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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gothmog" data-source="post: 4017765" data-attributes="member: 317">I can answer some of this for you.  I've bought the fantasy, sci-fi, and horror toolkits for SW, and I've found they are all helpful.For fantasy, I'd rank the toolkits in the following order for usefulness: World Builder, Creatures, Gear, Character Builder.  The World Builder is a must for running fantasy- it has tons of great tips and hints for running a game, some new powers, weather, rules for familiars and how to design new races and monsters using the SW rules.  I like the Fantasy Bestiary too- while its not hard to stat up monsters in SW, having the work done for you is helpful.  The Gear and Character Builder I've found less useful- the Gear toolkit is mostly for magic items, which are a snap to design in SW anyway, and the Character builder is mostly extra tables for random background, and some new Edges and Hinderances for characters to take.If you're doing sci-fi, the Sci-fi toolkits are even better and more useful than the fantasy ones.  The World Builder is awesome, incorporating lots of sci-fi conventions, how to design planets, how to handle vacuum and radation, ship and robot construction, psionics, etc.  The Gear toolkit is essenstial too, containing gear from near futurs to way-out future (graviton beams, etc).  The Alien toolkit is good too, though at parts a little bit to B-movie for my tastes.But the real gems of the toolkits are the Horror toolkits.  While not many people know this, Shane Lacy Hensley incorporates horror elements into virtually every SW setting, so the Horror toolkits are useful to almost any published setting.  I'm also a big fan of dark/horrific fantasy/sci-fi/westerns/post-apocalyptic/pretty much any genre, so I've gotten a lot of mileage out of the Horror toolkits.  The Horror GM toolkit goes into depth about madness and insanity, grimoires, summoning rituals and the nature of summoning, curses, horrific magic items, as well as tips for running a good horror game and keeping your players nervous and on the edge of their seats.  Pair the Horror GMs toolkit with the old ICE book Nightmares of Mine for running horror, and you've got all your bases covered.  The Horror bestiary is the real gem though- it has all the expected monsters, as well as a ton of new and original ones.  Many monsters are drawn from real-world myths and legends, but there are also new critters, as well as tons of types of cultusts, zombies, undead, golems, demons- you name it!  If you don't like dark or horror games as much, you might not get as much use out of these, but I use them universally across all SW settings I run.</blockquote>

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