Bits of Darkness: Dungeons is a very good idea and well executed. The concept is to provide a dungeon designer with little interesting characteristics of each room of the dungeon. Some of these details are more thorough with plot hooks, treasure, & traps; some are just a couple of lines of description. It's all terribly useful stuff, especially for groups which make heavy use of random elements. There are also several small pieces of good black & white artwork.

Liked: Variety of well written characteristics, all of them excellently organized

Disliked: The authors relied rather heavily upon the concept of finding the body of a previous adventurer. If I were to use all of these in a large dungeon, my players would be angry with me about all of these bodies laying around for no reason. It's also a completely incompatible concept with many themed dungeons. Really, why do so many people keep going into this dungeon if no one ever comes back out?

An absolutely essential piece of equipment for the tired GM for keeping the mood during the late hour playing sessions. I love this book and my players too even if they don't know it's not me and my imagination. Well laid out, well written and the cards are great for keeping around and not taking up space with another book. It's relatively printer friendly as well.

This is a computer program similar to EBoN or Tablesmith. It generates names for asian/wuxia campaigns. (Your computer must allow the use of active-x controls for this program to operate) The Deck o' names generator can be used to generate family names, male first names, female first names, and Japanese place-names.

Likes:

1) Ease of use. The program is simple and intuitive. 2) Optional word translation feature useful for generating place names. 3) Good value for the money. 4) You don't have to be an expert in Japanese history and culture for the program to do its thing.

Dislikes: None

Bottom line: highly reccommended.

Derelict Starships is one of those supplements which would prove useful for a variety of roleplaying systems; GURPS, D20, Traveler, etc. It's generic enough that it shouldn't throw any wrenches into an existing campaign (even relatively low tech space exploration), but specific enough to space flight that it doesn't seem like a rehashed fantasy set of snippets.

The book is moderately sprinkled with artwork which is above the average fair for indie publishing, and features an easy to read typeface. The final pages of the book also come with flash cards for quick (and random) descriptions of any situation should you need it. Very handy; though it would be best printed on card stock instead of plain paper.

Sections are broken up cleanly into separate sections of a standard of a ship, including: Hatches, Corridors, Bridges, Crew Cabins

Finally, the random blurbs for each section are potentially suitable to a mild rewrite to work for space stations (which I shall be doing tomorrow for my own gamaing session!), orbitals, or (which I just realized), exoplanetary colonies. There are even a few traps!

All in all, aside from being a little short for the price, it's a worthwhile product. Considering its the only one available (as of Oct 8th, 2009) for space settings, its pretty much a must have for the regular GM.

If you haven’t experienced the benefits of this series yet, Tabletop Adventures continues to produce some of the most amazing and useful supplements if you’re a GM short on time and creativity (and who isn’t?). If you’re not familiar with this series, their “Harried Game Master” products are designed so that you can “buy today and play tonight.”

And their tag line really meets and in many instances, far exceeds expectations. The detailed encounters are vivid and evocative; they really do create the illusion of a living, breathing city. A nice side effect with a great majority of the encounters is the element of mystery and curiosity that is induced in the players. As an example, here is one such description:

“On the other side of the street from you walks a young woman who catches your attention for some reason…she is carrying a bottle in front of her carefully, as if frightened to spill even a drop…the young woman stops at a door and knocks hesitantly …an angry man who looks a lot like her, only older, stares at her with loathing…head bowed, she follows him into the building.”

There’s more to the description, so if you want to read it in full you’ll have to purchase the pdf, but the point is using descriptions such as these, it’s easy to create adventure hooks and seeds which can become further developed. An Index is also provided, so if an encounter is needed to fit a particular situation, you can easily find one amongst the many listed quickly and easily.

To sum up, this series is nothing short of amazing. My one and only complaint is the included stats are for D20 system, which I do not use. I would have preferred more generic stats, but this is a very minor gripe as they are infrequent, easily converted with minor effort, and in no way diminishes the usefulness and flexibility of this product. It is easily inserted into any fantasy system you are playing in.

The same can be said regarding the other supplements in this series, as I’ve also purchased Caverns, Dungeons I & II, and the Mother of all Treasure Tables. The latter is completely devoid of game stats, but presents an amazing amount of texture and detail to treasure. It’s obvious that the folks at TA have put a lot of effort into their products; very well done and definitely worth the purchase price

I have picked up several products from Tabletop Adventures and I can not stress how impressed I have been with the high quality of their products and the thought that has gone into each of them. I found it particularly surprising and useful to discover this product had been released! Some of the artwork is a little small and/or awkwardly laid out (pages 8 and 32), but all of it is of good quality, and very appropriate, while the descriptions of encounters and areas are very well thought-out and original. Time and time again, Tabletop Adventures delivers useful products. Did I mention I like this a lot? Well, I do :)

A wonderfully well put together product that gives some great examples of how to make an npc (or pc) more then a block of stats and base motivation/goal.

Although geared towards fantasy gaming, with a little work the chars can be "overhauled" to have their personalities/plot hooks fit with any modern/ futuristic campaign.

Of particular like was how several of the npc's were described with gender neutral plot hooks/preferences, allowing those playing chars with same sex leanings, (like myself and my girlfriend,) to have a variety of potential companions to run into without any additional work on the gm.

The pics for each npc was well done in B&W, although full body portraits would have been better then the torso/head & shoulders treatment some of them recieved. (If they had full color full body portraits of each npc I'd easily have paid $5-$8 more)

Over all the book had a nice "pick up and use" feel to it, and the short story added a nice bit of extra material to get the mind flowing with concepts.

Hopefully we'll see another of these types of books modern day/sci fi themed.

Quality of writing: Very satisfied

Quality of art work: Satisfied

Over all value for $: Satisfied ($7-$9 feels more reasonable for amount of content)

I loved Tabletop Adventures LLC's Swamps book, and was not disappointed with this one either :) Once again brilliant descriptions of a wide variety of "believable" locations. This book is providing ideas and inspiration for adding depth to my own adventures is is a fantastic resource, regardless of genre that I am playing. Worth every penny! Now if only they would do a desert book...

This was my gaming group's favorite module. It's really hard to find modules that are low magic, and this one being set in the Historical (more or less) world makes it perfect for a group that prefers more realistic, low magic gaming.

EXCELLENT! Well done! Great job! I wet my pants I was so happy!

EXCELLENT! Well done! Great job! I wet my pants I was so happy!

EXCELLENT! Well done! Great job! I wet my pants I was so happy!

Excellent! Well done. You rock. Beautiful job. Thank's a million.

I thoroughly enjoyed this product. It's well-written without being overly florid, useful, varied and detailed. It's not flawless: cover art is a bit ropey, but more importantly could do with a more detailed contents page - having printed it, I've found I've had to write my own for quick reference - or even a more clearly sub-categorised index. Nevertheless, a useful addition to a GM's arsenal.

This is a fun addition to Tabletop Adventures' "bits of this and that" line, and a great way to get, well a taste of what this line has to offer--for free! In this no-cost PDF, you get ready-made descriptions of 20 desserts that you can lay before your PCs. Number 14, for example, will have you running to your nearest Greek restaurant for a serving of baklava. You can spice up your next in-game feast just by dropping one or two of these desserts into your description of the food. Go ahead and download this one—you've got nothing to lose, and everything to gain. And your PCs can gain (some weight), too.