Keep on the shining isle is a very pretty but overall not very fun adventure. I do like its system agnostic nature and the way stats are done however I overall dont really like this adventure. Players are sent on a deserted island home to a now dead cult which is an amazing premise however it dosent really give much after that. There is no loot to be gained as you get a heavy heavy shakedown at the end and only one thing really counts as loot and it dosent appear to be at first glance. There is little in terms of combat as most creatures are docile until attacked and even the "bad guys" will more or less shoo you away off the island. You dont kill much, you dont socialise much, you dont explore much since its basicly a straight line in a pretty damn straight story.

Could you have a good game with this? Absolutely but it requires a DM to really take this premise and adapt it themselves to their own thing. My biggest issue is mainly that players leave with nothing gained. They cant really even keep the Keep for themselves in part due to the entire island being basicly poisonned. It also contains a map of the island but not of the keep and yet players will most likely spend 90% of the adventure in the keep so im overall very confused by this book.

Its clear the designer has artistic talent at minimum but I feel like he can do much better and I really hope he does.

Bandit of the ghostwood is LPM's hottest module and I can see why. Its a nice and relatively lengthy adventure set up more or less like a dungeon and hiking trip combined. Its nicely laid out and features an interesting story between goblins and brigands. It is however very heavy on combat and features a lot of different enemies and not any ways to really interact with them outside of knocking their lights out. It features no traps or puzzles and while I do love combat this much so quickly could lead to a small amount of fatigue I fear. This adventure is less soothed for more tactical RPGs like DnD and perhaps better used on systems where combat is quick and efficient and perhaps not requiring a grid or map. Players obtain a nice amount of treasure and one or two minimal magic items which I like and the map while made with ms paint like others before from LPM this one is clearly much better done. Gone are the lines thicker than sausages and in comes something much more sensible and nice to look at, depicting an oddly not very dense looking coniferous forest which is odd from experience but it looks better with individually drawn trees in my opinion so it makes sense. However the second map of the hideout is....dreadful, sadly. The inside of the cave is not detailed at all and the attempt at a haching pattern is so thick and jagged it looks frankly horrible. I recommend using something such as Dungeon Scrawl for the future and wish nothing but the best to LPM, however and I do believe your players could quite enjoy lurking in the ghostwood and smashing a ton of faces and animals.

Peril in Pinehaven forest is a very nice module overall. It does manage its claim of being system-agnostic however the inclusion of the owlbear, a very specific creature from a very specific game does somewhat muddle that point. While hard to argue with that price I will say that I do have some complaints. First off this is set as a game for low level players and yet it showers them in tons and tons of gold, silver, magical scrolls and even enchanted items. I do appreciate tying some of the loot in cases of insanely heavy metals however the amount of random magic items and money is absolutely insane no matter the game. Yes you can tweak the numbers however a less experienced DM might not realise and turn the game into a monty haul kind of scenario which is quite bad. The map also leaves something to be desired. Its done with ms paint which is not the end of the world i suppose but its not great. A great is superimposed on it but nothing on the map confines to a grid system with things being put in every which way so what was the point of the grid? Most old adventure modules just gave ya hand drawn maps anyway so i dont see the point except for distances which could have been done easily with some metering bars on the side like real maps. There is quite a lot of different map making programs that could be used instead of this which I recommend the creator to investigate into. The sense of composition isnt actually that bad overall but thats hampered by the jaggedy and sometimes unconnected lines that come from ms paint.

Mechanicly, the monsters in this book are very well done and do expand the roster of undead creatures of the forbidden lands. While I do understand this is a small project and command the designer for this book there are many gripes i have with it. My main one lies with the new profession: The Slayer. Its generally seen as a bad idea to make a class solely about killing one very specific kind of creature and the The Slayer is exactly that. Of the 9 abilities you could get from his talents only 2 do not mention the undead to be used and they arent on the same talent tree. This is horrible horrible design since it means unless you are DMing an undead-heavy game, the one playing the Slayer will be stuck with a thumb up there feeling useless and dejected and only feeling badass once undead are concerned. Or it could lead to toxicity as players blindly follow the slayer as he ignores every adventure site not crawling with the dead. While this could make for an interesting game I do believe that it leans waaay too hard into killing undead and nothing else. With a name like that I would have hoped to atleast see one talent tree focused on the slaying of monsters in general instead. Melee fighters have the advantage agaisnt normal enemies if using the combat cards so it would be interesting to have a profession which instead has advantage agaisnt monsters in general. Even Van Helsing dealt with all kind of crazy crap and not just vampires (atleast in the shlocky movie i like and the videogames) and rogues of Forbidden Lands are no different. The rest of my issues come with what the book looks like. The old timey page effect of the background is indeed quite nice however it makes printing this book a living hell wether thats in color or black and white as that much ink on a page is gonna make the paper curl like hell. I do also think the book is waaaay bigger than need be. The core book manages to put all the information on a monster on a single page while here one entire page is dedicated to a big picture of the monster (very nice art btw) and the blurb with the text sometimes going in weird places as the image seemed to have displaced the text on a few of them. I think a compact version with the image, blurb and stats on a single page is entirely doable and it would also make it much less demanding to print which i think is an important consideration.

If the design of the Slayer becomes less parasitic and the book gets a makeover or atleast a second version, i could easily rate this 5 stars and as such from one game designer to the other, i wish good luck.