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Castle Gargantua
Publisher: Kabuki Kaiser
by John D. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 03/16/2021 01:14:52

The premise is good, the rumor tables are good, but the snakes-and-latters system of progression through the dungeon and the fact that enemies scale to party level make it seem like player agency in strategic gameplay would be very limited, since there's no difficulty gradient from going deeper and you don't control your progress through your choices anyhow. I don't foresee ever using this.

It gets a second star because there's a greek god on one of the encounter tables (whom you can try to kill, naturally), some of the stuff in the room full of magic pools is clever and stealable, and it was only $5.

I agree with Rachael's review that the product description does a very poor, borderline-deceptive job of describing what this product is (a toolkit, but not even really a toolkit for building a dungeon, more a toolkit for running a procedural dungeoncrawl under a very particular set of assumptions that neglect / override what is good in TSR-era D&D's dungeoncrawling rules). Might be a good fit tonally if you like Lamentations of the Flame Princess and themes of futility.



Rating:
[2 of 5 Stars!]
Castle Gargantua
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Book 6: Scoundrel
Publisher: Mongoose
by John D. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 03/08/2012 13:03:26

A solid, useful book. The new subsystems for smuggling, piracy, hacking, heists, and fencing items were quite good, though they look rather difficult for PCs to pull off. The new careers are lackluster, and also have unusually high survival / promotion difficulties (on par with Drifter rather than Rogue from Core, even for the careers that are derived from Core Rogue specialties). The new gear is mostly pretty good, with non-armor stealthsuits, rules for plastic composite weapons, and other fun things. Painkiller are, however, terribly unbalanced and not in keeping with the standard Traveller drug rules (no side effects whatsoever for overuse). The belt mining rules are just a pointer to Beltstrike, which is disappointing, and the salvage rules are rather brief. The gambling rules are pretty good, though. The patrons are inspiring and often amusing, so they were a highlight; many homages to classic sci-fi sources. Sample starships left me mostly cold; I guess more deckplans are always nice. Finally, the rules for ancient weapons (for use on barbarian worlds) were somewhat confusing; some of the numbers looked wrong.

Overall, fairly well-edited, well-laid out. Art quality was unimpressive, but also not terrible. Good book if you're looking to run a criminal game (though you might want to adjust the difficulties down some, unless you want the PCs caught and tried on their first run), less so for drifting. Not a bad product, but not a standout either.



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
Book 6: Scoundrel
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Supplement 9: Campaign Guide
Publisher: Mongoose
by John D. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 03/01/2012 20:18:49

The editing of this book is absolutely atrocious. Spelling and grammatical errors abound, making it painful to read. Many of the tables and events are singularly unsuited to use in a standard Traveller milieux; OTU fans may experience blurring of vision or slight nausea. The events tend to strongly disregard the hard-science basis of Traveller and go for the far-out, with things like "Planetary radiation has caused the villagers to be immortal and infertile", and "An unexplained space phenomenon transports the Player Characters’ ship to another galaxy." The actual rules content is haphazard and often neglects any PC capabilities or actions; lots of chances for summary execution, possession by aliens, or other unpleasant ends with 'no save'. Many of the tables are either so situational as to be useless, or general but have events that could only occur under fairly specific circumstances which will often not be met if rolling just based on the table type.



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[1 of 5 Stars!]
Supplement 9: Campaign Guide
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