My first review read:
"Well, I've given it a skim-through, and there is a lot of meat here. Very much worth the price of admission, for pages 6, 56, & 57 alone.
And there's a lot more here than just those pages! Very well done.
I will expand this review anon, when I have fully digested the work."
....and I stand by that review.
However, I have also read a lot more of Drongo now, and I feel that I can add a few more comments.
Things like tables for generating modern humans really work for me, and the information/ideas for boss monsters and aliens are equally great. Ray gun rules are very, very good, and the rules for relationships and true love are equally smart. In fact, these are rules that can hook your PCs into the setting. I also found the equipment "usefulness" rules to be an amazingly cool addition - one of those things that are obvious once someone has done it, but didn't occur (to me at least) until then. I would have gladly paid $10 or more just for these things. And there is more in here that is definitely worth stealing for any DCC campaign. There is a lot of expansion of the Appendix N vibe, but Drongo gets that vibe right.
I dropped my rating from 4 to 5 stars for a few reasons:
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Classes. I like the idea of new classes, but I want those classes to clearly offer a different play experience, or have a specific niche. Too many of those presented herein don't match that ideal, to me. They might to you, though, so take that with a grain of salt.
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Psionics. Psionics suffer from the same thing that, for instance, the Firearm crit table does. The antecedents from the DCC core rules are too clear; this is just a gloss over something that we already have. Later expansions may help this quite a bit, but right now, the psionics left me cold.
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System errors. There are mentions of Charisma, skill checks for specific skills, and Toughness saves in the text. Hopefully, these will be cleared up by the time a print version is available. Likewise, there are some formatting errors, such as a blank page with no headers/footers/page numbers to clearly indicate that it was left blank, and one class table falls into the line of the footer. These are minor problems, easily resolved, and hopefully corrected for the print version.
- There is a global overview map, but no indication if the dark is water or land. Nor, for the land, what is there. This may be intentional, so that everyone's Drongo is different, but I would like to see at least a rough map, more creatures specific to the setting, and an introductory adventure. These things might simply appear in future products, of course.
My final conclusion is that this is a great value for the money, and that there is stuff in here that you are going to use. Well worth buying!
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