If you are serious about weapon design, you may prefer to use Ennead Games's Starship Kit 4: Weapon Generator (also available here) but if you just want to be able to talk convincingly about a ship's armament then this product will do fine and be far faster...

Based on the same tables as in the generator, all you need to do is roll a percentage and there you have a weapon described in the sort of detail your average spacehound would use if asked. Or, of course, you can just pick something that sounds right for your purposes.

Do you want to mess with a ship armed with a Mark VI Pulsing Anti-proton Bomb?

Naturally, if matters turn nasty, you will have to determine just what a Mark VI Pulsing Anti-proton Bomb does under the ruleset you are using for your game, but providing you are comfortable with your chosen game mechanics that should not be too hard.

Many science-fiction game systems have their own spacehip design rules, but these tend to throw out very standardised vessels, so it is good to have a series of more generic works to aid in the creation of the wide diversity of vessels that are far more likely to be found out in the black. Use them in conjunction with your chosen ruleset to develop original and interesting starships.

This volume deals with offensive weapons. You need to be able to defend yourself out there after all!

It works by means of a series of tables, although if you prefer more control you can of course select the options you want rather than roll for them. These tables enable you to determine the 'class' of weapon (i.e. how powerful an example of the sort of weapon it is), its 'variation' (which provides wonderfully descriptive terms but also allows for a wide range of differences between otherwise similar weapons), its location, the sort of damage it does and the actual weapon type itself.

You will then need to do a bit of work to convert what you have got to your chosen ruleset, to cater for those details like how much damage that weapon actually does, in terms that work for the game mechanics you are using. That ought to be reasonably straightforward, compare your weapon description with existing ones in your rules and decide if it does more, less or the same damage...

A neat example of how to add more variety to starship weapon systems.

A nice collection of feats for Bards, aimed primarily at improving their performance skills.

For those who attract an enthusiastic audience there is Anything For A Fan, granting a bonus on all social interaction rolls (bluff, intimidate, etc) neatly mimicing the way in which a dedicated fan is likely to believe what his idol says more readily than they'd accept the same from anyone else.

Then there's a collection of performance enhancing feats which give subtle advantages to some of the more combat orientated elements of performance - countersong, fascination and so forth.

For the flashy and spectactular there's Power Slide, where striking a magnificent chord can propel the bard five feet in the desired direction (or land him flat on his face if he flubs his roll!).

Finally for those who really want to make an impression, there is Shatter Wine Glass. Which does exactly that, and impresses the audience no end (especially if they're of low intelligence) again making them all the more likely to believe what the bard says.

A neat bunch of feats for bards, which play to their strengths.

If you play a medic in a contemporary or science-fiction game, but don't happen to be one yourself, it can be quite hard to sound convincing... so here's a handy system to generate likely sounding drugs and derive their uses, side-effects, etc. Likewise if you GM such a game and want to expand on what can be a quite limited list in your chosen ruleset, this will be of use.

Basically, the product consists of a wealth of tables which cover everything from how legal the drug is to how it should be administered, how effective it is and what side effects it may have, as well as a rather nifty name generator that enables ready creation of the tongue-twisting monstrosities of names that adorn most packets of pills. However, there are notes on how to come up with a shorter 'use name' for the drug that you have created, as most of the time if you say the full name, the patient will have expired before you can administer it!

The one thing that isn't covered is what condition the drug is supposed to treat... no doubt this will be the topic of a future 'generator' book. Until then, cobble together a few symptoms and call it the 'plague' or the like.

Deciding on things like hobbies for your character is all part of making them a well-rounded person who will come to life in your shared alternate reality. Even trivia like favourite foods or colours can help develop him into someone who is 'real' to you... and when it comes to hobbies and interests... well, they are what often define YOU as an interesting person, so why not your character?

This product is just something to help you start thinking, a list of an hundred 'modern' hobbies that your character might spend his leisure time on. Some might even prove an advantage in the reality of the game world, others may merely provide topics of casual conversation. A character who, for example, enjoys car restoration may be at less of a loss when his car breaks down that his fellow party member who spends his spare time playing rugby or poker... but when there's a gang of crooks to infiltrate, that poker-player might come into his own as he joins a back-room game several gang members are known to attend.

If you are serious about role-playing and developing believeable characters who just might exist somewhere, this is a resource that you may find helpful.

As a free sample, I'm sure it's a helpful demonstration of the other products in the Helpful List line, but it's just not useful. If I wanted random words paired together, I should at least get to roll dice for them.

When gamers think of crafting an excellent campaign, we tend to think of grand sweeping epics that strike major archetypes and tell compelling stories. While that’s not untrue, it misses out on the fact that excellence is often found in details; that the little things are often what bring a game world to life. One of the aspects of these little things are the nature of “mundane” magic items – anyone, for example, can chug a healing potion and move on to the next encounter. But it’s something else again to have any details about that potion, what it smells like or what sort of container it’s in.

That’s an area that Ennead Games fills in with its Potion Details Generator.

Sixteen pages long, the Potion Details Generator is just what it sounds like, providing you with various details for your game’s magic potions (and, as the book notes, these apply just as well to oils too). It does this through a series of tables you can roll randomly on, allowing you to generate everything from the color of a potion to the details of its label (if any) and quite a bit more.

The book divides itself into roughly four sections – the first two being the details of the potion’s container, and then the details of the potion itself (not the game effect, but the sensory descriptions of it). Each of these has several sub-sections with tables for rolling up various aspects of the section in question. The container section, for example, has you roll for the material it’s made of, the shape of it, the size, the label, any marking or decorations it might have, and the cap. The potion itself has similar tables for things like the color, smell, taste, thickness, etc.

It’s not stated outright, but the implication that you should just skip a particular table if that aspect of the potion isn’t applicable (e.g. it has no label) is fairly clear.

It’s after these sections that we start getting into the purely optional materials; here we get things that actually affect the game mechanics of the potion. The first of these are two optional details: the potion’s freshness (e.g. the older it is, the less effective it is) and any lag time it may have before the effects kick in.

Side effects come next. A huge table of a hundred possible effects, these mix together mechanical effects with flavor effects. You could have a potion that causes the drinker’s eyes to glow as easily as you could have one that gives you a +2 to initiative. There’s no real rhyme or reason here.

Quirks follow this. The major difference between a quirk and a side effect is explained in the book’s introduction, and tells us that whereas the latter affects the drinker, the former is an odd quality of the potion itself, and has no real effect on the drinker. So here, for example, we’ll find results (on another table with a hundred possibilities) such as the potion container shakes and vibrates until it’s opened, or that the potion turns to dust when drunk (but still has its effect).

The book closes out with an appendix containing three expanded tables for colors, smells, and tastes – each put into a d100 table rather than a d20 from the preceding section.

Overall, the Potion Details Generator is a book that offers quite a bit of development for such an easily-overlooked area. Everything that’s here is useful, and indeed can quite stimulate the imagination of an innovative GM…which sort of leads me to my major complaint about the book, that being what’s not here.

Leaving aside a few technical details (the book has no declaration of Open Game Content nor Product Identity, and the Section 15 of the OGL has no statement for the Potion Details Generator itself), and that the materials for the potion container could have at least suggested a GP value for them (along with a multiplier for the size of the container), the book’s major issue is the omission of the ideas that spring to mind from what’s here.

While it’s tempting to just assume that magic is chaotic enough that every potion will have its details determined randomly, there’s a lot of potential here for fleshing out the game world by making certain details be consistent with certain criteria. Maybe all of the potions produced by a famous archmage are colored deep red, for example. Or maybe all healing potions smell like lilacs. Ideas like these aren’t discussed, and that’s a shame, because that’s where the greatest potential for world-building is to be found – not in the random details of a single potion, but in the consistent details for particular categories of them. That’s where, I think, the book’s offerings are strongest, but this strength is muted because it doesn’t bring this idea up at all.

That said, if a book’s greatest weakness is that it doesn’t take full advantage of its strength, that’s still a comparatively minor weakness. An enterprising GM will still pick up on this immediately, and use what’s here to help generate details for categories of potions, rather than singular ones. The Potion Details Generator is a great tool for helping to flesh out an easily-overlooked area of your campaign. I just wish it told you how to get the most use out of it.

I found this to be a nice small expansion to my Kingdom based pathfinder game. The industrial yard is an interesting addition to my PCs city.

Crammed into just a few short pages, this work looks at some of the spectacular buildings that you might encounter in your travels around your campaign world and the effect that they have on their surroundings.

Buildings having effects? Well, think about the presence of a good library making research a bit easier, or a specialist herb garden having some of the rare plants the party's herbalist has been looking for the past few years. Even swanky private residences can at the very least raise the tone of the surrounding area, whilst 'construction yards' - aggregations of craftsmen - can facilitate the manufacture of masterwork items.

Scatter a few of these around, and the characters will soon get to know which town to visit depending on their immediate needs - because the buildings that faciliate those needs are located there. As you create them, think about how their appearance might reflect their significance: many may be attractions in their own right - a spectacular library might attract gawkers and sightseers as well as those who thirst for knowledge. There also may be knock-on effects... somewhere with a good library may attract a scholarly community and before you know it a university forms, and attracts students to the town.

Ideas to have at the back of your mind when world building, and yet of practical application too.

These are all fantastic, and incredibly helpful and useful.

In particular, this set will be great for anyone wanting help coming up with Olaran names for Shaintar.

Simple but actually inspiring, as I read the job title and start to wonder more about the character behind the job, and what interaction they would have with my characters.

I thought this would just be a list of names, but it's actually a lot more and has description about colour, taste, smell, texture etc that makes it more useful

Another $.50 piece of work that may or may not help you with your gaming. This list claims it is 100 Dragon names. That is debatable, because I see nothing on the list that indicates true dragon names.

What I do see are jumbles of letters utilized as names. Some examples are Raalizygaxguth, Maughvureemseyr or Toszlotho Aryxondarrh.

If these types of "names" fit your dragons or any other types of creatures you are using in your adventure, then this list is for you. Otherwise, I would advise against purchasing this list and just make up your own names.

This is basically just a list of adjectives as "types" of dragons. Only a few of them are original enough to justify the purchasing of this list.

Oddly enough, I hadn't thought of crossing a troll & a dragon before or a spider dragon or Infernal dragon. Other than those few, the rest are colors, sizes or monetary types such as "copper".

Just taking a thesaurus and randomly flipping to a page would achieve the same, if not better results as this list and save you a couple of quarters too.

This supplement is a double bladed worksheet. It does have a lot of types of governments, but then they added randomized silliness after the type of government.

It has titles that can help you such as Hegemony, Sultanate or Sovereign Commonwealth, but then it tosses in things such as United Zobu-Coqehate Empire or People's Emirate of Bey'keoeg Igyuc'li.

For $.50 you can't really go too wrong, especially if you don't know too much about governments, but be warned there is ALOT of goofiness on the list.