Makes Essence go from good to great by adding pretty much a bit of everything: charms, character types, artifacts, spells, martial arts, antagonists, warstriders. I felt the antagonists section was particularly good, adding a lot of variety in a small package. Just a fantastic addition overall.

A small book that really punches above its weight. Covering Freeholds, Entitlements, Tokens, and Mantles, it really expands on the core book and fluffs hope Changeling society and magic in many ways. Strongly recommended if you enjoy Changeling in any forms.

Like pretty much every 2nd edition of the CoD core books, this one is an improvement in many aspects. The setting has been expanded and clarified, new Antagonists are added, and the system made more fun. I particularly like the main powers of the Sin-Eaters, the Haunts, which are all really cool and give a strong bizarre ghost vibe. Excellent book overall.

Just finished the whole clanbook series, and I'm sad in a way you are when you finish a good novel... such amazing mix of stories and mechanics! I'll echo another reviewer to say I hope Covenants one day get the same treatment... would get my money in a heartbeat!

Adding my voice to the choir, but this is an excellent product. The Bloodlines and Devotion really help flesh out the Clan, and are full of plot hooks and character ideas. Stellar work.

Like all CoD 2nd editions, this one refines the core concepts of the game, updates the system, and is overall a greater experience. A very flavourful tome that I greatly enjoyed reading.

An excellent game for a wild variety of supernatural being not previously covered by the Chronicles of Darkness game. My only regret is that it doesn't include a more unified setting inside, but it's solid enough for people to build their own.

This feels like it could have been a great game, but it's more of an outline than anything. The mood and initial premises are great, but everything is described in such broad strokes as to be near useless. It feels like the setting might have been clear in the author's mind, but she forgot or decided against explaining most of it, and we're left with a vague impression. A pity.

This is a fantastic book which expands on every aspect in the core game, and makes Beast a much better-rounded game. Absolutely recommended.

TL;DR: 7th Sea 2nd edition is a strange mix of old and new content which doesn't always work but looks promising.

When you hear 2nd edition for most games, you usually expect a rules update and maybe some small setting adjustments, but 7th sea took a much more radical path. The very land has changed, as we are introduced to a new map (with a whole new country) and briefly told of new continents. Some of it is welcome - many had ponted out in 1st edition how unlikely it was for piracy to become prevalent without a New World of sorts. Other parts are baffling - when you think Swashbuckling Europe, is Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth really one of the top ten countries to come to mind? What about, say, Portugal or the Netherlands ?

Some might point at how a version of Portugal is hinted at in the Explorers Society section - but that's only what it is, hinted at. And the reason why is sadly simple - the major part of the setting section is just a rehash of 1st edition. The authors clearly have many changes in mind - and, now that Pirate Nations has come out, we can see some of these - but weren't bother to include them in the core book. And, I'm sorry to say but this just lazy. On top of this the whole history section of the 1st edition is missing, meaning you get a partially updated, not fully explained setting. A good example is "Anno Veritas", the year 0 of the Thean Calendar, which is mentioned in the introduction - and never explained anywhere. It's easy to guess even for newcomers (it corresponds to the arrival of the First Prophet) but it's still surprising not to find it explained more clearly. I think authors should have started from scratch rather than rebuilding from an edition they're otherwise trying to distance themselves from.

It's far from all bad though - for one, the book is absolutely gorgeous. It's also more inclusive in terms of sexuality and ethnicity, and the new system looks good if a bit quirky. It's just that after a record-breaking kickstarter campaign, I expected better results. Thankfully as more supplements come out I think we will see more clearly the direction the game is intended to take.

The first full-sized sourcebook for Beast: the Primordial (after a solid Ready-made characters one), Night Horrors: Conquering Heroes is a collection of antagonists, but in classic Night Horrors fashion offers detailed, interesting elements for all of them. The book is divided in three parts: first Heroes, the titular characters who hunt Beasts (and are NOT Hunters, as a sidebar reminds us). Then Beasts, most of which have experienced the Inheritance (three types of transformation which usually turn into a Beast into something more suitable for NPCs). And finally, something entirely new - the Insatiables, a new type of creatures who hunt Beasts themselves. Each chapter is made of unique examples, all with interesting backstories and different approaches. A couple of new Heroic Gifts, Numina, and entirely new powers for the Insatiables can be found in there as well.

Beast being a new game, and one in which there is considerable freedom to create characters and antagonists, any new material helps and those many examples serve to enrich the game. I found the Heroes chapter offered different methods for them to hunt Beast, the Beast chapter made the Inheritances clearer, and the Insatiable offered an important new part of the Beast setting. Overall an excellent book which I can only recommend if you found Beast interesting.

Oh, and there's a killer clown.

Having finally read the whole book, I can say with certainty that this is a great product. No this is not a book about Abrahamic demons and angels, this is definitely something different, more in the vein of theMatrix/Dark City/Inception and other sci-fi routines. The authors went for something different, and really committed to it. Reading the book gave me plenty of ideas for games and settings, which I always take as a good sign. If you're not afraid of an original take on the concept of Demon, I recommend this product.

This book is a work of art, a wonderful and disturbing look into the most "alien" of vampires.

The latest in the batch of 2nd edition Chronicles of Darkness games, Promethean: the Created isn't changed as much in this new edition, probably because it was a brand new game to start with (as opposed to Vampire: the Requiem, Werewolf: the Forsaken, and Mage: the Awakening, who all took varying amounts of inspiration from the older World of Darkness games). As such, this book doesn't dramatically alter the game, just tweaks and updates in various places.

On the Lineage front, two are added: the Unfleshed (mechanical and artificial creations) and Extempore (spontaneous Promethean). I never cared much for either before: the Unfleshed feel out of place to me, not being made of corpses, and probably deserve more extensive treatment if not a separate system to descibe them; while the Extempore always boil down to player/storyteller working them out themselves, and would be a better fit as a sidebar. But I assume others will feel differently. The five core lineages are better defined than they were before, and I appreciated in particular the reworked Tammuz.

The Refinements go from five to ten, including all the core ones and the ones published in later books, together with an entirely new one: Phosporum, the refinement of thrill-seekers and mortality. I really enjoyed this latest addition, but all together it means the book has to present seventeen spalts (seven lineages and ten refinements) which take a lot of word count, which I feel perhaps might have been used to better flesh out the rest of the setting.

Mechanics wise, the 2nd edition is as finely tuned as the other CoD games. A few specific Promethean merits were added, all Bestowments were included, and Transmutations received a major overhall, making them more flavorful than previously. I truly appreciate the efforts of the Onyx Path team to have supernatural powers differentiate from the Discipline model (the 1 to 5 dots, buy in sequence kind). Once again though, with 15 Transmutations to cover, the mechanics take a lot of space in the book.

A core promise of this new edition was to make Promethean more approachable, and in this I think the game is a success: the Pilgrimage through which Promethean go to achieve humanity is both more structured and mechanically sound, while the drawbacks are easier to manage - though still significants.

Antagonists receive their own chapter, with a welcome new addition in the form of Alchemists. Pandorans lost the Mockeries which divided them into different pseudo-lineages, perhaps more fitting in theme for divisive creatures but something I regretted. Detailed Firestorm rules are back, and so are the enigmatic qashmallim, a personal favorite.

Finally as in other CoD game a chapter covers settings from different parts of the world. Those are regrettably short, possibly to accomodate for the nomadic life of most Prometheans. But they do point at interesting variations, such as places were Wastelands don't occur as easily, or others where qashmallim appear with surprising regularity.

Overall, this book is a 4 stars for me because it didn't "wow" me in the same way the original did, and I disagreed with some of the choices which were made (the inclusion of the two additional lineages in particular). But this is still a very solid book and one that I will use in my CoD campaign.

A solid new edition of the third Chronicles of Darkness (aka nWoD) game. Like Werewolf: the Forsaken, and Vampire: the Requiem before it, this new edition takes what made the game different from its predecessor and pushes it even further, while making the setting as a whole more colorful and full of game possibilities. The Paths and the Orders feel much more vibrant than before, and the setting as a whole feels enriched by the detailed description of Mage Sight and how it is used to solve mysteries. The five settings offered in the book also include interesting overarching mysteries, providing good campaign fodder. My only regret is the lack of examples NPCs, which feels like something which had to be sacrificed on the altar of the word count gods. But this remains a great product, and one which I read in its entirety in a matter of days.