I rarely write reviews, but this product really got me thinking and what I think is that Red Ram Studios could be headed in the right direction... with some feedback from the public.

For under one dollar I got more than several hundred dollars worth of "home-brew sauce" for my own games. Really, I imagine that most of DriveThruRPG's biggest customers are just distilling everything into what really is their own game system. Most people have never played a module purely as written. As of right now, I have exactly 3,246 entries in my library. Most of them I never read start to finish. But this one I did.

I love the six cultural alignments, which I of course merge with the traditional alignment system. This product is loaded with this kind of imagination-fuel. And the art really adds to the idea of a true sword-and-sorcery setting.

So, why not 5 stars for a product that cost less than a dollar? Because I have two requests! Number One: Without deleting any of your current versions, add updates with improved formatting for printing. Number Two: Release your digital assets as a separate file (jpg or similar) so we can use the pictures as a screensaver or whatever. I think the polished AI art style is definitely worthy of being stock art for other people games. I'd pay extra.

If those two adjustments can be made, I'd give it five stars and put this up close to the best of my 3,246 purchases on this site.

EDIT: My two requests being met, I hereby grant this product 5 stars and proclaim it the best dollar I have spent on DriveThru. Whether you play this as is or merge it into similar products, this is a great addition to your collection. As an added bonus, the spell lists by culture works perfectly for Knave or Mazerats games. Gives it much more flavor. 5/5+

Excellent book. Love the art, character options, and random tables. Really evokes an S&S setting well and can add a lot of value to other settings with its abundance of tables and unique handling of items like sorcery and corruption. Now all we need is a POD version...

EDIT: This review is for 1.0 of Magi & Marauders. The author has been very attentive in fixing even my specifics complaints and so most of the below is probably irrelevant now, but I've not had the time to go through and verify and create new review, so I'll let this one stand, but this addendum is very important, because you, as a reader, need to realize it might not reflect the current state of the game.

It's a mess, but if you don't mind that, it's fine. The PDF is a barely formatted text document with some scattered creative commons art to bring across the vibe of swords and sorcery. I don't need a top tier presentation, especially at this price point, and you can see it for yourself in the preview. The rules are a mess, and this is where I have to ding it the most, because I'm not convinced it's playable as written. It makes references to things (like alignmnet modifiers) that don't seem to exist. It has inconsistent rules, such as spell casting costs either the cumulative result of two rolls or just the roll of one die, and if the latter, then why does the table say that the price gets lower and lower the better you roll, but the rules say it costs more the higher you roll? Combat is extremely simplistic: you just roll a single die until someone dies and there's not a lot of interesting tactical choices. Character creation is scattered across the book, and it's inconsistent. For example, Magis get no spell at level 1 (?) but gain one spell at level 2, another at 4 and another at 6, and then the game suggests you retire (so max 3 spells?), but Marauder-Magi start the game with more HP and one spell? Then why play as a Magi? And the game heavily implies that if you're a Degenerate, you must be a Magi, and if you're a Bestial, you must be a Marauder, but then offers Marauder rules for Degenerates and Magi rules for Bestials, which is cool, but I'd rather see more flexibility here (though perhaps if I rolled up a few characters the flexbility of the game might be more obvious). There's not really a setting. It uses the typical OSR approach of "here's lots of tables, you know what you're doing, right?" Which seems fine, but if you came herr for something as evocative as, for example, Morkborg or UVG you'll be disappointed. That might not matter that much if you're in the genre because you know roughly what the setting should be like and the gameplay matters, but again, the gameplay is a mess. The whole thing feels less like a finished product and more like an ashcan. I feel like if it had one more edit pass, and it cleared some things up, and maybe organized things a bit better (and put what all the classes had in a single spot, rather than making you hunt through all the different sections to figure out how to make your Bestial Magi) and maybe offered some more interesting tactical choices, maybe more power-ups per level, we'd have a pretty solid start to a good game. It feels like instead someone finished a first draft and was in the midst of editing it into a proper second draft when the deadline hit and he had to drop it on store. That sounds bad, so why 3 stars? Why not 1? Well, look at that price point. I'd pay that for an ashcan. I like ashcans. There's some neat ideas here! I especially like the alignment system. So I while I wouldn't recommend someone buy it, I wouldn't recommend against it either. It's a book for people who like to explore how others designs their OSR, or for people who love indie-fixer-uppers. It's not for people who expect a complete and instantly playable RPG. But what were you expecting for a book that's essentially the entire ruleset for $1? You have to judge it where it is.

Excellent setting that is very evocative of a Robert E Howard or Michael Moorcock type of Sword and Sorcery world. Classes are evocative of the setting and there are plenty or random tables to flesh out whatever you need for your campaign. Name guides are a personal favorite and the book is packed with AI art. This book is a great resource for any S&S setting and I recommend purchasing the high resolution copy if available.

-Lots of tables and ideas for S&S fans. -A large setting painted in broad strokes (think Greece, Egypt, Mesopotamia region). Not too big (when your PC group ends up being a very unlikely group), but with information to go beyond. -Multiple playable periods that change the setting. -Rules agnostic but nonetheless gives a lot of thoughts on the S&S, OSR and setting mix.

Too much (AI) art in the text for my taste but the art is good and evocative. Prefer the HiRes version of the pdf

I have reviewed the White Hack and the Black Hack of original D&D, and Chaoses Limb would have to be the Blue Hack of Holmes Basic. It is well written, and easy to implement. Any referee, dungeon master, or judge could have a game going in just a few minutes. The black and white interior art is evocative of vintage Sword and Sorcery. This book is great for both mood and setting. It's charts are easy to follow, and the desription of arcane/devine classes as well as spells add further flavor to that "Old School Renaisance Feel." The magic Items are unique and the dungeon generator is both efficient and effective.

For any Old School RPG'ers, this system will be an excellent addition to your collection. Very streamlined, simple and lots of room for collaborative imagination and creative storytelling.

It takes about 5 min to read through the essential rules, character creation is a flash, and gaming can begin immediately. I will definitely be using this system when I DM at RPG conventions since it's so quick and easy, yet has some interesting quirks that make it fun.

The hardcover included a sample dungeon which I thought was a great illustration for the random dungeon generator included in the back (along with graph paper!).

It's cheap, it's unique, it's easy, it's novel yet classic at the same time. Belongs on the shelf of any OSR fan.

Great addition to D&D Basic. Expands magic options, while maintaining player agency. Our group has played quite a few games using the Players Guide and Magic sourcebook and been very pleased with the results. Combat and magic flow very smoothly and I highly recommend this product and its OSR companions.

The Chaoses Limb Players Guide is an excellent value add for any D&D Basic game. It dramatically streamlines play and provides a wider range of character options than the basic set. Our group played (and continues to play) a number of sessions using the varied Chaoses Limb rules enhacements and are having a wonderful time. Character creation is resolved in 10 minutes or less allowing veteran or new players alike to get into the action quickly and easily. Combat and magic use have flowed quickly and smoothly and there is much greater player agency under this system than later editions of D&D. I strongly recommend all the Chaoses Limb products for, they are worth FAR more than the price of admission. Happy gaming!

First of all, I was a sponsor of the Kickstarter and I also purchased the original version of this book that was for sale a year ago. So, I'm talking about this version as someone who likes the genre, the system, the original books, and someone who forked out some $$$ to get this updated.

That being said.

This is a big improvement and a good value for those who are looking for a little more BoL fun.

With some caveats...

The artwork is better (much much better), there is a better fleshing out of the world of Almuric, there are random tables for encounters and cutom Aluric beasties, and there is a nice mini gazeteer and map of the area north of the Girdle.

The new artwork was funded via a kickstarter campaign, and, except for the horrible cover, I think it's a very nice improvement. The characters are mote dynamic, the detail is more in line with whatyou'd expect from a pulp fantasy setting, and the style is fairly consistant. I especially like the portrayal of the Akki.

The bestiary is a little more fleshed out, and there are simple rules for madness from some of the creatures. And there are rules for playing the Guras, Yagas, Akki, and Dogheads as PCs.

And the rules and setting for exploring the rest of Almuric are expanded on a little. (And the annoying-"Your character dies before the game begins" rules from the original PDF are completely gone...thank gods)

And the editing and writing are, for the most part, Much, much better than the original PDF.

And there is a little mini-campaign and some PCs in the back of the book for jumpstarting a campaign.

The best part is having a nice collection of information gleaned from the Almuric novel on one, easy to acces place.

However, there are a few places I'd like to have seen some better layout and editing.

To begin with, there are a lot of nice tables, but most of the tables are 1d6 instead of 2d6 or d66, meaning that there are only 6 limited options for each table. This could have been fleshed out a lot with a little effort and there is plenty of room in this book to expand it without increasing the page count to one that would make it difficult to print...

It would have also been nice to get some better firearm rules. They seemed a little thin.

As far as new careers, there is only a couple of lists, with nothing to flesh them out. This would have been a great place to include a bunch of victorian careers and some nice rules for includeing them, but instead, it reads like a set of notes from an outline. (And he had planety of leftover space to fill this in). And some new Boons and Flaws for the new races would have been a nice addition as well. Expecially since the new races seem to default to +1 AGL. -1 APP instead of using the BoL format of favored Boons and Flaws to get the same efects.

This is still the major failing of the Almuric project, while much of it is laid out well, and the references from the Almuric book are nice, some of it still feels like the writer just included a sentence or paragraph on some topics just to "include them" instead of actually fleshing it out a bit more.

I also thought that the madness rules could have been better fleshed out. And some of the monsters seem to be missing stats. (They have the 4 basic stats, but no Melee or Defence...)

And the pre generated characters take up a lot of space in the book. One character has an entire page devoted to his lackluster backstory. Again, this may be useful, but there are other things the game could have used more.

One last note, and its a thing that has no bearing on the actual game, but it needs to be said to satisfy the salesman in me: the cover of the book is horrible. If this were ever on a gamestore shelf or use to promote the book in any way, it would be an enormous FAIL. Its a dark cover, with Dark writing and a dark illustration. None of it either jumps out at the viewer or brings them in to look at it.

(With the hardcover, I opened the box the book came in and I was sitting in my car with the overhead light on and it took me a few seconds to be able to read what I'd just been sent becasue the cover is so hard to read. This is less of a problem with the PDF, but it sucks up an enormous amount of ink without giving a decent picture in return.)

When you print this, I recommend skipping the cover entirely...

And the cover artwork is not only dark, but also non-dynamic. The artist for the actual interior illustrations did a better job than Ryan Landvatter, who painted the cover.

Yes, I'm splitting hairs with that, and it doesn't mean the book is not worth reading, but this is not something that would catch your eye on a shelf. (And as one of the backer for the artwork on Kickstarter, I feel that if he paid much for that cover, it was NOT money well spent.)

In the end though, it's a deent value for the price and it includes some new stuff to expand on the BoL universe and rules and it has some nice reference for Howard's Almuric world.

Although Barbarians of Lemuria (BoL) just recently released their new crowdfunded Mythic Edition in PDF I didn’t read it yet. I’m waiting for the printed book to arrive. My impression from the beta is mixed: although the new version definitely looks snappier and has lots of additional material the mechanical overhaul doesn’t look like an improvement to me. Nonetheless, the overall package looks sweet and I can always pick and choose what I want to use. So, while I’m waiting for my book let’s review a supplement for BoL: Swords of Almuric. Of course, it’s still written with the old Mythic Edition in mind but BoL is pretty backwards compatible so it shouldn’t be a problem.

What do you need to know?

Swords of Almuric (SoA) is an adaption of Robert E. Howard’s novel Almuric. I’ve never read the book but as I’m a big fan of BoL I took a gander at this sourcebook in the hopes of getting new material for this awesome game.

Content

The book is divided into four parts: The Almuric Gazetteer describes the world and the inhabitants of Almuric. The second part, Almuric Expansion, has suggestions for broadening the setting. These two parts of the product are system-agnostic. The third part is called Playing in Almuric and comes with adaptions for BoL’s rules. The last part concerns itself about adventures, a bestiary and pregenerated characters.

Let it first be said that the world of Almuric is very interesting if you like the pulpy stuff Howard is known for. At the begining of the 20th century a scientist discovered a way to transport living matter to the planet Almuric. The genre is Planetary Romance and comes with a lot of recognizable tropes. Almuric has the “noble savage”, the Gura, the decadent and long-lived Yaga and their slaves, the Akki. The world is fantastic with sabre-toothed predators, unicorns, thunderbirds and prehistoric plants.

The author acknowledges that it is best to read the novel. That leads me to question the additional value of SoA as a product. Part 1 to 3 roughly outline the setting but it’s way too insufficient to be useful without prior knowledge of Robert E. Howard’s work.

Part 4 deals with scarcely sketched options beyond the novel. These informations fit unto two pages. Some entries refer to the original source and don’t make sense to me: what are the “yellow and red races”?

In the chapter Playing in Almuric the author offers advice for campaign play: during the events in the book, before, after, shortly after or far into the future.

So, perhaps we can find the gems within the system-specific rules for BoL? Mechanically, races are handled with simple bonuses and penalties on attributes. You won’t find boons or flaws. That’s a bit lackluster. Human characters hailing from Earth do get career backgrounds. They give you a good sense for the early 20th century. Unfortunately, entries are only grouped into categories without further background information. While the idea is laudable its execution is poor. The chapter ends with a marginal note about firearm rules.

On the positive side, there is a whole chapter with plot hooks and adventure ideas. The game master will find lots of material for her campaign.

Chapter 7, Almuric Exploration, contains two pages of tables for random encounters and events. Chapter 8 is the Almuric Bestiary. It’s another set of tables with mutations and modifications for the normal cratures of the core rulebook plus some new original monsters. Like the rest of the book the information content is meager.

SoA closes with some pregens and NPCs. In contrast to the rest of the product the background stories are unnecessarily inflated.

Appearance

The original cover was strange: too dark with dark fonts, it was difficult to recognize anything. It looks like the author changed the fonts in the preview image which now looks better. However, the PDF still features the old version. The interior illustrations are of good quality and arouse the Sword & Sorcery feeling. The layout is simple and clean with three columns. I really like the used fonts and the border illustrations. For a small press publisher the inside of the supplement looks pretty nice.

The Verdict

All in all, Swords of Almuric is a mixed bag. While it offers access to the world of Almuric you still need to read the novel. Otherwise you’ll get some interesting concepts without meat. The adaption for BoL is uninspiring. As things are now it doesn’t offer any incentive to use it instead of the standard setting. Lemuria is immediately familiar and invites me to get started right away. Visually, SoA is an appealing indie product (except the cover). Overall, the information content is too sparse. The product is full of potential but while you can see the spark of something great it fizzles out throughout the book. In the end, I can justify the purchase of the PDF for the inspiration it offers. The chapter with adventure hooks and the bestiary are neat. Ultimately though, for me it falls short as a standalone supplement for a roleplaying game.

Buy this if you already read the novel and want a refresher of the world and some plot hooks & adventure generators. Don’t buy this if you are not familiar with Robert E. Howard’s Almuric and expect a complete setting sourcebook ready for play.

A table-top adaptation of Robert E. Howard's world of Almuric as represented in the novel of the same name, Swords of Almuric is faithful to the source material but at the cost of being somewhat anemic. Still, the PDF is a good value for the asking price of $5.99 (US). I only ran into one hitch. It's kind of a big one, unfortunately.

The PDF would only render correctly in Adobe Reader on my Mac. It would not correctly display in any of the native PDF readers on my Mac (Safari, Preview) or in any of the other three third-party PDF readers that I tried (Firefox, PDFView, or Skim). In all of these viewers on my Mac, large portions of the file's text appeared as corrupted, garbled, nonsense and artwork displayed incorrectly, obscuring text in many instances. In Adobe Reader, though? Fine.

So, if you own a Mac and download this file, try installing Acrobat Reader before you pull all of your hair out. If, for whatever reason, you're averse to installing Adobe software on your Mac, you might want to skip Swords of Almuric until this issue has been addressed (RPGNow has been made aware of it).

First of all, I have to admit being deeply invovled in this product. However, before getting in the train I funded this work because Howard's Almuric just rocks! This item offers any DM plenty of room to elaborate a pulp style campaing in a dangerous Swords and Planet setting. The mix between OSR reflexes (encouter tables) and the freshness of BoL rules is just perfect in this way. Enough to say the author did his part in getting interesting stuff out of Howard's work and expanded it just enough to my taste. If you like Swords and Planet settings and enjoy BoL rules, this is good value!