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I picked this up because I do enjoy seeing what others can do with such well trodden ground as the Keep and the Caves of Chaos. The cover claims to be 5th Edition compatible and uses the current OGL to get there. Personally if I were a publisher I would be staying away from this. It is murky legal ground right now and one I would not tread on. But lets move on.
The cover is nice and drew me in right away. The book is 24 pages, but minus 1 for cover, 1 for ogl, 1 for a blank page, 1 for an ad, 4 for maps and 1 more for a character sheet. So 15 pages of text.
The Good: There is a good section on pages 4 and 5 on playing humanoid races such as orcs, bugbears, gnolls and so on. Just the stats, nothing really on "how to play them" No big, these are the standard baddies for the last 40 years. We know them.
There is detail on how the caves are controlled and what can be the expected losses of the various groups of humanoids living in the caves over time.
The Not As Good For Me: The caves and the rooms themselves are not detailed. There are blanks left for the DM to write in what is there from monsters to items. The main conceit here is that the inhabitants of the Keep have taken over the Caves now. It is all very sandboxy which is fine, but not what I was expecting. I am perfectly fine with sandboxes, but that it not why I buy pdfs. I buy graph paper for that.
The Bad: This PDF uses scanned images from the original map of the Caves of Chaos from B2. It has been run through Photoshop and some alterations have been made, but I can overlay a scan of the blue/white Caves map and line it up perfectly (including grids) to the "Reclaiming" maps. Not very professional at all.
The Ugly: Additionally there is a really bad scan of the old D&D Basic era Character sheet. It has been edited (poorly) to make it more in line with 5th Edition, but honestly it is just plain ugly. The artist would have been better off starting from scratch and making a 5e sheet that looked a bit like the Basic one rather than include this. Better still would be not to include one at all. It is just ugly, shows really poor Photoshop skills and a copyright infringement to boot.
So in the end, despite some promise and high hopes, this falls really flat.
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