5 comments about Magic the Gathering: Official Encyclopedia: The Complete Card Guide, vol 3.

1. This book was a great help to search for a deck of Magic cards.Its cool you should buy it.



2. Full color photos and errata on every card... a must



3. This book has all the information you could possibly need, is very interesting, is complete, and has wonderful pictures. This book is great!

   GET IT




4. Just finished the review below...since when an erratum for every card was good? Errata are the behind-the-scenes changes in the rules - how is that good? It only complicates the game. Also, I've noticed that with every volume the amount of info steadily decreases:the first volume held images of well over 2000 cards from Third and Fourth Ed., Arabian Nights, Antiquities, Legends, Ice Age, The Dark, Fallen Empires, Alliances, and who knows what else. It was jam packed with an out-of-order chronology, the banned cards, lots of strats and card info. The second volume was thirty percent smaller - 1300 cards from Weatherlight, Visions, Fifth Ed., and Portal. It was bleaker, smaller, less enthralling. Now, THIS volume features 900 cards from four small expansions - they didn't even wait for the block to be over. Some of illustrations are botched or ill-colored, and the text on the best cards... Of course, if you want some sort of help choosing or organizing your M:TG cards, you will need this, but, believe me, this is not a diamond in the rough.



5. Seems like it's getting thinner and thinner each volume. They should publish it later (until they have enough cards to fill-in). But then as a serious MTG collector, it's still a must to have.

2 comments about Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Monster Smackdown (Buffy RPG).

1. This book is packed full of colorful, eye-catching illistrations along with text true to the show. Many of the monsters included can be easily recognized by any true fan. Includes ways to make your own demon characters!



2. "The Monster Smackdown" is a supplement for the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" roleplaying game, a counterpart to the "Slayer's Handbook" that is also available. Written by Thom Marrion, with assistance form a lot of others, this volume builds on the canon of the Buffyverse (through the show's first six seasons) and expands it to help players of the roleplaying game create new scenarios. While most of the monsters on "BtVS" were based on real world supernatural myths and legends, that is not seen as a limitation but a starting point for Directors. So while "Monster Smackdown" provides a summary of that mythology as it pertains to the darker side of the Buffyverse, it also introduces you to the rules and tools for you to expand your own neck of the "BtVS" underworld as your little (still beating) heart desires.

   The book is divided into seven chapters: (1) Welcome to the Hellmouth summarizes the major points about monsters in the Buffyverse that gives you some ideas for locating Hellmouths in other places and a quick lesson on various demon dimensions; (2) Die Young, Live Forever is a detailed look at vampires, from abilities and weaknesses to notes on the soul and mortality; (3) From Hell runs down the "regular" demons who are considered lower-tier threats; (4) Everything You Ever Dreaded Under Your Bed collects all the various non-vamp, non-demon creatures that have appeared in the Buffyverse; (5) Bads, Big and Small focuses on the "name" adversaries for Buffy, from Adam and Angelus to Sweet and Mr. Trick, in what is by far the longest chapter in the book; (6) Monster Spawning provides tips for Directors creating their own adversaries and includes some cast member monsters, new creature qualities, new powers, and new archetypes; (7) The Once and Future HST is a ready-to-slay episode containing a major turning point in the on-going Djinn Season that we have been following along in these Eden Studio publications.

   The book is filled with those pithy quotations that made "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" a test of your pop culture knowledge, boxes containing additional information and supplemental charts and tables, and fiction sections or cut scenes that give you a sense of what sort of scenarios you can play out in these games. These books are filled with photographs and illustrations, with gorgeous production values, so that they will appeal to fans of the series who are not necessarily interested in playing the game (which explains why they are on the shelf of my fancy bookcase next to my volumes of "BtVS" scripts).

1 comments about Spelljammer: Adventures in Space (AD&D 2nd Ed Fantasy Roleplaying, 2bks+4maps+cards+counters).

1. This Advance Dungeons and Dragons campain setting box set is among the most fantastic ever produced. With the three books contained within this set, is everything that anyone need know to begin an AD&D campain in space. It allows you to take to the stars within the fantasy worlds of Forgotten Relms, Dragonlance and Grey Hawks.

5 comments about Traveller's Handbook (Traveller T20 D20).

1. This is easily the best d20 old-game-to-new-game adaption I've seen in the last couple years. It is fully developed - tons of skills, classes, feats, and equipment. The combat rules are logical and lethal. Starship combat, psionics, and planetary generation are well-designed and incorporated, drawing on twenty years of game development. The "Imperium" background is vague enough to allow plenty of flexibility when designing the setting while still providing enough of an inspiration framework to avoid doing it from scratch.

   The game is a hard-science sci-fi roleplaying game - more Star Trek or Foundation than Star Wars. Belongs on every gamer's shelf.




2. The long wait to a modern vision. The best game produced with out being backed by a movie. Mark Miller wrote the forward and you can tell he is happy about the product that was his baby, and now all grown up, setting another standered in RPG's. Thank God for this book, saved me from giving up gaming.



3. T20 is a really great game. It may look a little pricey, but you get a lot of bang for the buck (unlke many expensive White Wolf books, this one is packed with info).

   I highly recommend this if you like the d20 system. I doubt that Wizard's d20 Future will even hold a candle to it.




4. I'm a big Traveller fan. It was one of the first RPGs I ever played and the first I GMed. I've owned products from every incarnation of it, even the dreaded Gurps Traveller, and own almost all original (or Classic as it's now called these days) Traveller products.
   
   Physically, this is an impressive book. It's heavy, and it's huge. That's the first thing you notice. The next thing you notice is the price tag (...). Though after a quick mental "D'oh!", you realize it's priced reasonably, given it's size. (...)
   
   Traveller 20, or T20, takes the tack that Fading Suns d20 took - ditching all the regular d20 classes and introducing several new ones. Herein lies much of the problems I have with T20. Although realistic, several of the classes are simply terrible at combat. They have a Base Attack Bonus progression which ends up at +5 when they are 20th level. Again, this is somewhat realistic, especially for classes like the "Academic". But I think it's bad game design. You're going to end up with many characters simply worthless in combat. No one likes playing the far future version of Richard Simmons. By using the weakest normal Base Attack Bonus progression (where it ends up at +10 at 20th level), you're giving the character a much better chance of being useful, yet aren't stretching reality too much.
   
   I also found it odd that the Army class has a fairly weak base attack bonus progression - the average one in d20 terms, that ends up at +15 at 20th level. The Navy is even worse. Not quite as bad as the Academic, but weak (the weakest normal progression, like that of a wizard). Should military classes be worse at combat than a Mercenary? Maybe the Navy, but not the Army. And should Mercenaries be on par with Marines? Marines are considered to be the toughest regular fighting forces around (and this is especially true in the Traveller universe). So I'd definitely say no.
   
   While presumably not everyone will run a combat heavy game, Traveller always had a strong criminal and mercenary slant since the begining (early on, it was more or less "Thugs in Space", where the PCs were criminals or toughs.) So this great imbalance between the classes is perhaps a bigger problem in a game like Traveller than other SF games.
   
   I also have problems with the concepts of some of the core classes. The "Traveller" class for instance. Does that really need a class? No. And why is "Mercenary" a core class? I don't really get how you can become a mercenary from the get go, once you're 18. It seems like it's something that you can't start out in, but can become on after a tour in the military or somesuch. I.e., essentially a prestige class. In fact, this is likely why in the original Traveller, which didn't have classes but had careers, there was no mercenary or "Traveller" career. Though they did follow the classic Traveller careers fairly closely (which is good, as early reports about the game had them doing something complete different and very wacky), I think they should have followed them much closer.
   
   In a way, all core classes are somewhat similar in that all their special abilities are bonus feats. Some of the feats are exclusive to that class, but they all get the same number of bonus feats (about one every other level).
   
   There are 3 prestige classes - the Big Game Hunter, the TAS reporter, and the "Ace Pilot". By contrast, these do have some special class abilities which aren't feats. But the Ace Pilot is a really dorky name. I can't help but think of Red Dwarf - Ace Rimmer. I think the first two should have been regular, core classes (well, maybe a generic reporter or media class). I also think some more prestige classes were needed. Special Forces, for army characters. Assassin. Lots more.
   
   I also think Psionics should have been handled as a prestige class. Not only does it makes sense (that's one thing prestige classes are for - secret societies and such), there are balance reasons for it. As it is, Psionics are largely handled by feats and by random luck. If you have psionics, you might have powers in one of 5 different areas, or spheres. Each different power requires a feat to be taken, and each sphere is also a skill which needs to be built up. Okay, except that all spheres are not equal. Telepathy has 7 different powers or feats. Telekinesis has one. Teleportation has one. The latter two are potentially very powerful, depending on the character's PSI ability.
   
   So, while I think most new classes are okay, some are flawed pretty badly, either in execution or concept. Even as NPCs classes, they wouldn't work. And as there are no NPC classes, the workload on the DM or Referee is going to be increased a lot. For some reason, many don't realize that part of the reason for the NPC class was to make things easy on the DM - the original ones are all very simple, with no special abilities or powers (other than the adept and it's spells). This is somewhat mitigated by the large appendix of stats for NPCs. But still annoying, IMHO.
   
   Another interesting idea, but flawed (or so I think) is how characters gain past experience, called Prior History. This is similar to past versions of Traveller, and is almost a game of it's own. But in essence, the problem is it ends up producing characters that have a wide variety of character levels (each year of prior history, they get 1000 xp, plus possible bonuses). One PC might have a 3rd level character. Another might have a 10th. While this is perhaps realistic (though honestly, older is not always better), it largely defeats the whole purpose of having character levels (which is to make combat ability easier to gauge, as well as general competence).
   
   While Prior History has balance problems, it also is quite confusing. I can't quite figure out how college works. Characters in it get XP, but what class are they? Academic? Any class they want? It doesn't say. And multiclassing is confusing. On the one hand, it says anyone can apply to a service class until they are 33, but in the multiclass rules, it says those classes can't be multiclassed into unless you have prior experience in that class. So how do you multiclass into it? And the Mercenary career - the text mentions an Academic might want to multiclass into that, but Mercenary is restricted to those who were in the Army, Navy or Marines. And why can't Scouts be a Mercenary? They were in a military service, and are as good in combat (in T20 terms) as the Army and better than the Navy. Or Rogues? While not in the military, they are good at combat as well.
   
   It doesn't help that the only example of prior history is as simple as you can get: a character that starts off a rogue and stays a rogue his entire career (he's also immensely fat, perhaps this was meant to be a Marlon Brando/Godfather reference). Gee, thanks for the help. So in making up characters, we just ignored the multiclass restrictions in the prior career, and no one took university.
   
   Speaking of combat, T20 introduces several new combat rules, most pretty major. For one, there are no more hit points. Instead, there are stamina points, which are more or less identical to hit points (and go up every level). There is also "Lifeblood" points, which are based on a characters constitution and are fixed. The explanation of this is actually hard to find in the book. It's in the combat chapter, but rather being the first thing explained, it's buried after a long section on starship sensors. WTF?
   
   Anyway, since there are two types of hit points,armor is handled a bit differently. Armor increases armor class, but also has a damage reduction value. This reduces the number of dice a weapon does, to a mininum of one. The remaining value is then subtracted from that remaining die (which was the high roll). It's confusing to explain, but is actually fairly clever.
   
   Example:
   
   Alec is wearing cloth armor, which has a rating of 6. Homer comes along and shoots him with a Laser Rifle, which does 3d10 damage. Homer rolls for damage and gets a 7, 10, and 4. Alec thus takes 21 stamina poinst of damage, which is easy enough to figure, but the lifeblood damage would be 6. The cloth armor has a rating of 6, so that means 6 dice would be removed from the total. But there's only 3. So 2 of the 3 are removed, leaving the roll of 10 (the highest). From that roll of 10, 4 is subracted, leaving 6. (4 because the armor rating of cloth armor is 6, but 2 of that was used to remove dice).
   
   I find this pretty clever, and it seems to work well enough, though it has some quirks. They've also managed to keep weapon damages and armor value consistent with other d20 stuff. Another change is that strength no longer helps in melee combat, it's dexterity, like in missile.
   
   About 110 pages of the book is on design sequences for vehicles and examples of vehicles. While many Traveller fans are in fact people who love to design stuff, I think this really would have been better suited for another book. It's also really only suited for Traveller games, as Traveller tends to make certain assumptions about it's starships that don't really apply to other universes. (For one, their expense. Ships in Traveller are insanely expensive. Contrast that to say, Star Wars, where starships are priced like cars. Or most SF games where they are more like ocean ships. This is one of those things I never liked about Traveller. There's no real reason for starships to be that expensive, given the technology levels - robot construction, contra grav, computer design, all would drastically reduce the cost of starships. But they still cost 200 million credits+, even for a small ship. I also don't understand how it can take years to build relatively small ships either. But I digress).
   
   Basically, by comparison, in 35 pages or so, the Imperial Encyclopedia fro



5. This is a comprehensive and well executed adaption of D20 to Traveller. Traveller is a game I've held in high esteem since I was a young teen in 1983. The other reviewers do a great job of describing what's appealing about Traveller, so for the sake of brevity: ditto.
   
   But not only that. It's a better D20. Here are the areas where I think T20 does better than D20:
   1. Armour exists not only to deflect weapons, but to reduce damage.
   2. Being more experienced doesn't make weapons less damaging. A sword or pistol is always a dangerous thing to have pointed at you.
   3. People who work together have different backgrounds, different levels of experience, and different ages.
   4. Magic Powers (in this case, psionics) are built on the existing skill system and bought with skill points.
   5. In many cases, you can compensate for poor education by having high IQ, poor charisma by higher social standing, etc.
   6. Experience points for completing objectives, rather than winning fights.
   
   If you like lots of combats where your character takes a half-dozen 10-point sword wounds in a row and comes out fighting, and you get masses of XP for this, then this game isn't for you.
   
   If you like a lot of variety with exploration, role-playing, a few *very* dangerous fights, space ships, high-tech, low-tech, utopias, hell-worlds, commerce, aliens, etc, then try this game.

1 comments about Tribebook: Glass Walkers.

1. The Glasswalkers have the most interesting history among the tribes, and this tribebook brings it out perfectly. From all the various names the tribe has had, the book not only covers them, but lists the gifts that each version would have. if you are the least bit interested in the "Weaver tribe", then get this book.

2 comments about Paranoia: Criminal Histories (Paranoia).

1. All I have to say is this: any book that devlopes a multi-page flowchart for randomly generating PC backstories deserves five stars. Keep 'em coming, guys.



2. Paranoia is a great game but sometimes it takes a lot of work and creativity to really wrap the players in plots and world that is out to get them. This supplement does a lot of the heavy lifting by creating that world as well as giving your players a history to work with. I use this supplement with new players all the time and it never fails to amuse them and get them involved. For my experienced players, it gets their own imaginations rolling and helps them create their own rope to hang themselves.
   
   I feel this supplement is like having an experienced gamemaster standing over your shoulder while you are setting your game up.

5 comments about Monstrous Compendium Appendix III: Creatures of Darkness (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd Edition, Ravenloft Accessory/2153).

1. Just what I need. Finnally, that "Summon Planar Creature" spell can summon more than just Imps and Baatzu.



2. Wow!

   All I can say is........WOW! This is the treasure trove of the unique, original, and inspiring creatures I have always longed for... The art is amazing, the text is well-written, the book is sturdy and very attractive, and the content is....... simply put, oustanding. This is a sort of book that you lift up and say " why haven't I heard of this earlier! " or " why haven't they released this a couple years ago! ". Every single creature is so original and unique, they fully deserve to have legends written about them. BUY THIS BOOK!




3. WOW! The best monstrous compendium(other than ravenloft) ever created! It has all the elementals one could ever want, including Ice, Ash, radiance, magma, ooze, and even Vacuum! An almost-Must-have for any party with a high level wizard with access to the conjuration/summoning school! The other animals in this book are also incredibly cool. also includedin the front and back of the book are guides to the way creatures react with each other, and harmless residents of the inner planes!



4. For their third compendium release, the planescape team (directed by Monte Cook) decided to concentrate on monsters from the inner planes. The idea is a good one and the new monsters presented in this book are among the strangest players will ever come across. As for the older monsters, most of them taken from the original Monster Manuals they fit very well in the book and the new informations & drawings of them are excellent. The result make for a refreshing book that I definitly recomend to experienced players & Dm who are tired of the same old monsters and think they have seen it all. However if you are just starting a campaign or do not intend to adventure on the planes this book will only hold a marginal interest for your campaign.



5. As of the writing of this review I am running a inner planes Campain. There our 2 books which have proved useful. This is one of them. Most the monsters our found in the inner planes and really help flush out that part of the Planescape Campain setting. The other book The Inner Planes is also wrote by Monte Cook the 2 our surprizingly compatible which is nice.

1 comments about Monsters and Animals (Palladium Fantasy RPG).

1. This book is a definite must for anyone interested in the Pallidium universe

2 comments about Deadlands: The Quick & the Dead.

1. This books adds some welcome new seeds for characters and stories alike, along with more than a few bits of humor (Roswell, NM and "Fort 51", to name the two most obvious). Though the basic game book alone provides an excellent skeleton and generous portions of meat (and gore), herein is a second and third helping of tasty ideas. Naturally, there's still lots of room on the plate for the Marshall to add his (or her) own special touches without seeming too sparse. Overall, a well-done supplement that belongs in the library of every posse and Marshall.



2. THE QUICK AND THE DEAD is really two supplements; one is extra toys and background for a Deadlands game and the other is a gazetteer from The Epitaph.
   
   The first part I can take or leave. It has new hexes, new guns, rules for knacks and black magic, new archetypes, new monsters, new edges/hindrances, just more of everything. It's nice, but I can sit down and make those up too. The additional Marshal's background is interesting and adds more depth to the Deadlands world. But the really useful part is The Epitaph - no player or Marshal should be without it.
   
   This issue of The Epitaph is pretty much a Player's Guide to the Deadlands. It explain politics, geography, history, famous people, famous places, monsters, diseases, and a whole host of other things. The information here helps to define the borders of the Deadlands space. After reading it, I had a much better feel for what my characters might encounter in different parts of the country or what and where might be interesting to investigate. Don't leave this important issue out of your collection.

1 comments about Warhammer RPG: Terror in Talabheim (Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay).

1. I am currently preparing things to GM 'Terror in Talabheim'...and from reading it I have to say it is very well written. It is not your standard city adventure and the plots are not as obvious for the characters as it was in past adventure.
   
   The first part of the book describes in detail everything there is to know of Talabheim. It also includes maps of Talabheim and surroundings.
   
   The second part is the adventure which is divided into 7 chapters. The adventure itself is designed for first or second career characters (first career characters will have a tough time though). The book prepares the GM for all eventualities and still allows the players their freedom.
   
   Not to spoil too much I think it's save to say that I'd buy 'Children of the horned rat' in addition to this book if you don't have it already.