A lovely little mini-sourcebook, this provides details of five monuments, each with a secret and a couple of plot hooks. Its only 16 pages long, but there is bags of fun stuff in here. Each monument is beautifully illustrated with a nice atmospheric description.
(N.B. spoilers follow.)
Somewhat ironically the most mundane monument – a statue with a hidden shrine to Ranald – is the one I found most unbelievable, since allegedly this underground shrine was constructed after the statue concealing it, which seems implausible. At the other end of the scale there’s a an icon which it turns out is the headcrest of a buried hierotitan (i.e. an enormous Tomb Kings golem thingie). I loved the concept of this, although I suspect in practice it might be tough to include in an adventure in a way that PCs can meaningfully deal with. Not impossible though.
There’s also a fun overgrown forgotten wizard’s tower (which is essentially a mini dungeon crawl), and the cream of the crop, a “horological curiosity” created by a genius inventor who was actually inspired by a daemon of Tzeentch. The plot hooks for this one are gold dust.
All in all – a very pleasing little book dripping with atmosphere and packing a lot into a small space.
Buy Monuments of the Reikland from DriveThruRPG. This is an affiliate link so I receive a small payment for purchases made using it.
NB Monuments of the Reikland is also included in the anthology Reikland Miscellanea, just released.
Ill Met by Morrslieb 
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I admit I was less then impressed by the Monuments. I actually disliked it and regretted that I bought it.
My issue is… what is this thing for? Can I actually use it in my games? The answer is: hardly, and only partially. Most of it is just for reading. A large chunk of the text is are backstories of the monuments, which are cool – to read – but will never actually get into play. The actual gameable content is quite scarce.
There are some cool ideas but I have trouble imagining how to integrate them into play. How to make them more than just a single situation/scene that will be over in a couple of minutes. At best, these are story hooks, which I will have to develop into proper adventures myself. That’s the hard work… and it’s up to me. The designers did the easy part: came up with the ideas. Not more. I bought a supplement but I am the one left do to the hard work.
The forgotten wizard’s tower is the worst, I think. It’s more then two pages think with text but there’s nothing in it. Just backstory (ie. reading) and a horribly described (ie. in thick paragraphs, no other organisation) minidungeon with some three rooms and nothing to do.
I think this is my OSR background speaking. On the OSR scene, a 16 page-long document would be a proper adventure for a couple of evenings. I never cease to amazed how little gameable content and how much fluff there is in WFRP products.
(Case in point: I came to accept the fact that the WFRP norm is that a one-shot adventure is 20 to 30 pages long. In OSR, this would be an abomination!)
Sorry, this is the bitter part of me speaking.
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BTW, one of the IMHO best WFRP adventures – The Night of Blood – only is some 7 pages long. That’s less than half compared to the Monuments of Reikland. Yes, it’s so much more exciting and gameable!
I wish we had more Nights of Blood and less Monuments of the Reikland.
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Agreed about Night of Blood, that’s one of my favourites too!
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No problem, I’m happy to have your perspective! Personally I’ve always loved WFRP for its detailed descriptions – I think that’s one of the thing that makes the setting feel so much like a real place. But I completely understand that its fully at odds with the OSR approach, which packs a lot of gameable stuff into a small page count, and I can appreciate why you might prefer that.
I disagree about the forgotten tower – I like that it contains no traditional monsters but does have some environmental hazards and some interesting treasure. Although I’d have preferred a map and a presentation that was more usable at the table though.
And I do agree about the backstories being a bit too wordy for something that Players will probably never discover!
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