There's some good worldbuilding & DMing advice here!

But what I was really excited to see in the subject list of Cairn Warden's Guide was the author's approach to diegetic growth - ten pages about it! It's a popular subject in the last few years and one I'd like to make more use of in my games. But reading pages 124-133 leave me no more ready to implement Cairn growth than I was before - maybe somehow less ready? I don't synthesize anything from those examples. I get more insight on how to approach the subject the discussion of non-treasure rewards in the WotC 5e DMG, which is not a book I expected to praise. Looking over logs of our playthrough of Twin Lakes it's not at all apparent where growth might have happened to the characters. (My PC's nasty bond was resolved, but that felt like an extremely arbitrary spur-of-the moment choice by the DM that didn't emerge out of the worldbuilding or the scenario...)

But then, Cairn probably isn't for me. "It is more important for a character to become more interesting than to become more skilled or capable." says this is not the genre of Adventure Game I want to play in or DM in - characters are so fragile and so incompetent that they come up short in agency.

I found this really quite disappointing in play. It may be hard to separate the rules from the adventure from the DM, but did not work at our table with a experienced-player-as-novice-DM. Was it that our DM didn't know how to put the Cairn Principles into action? Or that the adventure was so arbitrary, whimsical, uncued that we were left confused, without agency or understanding, just lawn-mowering through the space until we were anti-climactically "done with the adventure". Oh, that was an evil lich-queen? We couldn't tell. The other witch had a world-ending plot that we accidentally foiled? We couldn't tell. Messing with that thing released a deadly monster? We couldn't tell. That magic artifact saved a life? Total surprise. There was a deadline clock ticking? Not a single hint of that was ever conveyed to us. And, simultaneously, the opposite: oh, somebody left a sign on the arcane mechanism that we could completely read to explain how to use it - who was the sign for? The aliens left murals so we would know the history of the dungeon, even though there felt like continuity / point-of-view issues there.

I found this really quite disappointing in play. It may be hard to separate the rules from the adventure from the DM, but did not work at our table with a experienced-player-as-novice-DM. I was pretty confident it would not fit my expectations for a game I want to run, but I don't think I need to play in it again, either.

There is, at the moment, one five-star review that reads "very original own mechanics." Most of the mechanics aren't original, but are seen in Into the Odd / Electric Bastionland, Knave, Mausritter, etc - it feels more like a bricolage of some NSR mechanics that the author thinks fit together, and if I recall correctly explicitly credits?

This looks to be a cut-and-paste of the author's "the Lost Art of Hexcrawling: Basic", with some minimal substitutions for Shadowdark rules & expected party sizes. And the word "Shadowdark" in the title, to try to draw in a different audience.

There's no indication of what's in the "Advanced" / "Full" version.

A mixed bag, but I'd agree with other reviewers that Blood Magic seems like a very nice implementation of that idea, and the Circle of Ruin use of wildform is even better than the Circle of Stars from Tasha's - maybe ripe to be applied to something other than Entropy? Chronomancy and the Hand of Fate also seem reasonable.

This is a good synthesis of the field & practices, and nice adaptation to 5e mechanics that seems mathematically sound, but like so much that falls into the 5e house style it's overwritten - they wouldn't have the frequent complaints about tiny font size if they'd cut 25% of the material, which feels like what an editor should have done. The art is broadly nice but there's more than is necessary; the layout is good, particularly the use of three flavours of coloured callout boxes.

The reflection & discussion in the worked examples in Appendix II are excellent, but then the example in Appendix III loses all that, spending a dozen pages on something that should have been 4 or maybe 6, without showing the same kind of explanation of development.

Good random tables are great for this kind of sprawling worldbuilding, and some of theirs are quite good - the scope of Titles & Epithets, and maybe the combinatorial complexity of Generic Lore. But Landforms & Structures is tiny? Region Modifiers is ... off-kilter?

A few of their sections don't quite connect for me, and I don't know if it's because they didn't get some kernel of an idea across, or our setting assumptions don't align. What's up with Town Types & Town Buildings? Magical Services seems like a tiny but important section, and maybe more would have been good. We get a warning box that crafting is complicated, and lots of talk about the meta concerns of whether or not to have a crafting system & how to parameterise it. (There are no examples that land for me how complicated it is, but I'd probably grumpily complain if there were that they didn't line up well enough with my sense of verisimilitude, so maybe that's a reasonable choice.)

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?)