The Practical Enchanter - my review

[Alzrius]

I'm posting this here because this is a great book that, I fear, is almost totally unknown among those who'd get the most use and enjoyment out of it.

I've just now posted my review of The Practical Enchanter, from Distant Horizons Games. This book, unlike most of their other work, is only available on lulu.com (possibly due to the huge size of its PDF).

My review on the book's page says pretty much everything I want to say about the book (though I admit having to squeeze my review down to fit within the 3,700 character limit), so I'll only say here that I thought the book was absolutely incredible, and that everyone should take a look at it.

Just to be clear, I'm in no way affiliated with Distant Horizons Games. I'm hawking their work here because I enjoy it just that much.

 

[Pinotage]

I guess the question to ask is whether they're planning on releasing it at other stores like RPGNow. Surely they can reduce the size of the pdf?

Pinotage

 

[Sigurd]

Publishing quality ruins it for me.

Just my .02

I dont mean to sound draconian but the age of the 300 meg all image file pdf are over. It sounds like a great book but as a straight scan with no OCR and without the original layout source, its a poor product.

Too many other great PDFs have search, reasonable size and convenience on their side.

I'd understand if this were a hand written manuscript but its not. PDFs have their own demands , you wouldn't try to print a book on wet paper would you?, and I think publishers have to step up to the plate in order to publish.


Sigurd

 

[Alzrius]

Well, all of those issues become moot if you order the print copy of the book.

But yeah, those are good points, all of which I ran into headfirst when I bought the PDF. I was on a dial-up at the time, so 300 megabytes was impossible for me to download; thank heavens I was able to set up a wireless connection on a nearby college campus to get it. Likewise, I was recently looking for a specific spell in the book, and while I was able to use the appendix to find it, not having bookmarks, or being able to do a search for it, was rather irking. (Of course, I left feedback for them regarding that, as those are all problems that are very fixable.)

That said, even with the technical misses, the book's contents more than make up for them, in my opinion. The work here is stellar, and should not be missed.