Deadly Games is a good read. Interesting NPCs, good backstory, nice variety of games and settings. But is it actually useful? Actually: a lot of it, yes.
Chapter One details the Society of Sinister Sport (who run the games), its members and history. The history hangs together nicely and the NPCs seem well-statted, with useful notes on combat, should the need arise, and lots of motivations for the PCs to run afoul of. The one downside of all this is that this section runs to a full quarter of the quarter of the page count, which could be considerably more than some people will find necessary. A big part of the 'bloat' of this section is the inclusion of combat strategies for the NPCs, which takes up quite a lot of room. The value of all these stats will vary widely from campaign to campaign: some DMs will see them as a godsend, while others will prefer to tie the Society to their own NPCs, or may have little interest in the combat techniques of the 15th-20th level NPCs.
Chapter Two covers the various games played by the society. It is surprisingly short at 7 pages, but in that space it presents 9 main games (each with variants) and 4 mini-games. There's a fair variety of game styles offered here, from free-for-alls to pitched battles to more subtle events that require speed, ingenuity, teamwork or all three. The Race Against Time is particularly clever (it’s a duel to the death between 4-8 poisoned adversaries, who are slowly being worn down by the poison even as they slay one another), though perhaps difficult to implement in a campaign, due to the 'only one survives' nature of the contest. It should work great for a one-shot, though. The 'Save the Seals' adventure is also well designed, as it adds an extra level of urgency to the standard concept of fighting hordes of enemies. Other than this, the variant games (such as the melee where the dungeon is also slowly flooding) are generally more intriguing than the 'standard' versions of the games. Ideally, however, I would have liked this chapter to be longer: at least 3 more main games and 2 more minor games would have been good.
Chapter Three outlines ways to motivate characters to participate, covering both threats and rewards, and offers general advice about keeping the games exciting and interesting. Despite it only being 4 pages, it's one of the more important chapters. I would have liked to see more content here (particularly in light of the page count in some of the later chapters) dealing with methods of using and re-using the Society and the games within a campaign, including ways of using them as either sponsors or adversaries of the player characters.
Chapters 4 through 7 outline the four arenas, each of which is aimed at a different level of party, ranging from beginners through to near-epic parties. All four are large - perhaps too large in some cases, and battling through them could become tiresome - and well detailed. A genuine effort has been made to make each setting seem unique, but it's not 100% successful, since they are at heart all places to run around and hack stuff up. Each game also gets a full description of how one specific game runs when used in that arena. I would have liked to see a bit more than this: it would I think have been better to provide more detail on each game in chapter 3, then simply had a short section for each game in these chapters, listing ways in which the game would be affected by the change of venue.
Appendix One outlines traps - and it has plenty of material. For DMs who like to subject their PCs to dangerous environments, this is a great chapter. It packs a lot into just three pages: dozens of traps, many with optional 'extras'.
Appendix Two: 15 pages of monster stats, most of them straight out of the SRD. I suppose it helps make them convenient, but devoting a sixth of the total page count to this was excessive. It would have been much better to simply use one page to list suggested opponents, and either reduced the page count and price, or included additional content. 15 pages would be enough for another arena, or lots more games, or for extra information on tying the Games into a wider campaign arc.
Appendix Three: Sample characters for one-shot sessions. This is more wasted space, to my mind: I'm sure we're all more than capable of knocking together some quickie characters that would do the job just as well. While this is a handy convenience for a 'pick up' game, it would have worked better as a free web enhancement, rather than a part of the book's listed page count.
The book ends with a solid index - always nice to see!
Deadly Games has a great concept and lots of good ideas, but towards the end it ran out of steam and seemed a bit 'padded', contents-wise. I would have liked to see some of the pages used for the appendices given over to chapters 2 and 3, myself. In the first of these chapters, it would have been nice to see more games, as well as suggestions for combining the games together. In the second, I would have liked there to be more suggestions for motivating characters, options for using and re-using the Society in a campaign, and more details on the possible ways that the Society could interact with the wider community, from officially sanctioned method of execution to high stakes entertainment to concealed bunch of aberrants, hunted by the authorities.
Summary: With more (and more detailed) games, and better information on integration with an existing campaign, this product could have been superb. As it is, if you have a use for four cool and intriguing dungeon style settings, several ideas for different quest/game types to run within them, and a number of interesting (though disturbed) NPCs, Deadly Games is still a solid product.
