This is an excellent book that presents an interesting ice age setting and a mostly immersive primal fantasy supported by a wealth of very well thought out mechanics that can both help to bring players into the setting or use by GMs for their own world.

Overall, this book focuses on mechanics that would help people run a primal fantasy game instead of spending pages and pages on lore and worldbuilding that a GM may or may not want to use. It instead presents the only most essential element of the setting to bring people into the world of Illambria. Thus, this book is also useful for GMs who are not only interested in the setting itself but are looking for adapting mechanics to complement a primal fantasy game, such as a game set in Planegea, Prehistorica, or that of their own homebrew.

This book provides a complete barter mechanic, a simple harvesting system, and many weapon properties that keep combat exciting for players. It also provides useful GM tools and advice. At the end of this book, there is an adventure for 1st-level characters. Of course, this book also contains many typical content people would expect, like new classes, subclasses, monsters, spells, magic items, and playable species that are evocative of the ice age setting.

And the way character creation work in this book is very cool, not only can you play a sabertooth or alligator person, At the end of of each species option there’s an ancestor table players can roll (or make their own), which both helps players flesh out their character more, and integrate them into the setting. More importantly, a character’s ancestors can go beyond their own kind. There is an entire Heritage system that provides mechanic support. A human with saberteeth ancestors could inherit the long fangs or claws for example.

And this brings us to a criticism I have: The player options are called ‘Species’, and species by definition cannot interbreed! (actually stated in the 1st sentence on wikipedia). So by calling them ‘species’ undermines the entire Heritage system (I think WotC uses the term in one D&D because they want to remove half-races from the game, because there are no half-race options in the new PHB, but since this book is not an official product, and 1DD has no OGL anyway, the author is not obligated to use the same terminology as WotC), and this conflation detract from the experience. Had the author use other terms like Ancestry or Lineage, it would have enhanced the experience instead.

But that aside, I do recommend this book. An easy 4 out of 5.

Well written and unique I can run this fully as is Or the major north/south lands Or a world for a space setting At first the download was not downloading Handled efficient and polite Worth the wait..this has my highest recommendation Good value .good product Thank you for inventing it Bryan

Excellent setting book! I love its creativity, details, and included artwork, and the new mechanics it introduces are craftily simple and well-integrated into 5E!