I absolutely loved Fantastic LAIRS, because I could easily drop them right into my campaign with very little prep or even advanced notice, and hoped that this offering would work similarly. It doesn't. The absence of maps means that I have to create battlemaps, since that's what my players expect. Each location comes with one image. Some are evocative and thus useful for setting the scene. Others, though, come with inexact cross-sections of the location, which are extra frustrating, because they aren't necessarily something that you want to show the players and also suggest a more complicated layout for me to map. The artistic style is also more cartonish than I would like. Despite these irritations, the descriptions of the locations really are special. In part it's that very uniqueness that makes drawing the maps extra challenging.
In short, these locations are NOT "ready to use," but if you're using theater of the mind, then they're a lot closer than if you're using minis and battlemaps. In either case, it will be up to you to decide on the monsters, quests, etc. That allows tons of flexibility, so that they really could be used in any campaign at any level. The strength of this product is its ability to inspire the DM to create a memorable campaign in a worthy location, but in an age when so much gaming is happening on virtual tabletops or with minis, adding even just one battlemap per location would have elevated this product to an elite level.
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