I suppose any supplement like this has to do some implicit worldbuilding, and there are just enough ideas in here that would never appear in any world I run that I can't expect a table will be useful. Also, needs copy-editing.

This feels like an excellent place to start customising armour for a 5e campaign: it add a bunch of classical / early medieval variant armours, adds damage resistances for particular armour types, adds the ability to soak some damage with shields, in just 3 pages.

It's a bit more complex than the classic OSR Shields Shall Be Shattered, more specific than the array of options in 5e Manual of Arms: Armor & Shields, covers a broader range than A Fantasy Guide to Classical Greece.

This is a cool cookbook for people really early in the worldbuilding / 5e-variant-designing process. Lots of options for how to reinterpret the rules and add a little complexity, or have an underlying base system for you to put the appropriate reskinning on top of for your game.

If I were going to write something like Red Lily's Supplement 1: Armor Overhaul from scratch, I'd go to this after initial brainstorming when it's time to systematise; for my current project I'm more likely to start with the Armor Overhaul, cut it down 20%, then review this to see if there's anything I want to add or rationalise. Useful!

Like the other Olympia modules I've purchased, this reads like an author wants to tell a story, and expects the characters to play predefined roles in it, always doing what they're expected to do. All sorts of relevant details are introduced long after the characters would need to know them to make any use of them - rather, this is what the author assumes will happen, and now we'll tell you why.

Maybe this works for some, but not for me - this version of "the gods chose you" is slightly better than the drek that was Odyssey of the Dragonlords, but not what I want for my table. Given the simple, small, artificial design of the adventure area I'm not left with many ideas to adopt or adapt, either.

It could use a little more development and editing - an incomplete sentence, a trap definition that is unclear, some references to a "usual value" that doesn't seem to be anywhere specified. There are self-contradictions in the plot that have real impact on gameplay & on the ability of the players to find novel solutions.

It also seems to break the minimal mechanics given in Olympia for the trope of having the gods involved, one as "Watcher" and the other as "Hunter", typically somewhat antagonistically. Here the same god is both, and it's really not clear how the author intended that to be interpreted. There are notes at the end that are, again, insufficient to run the module.

It seems like a reasonable starting place for a sketch of rules, but seems to have serious flaws - for example, the movement rates given for galleys are annotated as kilometers per TWELVE hours, but if you start looking into grounded research the numbers I'm finding are much closer to kilometers per HOUR. e.g., "under favorable wind conditions, ancient vessels averaged between 4 and 6 knots over open water, and 3 to 4 knots while working through islands or along coasts." These same sorts of numbers are reflected in earlier RPG supplements - the 1e DMG gives even higher speeds for small galleys. And it fails a gut check - if people walking overland in excellent conditions can make 40km/day, oxcarts can make half that, and ships should be better than overland for transport, why can Maritime's ships not travel at even 1/4th walking speed?

I'm not sure where the author got his numbers, but seeing this wrong makes me doubt all the other numbers. There are also some lacunae where the author seems to have an idea in his head about how a mechanic works but doesn't write down quite enough words to convey that to the reader, or where there's a lack of definition that would help.

For gameplay: ballistae are in every way better than cannons; this is surprising. Cheaper, equal range, more damage, faster firing...

This is a brief reworking of Morten Braten's Xoth to a different ruleset - credit is given in the start of the product, but not on the page here, so I was a bit surprised and disappointed to be buying only a slight variation on something I already own.

The sample adventure does feel S&S, but has some editing / continuity / development issues. I don't grok the mechanics of the USR system well enough yet to judge that aspect. The hook reads like something straight out of a novel, but is a railroad that I wouldn't expect to go over nearly as well with actual humans as with characters in a book - "oh, your purse was stolen! (and all of you only shared a single purse between you?) and you follow the thief and he's dead! and it's obvious that he was killed by the evil priests from the nearby temple! so you're going to go in there, right? because we're playing D&D tonight and that's what's on the menu."

Only when you get to page 70 does the book note that (some of?) the illustrations are AI-generated, which likely would have stopped me from buying it at all.

Not an adventure with any meaningful player agency, from the hook "you were chosen by the god" to the strict series of scenes & events to the unavoidable fall of the city & death of the queen. There is a big chunk of Greek myth trope feel - somebody offends a god & gets punished, the players are the pawns in the game - but that's not the way I'm trying to get the feel to my table. Some humour, some good writing, but generally too many words - particularly in the long read alouds. The author has a story in mind and is letting the players step through roles in it.

A competently put together, usable set of random generation tables, a process for setting up and tracking the work of worldbuilding, simple in-game wilderness exploration procedures - not everything in it is to my taste, but very convenient, and in my virtual toolbox a fallback when I don't have time to use some set of 10x larger and wordier guidelines, or haven't built something custom to my game.

Nice resource! Quite useful, even a little inspirational - overview of social mores, mapping from 5e weapons/armour to Classical history, discussion of the place of classes.

A third of it is the author's sample Classical Greek-expy setting, and at first reading I like it more & consider it more usable than most of the published pseudo-Greek RPG settings I've seen (Theros, Dragonlords, Arkadia, ...)

The worldbuilding is a bit permissive / more kitchen-sink than I want, but the author does write good justifications; the text could use some light editing, but again I was very happy with this overall. The one important thing missing: a bibliography! Where do I go to read more? Where did the author learn all this? (The author explicitly says "this is classical, if you need archaic, do your own research" - but advice as to how would be brilliant! Finding books that are up to date, readable, broad, not overly academic, etc etc is hard work. Wycherley's "How the Greeks Built Cities" is from 1962; is there anything newer in the same vein?)

There are some really cool ideas here, but they are hidden among far, far too many words. It looks like playtesting was just the author + one set of players, which is doesn't really suffice to figure out usability of the text or approachability of the content. Although the author pitches it as sandbox, it starts with a mandatory combat that reads like a TPK, then leads into an overwritten adventure path. Volume 1 feels like it doesn't stand on its own without volume 2, since (like a good sandbox!) there are ties between the locations. If the editor had been a lot more aggressive about trimming the first two volumes might have been combinable, which would make them more attractive. But for now, I don't see this as anything but a source of ideas and the sadness of a missed opportunity; reading 150 pages in (then skimming further) isn't enough to sell this over some other megadungeon or hexcrawl on my shelf.

There seems to be a rule that viking 5e reskins lead with their weakest material - the variant mechanics here need more editing and more playtesting, and like most attempts to add narrative abstraction on top of a D&D base miss the mark for somebody interested in more simulationist or gamist gameplay.

But the class reskins are golden in flavour and, as far as I can tell, in design; I would love to use them instead of the standard 5e classes. This is far far more spirited than adding one subclass here and there and otherwise having the entire smorgasborg of modern fantasy goop.

The magic system rewrite is also quite flavourful, and ties into the new classes in fascinating ways (the most socially acceptable magic-users are berserker subclasses!). I think my players would be a little disappointed at the lack of raw power, but it has the vibes.

The sandbox adventure is a sketch, missing the grounding and detail necessary to run, but is such a good start and doesn't just make a concrete example to embody the worldbuilding but also brings out some really nice - or dark and grimy - themes.

The editing is worst in the new mechanics; there is an egregious error or two in worldbuilding, but nothing else jumped out at me.

I don't know if I'll be able to bring the better pieces of this to the table, but I'll be wishing I could, and if I do find a way I'll be wishing I had it in hardcopy.

Not quite as good as the first one, but far more dangerous - I went out and bought the collected Thieves' World anthologies after reading this, which are not exactly cheap, and really regret having gotten rid of the Companion / curious about looking for the original setting box from Chaosium; from memory (& having started to read the first anthology over the weekend) it seems a bit more to my current taste than the lengthy Lankhmar focus of the first zine. Maybe what I need to do is just extract the prototypes of the factions & major NPCs from the books as a skeleton for building my own city on.

The editorial could again have done with a bit less culture-warring and a bit more argumentation & marshalling of evidence, since I agree even if I dislike the tone. The heist was much more to my taste than the first, and if you need a quick two-session Halloween scenario it's got great vibes. The house rules, subclass, and backgrounds all deserve at least some consideration.

Enjoy!

Much appreciated! This inspired me to seriously consider an urban adventure for the next campaign with at least some heistyness - maybe the Alexandrian's rework of Waterdeep, but likely something more swords & sorcery. I could see using several of the articles, or using them as spurs to develop my own ideas.

I agree with the author's opinions on a lot of 5e and setting flavour, yet wish he'd spent less time and vitriol on them and more time on game-relevant content. The love for Lankhmar shows through, and I liked the reviews; it'd be nice to have more thoughts about selling Lankhmar to modern players without the Appendix N familiarity.

The adventure shows experience running heists and careful attention to detail, but is far too high-magic / anachronistic for my tastes; it feels like it belongs in a Victorian/Edwardian realm, or maybe BitD's Duskvol, not my pseudo-medieval low fantasy.

Could have used an editing pass for clarity, precision, brevity.

When the document said it was about non-hexcrawl maps, I was expecting pointcrawl / pathcrawl, or pure maps, but what we get instead are totally-scale-free "areas" which are a little more divorced from actual concerns of time and distance than I'm keen to play with.

Uses a settled lands / wilderness dichotomy; I personally find the civilised / borderlands / wilderness three-stage division works well for world-building even if it's not quite as apparent in play.

Overwritten, random collection of ideas which are variously trite or underdeveloped. Claims to be about exploration but full of player-authored worldbuilding which undercuts that pillar. Makes grandiose claims that it doesn't deliver on - "Connections create goals", but they aren't goals, they're post-facto NPCs.

We could use a dozen pages of discussion of world design around Zones - we get one-half page that's oversimplified & doesn't integrate well with everything that follows. Then we get something like six pages of "Travel Roles", which there are already many implementations of for 5e; it's not clear how this one stands out from the others.

It reintroduces skill challenges, which took a lot of discussion and examples to make work well in 4e, but doesn't do that work. There's a bit of "extraordinary actions" that seem unrelated to everything else in the document.

Filler text "in character", meant to be humorous, particularly with a heavy-handed accent, makes me wish I could give 0 stars.