So I hope it doesn't come across that I think they are terrible in any way. But I want to use these product reviews as a way to teach design as well where possible. The amount of thought and care that went into the creatures is noticeable and really benefits the whole package. Again the majority of the falling short comes in thinking about the encounters.

So quick things to keep an eye on though when using the creatures in the supplement - In general alot of abilities with stunning potential so keep an eye out on how that is effecting your players to avoid TPKs and adjust as needed. The easiest thing to do is to add further limitations on uses. The Feeder Soul's Moan action holy shit can that really screw over a low-level group of players or someone with bad rolls that night. Its base DC may be a little high for a CR 1/4 but that quickly doesn't become a problem with Tier 3 or 4 players, again backing my idea of level suggestions. I think it would have been a good idea to have the generic Crowned Soul creature be instead a fully flavored Cleric Erest, as he would have made a great mini-boss to give the group a taste of horrors to come. Other than that the Crowned Soul is pretty well balanced but keep an eye out on how the Necrotic Shield (stun potential) and Abject Sacrifice (frightened) are effecting the player's action economy. The build for MacrAbeesus is beefy but I found it strange that she didn't have any magic considering her Demonic pact especially as the lore had her liking to manipulate things from a distance. I was expecting something more controller based rather than up close fighter but I think the up-close approach is going to quickly terrify players. I did find it a little weird that a bite action is a legendary action without added benefits like poison or additional damage, and that there were no lair actions despite the island being listed out as a liar. This does though allow the DM to do some flavoring by adding in liar actions they think may be appropriate and customize it more to the makeup of the player group.

Accessibility

This supplement is something that new DMs should probably avoid as the experience level needed to adjust encounters on the fly, generate balanced encounters, create templated creatures that aren't OP, and guide a player group through to the end without a TPK is a tall order otherwise. It isn't a pickup and go adventure or encounter for those reasons as well.

Headers and clear labels make it mostly easy for a text reader to navigate however the frequent use of additional information boxes can quickly muddle the waters. A table of contents or bookmarks within the PDF that you could navigate using would go a long way to improving its accessibility in this regard. (Note: I am not an accessibility expert and am only giving my opinion using the knowledge of things I have learned)

Complete Package

This supplement does present some challenges for DMs hoping that they can just drop this onto their players with little to no preparation. However, for experienced DMs it does layout all the tools needed to craft a very compelling story arc of encounters leading to a BBEG that the players will truly hate making your job easier in the motivation department. I also find that it is a gold mine of lore, creatures, and encounters that can be woven into other existing story arcs. The value in this product is really in the depth that it goes to in order to build foundations that DMs can then build on top of. Its actually a great thing for DMs to pick up if they are looking to start creating their own story arcs or adventures but aren't ready to jump into creating without a blueprint.

With that little rambling over with, I’m JustKay your regular DM Dalliance on the web and I’ll see you next post.