Shiny's Sundry of Slimy Ooze: a Review

Shiny's Sundry of Slimy Ooze provides excellent oozey options for your campaign, but is perhaps best used as a minor supplement.

It's no secret that we, at Gelatinous Cubicles, love us some ooze. So, when our friends at Shiny Press announced their plan to release a supplement entirely devoted to all things goopy, I was stoked.

For the uninitiated, Shiny Press is a two-man team based out of Brazil. They have a focus on magic items, and release several designs for free every week, all accompanied by wonderful art by their in-house artist. Being based out of Brazil, they also offer their releases in both English and Portuguese.

Background information aside, let's take a look at that book! Coming in at 26 pages, the Sundry boasts 20 items, 12 creatures, 3 ooze spells, and a player race, all accompanied by lore on unique locations, characters, and factions.

Art

Perhaps one of my favorite qualities of the Sundry, the material is generously decorated with beautiful artwork. Not only is the work aesthetically pleasing, but it helps visualize some of the stranger items, locations, and creatures found throughout the supplement. Big props to the artist!

The book is also well-organized and pleasant to navigate. Stylistically, everything is formatted as you would expect with 5th edition content, and the graphical design itself has a nice personality to it.

The Sundry wouldn't be complete without Shiny's beautiful artwork!

Balance

The Sundry certainly won't break your games, and is a relatively safe bundle for new and experienced DMs alike. However, I would certainly take a second look at item rarities and give each item a thorough read before giving it to your party. The Portable Gelatinous Cube comes to mind (yes, there is a portable gelatinous cube, and yes, it's awesome), as an uncommon item that could provide a low-level party with unprecedented ability to fight off swarms, potentially rendering an otherwise deadly encounter somewhat trivial once each day. That's nothing to say of hovering mounts or long-ranged prosthetics.

Worded correctly? More or less. Uncommon? Probably not. Cool as hell? Absolutely.

Nothing is broken in the Sundry. Everything works within the rules and can be easily accounted for and leveled by even an apprentice DM. However, I would advise that you think through the implications of some of the Sundry's material before incorporating it into your campaign.

On an additional note, I say that everything works within the rules, and it does. However, experienced DMs may find the mechanical wording within the Sundry to fall somewhat short of official WotC material. Reading through the material extensively, most if not all situational issues are accounted for, and I certainly wouldn't worry about the Sundry introducing any insolvable rules dilemmas, but traditionally-inclined DMs could be irritated by the disregard for following traditional rules wording.

The mechanical wording, while it makes sense, can get a little funky.

Creativity

Big props as well to the ingenuity of Shiny Press's designer. It's easy, especially for a release using a pre-established theme, to fall into the trap of emphasizing pre-existing concepts at the expense of inspiring new ideas. I'm happy to say that I found the Sundry to be thoroughly entertaining due to its off-the-wall items and ideas, from ooze-infested weapons to gelatinous prosthetics, to even a giant, floating, ooze-infested corpse that stalks the seas. You heard me. Truly, Shiny's Sundry is brimming with imagination of the best variety.

If I were to recommend the Sundry based on one quality alone, it would most certainly be this one.

I wasn't kidding about the corpse island.

Flavor

The Sundry's flavor is somewhat erratic. The previously described ooze-corpse and the creatures that infest it are brimming with flavor. Additionally, there is a consistent effort made throughout the Sundry to provide the reader with some context for the creatures and items contained within. The consistency varies, however, in how extensive or inspired some of the flavor can truly be.

I can say, personally, that I would probably reskin the flavor surrounding most of the magic items, as they don't necessarily feel like a cohesive unit in their current grouping. If I had to make a guess as to the document's design process, the items were developed to fit the theme, being oozes, and the flavor was created after the items were grouped together. There's not an inherent problem here, as the preexisting flavor is at worst serviceable, but I have to wonder if some of the included lore could use a bit more flesh on its bones.

I certainly would not purchase the Sundry looking to run a campaign based on its lore without being prepared to put in quite a bit of work doing your own worldbuilding. And, to be clear, that's not necessarily a bad thing! It's just important to know what you are and are not getting with this book.

Conclusion

Priced at $6, I would feel comfortable recommending the Sundry to anyone interested in enhancing the presence of ooze in their campaign, albeit with some small caveats. It's important to understand what the Sundry is and isn't, and who it does and does not serve. As a piece to inspire and add some spice to your game, it stands head-and-shoulders above similar collections, especially for ooze enthusiasts. But, I would not purchase the Sundry looking to add a new location or dungeon to your campaign without some work adapting the material, and that goes additionally for new DMs unfamiliar with 5th edition's broader mechanics. Still, with 26 pages of imaginative material that put a grin on my face at $6, it's hard to argue with the value on offer here.

You can find the Sundry on Shiny Press's Ko-fi shop, and you can get early access to similar releases by subscribing to their Patreon. Check it out if it sounds like a good addition to your table!

-Trent the Sewerman