The Dungeon Craft: Hell & High Water companion book does a great deal to add to the incredibly well-designed and diverse gaming platform pieces provided by 1985 Games as a whole.
The Hell & High Water companion book is yet another set of dry-erase printed sheets that can easily be cut to drop full naval vessels as well as hellish, lava-surrounded platforms down onto your game map on a moment’s notice. The pieces also include plenty of waterbound monsters, seemingly friendly NPCs (as much as pirates can be friendly anyway), demons, ritual circles, watery landscapes, and a ton of things both bloodied and on fire, as you would expect. As with the previous companion book, the sheets are all dry-erase marker ready and fit with 1”x1” square grid maps, so there’s no question as to whether you’re dealing with a medium, large, or huge tentacled monster trying to drag you down into the depths.
I’ll continue to say that I enjoy the double-sided nature of these game pieces, with one side usually representing the normal object, creature, or scenery, and the opposite side showing it on bloodied, on fire, and other summarily destroyed. For the ship pieces, this is especially useful because the flip sides show the scene below deck, and are super easy to transition to as players move about the ship.
All in all, this is a fantastic addition to my game master toolset, and I’ll continue to look forward to these companion books as 1985 Games continues to pump them out. May I humbly request that the next one be for planescape adventures? A planescape adventure is on my short list for campaigns I’d like to run, and you could totally drop an almost identical pirate ship on a spacey background and make me super happy!
Dungeon Craft: Hell & High Water is now available.
Jeffrey Venture is a noob gamer, okay writer, comic book enthusiast, social media fiend, and creator of the D&Dify It series on YouTube. You can connect with him on Twitter where he mostly posts memes for D&D and all things internet culture.
What are your thoughts on the companion books from 1985 Games? Want to talk to me about them? Feel free to chat with me on Twitter or leave a comment below!
