Each useful treasure is buried within a block of bloated narrative boxed text. It takes extra time and effort to find the treasure you need. It is not fast nor easy to use. If you’re looking for a quick reference or a book that you can use on-the-fly at the gaming table, look elsewhere. Super-disappointed in this book.

The entries in this book of lists do not provide any additional contextual data necessary to make them useful. — e.g. the list of period books doesn’t include the publication dates; the list of entertainers doesn’t include their professions (actor, musician, etc); And the list of writers and artists doesn’t indicate who is a writer and who is an artist.

In short,a GM will have to do extra research to make this book useful. And isn’t the whole point of a reference work to •eliminate• research?

For my Ravenloft game, I’d needed a solid floor plan for a Gothic manor house. Not only was the house to be an adventure site, it would eventually become the base of operations for my players’ characters and a focal point of the campaign. I’d looked for months. And, unfortunately, every adventure with the title “The Haunting of ____ Manor” (even the good ones) featured a poorly researched floor plan resembling your average American McMansion on a typical American middle-class yard. Internet searches turned up plenty of floor plans of actual historic homes. But most accompanying data was architectural information and provided little about how the houses were used or who lived in them.

Briefly, I’d considered Chaosium’s “This Old Haunted House” and “This Old Haunted House, Too”—books of historical floor plans obviously targeting Call of Cthulhu players. They looked promising. The floor plans were authentic. But floor plans were all they were — no historical context or descriptions of room functions were included. And Chaosium’s books were packed with extraneous floor plans I didn’t need. I only needed one gothic manor.

That’s why I was thrilled to find this product. Not only does this book give fantastic floor plans for a single gothic manor house, it also puts the house on a proper estate (with an estate map !), describes the appearance and function of each room in the house, and provides a complete listing of the staff that would live and work on the estate. The only thing missing is a map scale and legend. If you’re looking for a gothic manor house with just the right amount of detail in a game-system-neutral book, then you need to get this!