[Review] Monsters of Sin: Avarice

The Seven Deadly Sins provide a powerful framework for defining characters, campaign settings and stories. I’ve seen them used in the World of Darkness and Pathfinder’s Thassilonian magic. I’ve even used them to define my old homebrew pantheon. Monsters of Sin is a new series of Pathfinder compatible products by Open Design. The first in the series, Avarice, by Ryan Costello, Jr. introduces four new monsters, thematically tied to the concept of avarice, and a simple template to create your own greedy beasties.

Monsters of Sin 1 includes monsters to challenge parties across a wide range of levels:

For the lower levels, there are map mimics – young mimics that can hunt alone, or work in conjunction with others of its kind and its parent mimic, to trick and then consume greedy adventures.

The midasite provides an interesting challenge for the middle levels. Surely nothing bad can come from dealing with capricious fey with the ability to transmute both flesh and stone to gold.

The hoard golem adds a nice surprise to the party’s first experience with dragons and other treasure-hoarding nasties.

Finally, the embodiment of avarice is a challenging CR20 brute. I have to quote the descriptive text for this monster:

Rodent-faced with a thousand compound eyes, standing twelve stories high and built like a scarecrow, the Embodiment of Avarice wears sterling full plate wrapped in brilliant silks and lace. Still, it can’t conceal its dirty, furry hide.

Each monster features well designed and unique abilities, to both tempt and punish greedy PCs. I was impressed by the quality of the design work, meshing flavour and good mechanics to produce a collection of interesting monsters that can function as a single encounter or an entire adventure arc. Costello set the bar high with this one and I have high expectations for the rest of the Monsters of Sin series.

- Jerall