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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Felon" data-source="post: 873374" data-attributes="member: 8158">*grimaces a bit*Sorry, gents, involuntary reaction there. When I hear someone asking a crunchy question about a product like "how does this monster book avoid the common habit of its ilk by simply repeating minor variants on the same roles that are already by filled by creatures in a dozen monster books that proceeded them?", and they get a somewhat vague response like "by being so darn cool!", I just have to grimace a little. Sometimes people get excited over a book's "flavour" and give it rave reviews without scratching beneath the surface.Case in point: my first and only purchase to date in the Privateer Press line was The Longest Night. It soon wound up on my pile unusable gaming material. I found it to be a highly-scripted railroad of an adventure that violated many of the basic tenets that they teach in "DMing 101". Then about a month later I walked in late to a session to find another DM actually running it. Sure enough, the story that to him looked so friggin' cool on paper evoked little from the players other than boredom and exasperation. <a href="http://www.montecook.com/arch_review4.html" target="_blank">Monte Cook's review</a> covers some of TLN’s weak aspects, although his comments are really just the tip of the lameberg.The really disappointing thing about TLN is that I purchased it based on the landslide of 5-star rave reviews here at ENWorld. IMO, it seems like everyone got so fixated on praising the "storyteller" elements--creepy ambience and deep character motivations--that they overlooked some pretty obvious design flaws, namely that the book places little importance on either the value of sound game mechanics or the significance of player choices. There are some pretty ready warning signs too, such as a sidebar where the author shares his secret to good DM-ing, which boils down to something like this: "Events should always proceed as planned regardless of what the players do. It is the true Art of the DM to trick players into thinking that their foresight and ingenuity can influence the outcome of an encounter, while tactfully and subtly quashing any and all attempts to disrupt the flow of his story". Well, fool me once, shame on PP....Now once again I'm reading a whole lotta gushing posts about a Privateer Press book that contain relatively few specific details. Anyone care to go a little beyond adding to the number of times the word "cool" has been used? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Why exactly does the book inspire awe? What in particular about the monsters are original? Up to this point here are the details I've been able to gather about the Monsternomicon's major strengths:1) Idea-mining: Each monster is given a lot of individual attention as to how they can be inserted. 2) Superlative artwork3) Guns and other steampunk elements that provide a new twist.So far that sounds fairly cool. What else?(Barsoomcore, thanks for the individual critter write-ups!)</blockquote>

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