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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 2008910" data-attributes="member: 2205">First off, let me clear up two potential sources of bias in my review.  Number one: I was given this book for free and asked to review it.  I've made an effort not to let that influence my opinion of it, but I'd be remiss if I didn't even mention it.  Second, although Acceptance of Fate is called "A Diomin Campaign Supplement," in reality it's a module.  Or rather, an adventure, as there isn't really anything modular about it.  And this causes a few potential problems.  This is the third part of a trilogy, for instance, and I have not read the first nor the second part, so I come into this one cold.  And secondly, I typically don't like modules nor do I have much use for them.  Back in the day, they were too spartan -- "you enter a 10x10 room with an orc and a pie.  The orc attacks you" type of thing.  Following the Dragonlance modules, adventures became too scripted, trying to get players to go along with the author's idea of a good story: not necessarily what the players would want to do, and complaints of railroading are very common on later modules.  In my opinion, all modules I've ever read suffer from one of the two of those problems to some degree, and Acceptance of Fate isn't different: it's the later style module, so it tends to script the players along what the author wants them to do.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.  The book has a beautiful (if a bit too dark to read the title easily) cover with 80-pages of black and white (with a lot of gray, actually.)  In general, the book looks really nice.  The pages are crammed to the point where they almost look cluttered, and most of the illustrations -- which are just about the right size and frequency -- look really good.  The content is meaty too: it's not all fluff.  This modules got new spells, new creatures, new magic items, a new template, new feats: and they are interesting and useful additions to the mechanics, for the most part.  Many of the creatures are of a mechanical, construct variety, which are always kinda fun, and I don't think there are enough creatures of that type, so I found them useful.That's the good, and it's good enough to get the module a 4 rating from me.  But, of course, the module does have some flaws.  Let me make a note of them, at least.First of all, as I said, the module feels very scripted.  The players will be required to tramp all over the world of Diomin doing all kinds of things.  What if they don't really want to?  What if they have totally different solutions to the problems presented here?  Despite some attempts to address this by offering variable path descriptions and scenarios, the PCs are still required to "catch the vision" of the module, and if they don't: then too bad.  Secondly, and perhaps this is intentional, the "module" certainly isn't very modular.  Without having the first and second parts of the trilogy, or any more information on the campaign setting, you're in a little bit of trouble, as converting it to your own campaign setting, or using it without part I or II seems like it would both be very tough.  The module starts en media res which makes sense if you just played part II, but it took me a while to figure out what the PCs were supposed to be doing or why, or who these "red shirt" supporting folks were.  And some of those guys really did seem like red shirts: they didn't seem to serve much purpose at all except die instead of the PCs, or give them lots of encouragement.  Perhaps their involvement makes more sense in the larger scale of the trilogy, but I can't say.In summary, I think the module's flaws are relatively minor compared to it's strengths.  I wouldn't be likely to ever run a module as a module anyway, so having interesting new rules is vitally important to me.  Likewise, the module was good enough and interesting enough to make me more interested in the campaign setting, which is always a good sign.NOTE: While reviewing my review, I noticed that ENWorld automatically assigned a price of $7.95 for this product.  However, the price on the back cover is $15.95.  Given the size and the content, that seems like a more reasonable price for the book.  However, as I mentioned, I got the book for free, so I can't vouch for what it sells for.</blockquote>

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