Another great work from James Desborough! I was very impressed with his 100 Horror Adventure Seeds book, and this is another winner! Each entry begins with a Description, which sets the scene for you. Next comes the Horror explains the nature of the supernatural creature or circumstances surrounding the scene. The Layout section offers a glimpse of how the setting is arranged. Finally, each entry has three Stories, for how to get the action started.

I want to stress that, as with 100 Horror Adventure Seeds, this book puts the onus of the work on you, the GM. You won't find stats for the monsters or maps of the sites here. The work is very system-neutral and easily adapted to nearly any setting. The Layout portion gives just enough info that a skilled GM could run it off the cuff, yet provides enough detail that those wanting to draw their own map should have no trouble doing so.

The entries are quite varied, and though most all are meant for the modern world, an imaginative GM should have no trouble adapting them to almost any setting.

Frankly I was a little disappointed. I was hoping for some clever new locales that would inspire me to greater heights in my Call of Cthulhu campaign, and instead what I got was a pastiche of old Lovecraftian locales clearly discernible under a thin coating of revised description. Heck, one, "Dark Carnival" even used the name of a Chaosium Adventure for Call of Cthulhu likewise set in an evil carnival.

There were several useful ideas in the book, but all in all, I'm not sure it was worth the price. Had it had even a few line drawings of the locales, the worth of the book would have been beyond dispute. Alas, there were none. Even more annoying than the usual horrific grammar, punctuation and spelling errors I've come to expect from Postmortem Studios, was the total cop-out of some of the locales. Really? You're presenting DARFUR as a location for a modern horror campaign, and "the horror here is man's inhumanity to man?" I think we all get that Darfur is one screwed up place where a lot of people are suffering because of human greed and evil, but it's not the sort of thing that is implied by the subtitle "A Modern Horror Roleplaying Sourcebook." In fact there are several locations here where the deadly phrase beginning with "the horror here..." is employed to serve notice to the reader that the "horror" will be something like "being isolated," or "being faced with starvation." Come on, Postmortem, I can get that from the local newspaper; what I wanted from you was, you know, HORROR stuff....

As I said, I was a tad disappointed by these issues. However, having said that, there are several locations which are not previously done much better by other companies (Chaosium's "The Mountains of Madness" for example in preference to the author's pastiche of Lovecraft's theme) or are not cop-outs in terms of actual horrors that might be very interesting to work with. One, "Sideways Street," in fact, provides an excellent germ for some very interesting role-playing, though again it lacks somewhat in originality since it seems to be reflective of "Diagonally" in the Harry Potter series, with a bit of the shops from "A Mysterious Pentad" and some of Clive Barker's work thrown in.

If you have a spare $7.50 floating around that you simply can't find any use for, then use it to buy this book. Otherwise, pass on to something more fleshed out and complete to work with.