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At $1.19 I was not expecting a lot. I did get a book of 7 NPCs that I could use in any fantasy/historical style game. With a bit of work I could use them in almost any game, so the utility seems to be pretty high. But the issue I have this (one of them anyway) is there is not really enough information here. There are background sketches and motivations. There is an idea of how each character compares to the commoners of the time (intelligence, skills, wealth) and presented in a way to aid conversions into any system. There are also some adventure hooks and use ideas.
But there are some issues I have with it. First the art, that is there, is not really related to the text. Some art of the women in question would be nice. And "Trollops". Really? Why not just women or Femme Fatales but Trollops? And I am not sure what the whole "Destiny" thing is about. I know these are supposed to be archetypes, but they are very close to being stereotypes.
At the end of the day, it's nine pages for under a buck and a quarter. I would have rather paid more and gotten more I think.
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This one is a bit of a mixed bag. There is a lot of fluff, which is fine really, but I might not ever use any of it. The cover art is great, the interior art, less so (though not bad). There are some new feats that are good and some new gods. The best part though are the spells. There are a good number of useful spells here. Plus some interesting tomes and magic items.
It might take some tweaking to fit some of the background information into your game, but there is still enough here to make it worthwhile to buy.
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A bard-variant for d20/3.x type games. The file is 4 pages long, but 2 of that is the OGL and the rest amounts to 1 page of text and a table. Not enough here to really make a class. No new feats or new uses for skills and no pre-generated character.
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Fantasy Commodities 2 naturally follows the same format as the first entry in the series, but this time, has 28 commodities, almost twice as many as before.
Unfortunately, the originality of the first volume is generally lacking here. Many of the items listed here are real world ones, where the strength of the first product was in its sense of fantasy and magic. Even the fantastic commodities don't seem to be terribly interesting, although there are a few exceptions.
The items are once again a mixed assortment of organic products, albeit with more small invertebrates this time (all real ones, such as fireflies and millipedes). Its something of a disappointment after the first booklet, although reasonable enough for the price as a listing of possible things merchants might be selling.
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This is a short, 5-page booklet describing a range of items that any merchant in a fantasy campaign might be dealing in. There are fifteen commodities here, all of which have a rich fantasy flavour, and are provided with prices and weights alongside the text descriptions.
Two of the items are types of clay, but all the others are organic - mostly plants of various kinds. The descriptions are generic, but easy to adapt to any rules system or setting. The nice thing about them is that they are pretty original, and their mere existence should provide a strong sense that the characters are living in a magical world, where the merchants are not just dealing in silk and spices.
The layout is basic, as one might expect for the price, with only the cover in colour, but is competently done. Overall, a nice booklet that achieves what it sets out to.
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Clothing Bits: Outerwear is a compendium of cloaks, coats, and jackets of various kinds for use in a fantasy campaign. The illustrations are good, including some photographs, although their full colour nature will make printing a little ink-heavy.
The first section of the book is a reasonably detailed and comprehensive selection of items, with well written descriptions. These are all normal items of clothing, presumably intended just to flesh out the appearance of your character, although its odd that there are no prices included, if this is really intended as some kind of shopping list.
Eleven different "special" items follow, which are essentially those that provide some sort of rules bonus (written for d20). Even characters not concerned with fashion might want to buy these, so the lack of prices here is even more puzzling. They provide varying levels of bonus to things like cold survival, disguise, and even intimidation, which would obviously make them useful. Some of the bulkier items, such as the cold survival gear, should also, presumably, have some sort of weight or limitations to dexterity listed, but, again, that isn't covered.
There are twenty magic items listed, and unlike the others, these are properly stated out, with prices, weight, and the necessary requirements for making them. Each is a different type of garment, based on those in the previous two sections. As one might expect, most provide bonuses to concealment or protection, although there quite a range of different magical effects among all the different items. (This feels somewhat less odd than it did for the companion volume on footwear, although that could just be me).
The book closes out with a selection of "unique" items, the purpose of which isn't very clear. They basically look nice, and have at least some sort of story associated with them, but that's it. Even when a nice, green, coat was once owned by the king of the dwarves, its difficult to see how to construct a scenario around it... presumably you could sell it for a fair amount of money, but there's no guidelines on that.
Overall, the book is pretty good for what it is, and is well written. It would have been much better with a price list, and some idea of what you're supposed to do with it all (other than the magic items, which are fairly obvious). I'd recommend it as a source of ideas and magic items for fashion-conscious characters, but it seems that it could have been better.
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This 6-page booklet (not counting the cover) is a listing of possible ingredients for making potions. Each ingredient gets a one paragraph description and there is also a price list. The book is generic and stat free, although a simple ingredient list probably doesn't need much in the way of rules anyway.
This might be useful as a means of providing a little background atmosphere, or of giving adventurers the opportunity to sell the spit of the wyvern they've just killed (for instance). There's little indication of what the ingredients might do, beyond the fact that they can be bought or sold for money, and the utility of the book is probably therefore somewhat limited.
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The single thing I was expecting was a wider variety of characters. Without soapboxing it this supplement only covered Caucasian and Caucasian sounding NPCs. The audience buying the product is larger than that and one would think that black, asian, indian, arabic, etc would automatically be included in the product. Gaming is for more than those with blond hair and blue eyes...
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Dreadfully poor value for money, even at the price.
I expected a fairly thin piece of work (at the price, naturally it would be), but I expected at least some meat on the bones for the 100 items - a one sentence description, perhaps a few broken down categories. This really is just a list of 100 vague descriptions of items - such as "Antiques/Collectables" - and for a busy GM trying to run a game, that's absolutely no help at all.
For something purporting to be an Alien Flea Market, there's nothing in it which feels alien.
I just feel cheated - out of a trivial amount of money, granted, but even for free I'd feel somewhat taken aback that someone thought this worth sharing.
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Overall, this PC class for the d20 Fantasy system really isn't all that bad--a little basic, perhaps, but at least I can see where author David Woodrum was going. To summarize, the Wrestler is a stronger, more durable, more specialized version of the default OGL Monk with a Class Initiative Bonus at every odd level after 1st (and at 20th level), a Bonus Feat at every even level, and proficiency with only simple melee weapons and light armor. However, I think this class would have been more useful if Woodrum had gone into detail and listed which feats were available to the Wrestler as Bonus Feats as well as introduce fitting original Bonus Feats for him/her. Off the top of my head, Submission Master, Death From Above/Aerial Assault, Cheap Shot, Hard Knocks, and Shake It Off all seem like plausible candidates. Secondly, how about Signature Move and Finisher as class features to make the class look less generic? Also, the Unarmed Damage for large wrestlers seems a wee bit overpowered in comparison to medium and small wrestlers, especially considering how much stronger large-sized PCs are in comparison. I also would have liked to see a moves list and a Maneuver Performance System similar to the fighting system presented in Wizards of the Coast's own Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords.
All in all, Fantasy Hero Classes: The Wrestler isn't a bad PDF at all, although the PC class it features could have been fleshed out more.
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I have to say that, at the price they were offered for (because of a GM Day special, the bundle cost only $4.25, instead of the regular $6.20 price tag), these small references are a decent source of ideas for plot twists meant to get unsuspecting characters into serious trouble.
The material itself is interesting, despite the numerous errors (spelling, grammar, irritating expressions like “quite certainly perhaps”…), and the “Probable Cause” sections are actually quite useful. Our little group likes to get into discussions about the plausibility of some of the events thrown into a game, and we like such details. A line or two after each law to indicate whether it is actually on the books of some poor misguided town or county would have been even nicer.
The presentation, on the other hand, would have to go up a notch or two to qualify as poor. The cover looks like a bad attempts at recreating a psychedelic poster from the 70’s, while inside, there is no format to make the text pleasant to peruse. Just check out what you want, and get back to something more interesting.
By Vol. 7, the cover has evolved into something a tad more attractive, even though it does look like something from the earliest days of RPG’s; by Vol. 8, it actually looks more professional, and some decent attempt is made to give the text itself a more appealing format, something which is eventually managed in Vol. 9, which even includes a few stock images. (Unfortunately, neither of these two last volumes are included in the bundle, an odd oversight at the very least.) But all in all, this is a visually unappealing product line.
We have simply decided we will strip the texts out of the various pdf files, combine them into a single document, and give the results a more appropriate presentation. Should take us all of an hour, at the most, time we would have liked to see the author himself invest.
All in all, a decent buy, considering the sale prise, but not an incredible one.
What we liked:
Contents: Imaginative and useful. Inclusion of a Probable Cause section a very nice detail.
What we disliked:
Presentation: Absolutely amateurish.
Writing: The author's taking a few minutes after writing to polish some sections or even to check the spelling and punctuation would have been nice.
Overall value: Worth the on-sale price, at most. Definitely not worth the full price.
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Simple quick reference to add flavour to your game.
GOOD: Cheap, simple. Easy to use.
BAD: I bought this on special. I don't think it is worth $1. Not because of the quality but because it is a simple list. If there was a brief description of the barrel contents that could be read to the players, this product would be a bargain.
OVERALL: I would recommend the product. Even though I would have liked more detail, at $1 it is not over pricey.
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Coffer of Coins reminds me of the excellent Citybook series put out years ago by Buffalo Games. It details 13 shops that would credibly populate a district of jewelers, lapidaries and metalworkers in a large city with sufficient notes on merchandise and employees to run the place, and adventure plot hooks if the players get more deeply involved. I find this format useful since it’s a manageable slice of information to help avoid making an urban shopping excursion feel generic, yet has enough information that if anything clicks for the players you can instantly add dimension to the encounter for that first game session giving the DM time between sessions to flesh things out even more fully once the players are interested.
The aspect I especially like may not be everyone’s cuppa, but the majority of shops not only have unique items and services not described in the player’s handbook (or not fully fleshed out), but this product usually offers rules not just for creating those items but a means of integrating them into the character’s repertoire. As a minor case in point, the Player’s Handbook gives pricing for silvered weapons, but if a player wanted to make one themselves there are no specific rules for that. In this product visitors of the Smithing Guild can take classes in it, which includes painting, gilding and leafing (none of which are mentioned in the official guides). It’s not an overwhelming dissertation on silvering, but it suddenly becomes an element of the campaign more or less at the players’ discretion if it clicks for them when visiting the shop.
I have mixed feelings about the presentation. I give major kudos for the inclusion of an index, so I’m willing to overlook the funky chapter heading fonts and text box borders that sometimes look like they were printed off a dot-matrix printer from the early eighties, or the occasional border or drop-shadow that crowds or overlaps text. I also have a personal dislike of ‘flavor text’, so I was briefly put-off by the fact that the first 3 ½ pages are nothing but flavor text. To me those are niggling concerns when the overall product is legible, relatively error-free, and chock-a-block full of ideas I can (and WANT) to introduce to my campaign. Buffalo Games’ Citybooks cost a lot more than this product (and those were ten and twenty years ago!), so in my books this is a bargain at $6.95, but on sale it’s an absolute steal!
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This is not an earth shattering product, it will not change your life or the way you game. It is however just a touch over a buck and has some very amusing ways to add some spice to a potentially very tired and played out monster.
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Liked: the modest price
disliked: the unhelpfullness of the final product
Explanation:
A rough description of what the plants look like, or perhaps just the most common use for it, would have been nice.
Then I might actually have been able to use more than 1:5 of the names on this list. As it is, I doubt it shall prove any real help at all.
But my main complaint is that most of the plants are native only to North America.
If your campaign is taking place in a strict fantasy realm, and you and your players are all american, that shouldn't matter, perhaps it'll even be an advantage, since you might then might all know what bergamot is, without having to look it up first.
That may be.
For europeans such as myself, that means this list isn't much good, though.
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![TFG Stupid Fantasy Laws Bundle 1 [BUNDLE]](images/427/29029-thumb100.gif)
