Who would hire this bunch of frat boys? was my early impression, and ultimately, the chatty style fills up paragraphs without illuminating the setting much. A reasonable bulking-out of UPP stats for a world that doesn't have a lot of obvious adventuring potential or reason to exist. A couple of pieces of equipment are interesting, such as the multi-caliber revolver and personal survival unit.

At half the price and on a regular schedule, it might have been a helpful sort of a series.

This is not the first (nor second) time that I've seen that cover art, which has nothing to do with the contents, unless those guys are the crew of the "Avenger".

I have the impression the author was of two minds whether to write this as a Hard SF or Space Opera supplement, so, unusually enough, he's provided plenty of high-quality support for both. Combines wit, danger and some interesting background ideas. As my fellow reviewer mentioned, it doesn't seem difficult to adapt to another setting.

This is a bit of a mess. An incident about midway sums it up nicely: the players are on a railroad and it's not going anywhere good. After some quite lethal and ultimately pointless messing about with subs, trains and indestructible plot devices, a couple of NPCs commence chewing the scenery and negating the PCs' actions, until they jump to hyperspace with the Death Star plans, or something. I think the author may have had a different, more interesting story in mind, but I can only go by what was published. Likewise, the Loyal Sector Guard and Chimera are quite useful ideas in themselves and worthy to follow the much better Into the Glimmer Drift, though their subtlety is not brought out here.

Taking the various bizarre assumptions of D&D absolutely literally and trying to devise logical explanations for them is something many of us might have done from time to time. This effort may well reward reading with a few novel campaign ideas.

Assignment of Loki to Lawful Evil and Tyr to Chaotic Evil seems .. unorthodox.

The OGL section 15 for each product I've seen in this series is incorrect. This is important, apart from anything else, because it fails to give due credit to the designers for their hard work that the author is using free of charge.

This parallel development of the general idea of planar ant-people all seems carefully worked out. I have to wonder about the usefulness of a regional supplement that basically says the only adventure PCs will find in this place is trying to leave, and the inhabitants have no obvious reason to want to stop them.

A detailed local setting with some very nice Harn-ish maps supplements a military outcome that seems almost entirely scripted (unless the party does something spectacularly stupid, which can't be ruled out) and an unremarkable hack through a complex garrisoned by various humanoids, picking up the typical letters from the next few bad guys in the series. I can't help thinking the NPCs seem to earn more glory and interest than the players at a couple of points.

Good-looking, slow-building investigation into rumors and hints of a lost ship across a border region of minor planets and local powers, ending in a particularly hairy situation amid a rebellion on a harsh backwater world. The hook is believably low-key while still likely to leave astute players, or those who built their characters for such connections, with little doubt they're getting into something political.

For a good-sized campaign, you'll probably want a few other sources for things to do as the characters wander around trading and asking questions, rather than just feeding them the plot scenes in order.

Seedy ports, dodgy employers, malfunctioning ships, semi-sane robots and dangerous cargo provide more than enough in this series of encounters to make players paranoid about ever again leaving their nice safe planet. These free-trading scenarios call for a lot of fast talking and some gunplay if the PCs hope to turn a profit and stay out of jail.

There's not a strong plot to follow or dependence on any locations in the setting. As the authors point out, it should be quite viable to mix and match events in different orders, though the second and third parts each mostly involve one specific source of trouble.

A good sensibly-detailed example of a thieves' tavern supporting a modest guild - or just a place for a cheap meal and room, if the PCs know how to take care of themselves. Several low-level adventure hooks are given but mostly it's a dependable building block for a campaign.

Obviously very strongly influenced by, if not centred on, a movie current at the time, but that's OK, "The Village" is a fruitful starting point and this game uses its lessons well. The game has only a single, very simple but viciously effective dice mechanic, ideal for the story that it tells - really a neat example of design.

Probably this will prove most useful as a toolkit of different concepts and descriptive snippets of Mythos magic, and for what looks like a sensible and needful revision of spellcasting. Includes a few more Contact spells, benefits for visiting strange places or maintaining a place of power which were new and useful to me, and an inspired extended example.

For its size, this small location provides quite a few complexities, surprises and points of visual interest. Nice compact design with few random or inane elements.

The layout is clear and well set out to run a game, with the exception of encounter 6 unfortunately, for which the map and description are not up to the task, though it's not too difficult to figure out what was intended.

I'm a little surprised that some people have bought both this and the Rooms 1-7 releases, as they are only the individual encounters from this adventure (not great value for money, I would have thought).

I could take issue with some of the editing (change shelf - a fearsome spell indeed), dimensions of the tower and exactly what breed of creature the villain is supposed to be, but for the price, it delivers very much what the description promised, with some degree of subtlety.

Details make this interesting: the vampire's agent, the rope maker, the swine-races. Many of the temples are worth a look as well. It looks as if the authors had fun with this, so good luck to them, but on the whole most GMs (and many random generators) can come up with this sort of stuff. Editing is distractingly bad.

Alien Racial Levels are an interesting mechanic to add extra traits at the expense of abilities that the character might get from a typical class. Otherwise, not great for the price asked, dealing mostly with rubber-forehead aliens with hit-and-miss trait balance, a sketchy cultural system (split between the main text and an Appendix for unclear reasons) and some line art. The cover is, unfortunately, a good indication.