Another excellent little adventure for Thrilling Tales. (Spoiler Alert!) This one takes place on a movie set in Monument Valley, but everything is not as it seems. The Players get to participate in filming a movie, stopping a (real) stampede and laying the vengeful mummy of an Aztec priest, all the while interacting with famous Actors and Actresses. There are lots of opportunities here for action and adventure, both real and cinematic, and some excellent opportunities for the characters to do some genuinely heroic stuff and make useful contacts in an important part of the 1920's and 30's American culture. The adventure is tightly woven, without too many loose ends, and despite being somewhat linear has enough individual choices for the characters that they shouldn't actually feel like they are being rail-roaded down the only possible path. The book even has a brief script for the adventure serial episode being filmed! All in all, I found this one useful and enjoyable to a much higher degree than I expected. I can strongly recommend it to GM's and players alike.

This was really a no-brainer as a purchase for me; first, I love Kenneth Hite's work, and second, I love HPL (faithfully playing Call of Cthulhu since it first came out back in the day). This really ought to be titled "Tour de Force," given Mr. Hite's discussion of virtually every story HPL ever published (certainly those under his own name). His comments are insightful, and he clearly loves his work. I found it to be illuminating, though being a major fan of HPL's, I was already aware of some of the more broadly accepted critiques and commentaries. If you enjoy HPL's stories, if you play Call of Cthulhu, if you even like campy B-Movies (a surprising number of which are based at least loosely on Lovecraft's work), this is a book you'll enjoy very much.

The price is great, and the content is well worth it. As usual with RPGNow, the quality of reproduction was outstanding. All in all, I'm very pleased with this one. Thanks Kenneth!

I also liked the license plate on the bus! :-)

This was a surprisingly good little GM's aid for running an investigation of criminal acts your players may commit. It's quick and relatively easy to understand. Intended for modern RPG's (say anything from roughly 1900 on up; though clearly weighted towards the post-WWII world), it provides some quick guidance on how the GM can "rate" the local police department in terms of its ability to solve crimes. While this is a D20 type supplement, it should be relatively easy to convert to other systems, though a little guidance on how the authors thought that might work would have been nice. There are some holes in the document -- for example, not giving much in the way of understanding how a forensics system works, and so on. While some of that you may be able to extract from shows like CSI, it still would have been nice had a little more information been included in this supplement. Additionally, while some examples (and a "set-up" for a narrative event) were provided, the authors probably need to provide a few more examples (as well as some quick examples on how to convert the system to something besides D20) and should have continued the narrative story by using it to create examples for each step of the process (e.g., "the Players killed the four goons in a bad section of town, very near the freight yard, which is a notorious crime area; this results in the following adjustments to the DC for the police..."). Concrete examples are always helpful when explaining a new process to your audience. Still, there's a lot of information and ideas packed into eleven pages (one of which is the typical D&D spin-off type legal disclaimers necessitated by Gary Gygax's long-ago legal pursuit of all things that could be even vaguely perceived as infringing on his self-perceived right to control all Role-Playing Games everywhere), and which even includes a handy form the DM can print and use to fill out and track the information for a particular police department. Overall, I'll give it a four simply because it needs to be converted to use with any other system, and because they lost a couple of opportunities to make it much more clear to the casual reader (especially one, like me, that hasn't looked at a D20 system in 20 years)

Another nice little supplement from Drakat, primarily intended to support Call of Cthulhu campaigns set in the British Isles in the 1920's. This particular one discusses an actual flying boat that was in use briefly in the 20's, and while only three seem to have been manufactured, there's no reason why you couldn't assume a few more were built during the period. The resource is primarily intended to fit into a campaign that apparently includes a sizable (mythical) island between the Isle of Man and the coast of England, and to that end details of ticket pricing and dockage are included for that particular route, however enough information is included so that you could create a similar small flying boat airline in any reasonable island grouping (it probably wouldn't do you much good in the Marianas, say, but on the other hand, the Japanese authorities might have something to say about that anyway!). Since the flying boat was real, it should be possible to look up the details on the engine as well (wikipedia?) and that too might provide some good ideas for the Keeper to use regarding engine failures or other issues.

There are excellent pictures and detailed drawings, including the "livery" of two separate airlines, along with a blank line drawing you can use to create your own livery for your airline if you'd like to. An nice addition is an advertisement poster for each of the two airlines they created -- something you can have your players stumble across when they desperately need to fly out to some obscure island (or, perhaps, back from one).

As usual, the quality of the .pdf file was excellent, and the price was again only 75 cents. I'm hoping for many more of these nicely done little supplements from Drakat -- they are excellent, affordable, and have plenty of information and utility packed into a few short pages. Normally I would have given this a five, but since it does tend to be pretty specific to the British Isles, it requires a bit more work from the Keeper to transpose into a different area. Still it was an excellent job!

I picked this nice little supplement up for 75 cents, and it was worth at least twice that much! It's a very nice little supplement that describes six variant pistols, different enough to be intriguing, and common enough to be relatively likely to pop up in your 1920's Call of Cthulhu campaign (or even later, as collectors' items). One could even appear in your 1890's campaign -- since it was issued to Confederate cavalry during the Civil War. The supplement includes Call of Cthulhu suggested stats for the weapons in a tabular format as well. All in all, this was well done and very useful; especially if you're setting your campaign in England in the 20's. Furthermore, the authors provide enough of a description (along with a "baseline" firearm you can use to categorize these weapons in comparison with) to enable users of any other RPG system to use them as well. For 75 cents, how can you go wrong? The quality of the document, both text and illustrations is excellent. the only thing that would have improved it is to include a couple of shots of the weapons from different angles (especially the Protector Palm Pistol) to help the Keeper and Investigators better visualize them. I hope to see more of these from Drakat. This one was an excellent start.

I was a huge fan of the "Kolchak: The Night Stalker" series on TV when I was a kid back in the 70's. So when I found this book, I was, of course intrigued. Add to that the fact that it brings in HP Lovecraft's "Cthulhu Mythos" -- my favorite RPG -- and I was sold. Originally, I thought I was getting a role-playing supplement, and after that first flash of disappointment (what could be better than roleplaying Kolchak up against mighty Cthulhu?), I continued to read -- I could almost hear Darren McGavin's and Simon Oakland's ("Tony Vicenzo") voices during much of the early part of the book. It was an awesome tour de force, and very much in keeping with the spirit of the movies Night Stalker and Night Strangler, and the best of the Night Stalker shows. I'd cheerfully buy any more of these if they exist or are being written. This was one of the best $4.00 buys I've made in years! My only regret is that it wasn't substantially longer!

Doing a little research, I discovered that Moonstone has been working this stuff since 2007. Well good for them! It's a great franchise, and it's a terrible pity we'll never see another new Night Stalker episode from Darren and Simon and the gang.

First off, you need to spend a little time explaining the rationale behind what you're doing. Instead, the first thing we see is that confusing chart with absolutely no explanation of how it works, or what happens when you get a number that is NOT on the table. Either change the table so that it is entirely self explanatory, or replace the "politically correct" statement with an in-depth explanation of the table.

Second, you are assuming too much knowledge on the part of your audience. Just because YOU know what you're talking about, doesn't mean we have a clue. Try sitting down and explaining what you're doing each step of the way as if you were teaching your system to someone who's never played an RPG before. Once you do that, you'll see if your system is as easy as you think it is.

Third, your examples managed to confuse me more. Even when I though I had a handle on how something was supposed to work, when I got into some of the examples, they left me scratching my head.

As a suggestion, take a rules set by someone like Steve Jackson (who is one of the most elegant rules writers I know of) or anyone else who's style you like, and use it as an outline you can follow as you draft your rules. You don't have to get as complex and erudite as D&D to draft a good solid set of rules, but as it stands, your rules are nearly unreadable. Break it out into headings (e.g., "Character Generation") and then describe the process from scratch, illustrating your description with easy, clear, well-written examples at each step of the process (a good example for this particular technique is "Call of Cthulhu" where they use a single player with an on-going series of examples that take you from creating a character through adventuring, gun fights, sanity losses, the whole shebang, using the same character throughout -- it provides a simple series of examples that you have walked through each stage of and also provides a clever introduction to the game as a whole; bottom line, use a technique that ties your system together and makes it as intuitive to us as it seemingly is to you). Also, take a few sentences at the beginning of your rules to explain why you did them, why they are an improvement over existing systems, and why your audience should care. Put this BEFORE the confusing die roll chart.

You are planning on selling these, obviously, so you need to take care of your customers by being thorough in your explanations and examples. Otherwise, you're just failing them and you'll never sell another game. Writing rules always seems really easy until the first time you try it. Once you start actually doing it though, you find out just how hard it can be. As a suggestion, keep a note-pad next to you as you type them up, because half-way through the exercise you'll suddenly think of something that should have been addressed earlier that you'll need to go back and put in. Jot it down in your notepad and then every evening go back through and see what you need to go back and fix. Also as a suggestion, try outlining your rules before you write -- then shuffle the outline around a bit to make the flow as simple and intuitively progressive as possible. For example, you might address character creation first since it is the first step in any RPG, then go on to movement next, followed by combat, followed by adventures or something like that. In a wargame, for example, I always address the maps and units first, followed generally by movement, combat and supply in that order, then go on to the chrome issues that make my wargame unique (armored effects, poison gas, alien invader landing -- whatever it might be). And always remember, your rules must be written (if you plan on anyone playing the game) with the newbie in mind -- the person who's never seen an RPG before in their life.

As far as play-testing goes, currently it simply isn't possible since I have no idea what is supposed to be going on here.

This is an excellent one-shot adventure, and one certainly can't quibble with the price. Production values are pretty good, and the plot, though it tends to force the players into a specific path, has some variability in it allowing for certain side adventures. There is a brief sketch of Tombstone that provides enough information to play it to the extent necessary for this adventure. Eight pre-generated investigators are provided, including two women in case your group has any ladies in it. The encounters aren't too pre-scripted which gives the players some opportunity to vary the outcome in each individual case. The various confrontations aren't particularly deadly, though the final scene can be very bloody indeed. The author has also provided some adventure seeds in case you want to use the scenario in an extended campaign. In fact, this could be a very good starting scenario for an old-west campaign setting, though it would require some significant work in order to ensure the players can develop a gradual understanding of the mythos despite being forced to confront the monsters at the end -- still, they aren't major monsters and they are different enough that they could lead to further complications later on. Finally, it would be an interesting change of pace for your group, even as a one-shot adventure (and would result in an interesting back-story to a new threat arising in the classic or modern era...).

All in all, its an excellent effort with general verisimilitude to the western culture, (barring one glaring mis-reference to the "Pony Express" which apparently used wagons to deliver the mail in the author's world, instead of riding ponies and carrying the mail in their saddle bags.)

Overall I gave it a four for being a one-shot adventure as well as being somewhat "rail-roady" in its nature. Anyway, as I noted earlier, the price is right, and I strongly urge you to acquire a copy while you can!

Finally! Of the several "100 ___ Seeds" books I've picked up, one that is unashamedly useful! Despite the usual atrocious editing, the adventure seeds in here are useful, diverse (each with three "twists" in the plot that can be used alone or separately to complicate your adventurers' lives) and each also with an "epilogue" that suggests a way to continue to have the outcome of your adventure complicate the lives of your players long after the adventure is over. All in all an excellent book.

Pros: Excellent ideas (many of them done before, but here given new life); with complications in the form of the twists that can be used to tie into other thematic adventures you may already have in mind. The ideas are somewhat expanded on as compared to the normal "adventure seeds" you see, and are fleshed out enough to actually only require a few stand-by NPCs, some extra detail on the main "mystery" you elect to be the point of the story, a few monsters or ghosts or what have you and bang, you're there (though you may need a haunted house or something to work with as well).

Cons: The usual crappy proofreading and "spell-check" editing which can result in some amazingly inappropriate sentences and word choices that can lead to much inadvertent hilarity and unnecessary confusion. The constant misuse of commas (comma-spliced sentences like the author's would have gotten me kicked out of most of the classes I attended in college) is just simply annoying. The inclusion of a line drawing or two of the locales might have been nice too.

All in all, I found this one much more useful than the author's other endeavors, and it leads me to hope that he may continue to improve his work to this standard. My other hope is that he will find someone educated to send his drafts to for actual proofreading and editing. Four stars for the utility of the book!

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.

While an interesting compilation of potential conspirators, it suffers somewhat from being intended primarily as a companion for the "100 Conspiracies" source book. This means that the conspirators listed tend to focus on the aspects of the organizations and individuals that lend themselves to those conspiracies, and limits the author's ability to explore their other ramifications. While the author attempts to make up for this issue with the "adventure seeds," he still is limited in what he can provide, by his own format, and the requirement to tie in with the other source book.

Still, it's an excellent look into some strange organizations that have existed down through the centuries, though admittedly he focuses on the more commonly explored ones as revealed on "The Discovery Channel."

Pros: Generally good thumbnail descriptions of various esoteric organization and individuals with plenty of names and concepts that you can use for further research. Really it's an excellent primer on the subject, without providing more than a quick scan of the 100 organizations and individuals.

Cons: The author tends to permit his personal biases to show through, generally debunking "liberal" conspiracies while lending some small credence to various "conservative" conspiracies (lefties are good guys, righties are baaad). Given that most of these organizations are either defunct or populated by the lunatic fringe on both sides of the aisle, this seems somewhat disingenuous. Like its companion volume, this one too is riddled with grammatical, punctuation and spelling errors that would have easily been avoided had the author or the publishing company taken a few minutes to actually read the product before publishing it.

I give it three stars based on the fact that it's primarily a back-up to a back-up, and as a comment on the poor editorial effort by the author/publisher.

While I agree with many of the comments in Michael Dolan's review, I would add a few more:

On the plus side, the author does and excellent job of providing a "reader's digest" summation of most of the truly weird conspiracy theories floating around out there (though there are a few he misses). His organizational skills make it easy to dig into the superficialities of the various conspiracies, though if you want to really pull out all the stops, you're still going to need a LOT of hours on the internet reading some weird s**t. Still, for $7.50, you get a jump start on your research and, together with Richard Hite's work you should be in conspiracy heaven.

On the negative side, Mr. Dolan failed to mention that some of the run-on sentences and truly horrid grammar in the conspiracy explanations can actually leave you MORE confused than when you started. In addition, there is the occasional misspelling which can also briefly confuse since such misspellings are typical of the "spell-check" mindset -- that is, they are spelled "correctly," but it's completely the wrong word. I was frankly disappointed by the level of proof-reading, though I'm finding that particular failure to be more and more common as companies seem to let the computer do their editorial review for them, and don't bother to actually read their material prior to publishing anymore.

I give this one three stars, simply because all it really is is an introduction to the topic (though an excellent one for the neophyte) and the various issues noted by myself and Mr. Dolan do make it both harder to use and less useful than it ought to be.

Ken Hite is one of the most interesting and original thinkers working with the subject of Call of Cthulhu and Dubious Shards shows him at his esoteric best. He weaves together interesting bits of information that by sheer coincidence seem to confirm the most bizarre contentions of HPL while at the same time showing the prospective Keeper how to do the same thing. His knowledge spans enough different and seemingly mutually exclusive areas of knowledge to astound the reader with the bits of "corroborating" evidence he places throughout his topical wanderings, and yet he retains the joy of discovery as he does so. You fully expect him to exclaim at the end of one of his articles "And you can even use Zeppelins!"

Dubious Shards is another collection of his articles, this time focusing on some of the more salient features of Call of Cthulhu, including Irem of the Many Pillars, Dunwich, "Yog-Sothothery" and its use by the Keeper to evoke atmosphere and develop scenarios and even campaigns, an article on HPL himself, and so on. While his guidance scarcely falls into a "step-by-step" guide, he does evoke the spirit of HPL and provides some data that can be used by the dedicated Keeper to begin researching his own connections. Perhaps his most important piece of advice, however, is to "become paranoid" as you read through history in order to permit yourself to make those same leaps of connections that the truly insane can and do, and which are fully in keeping with the nature of the creatures (and their nefarious plots!) that Call of Cthulhu brings to the harsh light of day. The articles are interesting, and as noted, permit the reader to look up other bits of information and formulate ties between them, all the while keeping the idea of the mythos clearly in front of the reader.

In addition, this particular book includes a complete, ready to play Delta Green scenario. While I generally stick to the 1920s for my CoC campaign, I'm told that Delta Green is far and away the best modern era construct revolving around the mythos, and from what I saw in the scenario, it's a very good one with plenty of suitable places to hang additional plot hooks and adventures from.

All in all, I rated it a four -- simply because I'm NOT a fan of anything much outside the "classic" era of CoC and thus felt part of the book was "wasted;" however if you like modern era CoC, I'm betting you'll rate this book a "five+!"

Pocket Empires is one of the more interesting expansion sets for Traveller version 4. Basically, it provides the rules for players to set up and run their own mini-empires or states within the larger game. It also provides a vehicle for the GM to use to create a back-story for any small states he wishes to establish within the larger galaxy. It's particularly useful if you are hypothesizing an area of "balkanization" within one of the regions of space, which is usually the case immediately outside the boundaries of the Empire. Rules are provided for establishing an empire, conducting "actions" in that empire, improving technology and infrastructure, political interactions, and how to play the Empire within an ongoing campaign as another type of "player." The rules are dense, complex, and at times very difficult to figure out, but generally reward the diligent reader. Personally, I enjoy the concept but think it would be hard to fully incorporate into a campaign as an on-going event -- much better to use it to establish the background of one or more of your minor states. Given the difficulty of the rules, I would normally rate this one about a three, but because I'm fascinated by the ideas presented (many of which are truly creative), I'll take it up to a four.

King of Chicago is actually two adventures in one, both crime related. The first is set in Gangland Chicago and the second is set in the French city of Marseilles. In addition to the basic scenarios, there are two articles of interest, included to lend depth to the Keeper's understanding of underlying events. The first is a discussion of Prohibition and how it fostered black marketeering and organized crime, and the second is a discussion of the same aspects of international weapons smuggling. Both are well written and provide an excellent overview of their subjects. The two adventures themselves are complex and well written, and have the added advantage of providing at least some information on the two cities they are set in; which are otherwise not addressed in any guidebooks. Speaking of which, I hope that some day Chaosium reproduces the Cairo and London Guidebooks, and nice additions would include Chicago and Marseilles too! At any rate, I don't want to go into too much detail on the adventures, other than to note that there are plenty of opportunities for research, and, somewhat more unusually in CoC adventures, a much increased likelihood of gunplay and fisticuffs, courtesy of the organized crime elements in each story. In classic CoC, this makes both adventures deadly indeed, though if your campaign is more "pulpish" than most, it should simply increase the excitement. In each case, the eldritch horror behind the criminal elements is difficult though not impossible to defeat, and the rewards for doing so are commensurate. Overall, these are two excellent scenarios, and alas, very difficult to find for CoC players that didn't buy them back in the day -- at least until now. Thanks, RPGNow, for bringing them back to the light of day!