This is MUCH better rum than I expected. Buy the whole barrel if you can.

The story plots are unique and layered. Each has a hook, key encounters, and follow-up ideas. I don't know how it fits on a card but it does.

These are NOT random "you meet d20 skeletons on a d6-table craft looking for d12-table treasure".

They're the kind of adventure outlines you'd write for yourself with opportunities for role play, negotiation, villains that will make your players roar, and of course combat.

The art for the ship deck plans and port maps is, well, all over the map. It includes detailed black and white line drawings, color illustrations, and acceptable hex tiles. Personally I like all of it and I'm amazed to get so many unique maps for this price. This alone is worth the price and then some.

The card design is adequate. I allllmost wish there was a black and white option for affordable home printing.

This is one of the top 10 "value for the dollar" products I've ever bought, and I've bought over 600 PDFs here at DTRPG.

This old title is still essential for campaigns in any genre where your players are part of a larger band or they're up against one.

The 13th Warrior. Master and Commander. The crew of the Black Pearl. Sharpe's Rifles. Band of Brothers. Mad Max. Aliens. Probably Battlestar Galactica. I think this would help in all of them.

You've got a group and it's not only too much work to build out stats and backgrounds for every member, but even if you did it wouldn't capture what makes them unique as a team. These rules have you covered.

The rules are tailored for a swords and sandals fantasy setting, and includes lore, creating a band, giving it a personality, and fast and flavorful mass battle rules (including fortifications). It's a worthy purchase just for that.

Then the Game Master's section says "hold my ale". It has useful insights into types of adventures (including management and intrigue), some good ambush rules (finally, IMO), assassinations, duels, and a set of event/adventure seeds. You'll have to rework the lists of edges and details of the adventure seeds for your genre, but the structure here puts you on the right path.

One of my PCs is a pirate captain with 80 men, and until this book they were a bit of a blob. Now with minimal work they feel very richly detailed and with their own advantages and disadvantages that he has to work with.

This book is old so a good review does little for the author. I wrote it for you, fellow GM. This will help you.

Compass and Sextant doesn't bring much new to nautical adventures, or to navigation, but it does have what you need to immediately run a couple island-hopping adventures.

Chapter 1 is a history of navigation. It's interesting, but it would have been better with a timeline and some rules for the different ages. Vikings in 800 BCE would have no compass, but Chinese sailors might. Using the stars for latitude didn't come until around the middle of the middle ages. A compass, latitude, longitude, measuring knots and looking at the material pulled up from sea were all elements of navigation that could be interesting aspects to a game, but they aren't explored in game terms.

The extended navigation rules is a table of bonus things you might find if you roll well on a navigation skill check roll. In a book called Compass and Sextant I was hoping for more than a table that says you found a ship, a bottle, or an island.

There's a missed opportunity here to have a system for clouds that block the stars, storms that blow you off course, predictable currents and winds, and unpredictable periods of no wind that strand the ship.

So what's in here?

A crew, ready to use with interesting personalities and skills. A table for generating random islands... kind of meh. Some interesting magic navigation items. And several new and fresh monsters.

I think it's just what you need to have a couple adventures at sea in route to somewhere in your main campaign.

This is the best I've found for authentic adventure ideas while sailing, instead of encounters on islands or with monsters. Sailing is the difference between pirates and bandits, so I think this is a must-have.

Just skim this book you'll come away with stats for 10 tall ships, sailing vocabulary, roles for crew and harbor folks, at-sea hazards, magic, 24 realistic shipboard challenges, and 12 maritime plot devices.

I posted a more detailed recap of the contents in the Discussions tab.

This review is of the softcover book. I thought a lot about it before writing this.

At first glance, this looks like a good book and value for the money. But the more you look at it, the less quality content there is.

I'll start with the art. At first glance there's a generous amount of art, a full color drawing on almost every other page. But on second glance, most has some strange AI problem. The page 7 pirate is missing her arm. The page 13 pirate's eyebrow grows only her eyelid. The page 19 ship's rigging evokes spiderwebs and clothes lines. The page 22 street lined with buildings has windows of random sizes, some of which just fade away. In so many cases, if you think you like the art, don't look at it again. There are no artists details or flourishes to be found, only something from a bad dream.

For a while I thought, well, AI has opened the gates so that someone with good ideas but no art skills (or budget to pay artists) can still publish a book. Isn't that a good thing?

But the book isn't very good. It's not bad, either. It's $20 of meh.

Page 28 adventure: "The players are approached by a group of bounty hunters who are seeking to collect on a large reward for the capture of a notorious pirate captain. The players must track down and capture the pirate, while avoiding their crew and potential traps. Along the way, they may need to forge alliances with rival pirate crews or deal with corrupt officials who are willing to look the other way for the right price."

Even for a pirate book, this is the watery flavor of an adventure. The target pirate isn't described. The rival pirate crews aren't described, nor the corrupt officials. Why is the pirate a target? Where's he hiding? Is he alone? What's the twist? None of that's in here. It's 12% of a plan, it's barely even a concept.

Though there are many, many adventure concepts like this in the book, is it worth $20?

The barrier to writing a book is lower because AI can pad out the text, and perhaps even generate bland ideas like these. But will a library of books like this be worth it?

Will books like this crowd out publishers who have fewer illustrations, fewer adventures, and a lower page count because they refined their work?

I was on the fence about AI before this, but now I hope DTRPG requires publishers to tag works with AI so that they don't crowd out the quality and original material I'm looking for.

This isn't a must-have, but it's just what it says it is, and quite thorough. It's a lot of fun, actually, all of the permutations of things a PC might be transmuted into, and how long it might last.

BONUS: If you'd like to terrify PCs on their way into a tomb, scatter a few of these statues (and other types of transformationed characters) around as warnings.

All of the Story Design guides help me find the key story beats for my adventure, broken down into act I, act II, and act III. I find preparing with some points in mind doesn't limit player agency and heightens the tension and reward.

I bought all these in a bundle and they're quick and handy references. The price is right either way.

Chase could have been a little more concise (14 pages could have been 7), but the reminders are useful for setting up a subplot and resources that change the direction in the second act.

The PDF has 16 cards with 16 unique urban chase complications. There's a companion deck you can buy separately for rural chases. Overall, I'm glad to have this to use, but based on this I won't buy the rural deck. It just feels average and this didn't raise the bar compared to other decks for Savage Worlds chases.

Ideas: There are 16 unique chase complications. Most are average (dodge the cart at -2 or be bumped), but I think any GM can bring them to life in a fun way. A couple are really fun and will spice up your chase.

Presentation: The art on each card is a unique, true, but the art is a really poor quality top-down 3D render view of streets and rooftops, and they seem the same. The typeface on the cards is something like bad handwriting, making you slow down to read them. If it weren't for the borders, you might be able to put down the cards to form an actual chase map of the area. I wish the art were more colorful or perhaps more bold and cartoonish.

The PDF has the card back on one page, the card face on the next page, and so forth. If you're going to print them at home this is going to be a lot more work to cut out. If you're going to upload to a VTT, you'll have to extract each card illustration and upload them. It might have been nice to get a folder full of PNGs. And they don't have rounded corners, so they won't look very good online.

I play 50 Fathoms, SWADE, and I'm adding Buccaneer's ships and naval combat rules to my games. Finally ship combat rules that are fluid, tactical, and as personal as the players.

In Buccaneer, ships have skills linked to attributes, and hindrances and edges. A ship with a superior (d8) rigging attribute might take rigging-based skills like Pursue and Run Silent, while a ship with d10 tonnage might take skills like Boarding and Ramming. Now add an edge like "Helmsman's Dream" and a hindrance like "Fire Trap".

If your players want a unique ship that will call for unique battle tactics, Buccaneer has it. SWADE and 50F are pretty generic in this regard, and PotSM is more a system of vehicle movement with acceleration and turning arcs. IMO this has more drama.

Battles are theater of the mind: The captain calls out orders, and crew tries to execute them AND take heroic (normal PC) actions. You're making skill rolls, so learning and playing this is fast. It adds hit location, like gritty damage, to every shot.

The combined result really delivers a naval battle feeling in a fun and furious way. If that's all you take from this book, it's money well-spent.

The book is huge (305 pages), rich with setting lore, edges, and character archetypes, and at least two other major features: A voodoo magic system (10 pages), with trappings and spells to feel utterly unique, and an adventure generator (28 pages), which generates adventures with a hook, classic challenges, and then escalating problems, a plot twist, and a reward. I haven't played using either yet but plan to fold them into my 50F campaign.

Four stars instead of five because it really needed an editor.

• The sloop on page 123 has "prow" as a stat. In the Ship section, it's not mentioned once in 15 ship examples.
• The rules for attributes like Mastery and orders (skills) like Broadside are unclear when the ship takes Mastery damage.
• The ships on page 110 have a "damage" stat, ranging from 1 to 2. It takes some digging to determine that this is the number of hit location cards the guns draw, and it's based on the number of guns, not the size of guns.
• It really could have used summary tables for player skills, ship orders, edges, and hindrances.

This is nice to have but of average quality. It might suit your game perfectly. The Arcane template is the best, with circles of intricate symbols and layers of swirling energy.

Elemental magic is a pretty common trapping, in my view, and while this has fire and ice I wish it also had earth and air (unless you count lightning as air). On the other hand, this has other trappings that are less common and might be hard to find elsewhere.

It would have been great to have insects or some kind of swarm of particles.

This is a PDF, so there are no transparent elements. This could have been really fun with layers and swirls of mixed transparency for use in VTTs.

Since this is designed for printing and cutting, it would have been nice to print some of the AoE rules on the backs of the templates... If evadable, roll Agility -2. If prone, AoE damage -4. For 2 pts, avoid allies. Etc.

I haven't run a chase with this deck yet, but it's exactly what I was looking for. The obstacles are FUN, each with some options to play it. Having possible solutions spelled out makes it FAST to play. Finally, I can run chases that are not a slog of figuring rules, thinking up obstacles on the fly, and winging rules. This makes it work for me.

It comes with rules for a three or five card chase (or more), and a simple rule system. You can use these cards with SWD or SWADE rules, but the rules here strip out bumps and boarding and other complexity to give you a quick and easy chase; they look solid to me. (But I haven't tried them in play yet.)

About 18 of the cards are duplicates, but that's still a lot of variety.

As an action deck, it works, but I prefer action decks that have a 1-52 number to save that 1-second "Is is diamonds or spades that goes first" question.

The product description says you can take out the 24 vehicle cards to form a mini deck, but those cards aren't identified, so you'll have to figure this out for yourself.

Four stars! Worth every cent.

Five stars for the names. They're terrific and often memorable. The first 95 are in alphabetical order by first name.

I wish the names could easily be copied and pasted into other apps, and I wish they were grouped by ethnicity so I could quickly find a Spanish pirate name. But this is FUN as-is.

For me, this program's weakness is also its superpower. You've seen the examples so you know the maps you can create are only going to look good but never great. Here's why that was a huge help to me:

I'd been struggling to draw a map for a long time, starting, stopping, restarting, procrastinating. I had kind of a writer's block because no matter what I did, the map didn't measure up to my standards. When I bought Hex Kit its best looking map was below my standards and suddenly I stopped worrying about the texture and shadow of moutains. I simply felt free to just sketch in the mountains, rivers, and other features to communicate the important information. I was done in about half an hour and it was honestly exactly all I needed. My players loved it. I got back to running my campaign. And everyone said the map looked great!

I love the way it randomizes different textures for a given terrain type, with just enough variety in desert or water or whatever to make it look interesting.

Features I wish it had:

• Horizontal hexes (flat on top)
• Grids
• Thinner (or no) hex lines
• When dragging a cliff or coast line, instead of putting up a random tile, orient the new tile to connect to the previous tile, so I can just drag along the line. (You can rotate tiles with right-click but this means about 3 clicks per tile placed.)

But mostly, Hex Kit lets you set aside becoming an artist/cartographer and quickly point and click your way to a map that tells your players where everything is and how dangerous it will be to get there. Now get back to running your campaign.

I'm on the hunt again for a new map program that will work better with VTTs and produce better looking maps, but this will stay in my toolbox for the times I have mappers block.

The writing is fun and engaging, doesn't feel padded out, and is about 10 pages. The art and format are solid: four stars.

I think this might be useful to someone who has not played before, as a first step, but it lacked the coverage (all the aspects you should consider) and the process (how to come up with them) on character creation I was looking for, and also didn't have enough specifics on how to play in terms of connecting with the campaign and other players. Etiquette was covered, but only lightly.

Passages like this are fun to read, but what's the real advice here?

When you see two roads that diverge in the woods, you can take the road everybody uses (the brash instigator), take the one less traveled (strong and silent), or you can forge your own goddamn path (the oddity). As long as it's done with a sense of greater purpose and iron will, thou shall be thy own fucking boss!

Overall, an average but entertaining purchase and read. Three stars.

Now that the new rules (SWADE) are out, this hardly needs a review. It's the verision that got me into Savage Worlds and we loved it. At $10, it's still an affordable way to try it out, or to get books with mostly the same skills and edges so you players can have them handy. And there are plenty of adventures available this this. Compatibility is high.