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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Psion" data-source="post: 2009943" data-attributes="member: 172">Green RacesGreen Races is a miniature campaign setting by Fast Forward Entertainment. In the Green Races setting, the players portray monstrous races such as goblins, orcs, and trolls.A First LookGreen Races is a 224 page hardcover book available for $29.99. This is similar to their format for their Encyclopedia of Demons and Devils books, but a better value than some of their other hardbounds, which offer under 200 pages of material for the same price.The cover of the book has a grainy red backdrop common to all FFE books. The front cover is a collage with various pieces of nice artwork (apparently from the Dragon Elves card game, as I recognize the green looking elf from their ad copy) pasted on a color version of the green races campaign map.The interior is black and white. The artwork is mediocre to poor quality. Many of the illustrations are grainy copies of artwork you have seen in prior FFE works such as Rings of Power, and a black and white copy of the cover illustration from Wondrous Items of Power.The maps are similar in style to those in other FFE products: each map appears to be a collection of textured shapes placed on a map and labeled in a simple graphics program.The interior text density varies widely. In the text section describing lairs and mechanics, the body text used is rather small. But in most of the history section, the body text use is rather bloated.A Deeper LookThe Green Races campaign world seems to be a subset of the world of the Dragon-Elves e-card game. The introductory section describes the various races of the world, including such races as bronze men and dragon elves. However, the book spends little time on these races, instead devoting most of the book to the races that it calls the "green races", which occupy a major part of the region depicted in the map in the book.The "green races" include many of the humanoid races that are typically depicted as evil in the d20 System, such as orcs, goblins, bugbears, hobgoblins, drow, duegar, derro, and trolls. The book does not include racial statistics for any of these, instead referring the reader to the "monsters as characters" section of the DMG. While this saves space it has two problems. First, the section in the DMG lacks many of the finer details that are included in PC race descriptions that are helpful for making fully fleshed out PCs. Second, there are a few new races in this book such as dragon goblins; while they have monster style statistics blocks for these creatures, there is not character level adjustment derived for them that the DMG provides for other races.Each race has its own section devoted to it. Each such section has a background of the race in the region, a map and some brief details of the region, organization, statistics for a military unit of the race called a "hundred", a prestige class, and a sample "lair" of the race, which is typically some sort of fortification.As mentioned, each race gets its own prestige class. The prestige classes vary in quality. Some seem to work under the rules, with standard attack and save progressions and reasonable abilities. Others, however, are simply attrocious.For example, some "prestige classes" have simple requirements (allowing them to be taken at first level) and 20 levels, nonstandard save bonuses, and (worst of all) invent their own totally irregular iterative attack sequences. Some such classes have supposed feat lists that are, in fact, merely a re-listing of class abilities and include many abilities that are not feats in this or the core books. The same classes have class skill lists by no indication anywhere of how many skill points the classes receive per level. Finally, one class is totally missing its summary table describing when it gets the described abilities, and another seems to be missing a paragraph describing its ability, and uses a table hearkening back to the first edition assassin to resolve attempts to trap dragons instead of using d20 System conventions to resolve such attempts.The stat blocks of the "hundreds" for each race are somewhat better, but there are some errors there too, such as neglecting to take into account ability modifiers.ConclusionSomeone once mused that it angered them that people published stuff that they wouldn't use themselves or never playtested. I am unconvinced that happens that often. However, this book seems to be a possible example. Much of this book is simply unplayable as written, and I cannot imagine that anyone would not have noticed if they had even tried to write up a character with some of the material in this book.Some of the classes do work, but that only makes me more disappointed in this book as a product, as you know that some people who contributed to the book knew the d20 System, but others quite clearly do not.Fast Forward Entertainment needs to start exercising a certain amount of quality control if they expect to be taken seriously in the d20 market. This book is so much worse than that of their peers that I am forced, for the first time, to award a score of appalling.I should, to be fair, point out that this is not among FFE's more recent products. They do appear to have improved significantly in both content and editing. Green Races arrived to me in the same package as some of their newer products which I have recently reviewed. However, I reviewed this product almost last because I so dreaded doing it. In short, take a look at their newer products, but avoid this one. It is not good.-Alan D. Kohler</blockquote>

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