Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Grraf" data-source="post: 322712" data-attributes="member: 3791">I'm sorry that Morrus, Eric & co. don't really like negative posts. Unfortunately I think that there are some products that are bad enough to fall under the heading of "deceptive advertising".Two of my biggest offenders:Dragon Lords of Melnibone -- Ugh. This book in just wretched. Its pretty clearly a cut and paste job from other non-D20 books. References to an unexplained stat called power (used in Chaosium's Elric! game) make it pretty clear the goal was to print something -anything- and get it out as quickly as possible. The writing is poor and riddled with typos and errors. Monsters make the Creature Collection look like like picture perfect exicution of the D20 rules.Its not just a terrilbe book from an publisher who should have known better but a pretty shameless attempt to make money off one of the classic writers who helped define fantasy (Michael Moorcock).(this is going to probably irriate people but)Kingdoms of KalamarI really wanted to like this book. I was hunting around for a new setting with a gritter, deeper feel and asked one of my players to get it when he was back home. Ugh.Despite the juicy contract Kenzer has with WotC this fellow's also pretty clearly a cut and paste job. While I understand that Kenzer started off producing generic products for fantasy play they should have taken their time to produce a better book. I understand they have a loyal fan base but I can't figure out how anyone could have gotten into it from this book. The original Kenzer world apparently had only humans, (perfectly well and good) however Kenzer apparently wanted their D&D world to include them. However the races are never addressed. The book is written largely as if non-human races don't exist but the intro insists they do. They forgot to include domains for their dieties. There -is- a comphrehensive listing of NPCs... though this actually means that there is a name followed by a level with no description of the person.Lots of textbook style writing with an occasional box with --often incorrect for no discernable reason-- rules.So buyer beware. I basically have to agree with two names that have come up a lot on this thread: the Hero Builders Guild & Enemies and Allies.  I'd actually forgotten I owned these two until one of my PCs dug them out of the black hole in my hall closet. I remember saying to myself "maybe they aren't that bad...". Ugh.I'm glad some people found the HBG useful I really wanted to...  I'll keep it around in case I want to help out a starting player but its a lot of money for some sterotypes.Enemies and Allies is my least favorite sort of "problem book": the kind you need to do a lot of re-writing before its useful. The NPCs are un-inspired and two dimensional. Someone above implied that this was good for begining DMs but I'm not sure how.</blockquote>

Verification