Bad news: Your characters are all dead. Good news: That's the beginning of the game.

This is an early game in the Total Party Skills series and it feels very experimental. It's a good experiment however. The idea of playing ghost has been done in games before, but the Shadow Zone series has a bit of a different approach.

What do I mean by that? First of all the game is set in the 1970s initially although the author admits that you could play with that date and it not have a huge effect on overall game. It also has a very pulpy feel in the way it presents the horror.

Your characters are ghosts, but there are still stakes to the play. It is very possible for them to be reduced to spiritual wisps by being broken in mind and spirit. The adversaries and allies they will be confronted with are not obviously one or the other. There is a lot of room for a game master to define and shore-up the sandbox that they are initially presented with.

There are some very neat ideas in here that I haven't seen in other games where you play ghosts. For example there are a lot of ghost and spiritual residue from dead animals and dinosaurs and things of that ilk. There is also a bleed over effect from various afterlives and agendas that entities and creatures from those planes might have.

Since the subject of sandbox play was brought up in another review here I thought I would address it. This game is absolutely a sandbox game. The game assumes that the game master will develop their own NPCS for the large part and also the scenarios and agendas typically by orienting them towards the things that were going on in the lives of their player characters before they died.

Later in trees in the rest of this book, since it is a compilation, we'll provide more NPCs, adventure support, and factions to aid with this. The game doesn't present any more of a challenge than any other game that doesn't have a flotilla of modules connected to it. The author does a good job in setting forth large setting bits that hopefully provide food for thought in creating your own adventures as a game master.

To start off with, I gave this product a middling score. This is not to imply that it is a bad product or that I didn't like it. I want to like it. In parts I like it very much. But it also isn't what I was looking for when I bought it and I will probably never use it.

I do like that the author provides a rules summary at the end of chapter two. I deperately needed it at that point. I also like that it starts by guiding us through character creation. I dislike that it takes another fifty-three pages until you find out why there is an "item" column in the table with suggested destinies. I dislike that the pdf seems to laid out seemingly to be viewed on a mobile phone screen. And I dislike how the settings information and rules content are intermingled until I have a hell of a time finding anything.

I think that is also my biggest issue, the lack of a clear structure to work from. And that to me makes it more of a book to read and discover things in rather than a game to be played.

The setting itself is presented too shallowly for my taste. It says it's a sandbox and boy is that true! There is a lot of building to do. It covers a lot of ground in very broad strokes and would have wished for what other sandbox games often provide - examples that drill down to details and that can serve as seeds for building up around.

That holds true for the Ghost of the Shadow Zone core book. The Secrets of the Lesbian Illuminati provides such detail and even a short adventure outline for that title-giving group. Shame I don't have the right group that would appreciate this faction.

The next sourcebook in the bundle - The Young And Restless Dead - introduces four new factions, a short adventure outline and a hook for a media-centric plot.

Then we get to The Ancient AEgyptian Spellbook, new rules for various kinds of magic and spells.

And finally SCIENCE of the SPHINX - a book on Ancient Aliens whose main purpose seems to be to serve as a tie to the author's other games.

Overall, it's not a bad bundle and I had fun reading it and it has me eyeing the author's other books to read for fun, but it's just not a game that I would want to play.