Malevolent & Benign joins the Book of Unremitting Horror and the AD&D 2nd Edition Monstrous Manual as one of my favorite monster books. there's a huge selection of original beasts, many of whom have a few useful or positive traits for clever adventurers to exploit. the huge assortment of magical plants found inside means you'll never run out of adventure ideas for a fantasy forest or jungle. An amazing and fun Pathfinder product.

This is an amazing and comprehensive overview of the DCU, useful to comic book fans as well as gamers, and includes hundreds of cool write ups. It is also home to possibly the most hilarious typo I've ever seen in a gaming book. In the Green Lantern entry, it describes a rivalry between Hal Jordan and Guy Gardner over the affections of a lover: Karl. Don't worry, Hal ends up with Karl.

That just made me smile.

Excellent and extremely usable stock art I'll be using in upcoming Black Tokyo and PFRPG releases.... the only reason I didn't give this stock pack 5 stars is the lack of any meaningful license or credit info. I'm hoping this art is usable in both commercial and personal projects if credit is given to Golden Tigers, but I'd really prefer things like that spelled out explicitly. CHRIS

This is one of the strangest products I've ever bought and I enjoyed it immensely. Tough Justice is a rules light RPG that plays out court cases in England's justice system under the Bloody Code. I'm not normally a fan of rules light and indy games, but I liked the mechanics behind this one. Basically every action in the game benefits one of two sides (played by opposing groups of PC) the prosecution and the defense. In essence, the entire game becomes one long, drawn out opposed skill check, which adds incredible amounts of tension and allows for the kind of back and forth competition of good court fiction. Now, the book was inspired by BBC period dramas, but as an American cop-show junkie, the ruleset could easily be modified to handle something like Law and Order and the Wire.

Alternatively, the opposed skill check mechanic could be used to simulate prolonged tensions and elaborate battles for dominance between any two groups. I could easily see this as the engine for a cyberpunk espionage game, with one group taking the role of spies and infiltrators, and another group playing the security forces set out to stop them. Likewise, I could play out Spider Jerusalem's battle against the Smiler, from the comic Transmetropolitian or zoom out a bit and have one set of players represent NATO and another group represent the Warsaw Pact.

The historical info was great, and the exhaustive dictionary of cant and period slang was almost worth the purchase price alone. The gaming fiction was incredibly well done, and a high point, if incredibly bizarre. The one problem I see with this system is that being so rules light, you really need a good, well educated group of experienced gamers to play it with. If you have that, you've got an experience as good as the sample game played out in Tough Justice's pages. If you don't... well you've got Victorian flavored crap.

One thing that botheredme was the almost complete lack of art. One of the benefits of running period games is that there are plenty of public domain art (such as etchings from period newspapers) resources to pick from. I wish Postmortem Studios had availed itself of some of the free art resources out there to illustrate its product.

I'm a cyberpunk fan from way back, and this sourcebook is classic cyberpunk. Boston: Broken Cradle of Liberty is a fun, fast read. It's filled with nice plot hooks for a Boston campaign, and has enough local flavor to avoid being a generic near-future setting. The layout's clean, the art is excellent and the concepts within are well done.

This is probably the most fun collection of magical artifacts for a modern campaign I've seen in a long time. It's HUGE and filled with lots of good ideas.

Infinite Futures is an ambitious product, an attempt to convert D20 Future to make them fully compatible with the Pathfinder RPG. It's a decent attempt, and will be useful for gamers wanting new feats, futuristic and modern weapons, cybernetics and alien races to add to their PFRPG campaigns or who want to update an old D20 Future campaign.

At over 450 pages, the sourcebook is a decent bargain. However, I really wish the Avalon Game Company had gone a bit farther in their changes. Pathfinder felt like a really ambitious and innovative new take on D&D 3.5. By contrast, Infinite Futures felt somewhat tame. Aside from some minor mechanical changes, large portions of the text seemed like a straight translation of old D20 Modern SRDs. Character concepts in this converted system aren't quite as customizable as a Pathfinder Rogue or a Sorcerer and the dozen or so bloodline options available to that class.

Avalon Game Company illustrated Infinite Futures with stock art by Sade and other CGI artists, many of whose images I've used myself. However, I did feel that some of the art was badly chosen and just tossed into the manuscript to color a page without concern for the text on that page.

Finally, there are a few elements brought over from the Pathfinder RPG to this system and imported with no translation. Look in the section on diseases and curses? Why are there curses in a sci-fi game? Your guess is as good as mine. Also, why are all the diseases fantasy standards like 'devil chills' or 'cackle fever'. Where's AIDs, ebola and weaponized nanotech?

These complaints aside, Infinite Futures is a strong and ambitious release from a fairly young company. I definitely want to see more products in this line, and want to see some more support for a sci-fi / fantasy rule set that seems to have a lot of potential.

As always, good quality usable .PNG images. However, I did have one problem. I use an older computer, and the sheer size of the image was difficult for my machine to render. It would have been more convenient to break up the images into several smaller images rather than a huge illustration showing all the guns on one page. Other than that formatting choice, a great product.

As always, Sade produces some really high quality art, and it's great to see her including more sci-fi characters. This set has some of the best facial detail yet, particularly the female warrior in black and the smirky expression on the young heroine dual wielding the shotguns. I'll be using all these characters in upcoming releases, and I can't think of a better compliment than that.

These guys get it.

I picked up this calender simply because it was free, and because it's 12 months of CGI pin up art. And I needed a 2009 calender anyway. I wasn't expecting much, just something useful but not essential.

Instead, a small-press RPG company does something I wish alot of larger publishers, in every genre would do- they practiced religious inclusion to a degree that's sadly rare in this country.

Take a look at the holidays listed. What do you see? The usual Christian holidays? Check. The American Federal holidays? Also check.

What else? Jewish religious holidays? Check. Muslim religious holidays? Check. Wiccan religious holidays? Also check.

Seriously, I've never seen Wiccan holidays on a calender before in my life. Too many institutions simply forget that there is any option other than Christianity, and ignore those of other faiths. And by contrast, Dakkar Unlimited takes the time to get my holidays, and the holidays of North America's major non-Christian faiths, right and include them on a free calender.

Take five stars, guys, you've earned it. Oh, and the T&A was pretty sweet too.

Picked this product up for a modern crime project I'll be releasing soon, and I'm fairly satisfied with it. Two bucks for a single high rez image seems like a bargain to me compared to purchasing original art. As a comic fan, this reminds me alot of Barb Wire (the dark horse heroine who inspired one of the worst movies of all time) and honestly, that's a good thing. This stock art brings a smile to my face.

My only complaint is that the gun in her hand is a little small and tends to get lost against the dark background. I wish her handgun had either been a fraction bigger, or had been given a hi-light or rim-lighting to make it stand out a little bit more. Other than that very minor issue (which is more a matter of personal preference than anything) I've got no complaints about Dangerous Curves.

I purchased Sade's Steampunk Angels stock art for use in an upcoming sci-fi/cyberpunk release, and I'm fairly satisfied with the purchase. I'll defiantly use Steampunk Angels in at least one upcoming Otherverse Games release and I plan to purchase more products from Sade as soon as my budget allows.

Right now, I'm satisfied with the design of his characters, and am looking forward to seeing what else Sade will release. The studio is turning into the 'hot chicks' publisher of note- he's kind of like the RPG Stock Art equivalent of Mike Turner, a very skilled artist who knows how to illustrate tough but sexy female characters.

That said, I don't want Sade to fall into the trap of ONLY producing female characters. Expand the range. I want male characters, mecha, cyborgs, monsters, the whole range of sci-fi and fantasy archetypes. Give me more action oriented poses, battle weary and beat-up heroic women, and designs from a variety of genres, not just fantasy and sci-fi. Give us some modern women (and men): cops, gang-chicks, doctors, realistic US military, terrorists and generic foreign fighters.

Basically, give us the works, Sade. If you keep producing images at the rate and the quality of your first few releases, we'll keep buying them.

Before I go, a short side note. The version of the file I downloaded didn't include a license or information on how the company should be credited. It's an oversight, but one that should be corrected in future releases.

Strike Force Seven is a D20 Modern/Spycraft campaign setting based upon the GI Joe comics and cartoon. It’s an excellent, well thought-out piece of genre emulation, with some real thought into how a GI Joe-like storyline would fit into real world military stragety and politics. I may have disagreed with a few things in this book (more on that later), but I enjoyed it, and was prepared to write a glowing review of a product that brought a BIG smile to my face.

Now I’m angry- angry that I spent money on this book, and angier still that a single glaring mistake could sap my enthusiasm for a purchase so so completely. That mistake happened on page 82 (the back cover), and I’ll get to it in a minute.

Strike Force Seven has a lot of good points; it’s an utterly brilliant work of art. However, it’s a emininately Republican work of art, and it espouses some politics I disagree with. However, politics aside, Strike Force Seven is an excellent buy. Or would have been, if not for the back cover.

The PDF includes a well thoughtout, well described origin for SF7, which neatly blends real world events and spy fiction nicely. Likewise, the setting’s main adversary, the terrortist group Skorpion, is fully fleshed out and has an interesting philosophy behind it- imagine Ayn Rand’s objectivism on crack, and backed by acid bullets and power armor, and you’ve got a good idea of what Skorpion is all about.

Incredibly cool new vehicles, weapons and gadgets are presented, fully in keeping with the source material. In the words of Warren Ellis, the Anubis Warrior’s grav-skiff, battle pike and enhanced ammunition are emminently ‘toyetic’. The vehicles and weapons used by both sides perfectly mirror the nearly-plausible but awesome HISS tanks, Dragonfly attack choppers and VAMPs I grew up playing with. In terms of new setting information, SF7 shows it gets the vital elements of the ‘liscense’ more than most officially liscened games. Playing a game of SF7 would feel like reading a really good, Larry Hama scripted issue of GI Joe.

In addition to emulating the GI Joe source matieral, SF 7 nicely expands on it. Real world conflict is integrated nicely into the fictional war in the setting. A favorite passage is an excellent sidebar dealing with the legal status of captured Skorpion agents; the answers the game provides (to wit: Skorpion agents are illegal combattants and are going to be taking a long vacation at Gitmo) are logical and argued compellingly. SF7 is equally well described, and provides enough detail about military life to allow gamers who have never served to run a compelling military-action game.

That “Republican” thing.

Rather than describe in detail exactly why I consider SF7 to have an explicitly Republican/conservative bent, I’m going to reprint this paragraph, in its entirity, from page 50 of the PDF. " Skorpion is also active in the media of several nations, attempting to influence the public by showing the government in a bad light. Watchdog groups and investigative journalists are just two of the methods that Skorpion uses to expose the activities of Strike Force 7, who engage in illegal activities such as kidnapping of foreign nationals, assassinations, and assaults on foreign soil without benefit of declaration of war, all for the ‘good of the world’. Likewise they expose the actions of traditional armed forces and the blunders of governments; Skorpion is one of the major forces behind the outrage over not finding WMD’s in Irag. In adition, Skorpion has recently started developing projects for television, movie and book arena, all aimed at promoting the concept of a meritcratic society while generating more revenues to fund terrorist activities. "

The concept of ‘if you’re not with us, you’re against us’ and ‘good journalisim= aiding the terrorists’ have been Bush-administration talking points for nearly eight painful years. Are you, like the media in the SF7 world, enraged over not finding WMD in Irag? You poor soul, you’ve been brainwashed by Skorpion propaganda.

This paragraph hit hard and connected solidly, taking me rightout of the game world and enraging me with realworld issues. However, in and of itself, page 50 is not going to cause me to negatively review this book; at this point I can still give this book a great review.

I actually applaud Caias Ward for producing a cohesive, intricate fictional universe which reflects his beliefs and politics, and I’m glad someone out there is putting political content into RPG gaming in an intelligent way. Politics in gaming (when well done) helps the industry move forward from ‘hobby’ to artform, and produces more intelligent products. If not for page 82, this book would be a game supplement I may of disagreed with, but enjoyed reading. If not for page 82, you’d be reading a four star review right this minute.

Page 82. Page 82 hurts me badly.
Strike Force Seven was doing excellent; it was winning the race, but it stumbled and suffered a compound fracture two feet before the finish line. SF7 is the only roleplaying product I can think of which has ever FAILED solely because of its’ back cover.

The back cover is one of the two pieces of art in this PDF, with the other piece being the front cover illustration. The cover depicts a tough male soldier in stylized military garb pointing directly at the viewer. And if you’re a fan of the game’s source material, you’ll recognize the image immediately.

It’s a picture of Hawk pointing towards the Joe team during a briefing, taken from an early issue of the Marvel comics series, and illustrated by Herb Trimpe. The image has been crudely photoshopped, so that Hawk’s hair is a light brown, and he’s now holding a SF7 ballcap in his offhand, but the image is instantly recognizable.

Now, the entire product is a homage to GI Joe, but it’s not a theft. It’s a polished game supplement, which imitates and expands on the source material, which has consitantly displayed a spark of originality throughout the preceeding 81 pages.

THIS IS A THEFT.

Otherworld Creations stole an image from another publisher, and more importantly stole the image from the artist who originally drew it, and used it in their own for-profit game product. There’s no way they can justify this act- this single ruinous mistake. This plagarism can’t be called a homage; it can’t be justified as parody. They didn’t hire an artist to recrate an iconic image within the genre. I

t’s theft pure and simple. At this point, I’d recommend the production and release of a second edition PDF, removing the stolen artwork, and a public apology to anyone who’s bought the product- not to mention one to Herb Trimpe and Marvel Comics.

I bought BoUH based purely on the cover art, eyecatching and creepy as it may be. Inside, I found one of the best gaming supplements I've bought in months, and unless the industry does some great things to top this product, one of the early standouts for best rpg product in 2007. And this includes the stuff I've written. This is the kind of product that makes me want to step up my game as an author.

BoUH describes around 2 dozen new monsters for D20 modern horror gaming, and while it owes a spiritual debt to movies like Hellraiser, Silent Hill, Species the Ring and the the like, all the creatures are original and terrifying creations. Its obvious the designer is a horror movie buff, and has a genuine love for the genre, not to mention alot of originality and the warped worldview a project like this needs.

Each new monster recieves several pages of well written flavor text, detailing myths and legends and famous interactions with the creature. Then, telling you exactly what kind of product this will be, there is a description of what a victim of the monster will look like forensically. Pure unbridled awesome. Game statitics, which incorporate some new ideas and great concepts follow.

Though the monsters are statted for d20 modern, I'd wholeheartedly recommend this book to all horror gamers. A skill GM can swipe the ideas here and convert this to your system of choice, and this bad boy is worth the price of admission for the ideas andstyle alone. Creatures as awesome as the Organ Grinder, Snuff Golem and Sisterite deserve to be in every game out there.

The product is illustrated with moody, heavily inked B&W work, which resembles the work of comic horror artists Doug Mankhe and Bernie Wrightson, not to mention some of the art in classic WhiteWolf products. Excellent, athmospheric and very printer friendly.

As a fan of gory, disturbing horror I can't recommend this book highly enough. As a gamer, these monsters will show up in most of the sessions I run, and what higher review can I give this product than that? <br><br> <b>LIKED</b>: Great original monsters, in the vien of the best horror movies out there. Great art and an attractive, simple layout. Some of the best flavor text in gaming. <br><br><b>DISLIKED</b>: That I didn't think of it first. <br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Excellent<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Very Satisfied<br>