Barbarians of Lemuria. . .
I have encountered this product somewhat out of order. I purchased Dogs of War a few weeks ago and rather enjoyed it, and received Barbarians of Lemuria this morning. I printed it out (I'm fortunate enough to have a rather old, but functional laser printer in my study that will output double sided content, albeit SLOWLY :) ) and started reading over it.
If you own any of Mr. Washbournes other products, such as Dogs of War, or the Barbarians of the Aftermath by Nathaniel Torsen, which uses BoL rules, and enjoy them, then you won't be in for any surprises here.
For those who aren't familiar with these products, allow me to summarize, because it is a terribly hard system to catch on to.
To perform an action Roll 2d6
Add the Attribute that applies
Add any appropriate combat abilities
OR Add any appropriate careers (if not in combat)
Add or subtract modifiers as the GM sees fit.
If your result is higher than a 9, you succeed
(For those of you that haven't figured it out by now, I was being facetious about the system being hard ;) )
You get 110 pages of nice, clean 2 column text with system and setting appropriate artwork, most of it simple line drawings, for which your printer will thank you when you go to print this out.
The writing is clear and concise, and after a quick read-through of about 25 minutes, I was ready to start making the characters that I will use for major bad-guys with my group when I run this game.
I don't anticipate any problems with character creation, a couple of weeks ago, I sat four guys down who had never heard of this system (using Dogs of War) and they had eight characters created out in less than half an hour (and that was with interruptions from outside sources), and within 5 minutes of play, everyone was in the swing of things as far as dice mechanics went.
The pdf includes a decent bestiary, sample characters, a pantheon of gods, a nice setting (Lemuria, of course), and three short adventure hooks to get you started. There is also a beautifully rendered map (In color) of Lemuria by Gill Pearce, whose galleries I went and looked over on her website (do a google search for her name, you'll find it).
The ONLY minus to my review is a very minor one.
On the character sheet, in order to hide the page number and header text (I assume this was the reason, at least), whoever did the layout placed a 'watermark' style image behind the character sheet.
When printing out on a black and white laser printer, this looks horrible, and makes a good portion of the sheet difficult to read.
This is not a big deal to me, since I often create my own sheet (Although I like the sheet in this one, except for the watermark), but I own the software that will allow me to make adjustments to this, or rebuild it myself, which I will probably do.
My overall rating is 4.875 out of 5. Well done, well worth buying, as are the other products by Mr. Washbourne.
|