As someone who's been playing with the CARDINAL game system since Ironclaw's first edition, this book is bad. Very, very bad. There are a number of not only techncial issues, but typographical and continuity errors. Let's dig into some examples:

The Technical

pg. 744/18 - The Tazekar career seems to have at one point been the Munjam career, but they never removed references to it. In addition, the gift of "Tazekar's Way" does not exist, but "Tazekar's Path", does.

pg. 747/21 - The Alchemy gift references the "Chemistry" gift, which does not appear in any of their books.

pg. 754/28 - A vast majority of the black powder artillery, such as the cannons and abus, lack Spark dice. One can argue that they don't need them, but why does the mortar have it in that case?

pg.820/94 - The X-Card, created by John Stavropoulos is included in this section, but is not credited to him per the X-Card's publishing under its Creative Commons License, which is a massive omission.

The Typographical

pg.764/38 - The entry for the Libertalian Lodge unexpectedly cuts off. The text reads: "Calabrese merchant companies pooled their resources " and then just hard stops. This is not a scanning error, because the next paragraph section picks up on the Governor's Palace and is spaced appropriately as if that really was the end of the section.

pgs.766 and 768 (pgs.40 and 42) - In what has to be the laziest thing I've seen, the entirety of the text for Sultana Yonca I and the Palace of the Sultana has been copy-pasted from one section to the next. Both paragraphs read the exact same and we have no clarification on what the palace actually looks like. As an aside, what is up with that bizarre shift of tone between the entries for Sultana Yonca I and Sultana Mariam?

The Continuity

all - It is very clear that the authors of these entries did not communicate with one another and wrote their entires sight-unseen to the map published in the Book of Jade (BoJ). Cases in point:

pg.757 and 759 (pgs.31 and 33) - The authorship, for reasons unknown, renamed Fayadeen (its name in the BoJ) to the Corsair Island, which they fully admit to being confusing as Calabria already has a Corsair Island. Compounding this issue, the authors choose to use words "Pirate" and "Corsair" interchangably, despite the Pirate Coast and the Corsair Islands being geographically distinct regions. In references to Anatolia, I cannot, for the life of me, figure out if they're referring to the westernmost part of Akoma or the southernmost part.

pg.759/33 - "Leaving from Fayadeen, their flotilla migrated slowly along the southern coast of Zhongguo, finding no such land in which they could settle until they crossed the sea and landed in Akoma" Fayadeen is not listed in this book, but it is in the BoJ, and it's analogous to the aforementioned "Corsair Island" here. In order for this to be correct, they would have had to gone from Fayadeen, eastwards around Yindustan, continued along Zhongguo's southern coast, past Calabria, and then landed in Akoma having circumnavigated the known world. An easier method would have to just go slightly north-west and land in Akoma at the (presumed) location of Bandar e Lengeh. This text insinuates that Zhongguo and Akoma are separated by a large body of water, but they're not. The easternmost part of Akoma butts up against the Zhongguo's westernmost provinces. Double bonus points of their capital city of Lygos not being important enough to put on the map.

pg.764/38 - Boats docking at Bazargani don't want to wait instead go to Bandar e Lengeh. We don't know where Bandar e Lengeh based on the map in this book, but if we look at BoJ, we see that Bandar e Lengeh is on the south-westernmost tip of Akoma; about 370 miles away from Bazargani's location on the map of Akoma. Quite a trip to cut the line.

pg. 765/39 - Tearspring is said to be at a river estuary in the north, but is actually located on a southern island on the opposite side of the country.

In Sum

This is just a bad book. For $15.00 you can purchase something else, like a splatbook from a different publisher, or a pizza. Having read this book I can safely say that I question if Sanguine uses proofreaders or even just re-reads their own material to ensure that it is free of grammatical, spelling and continuity errors. But the amount of omissions, lazy copy-paste jobs and poor editing that seems to have been slowly plaguing Sanguine recently, is apparent in this book from the get-go. A decline in quality this sharp means that this publisher has lost my business moving forwards. I simply cannot trust them to put out a quality product, let alone a mediocre one. To drive home the stake through the heart of this garbage book? There is a post on their official forums listing many of the errors above (and additional ones as well that I omitted for the sake of brevity) asking for Errata that has gone unanswered for over a year. If this doesn't show that Sanguine no longer cares about the quality of their work, I don't know what will.

Un super extension, qui montre un nouveau continent et offre des tonnes de nouvelles possibilités pour créer des campagnes dans ce super jeu !

(A super expansion, showing a new continent and offering lots of new opportunity to make new campaign for this grat game !)

So, it's a really neat setting to see in the world of Ironclaw. I haven't played Ironclaw all that much at this point, but wanted to give a bit of the good and bad as well that I've noticed. I won't really have anything to say much on the mechanics of the system as I haven't really been able to try it out much at all. The games I'm involved in currently is actually using the Pathfinder system but with Ironclaw as the world. So most of my pros/cons are going to be about the non-mechanic portions of the book.

Pros:

• Fairly expansive world and explanation of cultures both new and old.
• Many new species and careers to choose from.

Cons:

• There are numerous issues of consistency present in this book.
• Several of the marked locations of cities in the text don't match up at all with what's on the map (p.756). The map of Akoma is woefully under-developed as major cities aren't even listed on there. Some examples of things missing from the map that really need to be there or listed things in the wrong place. These include: Bazargani, Bandar e Lengeh, Tearspring, Lygos, and I have no idea where Anatolia is "actually" supposed to be.
• Numerous landmarks also appear to be put in the wrong place or don't match up between the text in the book and the map of Akoma or are not on the map of Akoma and really should be including: The Blue River, The Longest River, The Abrud, Zekas River, and the positions of the mountains don't all make sense either. Probably more that I'm missing though.
• Several places marked in cities like Bazargani aren't correct either. Like the location of the Palms By Moonlight, or not even having the Emirate Road listed on any map. There are many other places that have issues as well, the problems in Bazargani just stood out more because that's the starting place of the campaign I'm playing in, so I took a more in-depth look at the city.

Reading through the material, it seems like there was a major disconnect between the world of the Nine Tribes and Anatolia.

• The book does a terrible job at organizing the descriptions of places and Tribes in chronological or regional order.
• It's confusing trying to parse where the Nine Tribes actually ended up with a few exceptions.
• The map of Akoma listed in the Jadeclaw book (p.284 or p.566 on the newer printing) seems to be a more accurate depiction of what's actually written in this book.

The book talks about other places that seem to be the same place, but different times. Like, Waliopotea seems to be right where the Kohani lands, but the book makes them seem like they're not at all in the same area. Same thing with Namat. Namat's stated to have been there a good long while, but nowhere else in the book does it mention this. Namat SHOULD be in Sorkareh-controlled lands, but the writing in of Namat isn't listed anywhere else in the book, leaving you to make up your own ideas.

The book just feels like you have a few people writing up a section of the book seperately and then putting it all together without much effort made into making sure they actually fit together in a cohesive world.

So all in all, I can't in good conscience reccommend this book until the numerous problems have been fixed in it. You end up spending more time trying to make up your own work-around to this than using what's actually there. The oversight into making the individual parts fit together in this book is very much lacking and really needs to be addressed and fixed. If you do buy it, wait till it goes on sale and then get it then. You can at least use the book as a reference to re-build the world yourself.

Ah, a new Iron Claw book. More animal people, new landmasses and settings to explore, and new gripes about editing.

It's Iron Claw. If you already like this system this book is worth picking up. It's not as expansive as the Book of Jade and it doesn't expand the players toolbox the same way the Book of Mysteries does, but it adds another 20 species to play with, including more birds and reptiles, and new wave of careers, with the sandout being the bomb-throwing alchemist. However the big draw is the new setting and the new Warfare system. The Warfare system simplified compared to a table top wargame, though whether you want to see that as streamlined or stripped down is up to you. However unless your playgroup is full of armchair generals who want a meaty wargame this will be plenty.

It also adds a new rule that basically boils down to a "Not Cool" card. An option rule that gives each player the power to pause the game when something in it touches a nerve. It's a neat idea, and while in an ideal world people should be able to just talk things out when something in game is making them uncomfortable, it's not hard to imagine where this rule is super helpful. We've all had jokes come out wrong, or unintentionally bring up bad memories or corss lines we didn't know were there.

That's the good: More animals, more items, artillery and warfare rules, and a big new setting.

Now the bad.

First and foremost it has all the usual Sanguine gripes. If you have any of the Iron Claw books you've seen this stuff before, though hopefully with the book still in Beta they'll fix some of them before the full release. Their habit of numbering their expansion pages as if its all one giant book makes PDF navigation a pain (this book's page 1 is number 727). But at least they're consistant there. The big editing issue is the inconsistancy with the keywords on their gifts. Some of the new elemental spells have the wrong elemental keyword in the gift's description but the correct in the attack's description. None of the new elemental spells have the Battle descriptor even though they function like battle gifts (not sure if this is a balance decision or an omission). There's also a lot of random bolding, or bolding that cuts out mid word, though that's a minor cosmetic thing.

That's all cosmetic issues though. If you've read previous Iron Claw books and are thinking about getting another one then you've already accepted these as part of the package.

Mechanically this book is really light on new Gifts. Five new spells, a pair of gifts for artillery crews, a bare-bones bard gift, a bare-bones potion making gift, an animal companion gift, five new spells, a static anti-magical creature gift, a new Blessed Path, and four new atavism gifts. That's it. For players, that's not a lot, especially when compared to the full martial arts systems of Book of Jade or the suits of spells that come out of Book of Mysteries. Now, to be fair, this isn't entirely a bad thing. The number of gifts available in Iron Claw is already staggering and Book of Horn and Ivory explicetly states you should be using stuff from the other books. With that said, it doesn't leave all that much new stuff for Players to dig into.

Also, devlopers, if you're reading this, can you answer me this: What is an Akhal-Teke? There's a gift dedicated to getting/having one and their stats are impressive, but there's no description of what they are. Their Beastary entry is more concerned with the history of the breed and their use in setting than what they look like, and for the life of me I can't find a picture of them in the book. Are they some kind of giant bird? A flying reptile like a terradon? A beetal? some kind of enchanted loaf of bread? I am confused, please help.

Overall I'd recomend this book to Iron Claw Hosts. It adds enough new systems and an expansive new setting to play around in. Already running campaigns could benifit from the warfare system and the rules for artillery crews (all the attention given to cannons makes me want to write up a pirate crew to throw at my players ASAP), while new campaigns have a 3rd region added to the list of choices. To players I'd give a more tepid recomendation. With only a handful of new gifts there isn't the meat that Book of Jade and Book of Mysteries had.