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Gnomes – Masters of Illusion is a Dark Quest produced product for EN Publishing. What this means is that we’re looking at a d20 product and one that’s going to be soaked in well written flavour. Some people really don’t go for the flavour; in fact some people use term as a synonym for filler. I...

A martial arts supplement for d20 modern was always going to be a bit of a gamble. It’s a do or die scenario. RPGObjects’s Blood and Fists is, I think, the first such product out and so it has no one else to learn from. There are other problems too. D20 Modern was written with guns in mind. If...

Bugbears and half-dragons are out shopping the local mall and no one sees them because no one wants to see them. Urban Arcana is a d20 Modern campaign setting where fantasy creatures have been pulled through the Shadow Plane and into a world very much like ours. Mankind, the average Joe on the...

Ooo. So preeety. Time of Crisis is the eye candy we’ve come to expect (thus demand) from Green Ronin’s Mutants & Mastermind hero line. It’s full colour. There are wonderful full-paged illustrations. Oh, there’s a pre-written adventure for six characters at Power Level 10. We’re told we can...

Tournaments, Fairs & Taverns is a roleplaying games supplement about games that includes a roleplaying games substitute which can be played in a tavern or perhaps at tournament or fair too. Just to repeat that without the confusion; Tournaments, Fairs & Taverns is full of games. This is a...

Friends and Familiars is a very pretty book. It’s a luxury. I suppose it’s a bit like an extra generous slice of chocolate cake at the end of a meal; it’ll cost you extra, you can skip it without ruining the meal, it might not be worth it if you’re not fond of rich chocolate but if you’re a...

This is a review of a pre-written scenario. If you don’t want spoilers then jump in your spaceship and buzz off. Heart of the Machine is a licensed Dragonstar game. As a licensed game it’s not written by Fantasy Flight Games but by Mystic Eye Games instead, that’s alright, Mystic Eye have...

Blood and Space seems to confuse people and I don’t know why. It’s not a campaign setting; it’s a "Starship Adventure Toolkit". Oh. Okay. I suppose that slightly buzz-wordy and perhaps the inclusion of "Adventure" confuses people. I really don’t have that much sympathy; "Starship Adventure...

The Collector Series from Mongoose Publishing has done well to follow the style first introduced in the Quintessential Fighter (book one) and yet remain flexible and innovative enough not to look dated today. One of the selling points for the Quintessential books for me has been their efforts to...

The Fiend Folio is so-called because it has lots of extraplanar creatures in it, although there are plenty of Material Plane creatures too, and that some extraplanar creatures happen to be fiends, although there are plenty that are not. In summary the Fiend Folio gets its name because there are...

Take your copy of Tarot Magic and being careful not to bend the front cover, use your thumb to quickly flick-book the top right hand corner. You’ll see that the cup sidebar graphic jumps up and down and left to right. That’s about the only distraction in the book. Aside from the dancing cup...

The contents page is a bit of a mess. It’s nice and thorough - that’s good. The page entries are out by about four - that’s bad. Subtract four from the apparent page number in the table of contents and you’ll be much closer to where the entry actually is. It would be entirely wrong, it would...

Wow. Okay. Let’s try that again. Wow. No. There’s no escaping Todd Gamble’s Cartographica’s "wow factor". Mind you, there’s no escaping the "Get your dirty minis off my lovely maps!" factor either. If you don’t have access to a colour photocopier then don’t go near Cartographica. You’ll go...

Mystic Eye’s Guilds and Adventurers contains some victories on the battle ground of lateral thinking. The book contains a guild system that makes me far less uneasy that most. Guild status becomes an issue of Prestige Class, unless you’re an NPC, in which case there’s an expert-based NPC class...

When the Sky Falls is an event book. An event book, by its very nature, is a one horse trick. An event book is only ever going to interest GMs who are tempted to use the event in their campaign world. When the Sky Falls is about the effects of a meteorite impact on a fantasy setting. When the...

San Greal - Holy Grail. Sang Real - Royal Blood. Easy mistake to make. The Holy Grail is a relic, a bloody relic since it was supposed to have contained the blood of Christ. Royal Blood is just blood, but religious blood. Blood. Relics. Blood and Relics is one of the very first supplements to...

Tombs! bills itself as "the definitive tomb adventure design guide". We could start to debate the minutia of definitive here; dictionary.com lists four options, two of which are "Supplying or being a final settlement or decision; conclusive." and "Authoritative and complete: a definitive...

It just doesn’t work. Sword & Sorcery’s Scarred Lands campaign setting is one of very few campaign settings that I actively watch and wait for the next new release. I couldn’t help be horribly disappointed by The Penumbra Pentagon isn’t crunchy when it needs to be and it entirely messes up the...

If you’d ask me to name a top five d20 list then Mutants & Masterminds would be included in it before I had to think. The GM Screen was pretty good too, but we’ll not count that as the first support for the game, Freedom City has the honour and the challenge of being the first book to try and...

Where are the illustrations? Rather surprisingly that was my first reaction to Faeries, I don’t think it’s entirely unjustified but it sounds a bit harsh. I’ll say from the start that Faeries does well enough, it’s just not a wild success. The book begins with a character race faeries: Bogies...