For those who backed the Kickstarter, the digital PDF for Herbalist’s Primer is available! This was a great surprise in the middle of a stressful pre-holiday week. The physical rewards are set to fulfill in early 2022. After reading through the PDF, I’m even more excited about receiving the physical copy.

Herbalist’s Primer is, per the Kickstarter page, “an illustrated guide to real-world magical plants for magicians, worldbuilders, alchemists, and game masters.”  

This book contains information about a variety of herbalism-related topics, such as plant identification, folklore, herb gathering, and poisons. There are 100 different real-world plants illustrated and described here along with their uses in medicine and magic. There’s also adventure hooks and tables to use in creating your own magical plants and plant-related adventures!

The book is well-organized, and the layout is clean. The illustrations are beautiful and practical. The aesthetic compliments the purpose of the book; I feel like a student consulting their reference materials before setting out to gather herbs in some nearby forest.

The contents of Herbalist’s Primer are neatly portioned out so that you can read a lot in one sitting, or you can quickly reference certain sections using the table of contents or the index. The writing is factual with the occasional humorous aside, and it never becomes too dry.

Herbalist’s Primer is a lovely read for plant-lovers. I’m already finding ways to use it! My current player characters aren’t herbalists by any means, but one bard was raised by apothecaries, and the other is no stranger to using poisons, so having more background information about the use of plants will come in handy!

The adventure hooks seem easy to drop into a variety of campaigns. They’re intriguing and, like everything else in Herbalist’s Primer, spark a lot of inspiration. I also anticipate making a lot of use of the plant generation tables as a DM with players with characters who like to forage.

The information in Herbalist’s Primer is written without references to specific real-world or fantasy locations, so it fits into any setting! You could read out some information in response to a successful Nature check as-is. This makes the book a versatile tool for plant-related endeavors as a player or a game master!

While the Kickstarter for Herbalist’s Primer has closed, it will be available for purchase from Exalted Funeral. I’ll update this review with links once they are available!