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Message: <blockquote data-quote="God" data-source="post: 8283944" data-attributes="member: 4038">I found the book bland and, with a few exceptions, uninspiring.It's hard to put a finger on what was especially underwhelming. The cultural updates are a mixed bag: many of them much-needed and overdue, while others seem to serve no useful purpose. Viktra and Vladeska are the two gender-swaps that stand out as particularly lazy, down to the no-effort name changes. Others offer something fresh -- even if the loss is bittersweet. I have a soft spot for Urk von Karhov's Vallachan, due to past experience playing through the Felkovic's Cat adventures from Dungeon mag. Chakuna's domain is a great, alternate take on The Most Dangerous Game ... but could as well have been its own thing, rather than forcing it into the vaguely-recognizable corpse of the original.Other gripes are common to most 5E products. The pages and pages of Bonds and Ideals, etc., strike me as a shallow substitute for real description and plot hooks usable at the table. The art (with a handful of exceptions, including several of the darklords and Eleni's albino worm) uniformly is too colorful and generic high fantasy, and the graphic design is the same boring 5E template -- a missed opportunity to set a foreboding tone, as Stephen Fabian's black-and-white artwork did in the early 2E products.Which was all quite a disappointment because I had been excited for this release. Luckily, I have all my Golden Age campaign settings on the shelf (the real, actual Golden Age, ie. the 90s, for all the confused grognards and noobs <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> ) and can play the game that I like, as others are free to do. And if VRGtR gets the youngsters playing something, anything but FR, it will have served a useful purpose.</blockquote>

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