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Message: <blockquote data-quote="trancejeremy" data-source="post: 2443512" data-attributes="member: 924">There are several companies I would never buy new books from, as their general quality is typically just really poor. Both in terms of editing and writing and general quality.FFG (most notably their Legends & Lairs line), Fast Forward, Avalanche, AEG's non Spycraft/SG-1 stuff, Mongoose.I never minded the silly Avalanche Covers, it was the contents of the books that let me down - too shallow to cover their subject properly, and for some reason, one of their authors was obssessed with pushing the fact that in real life, women tend to be physically weaker than men, and NPCs that suffer from incontinence and have to wear diapers. OTOH, for the price their stuff sells for now, like $5 a book, they aren't bad.Fast Forward was a strange case. They seemed to think that since it was run by long time professionals, they didn't actually have to read the d20 rules to know them. The one product I really liked, the Encyclopedia of Demons & Devils, which did suffer from stat products, actually turns out to have largely been borrowed from another non-gaming product on Demons. Not enough to constitute plagiarism, but clearly they simply took the entries from that product, and rewrote them.  (IIRC, "A Field Guide to Demons, Fairies, Fallen Angels, and Other Subversive Spirits By Carol K Mack" was the book they were "inspired" by. Even the artwork was simply just a redo)AEG, FFG and Mongoose all seem to have a similar business model. They have some lines which they spend some effort on (AEG would be Spycraft, FFG would be Midnight, I guess, Mongoose would be Conan/Slaine/B5), but the other lines would be awfully slapdash. Legends & Lairs from FFG, the one word books from AEG, most of Mongoose's stuff. Just of jumbled quality, sloppy editing, big margins, just an overall cheap feel to them. I would never buy any of those again, though I would buy some of their products from the lines they spend time and effort on, like the new Spycraft. And in Mongoose's case I'm pretty much finished with them, unless the book is by Adrian Bott.</blockquote>

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