Arcadia is awesome. Flee, Mortals! is a masterpiece. So what about the companion product to the monster books, Where Evil Lives? I’ve checked out most of it, looked at the lair designs, and checked out how cool it is in my latest stream on Twitch. If you want to check out my thoughts before anyone else, that’s the place to be. Well, if you want to know my thoughts on Flee, Mortals!, check out this article.
What is the place where evil dwells?
When Flee, Mortals was crowdfunded, MCDM had planned to pack too much into the book and didn’t expect it to be such a big hit. So a decision had to be made: shorten the book or print a giant book that would easily fall apart. The answer was Plan C: neither. Make a Monster book and a shorter Lair book. But the Lair book ended up being so good that people asked for a physical product, not just the PDF that was originally intended. A new crowdfunding, another instant success.
So, is it worth it?
Ok, that’s the end of the review.
Now, let’s be serious for a second. With MCDM you can expect high quality work from talented designers and writers who are highly paid. This is a great formula for success. That being said, I am picky about the little details because with such a great product I know it could easily be improved. Still, overall, great job as always.
I only have a PDF copy of Flee, Mortals that I was given, and James Introcaso also sent me a review copy, so I can’t judge the physical version of this product. I haven’t found any images of a copy yet, and from my research, it looks like those copies are only just starting to arrive.
The best dungeons have fun boss battles, exciting dangers, and of course, great treasure. Where Evil Lives: The MCDM Book of Boss Battles has all that plus everything you need to run a lair right out of the book. Use the dungeon when you have nothing else planned, or build an entire campaign leading up to a climactic encounter in your lair.
A hideout, not a dungeon
This book is advertised as a book about lairs, but never states that it is a book about dungeons. Sure, it consists of 22 locations that we associate with dungeons, but they are short, made to be done within a single session, and are all lairs for powerful monsters from the Flee, Mortals! books. The fact that James Introcaso, Mike Shea, and Scott Fitzgerald worked on this book about lairs as well as Fantastic Lairs: 23 Boss Battles for your 5e RPG (another great product about lairs) meant that this product was destined for success.
Below is a list of the 23 lairs. It’s odd that they didn’t add level 1 lairs, but at the same time, I feel like there wouldn’t be much point in adding them – going through a lair to fight a boss monster would be suicidal or it wouldn’t work unless you made the boss monster very boring/pointless. Lairs go up to level 20. Tier 3 and Tier 4 content in D&D is so scarce and so varied that it was very interesting to analyze the design behind it.
Monster
The monsters in this book are some of those in Flee, Mortals!. However, you don’t need that book to use this one. All the monsters you need are reprinted in this book and are great on their own. That said, some things are reprinted that I didn’t think were necessary. For example, this Goblin sidebox is great for a monster book, but it’s useless for the cave lair where goblins are already shown to behave. It might have been more effective to re-adjust this text to fit the goblin behavior in the lair.
The monsters are copied from the Monster Book and the designs are fantastic, the boss monsters fit these environments very well, I wouldn’t be surprised if the monsters were originally created for this lair and then reworked for the Monster Book.
One thing that surprised me about this book are the wandering monsters. These appear in many dungeons, but I would have thought they would materialize and wander the hallways, becoming part of the monsters in other rooms rather than encountering the PCs. That way, fighting the wandering monsters would have the benefit of leading to fewer monster encounters later on. However, this could overcomplicate the dungeon design, and I wish there was an easier way to achieve this.
Finally, I’ll point out that while the Flee, Mortals! book doesn’t list Lair Actions, they are all listed in this book because they work with specific Lairs. Some Lair Actions create very unique types of combat that can only be accomplished by crafting those Actions specifically for that Lair.
Retreat
This is exactly what this book is about. In talking with some of the designers of both books, I found that the designers responsible for a particular monster also designed that monster’s den, if they had one. An example of this is Cat Krueger’s amazing hobgoblin den, which very much reflects their infernal lineage. Some of my favorite dens are:
Hanging Tree features a band of orc mercenaries who hire the tavern, and the environment is built in a way that players and orcs can throw anything at it to attack. Great and interesting game design! Camp Firefield is a hobgoblin camp set in a pocket dimension. This means you’re teleporting from room to room to different nodes in the lair, which is really cool. Eight City Advocacy Services is a place of business where a supreme demon reigns. You’re kind of infiltrating an office full of demons. It’s so quirky, I love it. Boughs of Eternity is a lich’s lair in a giant tree that you must go through to learn about this being’s past in order to proceed. I love great environmental storytelling.
There are also some things about these hideouts that I think could be improved a bit more. Many hideouts are divided into different sections or levels. For some reason, this is not specified on the map. By the way, the map is beautiful and perfect for VTT. Moreover, when you click on the table with all hideouts shown above (which would be very useful as a second index), it does not take you to the hideout page. I think this is very easy to solve and is a nice feature to improve accessibility.
Now, to finish off, I want to point out a few things that I don’t see often in lairs and dungeons in other products. Every lair has NPCs with names and personalities that set them apart from the usual guards and minions. Often they have useful information or want to rebel against the boss, so you might be able to hire them using the retainer rules. Additionally, as shown with the Lich above, many monsters and bosses have stories that can be learned by investigating the lair by interrogating minions, reading books along the way, or looking at environmental details. This is a great piece of MCDM and I love seeing it. MCDM seems to give designers enough freedom to do wacky things with their designs, like draining hit dice from PCs. This is something I love. Please do more things like this in the future. (If I ever do D&D design again)Finally, this product comes with a custom character sheet, which looks much better than the original one. I will use it in my upcoming D&D games.
lastly
That’s right! Another masterpiece from MCDM… but this is the last 5e before they make something entirely their own. Their next setting book seems to be system agnostic. I wouldn’t be surprised if they decide to make it primarily for their own game. So, after a long time, I see a change of direction for MCDM (and maybe Matt Colville’s channel). I’m excited to see what that means for the future of TTRPGs. This is certainly indicative of how a great TTRPG company should work.
Where evil dwells
