Our friends at 1985 Games have released another box set in their Dungeon Craft line. I previously reviewed the Cursed Lands and Hell & High Water sets, and I was very impressed with them. They sent me a review copy of their newly-released Fallen Kingdom box, so I dug in to see what they came up with this time.
New Jungle Terrain
The Forgotten Kingdom box set is themed around lost temples, ancient civilizations, and jungles. Think Indiana Jones: The Forbidden Temple, Tomb of Annihilation, Chult, and similar stories. The tiles include a lot of mossy stone environments, structures and objects built from wood, bone, and rough stone, and plenty of object tiles to decorate them further.
I would absolutely use these for a jungle adventure. Throwing down a few random tiles for random encounters or planning out a dungeon ahead of time would both look great on the table. Looking through these gave me flashbacks to playing through Against the Cult of the Reptile God, which I recall being set in a desert, but I wouldn’t complain about a change in locale.
Critters, Scaley and Otherwise
The tiles also include severa; pages of densely-packed creature tiles, including all sort sof critters. The terrain pages have a few critters around the edges including reptilian humanoids (kobolds, lizardfolk, etc.), while the pages of only creatures include snake-bodied humanoids of various sizes (yuan-ti, devils, etc.), elemental imp-like spirits (quasits, most likely), gargoyles, golems, ghouls, and a few other undead.
As always, each sheet is double-sided so you’re getting double the value out of each tile that you cut out. Usually this is a pallet swap or at similar-looking creature so that you can easily distinguish groups of simialr enemies without immediately needing to write on them. Of course, they’re wet and dry erase-compatible, and I’ve happily numbered my hordes of enemies every time that I’ve used the tiles so that I could track which ones had been thoroughly stabbed by my players.
Every Dungeon Craft box also includes some full-page, enormously large creatures. In this box, the giant creatures were a gigantic bird (a roc, or a similarly astounding avian adversary) and an enormous spider which I wisely freaked out and hurled somewhere into the depths of my basement.
Consistent Quality
Fallen Kingdom maintains the quality of their previous box sets, and the art has certainly improved since they start producing Dungeoncraft. I’m very happy with it, and I’m excited to surprise my players with a giant bird next time I can get a group together in person.
Dungeoncraft: Fallen Kingdom is avaiable on the 1985 Games online store and on Amazon (affiliate link).
