I will begin with Dwarves being my favorite fantasy race, something about the joviality of brotherhood, the weighty seriousness and pursuit of craft speaks to me. And like dwarves, By This Axe pursues the craft of bringing tabletop dwarves to the utmost highest quality. The tome is thorough, concise and extremely evocative of dwarven hero and myth. I'm relatively new to tabletop, so I am sure dwarves have been covered before, however for anyone requiring a lore, a legend and a concrete foundation for dwarves in fantasy, By This Axe is in my opinion a great choice on that basis alone.

While I have given praise to the Lore of By This Axe, like a surly craftsdwarf, I have much greater to speak on the mechanics, and classes, of By this Axe. From Mining, to mushroom farming, highroads, lowroads, almost anything you can think of relating to domains is detailed, and make for a litany of intriguing possibilities for building tall domains (Or deep, depending on how mining goes), with possibilities for some very interesting situations. Like flooding the vault. And my favorite part, the dwarven classes, have been expanded from Players Companion and ACKS core rulebook, with updates for those from both sources. Dwarven Machinist, a Players Companion class, has been upgraded and updated to make better one of the single handedly best player machine building mechanics I have ever seen. The new classes are evocative, interesting and epic feeling enough that I already know several people wishing to start up Dwarf Campaigns just to try them out.

In short, if the mountains are land of myth, legend and mighty deeds, By This Axe presents the Mighty inhabitants of that land in Masterwork Quality.

Delve Deeply and Greedily!

Fast playing, heart pounding actions and great art. Great system for anyone new to a Superhero RPG system.