I am always excited to get into supplemental crunch material. Nitehawk Interactive?s Adventurer?s Handbook is all about crunch meant to provide dungeon masters? with more material from which to draw from and provide a wider variety of options to their players. Unfortunately, this Nitehawk Interactive product falls short.

My review is based on the PDF version of the Adventurer?s Handbook. The Handbook contains an introduction, seven chapters, an appendix, and an index. I will discuss the chapters in turn. The PDF contains 148 pages, including the front and back covers. Given the length of this product, this review will be fairly lengthy.

Chapter 1- Races: This chapter contains nine races, five of which are actually half breeds. If you?ve been contemplating a mixture of dwarves and gnomes, gnomes and halflings, or dwarves and orcs; this chapter is your heaven. Combinations of common player character races have clearly weighed heavily on the author?s mind. The non half breed races include versions of some standard concepts, such as a winged ?feline? race and a lizard race; as well as some attempts at some novel types.

I found the fluff (descriptive text that provides the ?flavor?) a little too simple despite some of the solid ideas presented. Things like the slang terms for the various half breeds could have been left out. In addition, many of the descriptive entries for half breeds simply split the difference. (Members of race X worship the dwarven or gnomish gods, or treats dwarven waraxes and urgroshes or gnomish hooked hammers as martial weapons, depending on upbringing.) At the same time, the novel races are more interesting. (If you have been hunkering for these half breeds, I already said this is your cup of tea.)

They did attempt to include information on ?campaign lore? and ?adventure hooks? into the racial description. I hope that in future products Nitehawk Interactive considers keeping these concepts and expanding them. By expanding the effort put into the adventure hooks I think it is likely that the fluff would see a nice improvement in complexity and depth. This would especially play into the more interesting content of the novel races. These races could easily be taken by an enterprising dungeon master and placed within any home brewed setting and given?all new? campaign specific fluff.

Chapter 2- Classes: This chapter contains six classes, four of which are new. The chapter also contains alternate versions of the shaman and psionist. It should be noted that in addition to the alternate psionist class, the Adventurer?s Handbook contains a second psionic class, the mentalist. Also contained in this chapter are rules for the use of a talisman by shamans and an alternate psionic system. The talisman system is very basic and concerns itself nearly exclusively with the penalty for its loss and how to replace it. The alternate psionic system (where there appears to have been some editing oversights) is a point system using ?schools? of the psionic powers.

As with the races, I find the fluff somewhat lacking. Statements like, ?A bounty hunter thinks mostly of money.? are so cliche, and limiting. Seems like they should be able to range from the greedy street fighter to the more refined and less physical investigatory type. However, as with the races, if the dungeon master electing to use these classes prepares their own fluff for the players, these classes provide workable supplements to the core classes. If you aren?t interested in rethinking some fluff, you may not end up liking what you find here.

In addition, if I can return to speaking about the bounty hunter class, the class progression is unnecessarily ?clumpy?. Rather than gaining two special abilities between levels 12 and 17, both arrive at 15. This format leaves large gaps of time during which the power of the character will increase without any change to the character?s options. This is a flaw in the class design of a non spellcaster. Even with a spellcaster, gaining two new abilities and having one old ability ?improve? at the same level are overkill when there are eleven levels at which their abilities do not change, as is the case with the alternate version of the shaman. By the same token, the outcast class gains a special ability at every level except 18th and gains the ability to cast spells at 5th level. Something does not seem quite right.

Chapter 3- Skills: This chapter contains six new skills ranging from seduction to tactics. (Oh, those two might just be the same thing for some folks!) The new skills are interesting, but the author does not address the issue that adding to the skill list effectively reduces the ?power? of player characters. By making them divide their skill points over a broader range of skills, the character will, of necessity have less ranks in skills that will (eventually) be required.

In addition to new skills, ?core? skills are given a close look for the purpose of adding additional ways in which the skills should interact with other proposed game elements. For example, skills that a new race has a bonus to will include the statement that ?Race X gets a +2 bonus on...? This is an excellent idea and, with proper planning, this could?ve been an unquestionable jewel. However, you should note that while it appears that some attempt was made to include the core information for each skill, they appear to have left out some material. For example, the information on both the appraise and balance skills do not include a statement on synergies. Both appraise and balance have core synergies listed in core materials. So, don?t use this reference in lieu of your core references, use it for the content specific information.

Chapter 4- Feats: This first portion of this chapter contains 36 new feats, of which 3 are metamagic, 3 are item creation, and the remaining 30 are general. The authors imagination seems to have been best captured in this chapter. They provide a number of interesting feats, and ensure that some of them create new ?progressions?; such as the craftsman feats, or the kicking feats. If you are constantly trying to creatively come up with new feats, this chapter may be worth your while regardless of whether you are looking for feats concerning nature, combat, crafting, magic, and even one concerning your ?sea legs?! The second section details the ?Background Feats? being offered. These are feats that can only be taken at first level and are based on the prior experiences that your character background is liekly to deal with. There are 10 background feats. The prerequisites for these background feats ensure that the player has followed through with the background story when assigning skill points. It does seem like they should have provided a wider array of options for background feats. Finally, there are five epic level feats that build upon the new feats contained earlier in the chapter.

Chapter 5- Magic: The Adventurer?s Handbook presents 39 spells in the core schools of magic (anywhere between levels 0 and 9), a new school of magic based on a fantasy view of subatomic particles (17 spells), and a new divine domain concerning the power of animal spirits (9 spells). I will not say much more on this chapter because the usefulness of this chapter will depend greatly on the campaign that you run or are playing in. Some of these spells would not fit within the thematic elements of certain campaigns, some of them may seem perfect. If you have considered how magic might allow one to control things on a microscopic level, or if you have toyed with the idea of the relationship between magic and animal spirits, this chapter has your name on it...somewhere among all those spells.

Chapter 6- Equipment: This chapter contains new exotic weapons, goods, and containers for your characters to use and for you to sprinkle around your campaign setting. Its always nice to be able to ?pimp out? an NPC or a PC with something new...until the next new ?must have? item comes along! Here you can find the patar, catstink, and the yo-yo! If you are into ?bling?, this is a contribution of a mere five pages. If you are expecting a substantial library of equipment, then this will disappoint you.

Chapter 7- Campaign Master Tools: This chapter contains two sections, one for Prestige Classes (3 ten level PrCs and 1 five level PrC) and one for NPC Classes (3 twenty level NPC Classes). Mostly, my criticism from the earlier classes applies here. The fluff is weak and, sometimes, even confusing. For example, one of the PrCs is the Ghost Hunter, but the text is not clear in establishing why they sometimes destroy the ghosts they find and why they sometimes ask them to leave? Why would the ghost hunter sometimes live among ghosts? How do they reconcile the belief that ghosts do not belong on the prime plane and, yet, they understand that some ghosts must remain until they find peace? In addition, the ?slave? class, while an interesting concept to ponder, does not warrant NPC class status as written. Any dungeon master can purposefully create subpar characters at any point in time. Simply don?t pick up that extra feat, or assign lower ability scores. What dungeon masters need are classes that are balanced and provide an interesting way of filling a need within the campaign setting.

Artwork: Overall the artwork is adequate. Some of the individual works are better than others, though there is nothing to go crazy over.

Unfortunately, I noted some errors. For example, the ?bookmarks? window in Adobe Reader lists both Chapter?s 1 and 2 as ?Races?. However, Chapter 2 should be listed as ?Classes?. It is correctly contained in the Table of Contents, so it should be correct in the print version.

Overall, I found this product disappointing considering the options that should have become obvious during development.

To rousing gaming and ample rewards, I. Perez<br><br><b>LIKED</b>:

1. Interesting attempt at some novel race concepts, which if placed into a homebrewed world will not suffer for inadequate fluff.
2. Inclusion of commonly discussed half-breeds and the inclusion of campaign lore and adventure hooks in racial descriptions.
3. Interesting new feats and creation of two additional schools of magic and interesting spell concepts.
4. Some interesting, if limited, equipment.<br><br><b>DISLIKED</b>:
5. A variety of the tables are not formatted perfectly for ease of use. It can be hard to see some entries.
6. Minor errors.
7. Inconsistent quality of writing.
8. At times, the effort appears inconsistent. (Such as with listing skill synergies, addressing impact of increasing the number of skills, and developing even class progressions.)
9. Leaves too much work to the reader to make this product truly useful.<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Disappointing<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Disappointed<br>