Although I really enjoyed d20 Modern's attribute-based character creation rules, they did exacerbate the preparation problem that all d20-era games had, that it was difficult to quickly create adversary NPCs or villains for the players to face. The Foe Factory attempts to address this while still acknowledging the complicated nature of a lot of d20 Modern systems.

Foe Factory's approach is to focus specifically on things that will be rolled against the player characters, like initiative, attack bonuses, and equipment. The idea is that rather than a full set of stats, what you need is a clear picture of the level of challenge the NPC poses to the PCs.

It jumps right into the technical details with several pages of tables, followed by rules for adjusting NPCs created with the tables to the challenge level desired. The end has several sample characters.

As always with Adamant, the quality of the PDF is high. It's in landscape format, well-edited, and easy to follow. There are no bookmarks, but the length of the work isn't such that they're really needed.

I question whether a PDF is the right format for something like this. This sort of product seems ideal for a foe creation program in Flash or other simple programming language.

Another area of improvement that might be useful is in figuring out what challenge levels to "feed into" the Foe Factory. In other words, how do I decide how tough a particular encounter should be? Some insights or ideas regarding that subject would really elevate this solid work above the pack.

But it is solid and it provides an approach to NPC creation in D20 Modern that's beyond "winging it". If you're looking for that, this is probably the best thing out there.

I'll keep it short. I really liked this product very much, when you consider how long it can take to roll-up npc's for d20 Modern, this is a really good way of doing so quickly.

I have been getting a great deal of use out of this product since i purchased it.

Nice product. Foe Factory (FF) takes the NPC creation rules from Spycraft 2.0 and brings them to d20 modern. The NPC rules from Spycraft 2.0 was in my opinion the shining jewel of the entire book. What has kept me from d20 modern in the past is the NPC creation times could be time consuming. Well now with Foe Factory that time will be cut significantly. So how does it stack up?

The Good: The price is well worth the product. Four bucks gets you about 18 pages. With it you are able to create a wide variety of NPCs from zombies to thugs to harpies. Most important you can create them fast. What else is great is that you can create generic NPCs (ie. Terrorists, bodyguards) and you never have to add levels or to them to be a challenge as the player characters gain power. The system is that great. What's more this product should be able to be used in most of the d20 modern series (d20 past, d20 future, etc)

The Bad: Like mentioned earlier FF is porting over the Sycraft 2.0 NPC rules to d20 modern. It's not a 100% clean conversion. I suspect that NPCs using this document might be a little underpowered when compared to standard d20 modern NPCs. This is due to some rule differences between d20 modern and Spycraft 2.0. Granted I have not been able to playtest this theory yet. Another nitpick is a lot of theNPC options from Spycraft 2 didn't make the port over, and I'm not exactly sure why.

The Ugly: There appears to be no way to make magic using NPCs with this system.

Conclusion: FF is a great product for all the reasons listed above. The nitpicks I listed I would say are small roadbumps rather than product killing flaws.