This is a great addition to 5th ed that mixes just the right amounts of seriousness, fun, and useful game mechanics. A great option for anyone looking for an alternate warlock patron who doesn't take things too seriously... except Mondays and lasagna.

This is a great addition to the bard's portfolio, especially if your campaign leans more towards the late medieval / high romance or Renaissance periods, or even later. Bards don't always sit around strumming Saxon lutes, so it's great to flesh out what a bard in later centuries might do. The "Capture Soul" ability reads fantastically; it may require some narrative flexibility but I can see using it on both PCs and villains!

Non-spoiler review: I was a kickstarter backer and rode the long wait for this game to see the light of day, and it was absolutely worth it. This is one of the best story-driven RPGs I've ever ran. The book recommends swapping GMs for the 4 parts, but I ended up running the whole thing for my group based on how we play (long 10-hour sessions once every three months), and it worked out really well - we're a seasoned group of CoC players and had a blast with this game.

The less the players know about this game going in, the better. There's a big reveal at the end of Act 2 that's best not spoiled, so if you plan on playing in this game, I recommend you don't read the entire book (or any spoilery reviews).

The story / narrative is the game's strongest point. It works perfectly with the fugue system, where you build your characters by having "flashbacks" to remember them doing things - for example, someone might approach you with a knife, and you have a flashback to being a knife fighter - so now "knife fighting" is a skill you have. The flashbacks also serve to help build your character's backstory, and eventually the backstory of the entire group, for a fresh take on the whole idea of bonds and connections.

The conflict resolution system is a modified version of blackjack played with a tarot deck. It works pretty well, especially once you're used to it - the game recommends using the imagery on the cards to help narrate what you're doing, but we ended up just kind of making our own stuff up as we went, and it worked out just fine. The first combat is designed to get everyone up to speed on how it works, but I highly recommend the GM run some mock combats before the first session to famliarize themselves with how it works.

All in all, Alas Vegas is a stunning self-contained game with a heck of a narrative punch. My group ran it in two 10-hour sessions. I highly recommend this game for a unique, one-or-two-or-four-off game that will leave your group talking about it for weeks afterward.

This is my second Dungeons on Demand volume and I'm just as impressed with this outing as I was with the first. The package contains a handful of premade, dungeon-crawly adventures for a variety of levels. The adventures themselves are fantastic- just slot them into your own world and you're good to go. The way the dungeons are constructed allows you to easily steal just an encounter or a cool section to use if you'd like.

I've used bits and pieces from both volumes now, and plan to run the low-level adventure for a group of newbies at my office soon.

Highly recommended - great content, great presentation, useful and inspiring as RPG products should be.

Full disclosure: I was a D6 x D6 Kickstarter backer, and have had more time with this system than the wider public.

D6 x D6 accomplishes what it sets out to do beautifully: it's a simple but strong system that can easily be adapted to any setting, with basic conflict resolution mechanics that feel designed to keep the story moving. The closest analogues are to something between Robin Laws' Drama System, in that occupations and skills are dependent on the individual game setting; and World, which keeps the focus on fast and fun narration. Players don't have as much agency as in World, and the rules are a little more dice-oriented, but the speed of play keeps the story rocking and rolling.

Character creation is simple: choose one primary attribute, choose an occupation, and choose Focused skills and Unfocused skills. Focused skills are skills the character knows, and unfocused skills are skills the character is in the process of learning. The more Focused skills you have, the higher your Focus number - which is the main number you compare die rolls against. The trick is, you generally want a lower Focus number, so becoming a "jack of all trades" with a lot of Focus skills means you're going to have a harder time accomplishing tasks than if you were super-specialized in one or two skills, but, you have the opportunity to use your Focus skills more often, so there's some risk-reward in character creation.

It also serves as a built-in safeguard against power gaming. :)

Gameplay is generally fast and fluid. The combat rules can seem a little bogged down with details - I suspect because they're designed to allow for the use of miniatures and maps, which introduces all the little wargamery nuances that systems like *World do away with in favor of keeping things moving along. However D6 X D6 strikes a good balance between mechanics and narration, and if you're like me, you can simply ignore the mechanics that don't work for your particular group.

I found the layout to be logical and the rules quickly explained in a way that makes sense. You're not going to do a lot of flipping around looking for things. The art isn't AAA-quality, but I've seen far worse on Kickstarters that made 10x the amount that D6 X D6 did. It does offer a nice, wide range of cross-genre images, clearly designed to inspire GMs (or Game Hosts, in D6's terminology) to experiment with different settings.

Lester Smith has created a solid, universal system that can withstand pretty much anything you throw at it. Recommended.