All in all, the product offers a good mix of elements that have the right feel for Greek and Roman mythology.
Things you might like:
- The "plotlibs" template sentence lays out a decent situation.
- The tables have generally good content for the topics they cover. They capture the spirit of a lot of stories from Greek and Roman mythology (although see below for some omissions).
- Hallelujah, the author (or his editor) can spell and punctuate and put apostrophes where they belong. A quick skim just now finds only one editing mistake, and it's a minor one ("an disbelieved oracle"). (Okay, maybe that's "Things I might like" more than "Things you might like," but I'm saying it anyway!)
Things you might not like:
- If you need help turning random elements into a coherent whole, this doesn't provide it. It's on you to find a way to tie the random pieces together and flesh them out.
- A strange omission from the tables are the Greek and Roman gods themselves. Some of the lesser ones appear by name (Hecate, Pan) and a few others appear by indirect reference (god of the sea, hunting god/dess), but most of the Olympians are nowhere to be found in tables that are supposed to have "a very Greco-Roman flavor."
- The tables don't give you any help for rolling up locations found in Greek or Roman mythology. It would have been helpful to include the rich variety of locations found in the myths, by generic type (temples, typical city-state features, magical springs, sacred mountains, mysterious islands, oracular shrines, etc.) or by specific name (specific city-states, islands, foreign lands, etc.).
- The table entries offer no explanations. Some entries are obvious. For many items, such as the Sibylline Books, Cercopes, the Titanomachy, and Stymphalian birds, you may need to spend some quality time with web searches to figure out what they are, where they occur, and what you might do with them.
- There are some anachronisms, such as "Gypsies," Mithraism, and the Dancing Plague, that didn't appear in the Greek or Roman myths.
None of those are negative enough to make me regret the $3.
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