Krampusnacht: Knight of the Krampus is a fun little adventure. It starts off a bit light but as the story progressess it gets quite deadly. It is designed to use in 3 acts (sessions) but can easily be modified other types of Gaming Nights. The art fits the feel of the product and the production values are quite good, something that is normal for Skirmisher Publishing.

A fun little product that can bring a bit of the bizarre to the holiday season. Well worth picking up.

This is my first experience with the "Oddities" series, and it was interesting and informative. For those not familiar with the concept, these books provide random lists of objects that could be found during a role-playing game, depending on the genre- a Post-Apocalyptic campaign, in this case. Note that the cause of the disaster is up to the Game Master- it can be anything from nuclear war to the zombie apocalypse; the ideas included here could be adapted for any of those.

Because that is what the "oddities" are, actually- ideas. Everything from simple "well, that's unusual" to "geez, I wish I'd met the person who left this behind (or maybe not)." On their own, the Oddities are not much; just a way to fill the time as characters travel the wasteland to whatever their goal is. But they're very creative. I cannot truly explain how without giving the twists away, so take my word for it. By they way, don't let the intentionally cartoony art style fool you- some of the examples included can be creepy.

I only had two problems with the book, and to be honest they are more biases of mine. First is that I don't like random generation; I prefer thematic lists that help me find exactly what I need. The other is the format; each description alternates between "black text on grey" and "black text on white". I get that this is meant to help tell the oddities apart, but honestly, a simple line would have been better.

But as I said, those are personal biases that most people are not likely to share. Most Game Masters playing in a postapocalyptic setting who need quick ideas will find this most useful.

There is nothing worse than having the group wander off in a direction you weren't set up for. Quick thinking will help, but sometimes you need something more. This product provides that. The idea behind 100 Oddities for a Wasteland is to provide a myriad of different things someone can stumble upon. The random nature of the product means that you can roll or simply choose the object your characters come upon. The item can be used as the start to a new adventure or a simple red-herring meant to kill some time.

While this is specifically geared toward sci-fi/modern wastelands much of it could be used in a Steampunk setting as well with a little imagination.

Well worth the price...

This product is an interesting mix. While all the items listed inside are in the vein of the famous Arthur C Clarke quote about magic, the power levels are varied by quite a bit.

There are several items that could very well be the beginning of a campaign because of how strongly they would affect the surrounding area out to a considerable distance. These need to be handled carefully and not dropped into a campaign on a whim as they will change the world when they are fuilly revealed Some are weaker, but still powerful enough to start a story arc as they would easily hold sway over the area of a large city. These are season long stories begging to be told, if you view the game from a tv series metaphor, as they can easily change the balance of power in their areas. Finally some are weird but lower powered. In my experience these are the items you hand out to stir the pot or discover just what sort of trouble the players will get into with them. These are the items that will see the most play in a game, as they arent a plot point, they arent a goal, or a dues ex machina, but they weirdness that makes post apocalypse gaming different from sci-fi or fantasy. The mutant running around with the weird animal totem item that she doesnt understand but still uses will always be more memorable than a flat mechanical bonus item.

My complaint with this is not content based, but layout. All the items are listed alphabetically, so a trinket is next to the train of doom. This doesnt work for me, as I see several distinct power levels and would have prefered to see them listed by that. That way when im looking to do world building I could just look up the most powerful items, but if Im doing long term planning I could look at the middle group, or look at the weakest when it comes to game session prep. All in all, good ideas that are jumbled up, which gets distracting for me

[Disclosure: I was sent a complimentary copy of this ebook by the author in exchange for this review.]

Sinister Serpents: New Forms of Dragonkind is 29 pages long - 24 pages of content plus five of front and back matter - and it contains Labyrinth Lord-compatible write-ups of 38 new types of dragons. As you'd expect, the statblocks are very minimal (and, frankly, you could usually have worked out most of the stats yourself based on the accompanying descriptions), so essentially you're paying $6 for thirty-eight two-to-four-paragraph dragon ideas. This makes me slightly wary of saying too much about the dragons themselves, as basically every time I mention one I'm giving away just under 3% of the book's content for nothing...

...so. Dragons. They live at the bottom of your dungeon, sleeping on a big pile of treasure and waiting for greedy and/or high-level PCs to sneak in and get eaten. As niches go, it's a pretty small one, and yet D&D and its derivatives has hundreds of different types of the damn things. Fire dragons. Ice dragons. Good dragons. Bad dragons. Shiny dragons. Psychic dragons. Zombie dragons. Toad dragons. That stupid lust dragon whose breath weapon makes everyone's clothes fall off. (I wish I was joking about that one.) You can easily use a dozen or more humanoid races over the course of a campaign; hell, you can easily use a dozen or more humanoid races over the course of a single dungeon. But how many dragons is any one game likely to need? In all my years of running fantasy RPGs I think I've only run five dragon encounters, and one of those was with an abstract metaphysical force which just happened to currently be dragon-shaped.

The traditional way in which writers have diversified D&D's stable of dragons is via combat role: stronger dragons, weaker dragons, dragons with weird special abilities, dragons which use obscure energy types as breath weapons, and so on. Sinister Serpents takes a different approach: it diversifies dragons via ecological role. Stat-wise, they're mostly pretty similar: they have good AC, a high number of hit dice, claw and bite attacks, and a breath weapon that fucks you up. But the roles they play in the world are diversified: there are dragons as natural disasters, dragons as ambush predators, dragons as symbiotic parasites, dragons as natural resources, dragons as industrial powerhouses, dragons as community protectors, dragons as factors in geological and ecological development, and so on. It's an original approach, and one that I think has more to recommend it than the traditional 'dragon that breathes [X] instead of fire' method. How useful it will be, on the other hand, is ultimately going to depend on how much of a role you want dragons to play in your campaign.

The dragons in this book are still mostly basic D&D-style creatures with 8 HD or thereabouts, tough but still eminently killable, rather than the mega-monsters which dragons would go on to become in later editions of D&D. But they're still dragons: and they are, with a few exceptions, big and powerful enough to make a pretty big impact on the world around them. Their special abilities are mostly similarly flashy, powerful enough to exert a significant influence upon the local landscape or economy or ecology. They're a big deal. How many big deal dragons do you want in your game? How many do you need? How often do you want the answer to major questions about the way your campaign world works to be 'a dragon did it'?

If the answer is 'loads', or even 'quite a lot', then you'll probably enjoy this book, which is full of weird dragons who can affect their environments in all kinds of interesting ways. If it's 'not very often', then... well... you'll probably still enjoy it, because there are some nice ideas here. But you might struggle to make use of many of them in actual play!

Swords of Kos Fantasy Campain setting is a great compilation of the entire Kos line. It takes what has been created before and puts it into a single comprehensive tome. It saves the reader the frustration of flipping between different files in search of information.

Everything is presented in a clean manner that makes reading easy. It is comprehensive enough to flesh out large portions of a world. Even better is that there is still enough room left for groups to create their own additions with ease.

Wasteland horrors and zombies are always a favorite but here in Wisdom from the Wastelands Issue #52: Nanotech Undead we get a boat load of monster options and weirdness for the Mutant Future rpg. But is the issue worth getting? Yes but there are some interesting give and take things here in the wastelands. My sweet spot for post apocalyptic rpg's has always been Gamma World first & second edition, the games were and are some of my favorite systems & rpg's. They form a good part of my next phase of gaming in my life. The thing about Gamma World was its flexibility, the apocalypse could be anything from a zombie plague to a full blown holocaust of Biblical proportions with little bits of everything in between. Everyone I knew mixed in everything from Logan's Run to Night of the Living Dead. In case you don't know;"Gamma World is a science fantasy role-playing game, originally designed by James M. Ward and Gary Jaquet, and first published by TSR in 1978. It borrowed heavily from Ward's earlier product, Metamorphosis Alpha."

So I was thrilled to see Mutant Future a retroclone of old school post apocalyptic rpgs from Goblinoid games was available but like its originator the DM has to do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to developing the background, setting material, adventures, etc. Which is fine because there's some great licensed products out there to help fill in the gaps such as Skirmisher Publishing's Wisdom From the Wastelands and other fine source books to help fill in the gap. Now Skirmisher Publishing has come out with Wisdom from the Wastelands Issue #52: Nanotech Undead. Basically this is Skirmisher's undead & zombie source book for their version of the Mutant Future setting. The book is really nicely done at twenty nine pages for three dollars, I do wish it had an index because this issue is slightly bigger then normal issues. The undead rules are very well done and there is a vast array of undead to keep your players busy but once again we've got the same issue that I've had with Skirmisher Publishing in the past. None of the content of this book is OGL. They used public domain sources such as Wiki for the artwork and interior art work modified but none of the sweet Mutant Future content from Chris Van Deelen or the Skirmisher crew is 'open game content'. This has been a huge thorn in my side with about ninety nine percent of their publications going back to Skirmisher Publishing's issue #1 of Wisdom From Wasteland. For me as a blogger & writer I understand their stance upon their trademark and copyright but its God damn frustrating too. Skirmisher Publishing makes some of the best content for Mutant Future out there but I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot radioactive pole. Without the OGL open game content label I can't publish or use these great monsters in an adventure or scenario for Mutant Future without the risk of legal action. This is something I'm not willing to do. See that's one of the reasons why its important for companies to use and produce 'open game content' it lets other writers and companies continue the OSR momentum while at the same time putting money in the coffers of companies. Because of the success of properties like Walking Dead, the Night of the Living Dead films, World War Z, and so many numerous video games,etc. zombies and thousands of variations are in circulation. This is because of a lapse in copyright & trade mark of the original Night of the Living Dead. The fact is that this another example of companies raiding the public domain without fueling the content to continue the creativity at the expense of future projects that could benefit the whole Mutant Future community. But is Wisdom from the Wastelands Issue #52 undead necessary or needed? Well in fact not at all. Labyrinth Lord and The Labyrinth Lord Advanced Companion both provide lots of undead and a zombie template that can be used with Mutant Future with little modification and some numbers crunching. What Issue #52 of WFW does is provide a whole host of zombie and undead nanite animated goodness. The rules cover the entire gammit of zombification and the various types of Mutant Future undead. There are over a dozen varieties and sub types across the board in Wisdom from the Wastelands Issue #52. The pdf is worth getting for the support of the monsters and zombies alone but this book covers the whole range of wasteland horrors. Do I think that Wisdom from the Wastelands Issue #52: Nanotech Undead is worth getting? Yes I do especially for Mutant Future and other OGL players but is this product for me? Probably not because I've got this end of the wasteland covered.

Eric Fabiaschi Swords & Stitchery Blog Want to see more then please subscribe to see more reviews and support for this system and other OSR as well old school rpg system right over at http://swordsandstitchery.blogspot.com/

I remain a huge Mutant Future rpg fan and in point of fact my copy of Mutant Future finally had the binding fall apart today after who knows how many wasteland outings. I usually use it for reference at my table despite whatever old school or OSR game I happen to be running. You can see the edges of the binding giving and well the rest wasn't pretty. This was a copy that I got back from a 'friend' after it was 'borrowed' over a year ago and traveled to Maine on an extended vacation. Now that being said there are other titles that I've used in the past that players are loath to see peeking out from under books such as anything written by the Skirmisher Publishing crew. This brings up one of the newest titles in their Mutant Future based and licensed product line. Quantum Flux: Unique Superscience Artifacts is an expansive set of items that brings home the idea that certain relics are beyond unique. These are items that were beyond the cutting edge of the apocalypse's science. These are items that form those set pieces of the wasteland, those super science items and locations that form one of the backbones of adventuring in post apocalyptic environments. Things that PC's are going to have to unlock over time and with some very good rolls. The Quantum Flux: Unique Superscience Artifacts book is mostly system neutral in point of fact and could be with a bit of work used for a wide variety of post apocalyptic campaigns. There's lots of options here for the DM to really use. There are eighty six unique items that come with this book; "Quantum Flux contains 86 unique superscience artifacts suitable for use in any modern, sci-fi, or post-apocalyptic setting, and range from amulets to buildings. They were designed to show game masters the possibilities for superscience artifacts in their campaigns while emphasizing that these items are not just treasure or one sentence, throw-away items. Each has a history that will hopefully enrich, inspire, possibly even drive your own gaming story and most entries are longer and more detailed than for equivalent gear in other equipment or treasure books." My advise is to use these items very sparingly with parties of adventurers within the post apocalyptic wastelands. That being said there are some fantastic super science items authors Derek Holland, & Chris Van Deelen do an excellent job of creating some weird relics and items. And how do these items relate to a Labyrinth Lord/ Mutant Future crossover game? Well according to the rules presented in the pdf ;"Each item has multiple functions, and every ability must be discovered with a separate technology roll. The artifacts’ powers are described using spells from the Advanced Edition Companion and mutations from Mutant Future, both published by Goblinoid Games. For easier reference, spells are boldfaced and mutations are italicized. These both appear in parentheses, and have the same ranges, effects, damages, etc. as the original craft or ability (unless otherwise noted). Each power takes an hour to recharge, unless noted. However, MLs are encouraged to customize items or powers to suit their games. Because comparing the objects would be apples versus radiators, a Caster Level gives the harried ML a relative scale for each item’s potential or strength." This style of rules & play works out quite nicely within the bounds of Mutant Future. So what sorts of items are we looking at? Well for example there's the Bear Mask which has all kinds of uses as a post apocalyptic shaman or druid's item;"Bear Mask (Caster Level 14) The Bear Mask is a realistic full-head covering, complete with fur, eyes, ears, and toothed muzzle. It was part of an animal themed toy line that allowed children to use harmless virtual matter projectors (see dInfinity #6: The Mythos for details on these devices). The various masks projected or “created” the animal they portrayed, which was controlled by the mask’s AI. A child could study the animals, play with them, or pretend to be one; for some reason, slug masks were unusually popular. Adults also used larger versions, but more as part of identity/ totem performance or fetish play. The masks generate subliminal light patterns to engage and stimulate certain areas of the wearer’s brain, a refinement of the seizure-causing effect of strobe flashes discovered many decades earlier. Before the final wars, some Ancient parents used the masks to increase emotional understanding (empathy) in their little sociopaths... err, children. Now, a segment of the Bear Mask’s AI just wants to cause physical and emotional pain, and study subjects’ responses. It does this by corrupting children, allowing their dreams and nightmares to become real for a time (Advanced Phantasmal Monsters). But the Mask can also protect its child with a powerful force field (Wall of Force). The wearer/Mask relationship is even more complex, beyond the artifact’s warped research. Another part of the AI still responds to instructions and can talk, but only to the child wearing the Mask. And the wearer must be a child: the AI will not work with an adult, nor will it talk to someone not wearing the Mask. This can lead to diagnoses (accusations) of spirit possession or mental illness, or believing the child has a “sixth sense” of some kind. A very emphatic child can have the Mask reduce pain felt by 2d4 people within 50', if the targets fail to save versus stun (pain insensitivity). The Mask AI also does this on its own, but to conceal the damage its victims suffer until it is too late for anyone to intervene. To further mess with its victims’ minds, and the minds of those around them, the Mask can warp light waves in a 100' diameter (vision impairment), but allow the child to see through it all (True Seeing). Another favorite trick of the Mask’s AI is to project large holograms of locations (Veil) taken from either an on board database or a wireless connection to outside image sources. For an additional twist, the Mask can paralyze up to 25 people and cover them with"

Now according to Skirmisher Publishing;"This licensed "Mutant Future" sourcebook contains 86 unique superscience artifacts suitable for use in any modern, sci-fi, or post-apocalyptic setting, and range from amulets to buildings. All can easily be adapted for other games, especially those using the d20 system as their basis." Umm yeah not quite as we shall see. There are over eighty six of these items and some fantastic items & relics to use in a D20 style game or OSR style games. From bot slayers to the Golden Turnip Machine these are some great relics with some really interesting and solid post apocalyptic wrinkles to them. As an OSR writer I wouldn't touch these items & relics with a barge pole; I read through Quantum Flux: Unique Superscience Artifacts expecting to see the Open Game OGL content label which allowed me to use them for later publication . No such luck at all, in fact what I found was this;"All contents of this publication, regardless of other designation, are copyright 2015 Skirmisher Publishing LLC, all rights reserved."

After a recent court case I'm extremely careful to know where and when to step with regards certain items and relics found in the rpg wild. Quantum Flux: Unique Superscience Artifacts makes me very nervous. I can see all kinds of uses for these items in the post apocalyptic wastelands. But this looks to me like a case of the kind of tomfoolery we saw back in the AD&D 3.5 D20 days of, "we've got the best toy box but you can't touch it." My answer to this is to open up the content for others to use. That being said I can easily see using this material in all kinds of places in old school or OSR publishing. Publishing's Quantum Flux: Unique Superscience Artifacts gets a four out of five with the caveat that if Skirmisher Publishing wants a five out of five then go back and make all of these wonderful toys 'Open Game Content' so that others can play. One more thing I would do before purchasing is to wait for Drivethru or Rpgnow to have a sale as they frequently do before purchasing this one. As always keep those bones rolling. Eric Fabiaschi Want to see more reviews and support on this or other OSR products Be sure to subscribe to Swords & Stitchery for more original OSR content. http://swordsandstitchery.blogspot.com/

(NB: An even longer version of this review originally appeared at http://udan-adan.blogspot.com/2016/06/almost-review-basilisk-goggles-and.html)

Basilisk Goggles and Wishing Wells is a big book full of new magic items: over 570 of them, apparently. It should be compatible with almost any flavour of OSR D&D, largely because it's pretty light on rules: so light on rules, in fact, that it sometimes don't bother to provide any game mechanics at all for the effects which it describes. The reason it's so light on rules is because most of the items it describes barely interact with the rules system at all: the point of them is not to give you mechanical benefits, but to open up new possibilities. They are the kind of items that a character, faced with what Arnold K. calls 'OSR-style challenges', might find themselves describing as they mutter to themselves: 'You know what would really help, here? A __ that would let us _____....'

How about this for an example: gloves that allow you to swim through cloud and fog (although not clear air) as though it was water. I love this magic item. It opens up an obvious benefit (movement in three dimensions), but with an obvious limitation (only if there's loads of water vapour in the area), and consequently with an obvious risk (if you're five hundred feet up when the cloud you're 'swimming' in dissipates, you're going to go splat). This combination thus challenges the players to engineer situations which will allow them to exploit the opportunities it offers to best advantage. Will the gloves let you 'swim' up through the air to get that valuable gem off the cavern roof? Yes, but only if you can figure out a way to fill the cave with fog, first: got any ideas for how to do that? Or switch it round, give them to an enemy, and watch the PCs wrack their brains for ways to get rid of all that mist while their foe is swimming around in mid-air: temperature alterations? Giant fans? At every point, the limitations places on the item open up opportunities for ingenious and intelligent play which would simply not exist if you'd just handed out a ring of flying instead.

Here's another one: 'shadow dust' which, when sprinkled on a surface, makes the affected object insubstantial to a depth of 10' while in total darkness, but solid again when light falls on it. The description mentions the possibility of using it to trap people inside the ground: put it on the floor, lure people onto it in the dark so that they fall through the now-insubstantial floor, then shine a light on it and leave them entombed within the rock, at least for as long as the light keeps shining. But they don't die in there, they just can't move... so how long can you keep that light on? If you interpret 'surface' more liberally, then the uses multiply further: throw the stuff all over your enemy's armour and weapons, then douse your lanterns and fight them in the dark, leaving them unarmed and unprotected! An item like this turns something which is normally just an assumed background element - the presence or absence of light in each location - into a tactical consideration with new relevance, potentially leading to some tense and/or comical scenes in which the PCs stumble around in pitch darkness, waiting for their enemies to fall afoul of the shadow dust traps they've just laid...

Items like this - and there are a lot of them in here - show Basilisk Goggles at its best. Bracers that let you stretch your arms like Mr Fantastic. An item that lets you catch bolts of lightning with your bare hands and then wield them as crackling, electrical whips. A cloak which brings your shadow to life to run errands for you. A stone which explodes into a huge wave of water when exposed to great heat. What I love about them is that their usefulness depends primarily on the intelligence of your players, which means that they'll feel really pleased with themselves when they come up with some bizarre and ingenious way to put them to work. There's no satisfaction to be gained from working out that your sword +2 is better in a fight than your sword +1, and only slightly more from deducing that the potion of gaseous form is meant to be used as a way of gaining access to the vampire's hidden room, which you can see but not reach through its spy-hole; it's too pre-programmed, too predictable, too much like a 'puzzle' in a CRPG. But just giving players a whole bunch of weird tools to use, and a whole bunch of weird obstacles to overcome, and trusting them to figure out something is one of the things that's truly unique about tabletop RPGs, something that they can do which Warcraft and its ilk really, really can't.

Other 'items' listed here are really encounter ideas. Huge heavy mushrooms wielded as clubs by goblins, which release a cloud of confusion-inducing spores whenever they're used to hit someone; that's an encounter, a way to spice up an otherwise-dull bout of goblin whacking. Iron violets, which look beautiful, but whose petals are as sharp as knives; that's an encounter, too, an obstacle that the PCs need to first identify (hopefully without the loss of too many fingers), and then work out a way to navigate without getting cut into chutney. In both cases, though, there's also a resource to be gained: and there's no reason that the PCs can't take the mushrooms and harvest the knife-flowers for themselves, for use in some suitably devious fashion later on. Honestly, the things that could be done with knife-sharp flower petals hardly bear thinking about.

As is probably obvious, I like Basilisk Goggles a great deal, but it would be misleading for me to suggest that it simply consists of 136 pages of items like this; I've just picked them out because they're my favourites. What it really is is a miscellany, a huge heap of magic item ideas, which gives me the strong impression that very little has been left out; there are items here both strange and obvious, some silly and some sensible, some well-thought-out and some rather less so, some clearly defined and some willfully vague. Take the Amulet of the Turtle God; when used during a rainstorm, it allows the wearer to turn all the resulting mud within 100' into 'monstrous fish and reptiles', whom they are able to command until the rain stops falling, at which point they collapse back into mud. That's a nice idea for a scene... but how many monsters? How big are they? How dangerous? Can you call up alligators? Velociraptors? Godzilla? All this is left to the GM's discretion, based on their 'storytelling needs'; that's fine as far as it goes, but means that this isn't so much a 'magic item' as a suggestion for a scene you might one day like to include in a game. Others are joke items (a coin that grows to huge size when stolen, squashing the thief flat), story ideas (a food moss which grows anywhere, on anything, causing massive population explosions among nearby animals and monsters as they now have an effectively unlimited food supply), or just odd (a spiral which makes you grow to 10,000 times your normal size, which would make the average human about twice the height of Mount Everest and something like four miles across at the shoulders). Some seem very powerful, like the adhesive armour which makes any weapon or monster that hits its wearer stick to it (no save) until the command word is uttered; others seem oddly low-powered, like a broach which lets you grow horns (not magic horns, just regular ones) for three rounds once per hour. Different things appeal to different people, and I'm confident that just about anyone will be able to find some magic item ideas they really like in here somewhere; but it's very likely that you'll need to do a bit of digging first.

Is it worth the $5 asking price? If you're the kind of person who likes having big lists of old-school-style ideas to pick and choose from, and doesn't mind doing a bit of work to fit them into your campaign, then yes, I think so. It's a very bloggy sort of book, the kind of book that you might end up with if someone ran a blog where they posted a magic item idea every day for two years and then published their collected posts; a mixture of the inspired and the random and the clever and the funny and the just plain odd. Sometimes it runs off on weird tangents, like when it details seven different kinds of magic collars you can put on your alchemical homunculi. Some of the items are homages to other media, like with the demonic funnel-shaped hat that's clearly based on the ones in Bosch's 'Cutting the Stone' and 'The Temptation of St Anthony', or the amulet that lets you re-enact Forbidden Planet by calling forth monsters... from the Id! There's a decanter of endless water whose only setting is '11'. There's a Rolling Stone. There's a shiny parasitic insect which protects you from gaze attacks, but only while it's currently eating your face. A game which tried to use all this stuff would be surreal and bizarre and probably borderline unplayable, but I think that almost any game would probably benefit from using some of it. I almost never use other people's magic items in my games - whenever I see a bunch of magic items in a book I immediately start skimming past them to get to the monsters - and even I scribbled down notes on about fifty of these as ideas I might want to use at some point. Personally, as RPG books go, I think ten cents per useable idea is a pretty good rate of exchange!

This book adds about 23 new NPCs and Monsters. It has some pretty good new mechanics for a couple of the monsters, and the selection is certainly different from the series of monsters that we've all come to expect. Some of my favorite points: The villager is a great improvement on a commoner, using a fairly simple but inovative mechanic to make villagers feel useful to the PCs, and giving DMs a bit more to work with when using the simplist of NPCs the system has to offer. The dragon they add has some interesting flavor. I would have liked to see a side-bar for the dragon that explains the additional effects of spells like stoneshape or move earth, but very fact that there's a reason for that is why these dragons are cool and unique. (I don't want to spoil the feature). They've added a simple block for giving dragons spells. I really like this, but for me, they haven't gone far enough. One of the first times I DM's resulted in the PC's sneaking up on a sleeping dragon and nearly killing it in it's sleep, I vowed never to run an dumb or easy dragon again, and every dragon knows the alarm spell in my worlds. Back to the review, a good addition in this book: Dragons spellcaster rules. For the bad, I think the CR on a comple of creatures isn't quite correct. Also, the very first monster in the list has in my opinion, a poorly designed and explained attack. It allows multiple saving throws to completely avoid damage, and the damage isn't that significant compared to other attacks by a similar CR monster. The explaination of the effect is not effeciently worded and somewhat confusing. This had me worried that this would be a trend through the whole book. I can happily say that it is not, and they just have one badly written monster at the top of the list. Everything after that point is pretty solid.

So in conclusion, I'd say this is a fairly solid addition to the standard monster manual, particularly if you are planning to run a low level game in an outdoor world with african-like terrain.

Men & Monsters of Ethiopia: An RPG Sourcebook for 5th Edition

by Michael O. Varhola

Men and monsters of Ethiopia is a somewhat different sourcebook for a system like 5th D&D. This book gets players and GMs out of the western Europe setting that most players are used to and takes them to a more desert and dry environment that most Players are not familiar with, and to very good effect.

The book is just full of new monsters and NPCs for this new setting. The NPCs are very well done and are my favorite part of the book A competent GM should be able to come up with many types of encounters with these NPCs and should have a large range of reactions ranging from information gathering, to dire combat.

The monsters range from the mildly irritating, to extremely deadly. The ARWEAN DRAGON was my favorite of the bunch, and I am really looking forward to putting this Dragon in my game.

The monsters listings have a detailed description. I think lots of plot seeds are in these descriptions and the start of many adventures are in here.

The book over all is well laid out and easily printed on my Black and white lazer printer. The color pages looked ok in grey scale. The line are is quite nice and prints out well. The color pages on my rather cheap ink jet printer look good and are easy to read for the most part.

If I have a complaint about the book, I would have liked to have seen a bit more background on a fantasy setting for Ethiopia, perhaps a small part of the Kos World that Skirmisher books also publishes. A fe more photos of what Ethiopia looks like would have been helpful to describe what the various terrain looks like

Also, the one page on Religion is a bit terse and could have used some extra information.

These are minor nit pics and the books is worth the price.

Ill be looking forward to more such location books from Mr Varhola, so use those frequent miles , Bub, and get cracking….

I was pretty excited for this concept and I was hoping this was going to have more original material that I could work into a campaign. There isn't much in the way of unique rules, monsters, equipment or mythology. Most it it was pretty vague and more an interpretation of existing material with some Ethiopian flavor. Its not bad on the whole, but for the price I was disappointed.

Skirmisher has quickly become a favorite of the PlayersGuidePodcast crew and 100 Oddities for a Creepy Old House is a stirling example of why. We are planning a full review of the Oddities books on our website but the shortened version is thus. Using these books (this one formost among them) we have generated both interesting well discribed settings for both horror and fantasy games, as well as several compelling adventure seeds and story hooks. If you are looking for a neat way to get your players to investigate something in particular or you want to give your players a diversion from the main story arc of your sessions and have a fun one off game these books have everything you need to get the ball rolling.

All in all these are great suppliments for any genera of gaming and most assuradly something that every Story Teller and GM should have in their collection. Bravo Skirmisher for another great title!

Fangbjorn from PlayersGuidePodcast

At first glance the Oddities books seem like a fun little one off but not that much more. I however am here to tell you that they are hands down one of the most interesting ways to create story hooks and adventure seeds that I could have ever hoped for. We are going to do a full on review of the three books that we have recieved thus far in the coming days on our website but if you are a listener of the PGP you will know that we have done story generation on the show using these books.

I feel as though I should mention that we were given review copies of these books but even had I purchased them myself I would still be happy to report on their awesomeness. Wizards Tower makes it not only easy to populate the bastion of a mage or warlock but it actually makes it fun. Check this out if you want to make memorable and varied magical fortresses for the various spell slingers in your world.

Fangbjorn from the PlayersGuidePodcast

Looks like I am the lone dissenter here in being disappointed by this product. For the price and after reading the other reviews I was left wishing there was more. There was a cursory discussion about religion (three paragraphs). The first 12 pages of NPCs are mostly bland and don't add much flavor that a typical DM couldn't or wouldn't add: "Villagers will have good knowledge of who or what might be found in our right around their communities, will have some sense for any hazards or threats bordering them.." The stat blocks are almost all the same. A few pages of common monsters : "Crocodiles can be found in lakes and rivers throughout Ethiopia and will never pass up the opportunity for an easy meal." The strength of the product is in the new monsters presented-with a majority of the page count going to them-though padding it with using a whole page for a 1/4 CR "deer" is too much. If the product was under $5 or expanded on the entries that could have added flavor (without requiring more research) I would have rated it higher.