Trolls charging toll to let travelers across a bridge is a classic fairy-tale trope, and Spellbook Games offers to bring this trope to your fantasy role-playing game in this short product. The product takes a nice, lighthearted approach, but is so idiosyncratic that it's not easily usable. The product description page claims that the scenario supports d20/OGL games, older editions of D&D, and generic/any system—of course, it's hard to do all three at the same time without multiple stat blocks (or none), and this product doesn't deliver. The four pages of content are filled with stats in a system and format apparently unique to Spellbook Games; certainly, the stats are neither systemless nor d20/OGL nor AD&D or any other pre-d20 edition. The publisher's web page clarifies that the stat system is "compatible" with earlier editions of D&D if you do things like take "1d20 rolls GTET [30 - Intelligence]" from p. 2, column 2, apply the conversion formula -(X-17)/3, and treat the result as a penalty to a saving throw; in other words, you're supposed to read "1d20 rolls GTET [30 - Intelligence]" as a saving throw with a -4 penalty, or something like that. But you'd only know this if you visited the publisher's web site and poked around until you found and downloaded the conversion document (in Microsoft Word format). There's no indication of this in "Troll Bridge" itself, and the "converted" result doesn't apply equally well to, say, AD&D and to D&D 3.5/d20/OGL. I can't understand why the publishers put all the stats in their idiosyncratic system, didn't mention a word about this, and advertised the product as compatible with d20/OGL and older editions of D&D. Why not just put the basic/advanced/OGL stats in the product to begin with? The product also makes reasonably frequent reference to very specific magic items that don't exist in standard AD&D or D&D 3.5, without any hints (other than the names) as to what such items should do.

If you don't mind going on a hunt for the conversion document, doing the weird math, and mentally substituting appropriate magic items (and you don't get too annoyed by oddities like having "feet" abbreviated as "FT" in capital letters), you might be able to get some use out of the product. Of course, any skilled DM can just ignore the stats and employ the remaining parts of the product—but we could do this easier without all the home-system stats. The sketch of the bridge itself is actually just intriguing enough that I don't plan to delete the file after posting this review. If not for that, though, I honestly wouldn't keep it around.

In the future, I hope that Spellbook Games will advertise their products more accurately. A truly systemless four-page writeup of an underground bridge and its troll guardians would be worth $1.95 to me. Having to wade through all the stats that are supposedly compatible with multiple editions of D&D, but aren't presented using D&D vocabulary or numeric scales, is just annoying and significantly decreases the value of the product. Almost half the actual text is stats; when you take these out, the product has essentially doubled in price. I may come back to this product some day and use the bridge diagram and the basic idea, but I can't really recommend it to my fellow DMs.