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Peoni: Order of the Balm of Joy $9.99
Average Rating:4.6 / 5
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Peoni: Order of the Balm of Joy
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Peoni: Order of the Balm of Joy
Publisher: Columbia Games Inc.
by Steven V. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 11/02/2022 19:24:12

This is a well-written and informative book about one of the two clerical orders of the goddess Peoni in the world of Harn/Harnmaster. Although it is meant for the game Harnmaster, anyone can use the material here to run any game system in the world of Harn, and there is plenty to crib from if one is not even using Harn per se. Any similar goddess of nature/healing would work as the patron, and a quick swap of the proper nouns could make this book work in almost any medieval-like fantasy setting. The PDF quality is excellent.

However, I had no choice but to dock Columbia Games a point, and frankly almost two points, for three negatives about this book.

The first is the price, which under normal (non-sale) conditions is almost $10, for a 12 page document. That's nearly $1 per page, which is utterly outrageous. For comparison, the Ironsworn Lodestar supplement is $2.50 for nearly 3x the page count (35 pages, or 7 cents/page), and D100 Dungeon is about $14 for 74 pages (or about 20 cents a page). I understand that Columbia has to make some money on this, but charging nearly $1 a page is outrageous, especially given that this is a nearly 10 year old document which, as near as I can tell, as not been edited or updated since. And this is a PDF, not a physical book -- and even for a physical book $10 for 12 pages would be pushing it. This is the major negative and took off most of the point.

A second issue is the lack of bookmarks, and the "file protection" system used here (either by CG or by DTRPG, I'm not sure which) that prevents me from adding them manually (the PDF filie is locked against any editing, even bookmarks). This means that the only way to find stuff is to scroll. It's only 12 pages, but by the same token -- it's only 12 pages. Surely Columbia Games could have taken 5 minutes to make a few bookmarks... one per congregation, etc.

The third and final issue, and this is common with several of their products not just this one - despite the fact that there is a cover for this document somewhere, it's not in the file on DTRPG, so my document starts with page 1, not with the cover nor a title/publisher info page. Just straight into the text. There's really no good excuse for this.

I came this close to dropping the rating to 3/5 over these issues, but the content itself is too good to warrant that low of a score. If they'd just had a cover and 5 or 6 bookmarks, and charged maybe $5 instead of $10, this would be a 5 star offering.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
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