Nightmares and Dreams from Mystic Eye Games

Do you remember when you first discovered D&D;? Developing dungeons so you could run your friends through them and see how quickly they died? I was eight when I first discovered gaming, and by nine I was severely hooked. and one of the things I did as a nine-year-old gamer was to spend hours upon hours making up creatures and writing game stats for them.

Reading Nightmares and Dreams, I felt as if somebody had collected the fevered products of my preadolescent mind, bound it, and sent it back to me.

The creatures are, for the most part, grotesque and unimaginative, with artwork every bit as good as the illustrations I was producing at age 9 (excluding some expert renderings by Scott Drousin and other fairly good works by one who signs his work "Thrush"). Where imagination does surface, it is often overshadowed by the authors' failure to grasp the subtleties of motivation and/or biology.

A few gems do exist within the book. The feral prophet and the ethereal parasite are interesting, and the marionette is a pretty good treatment of the concept of a manmade life form (though it may need some tweaking if you want to use it in play).

The writers include a brief narrative for each creature, labeled Nightmare/Dream, and for some creatures they also provide magical items and/or adventure hooks. These are a good idea and would provide interest, except that they generally appear to be written at about the same level as the rest of the book.

Added: December 16th 2001
Reviewer: David Sklar
Score:
Related Link: Mystic Eye Games
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Language: eng