There is absolutely no reason for you to skip buying this if you love Rogue Trader.

This is the "Inquisitor's Handbook" style book for Rogue Trader. The better question to ask is what does it lack? Because it has so much material you will be inundated with possibilities. New advancements for all the previous Rogue Trader archetypes, new character types like Orkz and Kroot and tons of new gear for every character type are only the beginning. It contains expanded rules on starship creation, as well as, and this has been a long time coming, rules for iconic vehicles like the Rhino APC and Aquila Lander. Though the vehicle list is not as expansive as you would hope for a Warhammer 40k game, the vehicle rules are simple enough that you can reverse-engineer them to make your own vehicles well enough.

If you picked up the Rogue Trader book and liked it, this should be your second purchase.

The book does what it purports to do. It collects 28 pages of rather useful advice on the most common types of RPG products published into one small book. The advice is not exactly revolutionary, and at times there are areas where one would definitely wish for a bit more expansion, but that's not the goal of this book. Those answers, of course, are sequestered in the actual gamer lifestyle program. As an advertisement for this program, I suppose it works. I'm not terribly impressed. However, as a short collection of publishing advice, it presents numerous do's and don'ts that are pretty valuable for the price tag of a small lunch. If you're looking to publish and want to know where to start, this is a good book to pick up, and you will breeze through it so quickly you will definitely feel like all this publishing stuff ain't gonna be so bad after all.

For those of you who enjoy old-school, minimalistic RPGs, this one is a keeper. While I am personally not a fan of rules lite rpgs or old school games, this game's innovative and simplistic approach to class systems, relying on classes being "attributes" in which you have ranks (you can be a mage 4, warrior 4, rogue 2 right off the bat) and a flexible skill system, adds a bit more meat to the usual old school trappings while still keeping everything light and simple. You'll only need six sided dice and paper to play, and the game itself is free. So you could not only potentially be playing right now, you could be playing a game with quite a bit of flexibility and depth for its size. It's a catch overall, if you're into this sort of thing or if you like rules light rpgs like Wushu or Microlite but have been looking for one with just a bit more to it than that.

Every issue of Kobold Quarterly is packed with good information. As with most magazines, some things can be hit and miss, but the question becomes, when compared to other PDFs with a similar prize point, do you get your money's worth out of Kobold Quarterly? The answer for this issue is a resounding "yes." The Ecology of the Shoggoth article and the Lovecraftian Deities article are great introductions and adaptations of lovecraftian mythology to D&D even if you don't actually play the games they are designed for. Monte Cook's article "Thrill of the Unknown" offers interesting anecdotes from his days working on planescape as well as good information for GMs to add enigma to their campaign worlds. But the most outstanding piece is Mario Podeschi's "The Heart of a Hero" which is an interesting, responsible and adult take on romance in RPG games, and how to make it work. Where it could be sophomoric it instead decides to strive for a higher standard in this often ignored or ridiculed discussion and as a closet romantic I greatly enjoyed it. These are only a few of the articles in the magazine, but in my opinion they already offer enough content to make it worth your while. The fact that there's even more to be seen inside should tell you that it is definitely worth your purchase.

The First Book of Things is a monster product for Call of Cthulhu. Given the system that it is for, it is light on rules and full instead of vivid descriptions of the alien monstrosities within and their connection to the rest of the Call of Cthulhu mythology. I've never purchased a Miskatonic University Library Association Monograph, sticking to the "main" books instead. The book, while full of information, but the art is less than stellar. I would honestly rather not have any artwork. Many of the pieces that might have been decent lose their value by being so minuscule they can fit between regular columns of text without having it wrap around. Many of others amount to bland 3D objects on black backgrounds or scratchy drawings with a lot of blur and dither (the spoooooky filters). I was actually very drawn by the strange cover image, but pretty much no pieces of art within the book are that quality, and none have any kind of background like the one shown on the cover.

The book contains 60+ pages of lovecraftian monstrosities, some of which are very inspired like the Oblos, the gross floating bag of air seen in the cover, a servitor that might even have shared slavery with the infamous Shoggoths. Many monsters in the book have origins which I feel do enrich the mythos.

However, a startling amount of the monsters in the book amount to a spin on skeletons, zombies and vampires, even a mummy, and other such undead. If you want a lovecraftian spin on undead, there's more than five different ways for you to end up with a walking skeleton, including things as simple as a slime that animates a skeleton, to more complicated things like a slime which seeps into a swamp atop a skeleton and other muck and slowly develops into an animated skeleton. It's a real skeleton-fest in this book. You'll be throwing your bones down a lot with this. Ultimately it wasn't really what I was looking for at all, but many of the monsters do exhibit a lot of creativity even if they end up being just one more way to get a skeleton to move around.

The technology section is very limited but interesting, while the spells are, as you might have guessed, fairly heavily focused on all the sundry rituals by which to summon or bind all those new skeletons and zombies and vampires (as well as the other creatures in the book of course).

If you don't really care about the art, and you're interested in more creatures, particularly more lovecraftian variations on undead, the book will probably be worth your while. It would be worth your while even more with small price tag, however. Myself, I didn't find what I was looking for, and will likely keep to the big Chaosium books from now on.

Grain Into Gold is a very simple PDF with scarcely any artwork that sets about the daunting task of trying to teach you how to work your fantasy town's economy and the myriad of factors that will change it. Grain Into Gold is system-neutral, but accounts for many things that are likely to be common to standard fantasy rpgs. Grain Into Gold presents the subject matter in a very accessible way, and through humorous examples (that farmer thinks very little of John the Miller) and explanations in plain English, Grain Into Gold follows the fantasy economy from the Bread that sustains the peasant, to the cattle, and ultimately to the wizard's magic trinkets and the adventurers who covet them.

I found that the book did a very good job in keeping economics from being dry and unapproachable by using characteristics of settings we've all played in and concepts we're all familiar with. If you don't feel like constructing your own economy from the ground up, there is a base price list in the back. But this book is so much more than economics to me. It gave me a small picture of the struggles and triumphs of medieval life, a lot of ideas for campaigns (how's about a campaign around fighting dragons for their thingies to give to your wealthy wizard patron?).

While I ultimately can only recommend this book to real tinkerer GMs who like to play around with every aspect of fantasy worlds, I am certain even if not you'll find a spark of creativity from this book.