Very well organized and edited book of monsters. Not very many illustrations but the ones there are very well done! Besides, every entry comes with a terse, evocative description - very usable in-game (and much better than any illustration), for it creates in every player a detailed and sometimes horrifying mental image. Great 'theatre of the mind' kind of stuff. All the stats are easily convertible to other game systems, except AC which appears to range from 1 to 100, with 100 being the toughest. With a little thought, this is easily converted as well. A great addition to the completely awesome Malbolge modules! Buy it!

I have been playing D&D since 1978 and AD&D 1st Edition since 1980 and have several book cases of gaming material collected over the years; much of which followed me all over the country and to the Korean DMZ. I have an original hard copy of Geoffry O.Dale's INFERNO published by Judges Guild, copyright 1980, the cover price was $5.98 Oh those were the days for us old grognards.
For starters the cover was color, now it is black and white; my copy has 64 pages while the electronic version has 55; the e version has less art and the illustrations are smaller. They state the the only changes are editing and some of the missing pages are accounted for by the the reduced artwork. Bottom line if its not broke don't fix it. They would have been better off just scanning an original instead of tampering with a classic. Complaints aside it is nice to have electronic back up for hard to acquire gaming materials and was glad to add inferno to Temple of Elemental Evil, G1/2/3 Giants, and A1/2/3/4 Slavers among other old time favorites. Bottom line though two stars

An excellent overview of his devilish plane of Gehenna by Geoffrey Dale I only found on DriveThru RPG (it's not on Dale's website at Spellbook Games). Dale authored the old Judges Guild product, "Inferno" which is at least as deadly as "Tomb of Horrors" and doesn't kill you with traps. This primer explains the infinite plane of Gehenna and how to escape PC's must travel through the Inferno (Malebolge). Our gaming group is using this to enhance our gaming through "Inferno," but the primer really is intended to flesh out the forthcoming "Inferno: Journey through Malebolge" for a complete hellish experience. The product uses Dale's own game system, "Portal to Adventure," which at first glance seemed obtuse (GTET?), but is actually pretty simple (oh, "Greater Than or Equal To"). In any event, most stats such as damage, HD, & HP are AD&D compatible and the remaining stats can be converted in a straightforward way to AD&D rules which is what our group is doing. A great malevolent setting at under a buck!

This is an excellent item that every GM running a fantasy campaign should have.

This would be more useful if it came as a comma delimited text file as well. That way the information could be pulled into a spreadsheet or database for easier use.

After some free pdf's, this is the first paid for small encounter scenario not related to earlier D&D print products. At this price point, comparisons are with Oubliette issues or Avalon Games Company scenarios.

What you get is 19 page pdf consisting of cover (1), credits (1), backgound + rewards (2), encounter description & monster tactics (6 1/2), monster stats (4), magic item descriptions (3 1/2), encounter map (1).

Layout and typographics are satisfactory but could be improved. Better use of highlights for proper names and numbered encounter areas would be useful, I found myself using a highlighter on the Magic Item name descriptions, and the references to them in the encounter text. A little more white space might help and use of sidebars, especially for any system specific text. The footer font is bigger than the main text, surely it should be smaller? Oubliette has got better at doing this over their issues, issue 4 highlights quite well. The encounter map is shades of grey which makes it rather faint when printed.

Although this is described as systemless, it uses a OD&D like system not yet published by Spellbook Games. Thus it best lends itself to a level based d20 system. There is a basic one-page conversion document to OD&D/AD&D on the company website, this should have been included in the pdf or a reference made to it. It would be fairly easy to also convert to 3e/PF as the main monsters have class levels. Because there is no full definition of the spells, skills, or class abilities, either some conversion is needed or the GM will have to decide exactly what the various powers do. The same issue applies to magic items (what exactly does "Fatigue Banishing Potion" do?). Throughout, any skill checks are given in the Spellbook Games system. I'd suggest these be done in whatever system is being run and suitable modifiers decided by the GM. It would be useful if the adventure provided some systemless reasons for the chances given and have the chances expressed as a simple percentage or modifier.

The adventure itself is a fairly linear plot, as a simple hostage rescue. The background and plot hooks could do with a further edit to clarify to the GM what is going on. A small map of the campaign area in addition to a description would be useful. Overall there is both too much detail (eye colour of every monster) and too little (who pays the reward at the end?). A major issue is that the adventurers are against the clock but there is no written way to tell them this.

In terms of balance, I'd prefer to see less random elements that could lead to a TPK and have them suggested as additions if a higher level party is used. One important scenario element is rolled on 2d100 which if unlucky could make the adventure almost impossible to complete. It would be better to make this a sidebar plot twist that a GM could include if the party finds the scenario too easy.

The encounter description is highly detailed and the monster tactics are helpful for running the combat. Some scaling is suggested for larger parties.

Like the monster descriptions, the magic items are highly detailed. I would have preferred a smaller number of special items, particularly as they don't affect the plot, and more space used for plot e.g. adding a description of the village of Whiterock.

The adventure tries to be systemless whilst including elements of the Spellbook Games system which leads it to not entirely succeed at either. It seems to have it's origins in a home-grown campaign which needs to be balanced against providing an adventure that can be dropped into other campaigns. The focus should be more on providing something for mediocre or time constrained GM's. Good GM's can take the essentials from the module and run an interesting adventure using their preferred rules.

Overall, it's an edit away from being a memorable adventure at a reasonable price.

If you run a fantasy game in which your PCs have access to oracles or fortune-tellers, and you'd enjoy answering their questions by rolling on random tables, you might appreciate the bulk of "Seer Delight."

The first couple of pages focus on stats for seers—which, despite the product description, are not given in d20/OGL, older D&D, or systemless terms, but are given in Spellbook Games's idiosyncratic, unpublished (as far as I know) system. "Seer Delight" doesn't really explain the system, but it does go farther than any other Spellbook Games product I've read, revealing that GTET stands for "Greater Than or Equal To." (I have no idea why the authors used "GTET" instead of "≥"—a symbol everybody would easily understand—for that.) If you really need to decipher the stats, you can visit Spellbook Games's home page and download a conversion document. Personally, I plan to just ignore most of the first two pages of text.

At the bottom of the fourth page of the PDF (Spellbook Games didn't bother to number the pages for easy reference), the product turns to a set of tables that are truly systemless, appropriate to any fantasy game. If your PCs ask a seer whether they will find the MacGuffin, you can turn to page 5, roll d%, and consult the table for a suggested answer. The nice thing about these charts is that they numerous variations on "yes" and "no" answers, and they build in potentially interesting story hooks—if you decide that the oracle or fortune is true (more on that later). For example, one possible result on the MacGuffin question is "No, it has been moved," while another is "Yes, after breaking the spell." The tables on p. 5 through the end of the booklet offer randomized answers to nine different typical questions. Should your players present the seer with multiple-choice questions, you can use the tables on p. 10 to randomly decide how the seer answers. The final page is useless unless you're employing Spellbook Games's idiosyncratic crunch. On the other hand, with a little tweaking, you can make the tables on pp. 5–9 work for non-fantasy games as well.

In general, "Seer Delight" proceeds from the assumption that a true seer will simply tell the PCs the truth or will honestly tell the PCs if s/he does not know the true answer to their question. Using Spellbook Games's crunch, the tables on pp. 5–10 are best used for fakers. Nevertheless, you might still want to use the tables if you, as DM, don't know or haven't decided what the true answer ought to be.

I find it annoying that Spellbook Games labels their products as being for use with d20/OGL and older versions of D&D (hard to pull off at the same time) as a being generic/systemless, when in fact they're filled with crunch from an unpublished system "compatible" with pre-d20 versions of D&D if you run it through a conversion filter that is never mentioned in the products or product descriptions, even if it is freely available on the publisher's web site. However, a good 60% of "Seer Delight" is truly systemless, and useful enough to find a place in the "random tables" section of my digital DM binder.

Trolls charging toll to let travelers across a bridge is a classic fairy-tale trope, and Spellbook Games offers to bring this trope to your fantasy role-playing game in this short product. The product takes a nice, lighthearted approach, but is so idiosyncratic that it's not easily usable. The product description page claims that the scenario supports d20/OGL games, older editions of D&D, and generic/any system—of course, it's hard to do all three at the same time without multiple stat blocks (or none), and this product doesn't deliver. The four pages of content are filled with stats in a system and format apparently unique to Spellbook Games; certainly, the stats are neither systemless nor d20/OGL nor AD&D or any other pre-d20 edition. The publisher's web page clarifies that the stat system is "compatible" with earlier editions of D&D if you do things like take "1d20 rolls GTET [30 - Intelligence]" from p. 2, column 2, apply the conversion formula -(X-17)/3, and treat the result as a penalty to a saving throw; in other words, you're supposed to read "1d20 rolls GTET [30 - Intelligence]" as a saving throw with a -4 penalty, or something like that. But you'd only know this if you visited the publisher's web site and poked around until you found and downloaded the conversion document (in Microsoft Word format). There's no indication of this in "Troll Bridge" itself, and the "converted" result doesn't apply equally well to, say, AD&D and to D&D 3.5/d20/OGL. I can't understand why the publishers put all the stats in their idiosyncratic system, didn't mention a word about this, and advertised the product as compatible with d20/OGL and older editions of D&D. Why not just put the basic/advanced/OGL stats in the product to begin with? The product also makes reasonably frequent reference to very specific magic items that don't exist in standard AD&D or D&D 3.5, without any hints (other than the names) as to what such items should do.

If you don't mind going on a hunt for the conversion document, doing the weird math, and mentally substituting appropriate magic items (and you don't get too annoyed by oddities like having "feet" abbreviated as "FT" in capital letters), you might be able to get some use out of the product. Of course, any skilled DM can just ignore the stats and employ the remaining parts of the product—but we could do this easier without all the home-system stats. The sketch of the bridge itself is actually just intriguing enough that I don't plan to delete the file after posting this review. If not for that, though, I honestly wouldn't keep it around.

In the future, I hope that Spellbook Games will advertise their products more accurately. A truly systemless four-page writeup of an underground bridge and its troll guardians would be worth $1.95 to me. Having to wade through all the stats that are supposedly compatible with multiple editions of D&D, but aren't presented using D&D vocabulary or numeric scales, is just annoying and significantly decreases the value of the product. Almost half the actual text is stats; when you take these out, the product has essentially doubled in price. I may come back to this product some day and use the bridge diagram and the basic idea, but I can't really recommend it to my fellow DMs.

I wasn't sure what to expect when I downloaded this product, and I can't say that was I pleasantly surprised. Essentially, the product gives a six-page verbal description of an arcane library—there's no map—with another page devoted to resolving research in the library and two pages of NPC writeups. The product description says that the product is for d20/OGL, older editions of D&D, and any system; of course, no product can be all of this at once, unless it contains multiple sets of stats or no stats at all. This product doesn't take either of those courses, but gives statistics that don't belong to any of the listed systems. There are many references to magic items which are nonstandard for original D&D, AD&D, or d20 D&D, and since the items are never described, they certainly aren't systemless. Whatever system this was written for uses seven attributes: Agility, Beauty, Intelligence, Speed, Stamina, Strength, Will, and Wisdom. I don't recognize this spread. If you understand what "resist 1d20 GTET 35-Stamina" means, you know the system; I don't. The "rule system" entry on the description page clearly misrepresents the product. If this product were truly systemless, with descriptions of the NPCs' personalities instead of stat strings, and descriptions of the effects of their items instead of just names, it might be useful (a map would make it more so). As it stands, I might get a little mileage out of the descriptions of the tower, but the rest of the product does nothing for me.