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First, disclosure to give you some perspective on my review: I don't have any of the other campaign planners (yet). For the moment, I'm assuming those have similar forms that cover other areas of campaign planning, so I won't complain about missing essential forms. I do, however, have some other campaign form products and view the category of "DM campaign forms" to be fairly competitive. Not only are there other campaign form products around, but they must clearly outclass any home-brewed system a DM uses.
The forms do have a few entries that spark the imagination, but I would prefer them to be on a "reference card of things to think about" form instead of taking up valuable space on other forms. This is particularly a problem with many of the checkboxes on the forms. Is every dungeon hazard a slime, mold, fungi, or fog? Instead of adding an "other" checkbox to these, it would be better to list them on a reference card as types of dungeon hazards and leave a line for the DM to enter the hazard type. Is flammable gas a fog? What about stale air? How is the type different from the name of the hazard?
The organization of the forms and their entries is key to the success of a campaign form product, and while there are a wide variety of forms I'm not sure that most of them are comprehensive about their topic. Some forms like the trade route and plane description forms seem to have good coverage, but others don't. For example, the "other character class" form doesn't have entries for the base attack bonus or save progressions.
In addition, there doesn't seem to be a good organization to the forms in general, which would really help a DM to find information quickly. Maybe there was a "form organization" map in Campaign Planner 1, but if so there's no mention of where the forms in CP2 fit in. Some instructions on how to store and access the forms would help a DM to organize them and access them more effectively. For that matter, instructions for how to use the forms would have been helpful. The session event tracker form has good instructions, but it's one of the few.
Some of the forms were quite good -- the campaign outline forces you to really focus your purpose and the things you want to include on one page, which should help your campaign stay focused and more fun. It should also help you avoid over-designing your campaign. It also has backup forms to further describe the important events and the climax, which really help you flesh out the important areas on their own forms. It would have been nice if more of the forms had that kind of quality support and clear organization.<br><br>
<b>LIKED</b>: Some good forms and ideas.<br><br><b>DISLIKED</b>: The organization wasn't really good -- although I'll use a few forms directly and the others for inspiration, in general they're not organized and effective enough to be utilized wholesale.<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Acceptable<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Satisfied<br>
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