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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crothian" data-source="post: 2011450" data-attributes="member: 232">Lost Prehistorica     Here there be Monsters.  That is a clichéd area of maps that have yet to be fully developed or explored.  Yet, there has to be something over in these unexplored areas.  Is it lost civilizations, unexplored continents or islands, or possibility just a large monster infested area?  Obviously the final answer is up to the Game Master but Lost Prehistorica offers a few suggestions to place in these unknown areas and it also offers a look at less civilized places.      Lost Prehistorica is a new PDF put out by Dark Quest Games.  Dark Quest Games has been producing quality PDFs for many years now and hopefully soon they will see some of the better works really take off in the eyes of gamers.  They have mostly only released PDFs so far though I did see their Familiar book out in print.      Lost Prehistorica is a one hundred and nine page PDF.  It comes in a three and a half meg file that has the book and the cover in it in two separate files.  The book is a little under three megs and cover is a bit under a meg.  The book has a well organized table of contents.  This might not seem like something to really note, but more and more I am seeing table of contents that list chapter headers and the occasional appendix.  I feel it is very important to have a good table of contents as well as a good index.  PDFs should also come with a good set of bookmarks.  Role Playing books are manual and people need to find things in them quickly at times.  Few things slow down a gaming session like trying to hunt for a rule or passage that one knows is in the book somewhere.  Table of contents, indexes, and bookmarks all help to locate things smoothly.  While this PDf does not have an index, it does have a very complete set of bookmarks.  Bookmarks are the most important of the three for electronic books since a simple click will take one where they want to go.      The book is black and white with no borders.  This will make it easy to print out.  The art in it is pretty average and there is not a lot of it.  The layout is well done with good headers and fonts making this easy on the eyes.  The tables are well formatted, there is not a lot of obvious white space, and the pictures and text never collide.      The book starts with talking about the lands of the lost.  Exactly what are and how are they configured?  The books not specifically define what they are, instead they give the reader chooses listing the advantages and disadvantages of each so that the best for the reader can be chosen and used.  While they cover a lot of different types of places like islands, sub continents, other planes, underworld, etc; I would have liked to see more space devoted to each one.  Each area could easily have been expanded on and given an example or two to really show why this works.  At the very least the few paragraphs each section got really seems to barely touch on the topic.      The next section is the geographic elements.  And why they have some good ideas here on weather, diseases, magic, ruins, colonies, fossils, etc; this would have been better served if they tied it into the different setting types above.  What types of weather work best for the islands, or what fossils would be interesting to find in the Lost Underdark?  These are answers that any DM can answer for their own game but it is always nice to see how options from a book fit together to help guide the DM along.      Survival on any new and potentially different place is always a hazard.  They start with listing sixteen new diseases that are fully described and can easily be used.  From there they go with about a dozen new types of hazards that can be muck like quicksand to exploding crystals set off by sound.  While many of these hazards are for lower level adventures they are well thought out and will defiantly offer a new challenge to an unsuspecting group.  The chapter ends with a few types of plants.  This again would have been a great section if they would have just listed more plants.  The ones here are well described and can be used easily.      All lands of the lost have some sort of tribes on it.  They are primitive and different, and this book goes through and makes sure that they are.  They start by going through what tribes have like population, governments, religions, dress, etc.  Like above it covers the topic but not enough, for instance different samples of dress and types of primitive religions and governments would be a big help here.  Then they give a few sample tribes.  These are nicely explained and ready to be used.  Equipment is also well defined with weapons, armor, and objects of worth.      Characters are obviously important.  They have a few feats here that will be helpful like Lava Child that gives bonuses to skills when volcanoes are involved.  They also have foe feats that work only against a certain foe.  These feats usually provide attack and damage bonuses.  It might have been better if they would have just used  the Ranger’s favored enemy and turned that into a feat.  The book also discusses classes both the NPC and PC ones from the core rules.  It mainly suggests weather they make good roles as explores and natives and what role they would play.  It again lists the pro and cons of each class with each of the two major roles (explorer and native).  The book does the same with races and presents a few new twists on the standard races.  They really do not redefine the races in game terms but do place some cool twists on them.  There are also plenty of new races presented here as well as good discussion on ancient races and what happened to the civilizations of old.      Lastly, the book covers new creatures and religions.  It presents a new pantheon full of gods as well as a wide variety of new creatures many of them dinosaurs and having a wild feel to them.      Overall, the book covers a lot of area.  It could use a bit more depth in many of the topics but does start on them well enough.  It gives a the DM so good ideas to work with and allows the DM to connect the points together.</blockquote>

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