This exceptional book continues the top-flight work of Malhavoc games. The idea of an "event book" is one that was long overdue - it is simply easier and more natural to work a massive event like a war or a magical comet into a fantasy game than to suddenly plop a new kingdom or city onto the map.

Cry Havoc is about war, introducing it and making it adventurous in your Third edition campaign. Skip Williams, one of the best of the best, does a tremendous job of making an engaging setting element out of something that is often "too big" for a group of player characters to do much with.

If I were to name one way to improve Cry Havoc, it would be to go into more detail on how things like spying, sabotage and other bits of skullduggery factor into a war. Those are often carried out at a level much closer to the normal group of PCs, and if incorporated into the war system, the players could see their actions turning the tide in a very natural way.

A truly exceptional work, and well-optimized for PDF, though it does not include any extra features in electronic form.

As a PDF - good quality. As with all (most) Malhavoc products, it has a clean, black and white layout making it easy on the printer and quick to scroll through. This one is quite a big product, though.

As a supplement - This is really two books in one. It is part of Malhavoc's 'Event Book' line (also including When the Sky Falls and Requiem for a God) that give guidelines on how to incorporate huge world-changing events into your 'd20 fantasy' game. In this case: War.

So the book includes some of the usual splat-book elements of prestige classes, items and spells, plus some useful notes on what player characters can do during warfare that isn't just endless fighting. These are reasonable, but nothing special.

Then it's also a wargame. Almost two wargames, really - one dealing with small scale skirmishes and another for large scale combat. They're pretty much the same system with a bit of scaling. I don't know how they play out as I haven't used them.

There is a third level of wargame, which covers about three pages, which is a much more abstract system used for fights in the background. It's almost paper-scissors-stone with tactical maneuvres. I've used this when I ran a Dragonlance game (it is very useful for the Battle of the High Clerist's Tower) and it works quite nicely. But perhaps not worth buying the whole book for.

The best d20 system mass combat ruleset I've yet seen! Well-written and very flexible. 5/5 stars.