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This PDF contains 49 pages: cover, credits, contents, explanation/promotion of CreatureDaily.com , 20 2-page monster spreads (40 pages), OGL, and 4 pages of ads.
That amounts to 20 new Pathfinder-compatible monsters bringing terrible and fascinating new powers to your game. Of particular interest to me were the many mid-to-high-level monsters which dwell outside the dungeon in various different terrains (although tundra and snowy environments get a lot of coverage): as your game matures, your players may tire of the tedious underground dungeon crawls, and as GM you should be able to provide them with outdoor adventure.
The text is composed well and complete, providing reasonable monster origins, motivations, and tactics, as well as the requisite crunch.
The illustrations are beautifully rendered and colorful, clearly the work of a top-notch artist. The virtual paper texture is charming, yet unobtrusive; and well in line with the high standard set by Paizo's beautiful Pathfinder books. The layout helpfully provides a 2-page spread for each monster.
The high-resolution "PDF.PDF" version contains a bug which causes problems for some readers wherein several images are broken. Fortunately, the "WEB.PDF" version doesn not suffer from this problem.
The pages have no page numbers, and the contents page lists no page numbers; this isn't much of a problem when reading the PDF in a viewer, but if you print it for table use, you must depend on the fact that the monsters are alphabetized to find anything. Also, the PDF contains no "bookmarks" to structure the content, so to find a specific monster you must either memorize the PDF's page numbers, or scroll through the document's 49 pages. These issues are easy to correct, but until that happens, I will dock 1 star for this.
There are also some easily-overlooked typos and/or spelling errors.
Setting aside these problems, I suspect the real purpose of this product is not to provide great content per se, but rather to sell subscriptions to CreatureDaily.com , a task for which it is well suited.
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This whimsical resource presents rules for the fantasy of what it's like to be a man. Emphasis on the FANTASY.
I've been a man my whole adult life: beard, sideburns, deep voice, flannel. In real life it's usually not as good as the PDF suggests, just like becoming a real Druid (although possibly being spiritually fulfilling) doesn't allow you to call forth lightning, and that real British intelligence field operatives don't enjoy James Bond movies as much as regular people. This fantastic presentation of what it is to be a man may not be as thrilling to people who really are men, but it might be fun for kids or women to imagine the awesomeness of being a man.
I would very much like to see the (ahem) companion work for the Woman character class, with features like Feminine Intuition, etc., if it could be done in a non-offensive way.
What are you waiting for? It's FREE! Get it!
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I was intrigued by Paizo's "Kingmaker" adventure path, which transforms a D&D adventure into sort of a detailed cooperative "Settlers of Catan" or some other 'building' game, wherein each turn represents a month of world-time.
Unfortunately, my players are all too high-level to start at "Kingmaker's" level 1 adventure. Plus, would I really need to buy the entire Paizo adventure path, when I wouldn't be using their actual adventures?
Enter "Book of the River Nations." This book is inspiring, and condenses many many "Kingmaker" rules into its 52 pages. Most reviewers here mention it as a companion to "Kingmaker," but I want a replacement: how to create your own "Kingmaker"-like adventure.
Basically, your adventurers go out into the wilderness, fight monsters, discover valuable sites for resource creation and extraction, pre-existing abandoned facilities, and generally carve a kingdom out of the wilderness. The kingdom has several character-like stats, but there is a dark stat which brings down the other stats: "Unrest," or popular dissatisfaction.
I would really like some rules for map generation: how does one generate a "Kingmaker" wilderness, perhaps with some randomness. How much farmland is fair? How many windfall abandoned facilities are fair? How much mining is appropriate? In "Settlers of Catan" this facility is built in, but sadly, "Book of the River Nations" lacks this information. They do provide a page of hex paper, just no suggestions on what or how much to put in the hexes.
Another missing feature is some kind of straightforward "Unrest" calculator. Other people online have developed Excel Spreadsheets for calculating this, but surely this can be calculated on paper, and it would be helpful to see here. Also, it's not clear whether or how much unrest carries over from turn to turn.
Of course, this is specifically for "Players," and not "Game Masters," but the absence of a "Game Master's" guide makes the above gaps rather painful. I have to ding the book 1 star for that.
For all the complaints above, the book is swell, and well worth its now-reduced price. I just want the publisher to put together another "Game Master's" volume to cover the above-mentioned gaps. I'm willing to pay!
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Creator Reply: |
I'm really glad you enjoyed the Book of the River Nations: Complete Player's Reference for Kingdom Building. I noticed you had a few questions and I would like to address them. First, Unrest is a cumulative stat so if you have 5 Unrest last turn, you will have 5 Unest the following turn until you build something or have some kind of event that reduces unrest. Second, why was the word "Player's" included in the title? There are alot of reasons but they can all be summed by saying it is as much for GMs as the 3.5 Player's Handbook is for GMs. While we have been working on a more GM's based book that would detail things like map generation and the like, we have not yet finished that yet. So take heart. We will get there. |
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Fun low-level monsters for simple, possibly humor-oriented intermission adventures in between the "serious" chapters of your main campaign. You probably won't want to use these monsters more than once, but that's just fine.
Even if you never use these, it's worth reading for the entertainment value of these clever monsters.
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It's a small collection of banners and tile ads for your web page, to promote 3rd-Party Pathfinder content publishers. You could make your own.
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Tabletop Role-Playing Games are not generally considered a "women's hobby;" I was really hoping this podcast would go into this issue in depth, because I very much enjoy discussions of feminist politics, and I long for ways to give my RPG hobby a wider appeal. Besides this, making RPGs appeal to women is a big marketing issue lots of game companies would love to solve. Surely this (roughly) 3-hour recording would provide ample insight into this topic, right?
I listened and listened, but halfway through this podcast, I gave up on it. It's basically a bunch of British people talking about their FRPG characters and what games they played since the previous podcast. Apparently, this is the "women" episode because a woman joined in the discussion. It might be interesting if I cared about these personalities, but I felt like I was eavesdropping on some random peoples' casual conversations at a cafe. The poor sound quality did not help endear me.
In contrast, please consider the "3.5 Private Sanctuary" podcast, or even "Fear the Boot," both of which are FREE and quite good at identifying a topic and clearly attempting to educate their audience regarding that topic.
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The technical quality of the map is high, but it requires modification by the GM in that every version of the map includes the secret doors clearly marked in red.
In fact, instead of chopping up the entire map in pages, it might be more helpful to chop it up by which areas are accessible, or even room-by-room. As your adventurers explore, they may not have the entire map, but just the room they see; they open a door, the GM lays down a page or two with the new room, they find and open a secret door, the GM lays down a page with the room behind it, etc. I've used this technique with canned adventures before (scan the map, scale it, chop it up, and print it room-by-room), and it has worked quite well.
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It is telling that the first step of character creation is to make a puppet (preferably a sock puppet) from scratch. This game aims to liberate the boundless creativity of children, through the medium of role-playing games and sock puppets. These sock puppets live in a magical world of effortless and instantaneous creation without limits.
Another goal may be to get parents and kids to interact without the baggage of their usual family roles; role-playing and puppets are used similarly in psychotherapeutic and family therapy situations, but in Argyle & Crew the goal seems to be entertainment.
The PDF layout and typesetting is bland, with B&W single-weight Helvetica and limited drawings and photos. In keeping with the nature of the game, this book is like the bowl of milk, and your mind provides the sweet and colorful cereal.
The game is geared towards families with kids. Although I have no children, I look forward to the full product so that I can be a more liberating game master in other games.
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This is a (literally and figuratively) dark campaign setting alternative to the default Pathfinder Golarion campaign setting. The premise of this campaign setting is that direct sunlight has been blocked by a celestial object, leaving the earth in an underdark-like twilight. As a result, virtually all great civilizations have collapsed, ecological niches have disappeared, and creepy violent monsters and races have moved in to pick up the slack.
This volume boasts almost 250 pages of material. Roughly half the book covers the geopolitical regions of this world; and the other half provides the new races, classes, monsters, equipment, and religions that you would expect from an optional campaign setting.
You might expect some kind of grungy, distressed calligraphic typography to help convey the "dark ages" mood of this setting, but instead it seems to be laid out in Times New Roman, with headers also monotonously laid out in Times New Roman. Chapter headers and some image captions are laid out in Brush Script, which is almost the antithesis of spooky. It is very legible, but I hope that the final product uses different type, especially because the pages have "crinkled, distressed parchment" or "richly illuminated manuscript" watermarks which do not fit with Times New Roman.
Except for the cover, the entire work is in black & white. For a PDF, there are no color print costs; it might be nice to see the images, maps, and textured paper in color. This might also help the text "pop out", whereas the dark uncolored paper texture presents a gray background which mires the text. Some PDF publishers provide a "print friendly" watermark-free monochrome version along with the "full" color version. Another option is to use PDF layers, with which one document can contain both lush and spartan views of the same material. I hope the final product will provide one or both of these options.
The preview has 12 pages: color cover, credits, table of contents, 2 pages of intro, 3 pages of fluff about a region, 2 pages about a race, 1 page of fluff about a monster, and a 1-page ad for an unrelated product; by the numbers, there are only 6 pages of actual content in this preview, but it winds up being a little less than 6 pages of usable material, because the race is barely described in the 2 pages provided, and the monster page doesn't cover any of the crunch. Granted, this is just a preview, not a playtest; the publishers just want you to get a taste of the actual book.
The introduction uses the passive voice too much, which mutes any excitement you might feel about it; accordingly its "Inside This Book" section almost makes you NOT want to read it. The other pages use a significant amount of passive voice in an effort to sound poetic or spooky, but it hinders one's retention of the material. Confusingly, there is little distinction between monster and player race in terms of tone or motivation; perhaps this parallels the presumption that in a world of only twilight, there is neither light nor dark, only dim shades of gray. Also, there are noticeable and disappointing typos, many of which would be caught by any automated spell checker.
The art is decent, but the monochrome presentation mutes most images into muddy gray. The map provided has grid lines, but no legend to tie those grid lines to any scale. The most vibrant image is a line drawing of a character race which provides some nice contrast between white and black regions.
You SHOULD get this book if you're tired of your players treating trips to the Underdark like a visit to an amusement park they can simply leave when they are inconvenienced or bored: Realms of Twilight presents a world with no place to hide from the dark--the entire world is effectively Underdark. Also, you would need to like a lot of fluff and texture in a gaming book; and you would need a lot of time to reread the clunky writing.
You SHOULD NOT get this book if you consider endless Underdark to be hopelessly unappealing gaming monotony akin to Seasonal Affective Disorder; if you really like your gaming books to be as rich and beautiful as the Pathfinder RPG books; if you like clear distinctions between good and evil; if you demand a lot of crunch (granted, campaign settings typically contain little crunch); or if you have little tolerance for poor writing.
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