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Welcome to September’s DMs Guild roundup, which also happens to be the first anniversary of these posts! Every month I gather together some of the best new releases from the DMs Guild. You won’t find many bestsellers here; the huge amount of new content appearing daily means that lots of great work slips through the cracks. It’s my aim to shed some light on those undiscovered gems, and to give you some fun new things to use in your games that you might not otherwise be aware of.
I originally planned to combine this post with a look back at the things I’ve featured over the past year. I’m really interested to see how they’ve done, whether the writers of the things I featured back in the beginnings of these posts are still releasing things, all that sort of thing. This post is already late, though, and that would simply make things later, so I’m going to do it as a seperate post at some point this weekend. For now, we’ll stick to the normal format.
This month’s roundup is a little leaner than past entries. I don’t know whether I was in a bad mood, my standards have gone up, or it was simply a slow month for great releases, but out of the mountain of products that I looked at this month there were only a handful that I can say I really loved.
| Title | Price | (Suggested Price if PWYW) | What I Paid |
| The Sculptor Class | PWYW | $1.00 | $2.00 |
| Outlandish Sculpting Tools | PWYW | $0.75 | $2.00 |
| Weird Golems | PWYW | $0.50 | $2.00 |
| Hidden Pathways of Chult | PWYW | $0.75 | $2.00 |
| Hunted! | $2.95 | —– | $2.95* |
| The Carver’s Cave | $2.00 | —– | $2.00* |
| The Book of The Dead: An Undead Bestiary | $10.00 | —– | $10.00 |
| Ruins of Mezro | $4.95 | —– | $4.95 |
* I received a complimentary copy of this title, but paid for it after deciding to include it in the Best Of.
The Sculptor by Ross Leiser
We're starting off with one that got away. This class was released back in May and I somehow missed it entirely. It's an intelligence-based half-caster/half-martial class with some really cool flavour. Sculptors literally sculpt their weapons and spells from 'Mana', which representes their own internal well of power. I haven't had a chance to actually playtest this, unfortunately, but it's a really strong idea that seems to have been executed well.
Outlandish Sculpting Tools by Ross Leiser
I found the Sculptor class because I downloaded this, really liked what I saw, and wanted to know more about the class that these new magic items are designed to work with. There's some really interesting stuff in this, and if you like the Sculptor class and anticipate that one of your players might be running one in your game, you could do much worse than to check this out.
Weird Golems by Duncan Timiney
I'm a fan of constructs, and I always want more than the 'base set' of golems that you get in the MM. There are only four new types of golems in this book, but each is a nice addition to your bestiary and helps you span a few more levels of challenge with golems, if you're into that kind of thing (which I am). The added table of oddities is a nice addition that will help add some personality to the golems you use and make them that little bit more memorable, too.
Hidden Pathways of Chult by Alex Clippinger
Short and sweet, this one, presenting a small selection of options to beef up the hex crawl portions of Tomb of Annihilation, including a nice introduction to the Underchult. I particularly like the tables for randomly generating passages in the Underchult. Letting your players get hopelessly lost underground is always fun!
Hunted! by Tony Petrecca
With this adventure Tony proves that he's no one-trick pony. I absolutely adored Killer Kobolds, and I wondered if this was going to be a similar sort of hack-and-slash romp. It is not. Instead it's a nicely layered investigative adventures with some really fun twists and an awesome finale that I absolutely can't wait to get to the table.
The Carver's Cave by Richard Jansen-Parkes
Let's get this out of the way right up front: this is not an adventure for new DMs. The Carver's Cave gives you some plot hooks, a location, and a bad guy with a set of motivations, a task to complete, and a breakdown of how he intends to complete that task. Then it's simply left to you and your players to see how it all goes down. This is really well written and an absolute blast to play, and I strongly encourage you to check it out.
The Book of the Dead: An Undead Bestiary by Timothy Gonzalez
A pretty massive monster manual dedicated to new and weird undead enemies, plus a few templates to bring back the monsters your party have already hacked their way through. I've used a handful of them and they seem well balanced, and it's always nice to have monsters to hand that your group haven't encountered before.
Ruins of Mezro by Will Doyle et al.
I wasn't intending to cover any of the Guild Adept titles, since they already have more than enough publicity, but I just couldn't get past how much I adore this. I've been a fan of ruinscrawls for a long, long time, and I've been toying with the idea of writing one myself for a while. It's great to see one on DMs Guild, and I'm astonished that even as a Guild Adept title this is only a Silver bestseller. I think it deserves a lot more attention that it's getting, and it's well worth $4.95.
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