This book has given me more ideas for interesting characters than any other book that has come out in years.

Why I bought the book

• Competitive Cooking Rules
• Cooking and eating monsters
• two seperate adventures that are just cooking shows mixed with D&D. LOVE IT!

What Surprised me.

• The Druid Subclass is truly something special. The idea of sharing beast shape through potions is well thought out and I was amazed at the care taken to keep it balanced.
• The art for the Paladin of Beauty always makes me smile.
• The layout for the adventures are glorious.
• The sheer number of backgrounds available for working class. Farming, shipping, cooking, serving, butlering. All wonderful ideas that I am happy to see explored.

The bad.

• Kickstarter flubbed my email address so I never got my digital copy.
• That's it. The worst thing I have to say about this book is that my players like the magic items more than I like them.

Are the D&D 5e cooking rules flawed. Yes. Does this book fix all of D&D's skill problems? No. Buy it anyway. This book is amazing.

At the time of writing there are three books in the DM's Guild with actual suggestions on how to make your own traps and for some reason nobody seems to know about it. Also the motto on the page seems to mostly go for attention, all of the traps listed in here have plenty of clues on how they work and reasonable DC descriptions of figuring out how things work.

Pros - The section on different Mechanical Triggers was obviously made with love is my favorite part of the book. The side notes of flavor about a rogue in training is pure gold. The section on the end showing examples of traps were all very imaginitive and very fun. Every trap has a range of Locating DC's so a quick glance might give the players a small clue. The Trap Design Model for complicated traps is a lot of fun. And the section on Advanced Design Concepts has four paragraphs each explaining one step of the greatest idea on How to use complicated traps I have ever read. I also liked the variant rule suggestion for experience for traps, call me oldschool but it just feels right. The traps at the end punctuate what T.R. Gartland has been talked about and each give you ideas on making your own traps.

Cons - My biggest problem with this book is that I want to know what happened to the little theif in training. Seriously if the last page was just a young theif walking past a dozen traps, to steal a ring, or some other nonsense I would have read every word with pleasure. I noticed two minor mistakes that wont confuse anyone, and make sense in context. The only trap designs discussed are trap Triggers (again my favorite part of the book) and ways to deliver complicated traps, I would have liked more suggestions for dealing damage with traps. I guess that's something most people can come up with themselves, but that's something I came for.

Other - I worry that this book has not done as well as it should have simply for not having any cover art, (and maybe marketing, I don't know how that works yet) which is a shame because this book is great. The section that lets you create traps just by rolling on a table seems silly to me so I can't list it as a pro, but the idea of Projectile Caltrops covered Radiant Super Glue is silly, and I can see the appeal of a GM wanting to just roll up a couple of silly traps. I find that the 'air' or 'movement' sensors don't make much sense to me, but that's not going to stop me from using them.

Conclusion - This book is amazing for anyone looking to add something extra to their traps. I love the parts on triggers, and complicated traps, but I leave this book wanting more. It was easily worth the $2.00, but I feel like with an expensive cover, and a few more suggestions for traps this would be a far more popular book in the DM's Guild.

WOW this was fantastic. This trap is a work of art. I did not have high hopes looking over the 5 pages, A cover, a legal page, an advertisement, and two pages of actual trap.

Pros - Well organized, every important line is in bold so if you need to double check anything it is super easy to find. It has a section for changing the level of this trap to fit almost any CR. The art is fun. Most importantly this trap is Hilarious and Brutal! It could be added to any ancient temple, cultist hideout, or wizard tower no problem and probably anywhere else with two minutes of thought. Also the fact that it is not a simple trap to solve. The usual methods of looking where you are going, running through as fast as you can, or crawling through on your belly will all get you killed. Heck throw in 10 chickens or a bag of rats will only make your players underestimate this trap. Also I am not nitpicking the advertisement. You took my breath away and that was the perfect time to say you have more to offer.

Cons - None!

Nitpicks - A short paragraph describing the purpose of the trap at the very begning would have gotten my attention, and turned off my skeptisism right away and I would have been sold. Instead I had to get most of the way through the page before I realized that I was staring at a work of art. I will whine and say that there was only one trap... but it was such a wonderful trap that this does exactly what you want it to do. edit One additional nitpick, it mentions that the room provides it's own dim light, which gives disadvantage on perception checks along with the mist BUT it does not say if players adding their own light will remove this disadvantage. (I think it will once close up). Thos are all of my Nitpicks.

Conclusion - I don't know how I feel about paying $1 for two pages of content... That being said if they wanted to pad this out to 10 pages of DM suggestions and ideas to fit it into your dungeon they could have. Easily worth $0.75. Honestly I think the biggest trap in this book was letting me know that they have other books, so now I'm blindly running towards the bait... They know me too well. Lets see how your other books hold up.

Well organized and beautifully simple.

Pros - This book is well organized, and I appreciate being able to tell exactly where I am. This books main draw are four tables for randomly generating your own traps and pairs beautfifly with Xanaths' Guide trap section, and probably works with the DMG trap section, I haven't really looked at it for a few years now. Its' suggestions for traps and how to use them are well stated, and it enjoys itself.

Cons - First it's short. I feel like I would enjoy hearing more about what the author has to say about traps. I would probably like it better if all the tables were on one page just for my personal reference... (was that a downloadable option? I should have checked) I didn't love the background color choice. But those are three pretty small nit-picks.

Conclusion - Free is an amazing deal, get it, read it, and I think you will agree that it's worth the $1.00. If only to reward this line of creativity.

20 New Traps is a breath of fresh air in this edition that has deined to discuss traps as long as nobody asks any follow up questions.

Pros - Even if you never use any of the traps listed here, there are several creative and fun traps that give you ideas just for knowing about them. This is creativity at it's finest. I would start at the end because I did get a bit bored early on by large amounts of text describing something I already felt I understood. Fix this and add a Challenge rating I would happily give this a 5/5.

Cons - The information is all great. But the large blocky paragraphs are large, especially around several really good traps. If the traps were organized (Quick description, Perception, Trigger, Effect, etc) The information would pop right out and it would make skimming through take five seconds. The only problem I found with the book was that many of the traps left off Identification or Disarming rules. Which is probably 5e's fault more than James Introcaso's so while I would like that I wont hold it against him.