For the $2 I paid, I got a good value. There are literally over 1 million possible adventure seeds you can generate with this product. I was, however, disappointed to see that the "locations" table had a typographical error in it.

Hot Pursuit has quickly become the 'default' chase rules at many games. Modeled similar to Spycraft's chace systems, Hot Pursuit ditches maps and minis and takes a more virtual approach to the chace.

In Hot Pursuit, there are only 2 major roles: Those being chased, and those doing the chasing. Those being chased have a 'lead' which determines range and some modifiers. Each party gets to make a maneuver that changes the amount of the lead (greater = getting away, smaller = catching up), or setting up for a bigger maneuver next round.

Each round presents endless opportunity for random chase elements seen in movies, the most popular is the "fruit cart."

I look forward to seeing this ported over to other game systems, allowing us to put away the mini's and get into the fun part - ROLLING DICE!

I didn't know I was missing this until I found it! ;)

Seriously, taking the d20 Modern Occupation rules and adapting them for D&D... or any other fantasy d20 game... was just what my campaign was missing. For those unfamiliar with the system, a starting occupation helps round out a character by giving him a couple of additional "class" skills that apply to his early life rather than his adventuring career. After all, who grows up planning on a career in "Rogue"-ing?

The occupations are well designed, and categorized by the character's point of origin. If your character began life as a rural villager, there's a list of occupations for him. If he started life in a castle, there's a list for that too. I have to say that this was well worth the price.

What I liked:

• The basic idea is nice (giving players an edge in combat based on their skills)

What I disliked:

• No drawback - so if these stunts are allowed, and a character is using a standard action to attack, then using the stunt is a no-brainer
• Example on page 2 doesn't follow the rules given on same page
• Extra doesn't scale well (+1d10 is a lot at lvl 1, but a joke at lvl 20)
• The stunt DC is not depending on the stunt at all
• The result is not depending on the stunt at all
• The actual skill is not important as well - just choose the skill with most ranks in

The idea is nice, but it needs more thought to be really useful.

The Imperial Age: London is one of the best little supplements I have seen out there in a time. At least to my taste. Built around a historical Victorian London guide, which adds to the feeling of credibility it then expands. In ends up detailing too the basics of Victorian society, the government, the workhouse system and even how you are supposed to behave in a club.

This is about the real London, not a steampunked version of it, but even steampunk lovers can make use of it. If you are into XIX century roleplaying, you can't go wrong with this one for 13 bucks!

I am reviewing the DEFCON1 product. After briefly looking through it, I have to say that the layout is nicely done and there are some really great pictures of old propaganda posters and such. This really adds to the feel and also helps to establish the mindset. The product is set primarily in the era of history referred to as the COLD WAR era and this product helps bring it home. There are also "updates and suggestions" that allow the setting to be set in the modern era without a problem. Both Nato and Soviet characters are presented in a non-biased way that does not pick sides and shows that both sides are humans that are protectiong their homes.

There are three sections in the product. The first section, deals with advise for role-playing and not just roll-playing. There are some great suggestions and "schtickss" that you (the GM) can use to get the players involved in a more role-playing way. I for one, hope to use some of these suggestions with my own group. The second section deals with the characters that are in the product. You get five (5) Soviet characters and six (6+1) NATO characters (+1 is for a Sidekick) As I mentioned above, all the characters are well written and fully detailed. Each has a picture for them. The third section is the adventure that is included in the book. It too is well written and from what I saw, very complete. I hope to play it through with my group. There is a great map and write-ups for all the badguys. The only bad point that I have found is that there is no picture of the main bad-guy (other than the cover) Yes.. there is a Nazi artic base in here and it is sweet and is definitely being added to my characters' "Places to see" list. The base is ready to drop into any campaign and provides a great new setting to play in.

The "buddy movie" schtick is mentioned in the first section and to be honest, the movie Red Heat did come to mind. There is a great sidebar/box in which some classic/stereotypical Russian sayings were listed.. this along with some English to Russian translations for commonly used words... makes it easy to bring these characters to life in your game. When the GM can actually use the appropriate Russian words with a character, rather than putting on an "Arni-accent" and trying to pass the character off as Russian.. This is a good thing.

I highly recommend this supplement and I am impressed with it as a whole. I feel that this product would be a worthwhile purchase to anybody that is looking for a cool adventure and source material for Soviet (former Soviet) characters.

Anyone planning a horror type campaign set during the Victorian period should consider this (with a little work, it could be used in other time periods too). Depending upon the choices of the player, it can be used to create a range of character types from thoughtful scholars (such as Van Helsing in 'Dracula') to more action orientated heroes (like Van Helsing in, errr, 'Van Helsing).

On the downside, there is no supplemental material, such as adventure ideas, character examples and the like. Whilst not essential, such stuff would be useful.

Despite it's cover, which suggests Adamant are moving into the 'spicy' genre of pulp, 'The Golden Idol...' is very much a traditional adventure scenario. The players are led along a pretty linear route to a good old fashioned 'dodge the traps and retrieve the treasure' type ending. Whilst this simplicity may be off putting for experienced players, this adventure would be a good introductory story for a new group.

As an attempt to create a 'Holmes type' character suitable for D20, this works well. The character has a number of new abilities ideally suited for detective work. From being able to deduce facts merely through observation, to being able to predict the behaviour of a known criminal, the Scientific Detective would have numerous advantages during an investigation. Concentrating on such situations, the detective is less able in other activities, and as such is unlikely to unbalance a well planned game. On the downside, it would be useful, though not essential, if the pdf included scenario ideas, pre-generated character examples, advice on fitting the character into a campaign, and so on.

Overall: An interesting and well thought out character concept. Additonal material would be nice, but isn't vital.

Preview was good enough that I bought the full book.

But I must admit I liked Lizard's "Iron Lords of Jupiter" setting in Dragon Magazine better as it was more original.

Anyone familiar with the Sword and Planet stories (see Wikipedia for a good list) will appreciate this, and in some places the familiarity of the genre helps but does make the book a bit more generic than I'd like.

Very well written book covers Cosmic level heroes for M&M. It provides plenty of advice on various kind of cosmic-level games, and provides a few power suites for cosmic characters to use.

My only complaint was that the book didn't cover was large scale combat for cosmic characters. These types of beings can take on fleets of starships, yet there was no info/advice on doing so. Other than that, this is definitely a good book for higher powered games.

The Upside:

AAARRR! The Treasure Of Scurvy Jenkins is a D20 Modern Pirate Adventure. Set in the Caribbean sometime during the Golden Age of Piracy, the adventure is a sprawling series of encounters as the Characters set out to recover the treasure of Scurvy Jenkins.

The adventure also contains a very short historical look at the Golden Age of Piracy, some of the famous pirates that existed, and general information about pirates.

Since half of the adventure is the surprise of what comes next, I'm going to try and give an overall idea of what to expect without revealing all of it, or all the details at least.

Part One - San Paulo. The adventure starts with the Characters captured by the Spanish, if you're using the provided characters you were a group of English Privateers. If you're trying to fit this into a campaign a little more work may be required. While in jail the characters meet Scurvy Jenkins, who has bribed a guard to help make his escape, he wants to get his treasure back. The Spanish fort is being attacked by an old ally of Scurvy's, the Pirate Queen Raquel Dominique - who want's Scurvy's treasure for herself!

In the fray the Players escape with Scurvy on a stolen ship and the adventure kicks into high gear.

Part Two - Bartleytown. A pirate town where the Players and Scurvy can dock to get a full crew and supplies. This section provides not only ways to get on track for the main objective, but a number of fun side quests. There's gambling, bar fights, even a raid on a stranded group of Spanish soldiers after their ship ran aground. If you're in a hurry most of the encounters can be skipped, but they all go towards making this adventure seem a little more epic in scale.

Part Three - The Haggard Manticore. The tavern in Bartleytown is where the Players can get more crew men. More gambling, drinking games and bar fights can be found in this section. At least one bar fight should take place to keep the adventure on track, it's during this that Scurvy gets kidnapped! The next step is rescuing Scurvy from his fate to get back on track and find his treasure, hopefully with some more crew members.

Part Four - X Marks The Spot. Finally, the Players set sail for Scurvy's treasure. This section encompasses several encounters on the way to the island with the buried treasure. Sea monsters, ship wrecks, storms, and the return of Raquel Dominique! Only a few of the encounters are needed to keep the story moving, so you've got a few options to either lengthen or shorten this adventure again here.

Part Five - Isla De La Sombra. Finally, the Players make it to the island and head off to retrieve the treasure. Of course, nothing is so easy. Attacked by wildlife, savages and finally uncovered an ancient dark God from beyond this world. The Players are in for the fight of their lives as they work to keep both the treasure and their lives!

Part Six - Return Of The Pirate Queen! The end is very open, with a number of possibilities of how things can turn out depending on previous encounters and how many of the side adventures the Players got involved in, how they interacted with some of the NPCs (both major and minor).

While the adventure is fairly linear, there are so many options and places for things to go good or bad the ending has only one known factor - Raquel Dominique catches up to Scurvy and the Player Characters. How things turn out is nicely left up in the air.

There are Two Appendices, the first provides all the NPC stats and is intended for the GM. The second provides the pregenerated PCs and equipment lists. Ten Characters are provided for use, and if you have a group that large you'll need them all, if you plan on using all parts of the adventure it can become nearly epic in scope.

The Downside:

If you're trying to run the adventure in a Convention setting you'll need to likely cut several of the side encounters to fit a shorter time frame, and the Games in Bartleytown can be a great, but time consuming, distraction for any game - these really aren't down sides to the adventure, but something to keep in mind when running it.

The only actual downside is the NPC Stat Blocks included with each encounter. Many of them could have been either placed in Side bars, or included at the end of the Main Section in a printer friendly format for the GM to make better use of. Especially since many of them are so similar they could have easily referred to a generic Character Sheet to be reused as needed. With the stat blocks where they are it clutters up the presentation slightly, and makes it a little harder to use the adventure generically for other systems.

The Otherside:

This adventure has everything, sea monsters, bar fights, gambling, ship to ship battles, ambushes, buried treasure, mermaids, betrayal, all the essentials for adventure on the high seas.

Using the entire adventure would probably take at least two four hours sessions, a quick group could get most of it in one, but it is easily scalable to fit into shorter time slots, or even drawn out a little more. Overall, I'd definitely recommend this one for anybody feeling a need to yell YAARR!! at the gaming table.

This product does present a fair treatment of the sword & planet genre with the professional quality writing, art and layout one should expect from Adamant. My problem with it is that minus the d20 modern srd content [to be fair the d20m classes are presented with separate parry and dodge bonuses as apposed to a single defense bonus, much like Mongoose's OGL Conan, so it isn't a complete rehash], the reader is left with roughly 129 pages of new content. Why Adamant didn't produce this book as a straight d20m supplement, and reduce the page count and the price, I don't know. I bought this book at the current sale price and still feel slightly jipped. I'd like to take a look at the Slavers of Mars supplement, but the asking price is too steep, even at the sale price. Mars is clearly a $6.99 pdf at a $24.95 price.

Nice product. Foe Factory (FF) takes the NPC creation rules from Spycraft 2.0 and brings them to d20 modern. The NPC rules from Spycraft 2.0 was in my opinion the shining jewel of the entire book. What has kept me from d20 modern in the past is the NPC creation times could be time consuming. Well now with Foe Factory that time will be cut significantly. So how does it stack up?

The Good: The price is well worth the product. Four bucks gets you about 18 pages. With it you are able to create a wide variety of NPCs from zombies to thugs to harpies. Most important you can create them fast. What else is great is that you can create generic NPCs (ie. Terrorists, bodyguards) and you never have to add levels or to them to be a challenge as the player characters gain power. The system is that great. What's more this product should be able to be used in most of the d20 modern series (d20 past, d20 future, etc)

The Bad: Like mentioned earlier FF is porting over the Sycraft 2.0 NPC rules to d20 modern. It's not a 100% clean conversion. I suspect that NPCs using this document might be a little underpowered when compared to standard d20 modern NPCs. This is due to some rule differences between d20 modern and Spycraft 2.0. Granted I have not been able to playtest this theory yet. Another nitpick is a lot of theNPC options from Spycraft 2 didn't make the port over, and I'm not exactly sure why.

The Ugly: There appears to be no way to make magic using NPCs with this system.

Conclusion: FF is a great product for all the reasons listed above. The nitpicks I listed I would say are small roadbumps rather than product killing flaws.

A good generator to help you come up with interesting ideas for an adventure. You can get some really wild stuff, that may not be usable, but is always fun to try to figure out how to use it. For 2 bucks it is definitely not bad.