I’m going to let you in on a little industry secret. When you see a book like Atlas Games’ En Route, with lots of different sections all written by different authors, here’s probably the process used in creating it: An editor sends out a call for submissions, contacting either writers she knows or putting out a general call on various message boards, or both. Thus, when the deadline comes and she has a couple of months to pull it all together, she pretty much has to take what she gets. The numerous writers have all submitted their work, and it’s likely to be quite varied in subject matter, handling of the rules, and so on.

Thus, whenever you see a project like this, you’re likely to see a wide disparity of content. You’re bound to like some of it, and not the rest -- just like if you walked into a room of strangers, you’re bound to hit it off with some of them but not all of them. It’s to be expected.

En Route is a well-edited project. Michelle Brown Nephew pulled together this group of various short outdoor encounters into a cohesive book. The book contains 21 encounters from 15 authors -- all supposedly playable in about an hour (in reality, some are far less, others probably a full night’s session).

At first glance, I was disappointed at the number of “silly” encounters. By that, I mean light-hearted romps with sprites or gnome illusionists that want to trick or embarrass the PCs because… well, because they’re just that kind of folks. In my experience, these are encounters that some GMs love and most players hate. While I think including a few of these sorts of encounters is fine for this type of product, by my count this book has six of them. That's just under 25 percent of the total number of encounters. Three of them involve pixies. However, a few are done quite well -- I particularly like “Dance the Night Away,” an encounter with pixies that want to make the PCs their servants during a single night’s party. It’s well handled, with a number of different options available to the PCs, and plenty of notes and suggestions for the GM on how to handle them all.

And En Route includes more serious encounters, of course. Not surprisingly, some are encounters with bandits and strange goings-on at inns and taverns. And there are ghosts possessing people (and other creatures), lizardfolk demanding tolls on a bridge (in a interesting and well-done scenario with many options -- none of them clearly the “right” choice). There’s even a cool science fantasy encounter involving creatures that just might be alien greys.

The encounters vary in substance as well as subject matter. There’s one with four drugged goblins that I would have expected to be two or three paragraphs (and a stat block) but instead is four pages long. There’s another encounter with pickpockets that most GMs could probably put together on the fly without needing a professional product to give it to them. On the plus side, the book contains some wonderfully imaginative encounters. The PCs can stumble upon a soul prison, a whole tavern full of people inadvertently turned invisible, and a longstanding feud between two magical daggers. Good stuff. A couple authors even had the audacity to include encounters without combat or monsters! (And they are interesting and cool -- proof positive that there’s far more to D&D than hack and slash.)

One minor but nagging problem here and there in the product is the lack of understanding of what “Encounter Level” means. Many of the encounters (probably wisely) are adjustable to be able to be usable in various levels of play. That’s fine. But then a couple have EL notes that essentially suggest that the EL of a presented encounter is equal to the average level of the party. The problem here is that EL only exists as a rating to determine whether an encounter is appropriate for your party (not to award XP -- that’s what Challenge Ratings are for). So to say that the EL is equal to the average level of the party is to convey no information at all. It’s like saying that the encounter is appropriate for the characters it is appropriate for. What’s really meant, I believe, is that it can be appropriate for anyone.

Overall, if you’re willing to accept that you’ll probably like some of these encounters and not others (although they might not be the same ones I liked and disliked), the good outweighs the bad here. En Route is a useful product to have around, to insert a short “random” encounter into your game that’s more than a monster name on a table. There’s plenty of new rules bits -- magic items, monsters, and the like -- and they’re handled and presented fairly well. If my five-star scale used “half-stars” I’d rate this at three and a half stars.

Despite all the pixies.

Back to Reviews Archive Page / Back to Monte's Home Page