| 10 |
| Adventure! | 10 | Continues in the face of overwhelming opposition to be my favorite pulp game. The important stuff is just what I want and everything else is inconsequentially forgettable. |
| Mage Storytellers Handbook | 10 | I love this book, if just for all the mechanics-tweaking advice and alternate setting ideas. |
| Mutants & Masterminds | 10 | Second edition is a little more involved than first, but the book's still suffused with an obvious love of the genre. |
| Suppressed Transmission | 10 | I love the Suppressed Tranmission columns, but I can't imagine reading them without the extensive annotations, cross-referencing and bibliographic details herein. |
| Unknown Armies | 10 | Too awesome. Every page of second edition drips with style and plot ideas. |
| |
| 9 |
| Beyond the Barriers: The Book of Worlds | 9 | One of my absolute favorite Mage books, if only for the breadth of style and sheer joy of creativity that infuses the writing. |
| Break Today | 9 | Love the Mak Attax. They're the most down to Earth of Unknown Armies' factions, and the ones most readily sympathized with. |
| Continuum: Roleplaying in the Yet | 9 | |
| Dark Ages: Mage | 9 | From cover to cover, Dark Ages: Mage is unadulterated goodness. Well, it's slightly adulterated, since it carries some baggage over from Mage: the Ascension, but it's still got an awesome, flavorful magic system and brims over with plot and character ideas. |
| Godwalker | 9 | |
| GURPS Cabal | 9 | Holy cow, I love this book. If you're into modern conspiracy or occult games, but have no love for GURPS, you still should check this one out.
It's detailed, it's accessible, and best of all, it's got style. |
| Mage: The Ascension | 9 | I find myself echoing the comments of others. While Revised is the mechanically-superior edition, its lack of setting detail and wrenching -- to longtime players, at least -- change of venue and focus proved to be a dealbreaker for many.
Second edition, while somewhat sparser on hard rules, is much more "complete" presentation, with an even mix of rules and setting. |
| To Go | 9 | It's a good read and seems like it would be fun to run. The level of support given to customizing the adventure to the GM's tastes and players actions is impressive. |
| Trinity | 9 | |
| |
| 8 |
| Angel Roleplaying Game | 8 | Stylish in appearance and tone, Angel is Buffy's more outwardly-looking sibling. It further tweaks Cinematic Unisystem -- which is refined again in Buffy's revised corebook -- and includes rules for designing and adjudicating organizations a la Wolfram & Hart, Angel Investigations and whatever group your PCs get together. |
| Champions Universe | 8 | I don't know if I consider it so much a setting guide as an impressive idea mine for material to insert into my preferred game world. |
| Changeling: The Lost | 8 | |
| Changeling: The Lost Free Rules and Adventure | 8 | This quickstart totally changed my mind about the new Changeling. I can't wait to get my copy when it hits the stores! |
| Dark Ages: Mage Grimoire | 8 | What a great book. After being totally jazzed by Dark Ages: Mage itself, the Grimoire only further fired my desire to run a game. It's packed with options and more detail, including guidelines on how to create new magical Pillars, right down to their thinking in constructing the Fellowships in the game. How awesome is that? |
| Dreams and Nightmares | 8 | Wonderful book. Evocative, yet the material is easily tailored as the GM sees fit. |
| Fantasy Hero | 8 | Incredibly thorough. It covers almost all the angles, though it reads like an academic term paper. |
| Freedom City | 8 | |
| Galactic Champions | 8 | Left me wishing it were a hundred pages longer. |
| GAZ6: The Dwarves of Rockhome | 8 | Amazingly detailed, in-depth presentation of a dwarven kingdom and culture. It's a great resource for any fantasy campaign that needs an underground realm. |
| Ghostbusters | 8 | |
| Godlike | 8 | |
| GURPS Alternate Earths | 8 | It's intimidating, sometimes, reading RPG books like this. The material is so good, so authoritative and credible, that one's almost afraid to do anything with it, for fear of not doing it justice. |
| GURPS Alternate Earths 2 | 8 | A solid mix of thoughtful history alteration and game-able premises. Sometimes it seems like key facts must be inferred rather than stated outright, but I guess that just rewards the close reader. |
| GURPS Banestorm | 8 | Before reading GURPS Banestorm, I had pretty much entirely written off the whole idea of people from our Earth being transplanted to a fantasy setting. They really make it work here, though. The cause is hokey, but the consequences are so mouthwatering. |
| GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 3: The Next Level | 8 | The way this book organizes GURPS' usual myriad character creation options into neat packages astounds me. A huge boon to people making Dungeon Fantasy characters who need some guidance on how to make a specific type of character. |
| GURPS Fantasy II: Adventures in the Mad Lands | 8 | Amazingly weird and off-beat. |
| GURPS Fantasy Third Edition | 8 | The 4E version is an amazing rundown of the fantasy genre and how to build a world and apply tropes to it. One of the best genre toolkit books I've ever read. |
| GURPS Horror | 8 | Kenneth Hite is a master of making the brain buzz with possibilities for roleplaying games. His influence on the third edition of GURPS Horror is everywhere, especially in the campaign frames in the last chapter. |
| GURPS Illuminati University | 8 | Very fun to read. The Foglios' art fits nicely with the tone and style of humor. It seems best geared for a one-shot, or very limited run, rather than a campaign of any substantial length. |
| GURPS Infinite Worlds | 8 | Lots of solid material on running an Infinite Worlds game, but the material on plain jane time travel and the other mini-settings from GURPS Time Travel stick out awkwardly. Still, props for giving the stats for a time-traveling sports car. |
| GURPS Infinite Worlds: Britannica-6 | 8 | It's thoroughly researched, well-considered texts like Britannica-6 that make me feel like anything I ran in that world would do it a disservice. |
| GURPS Mysteries | 8 | Well written and thorough guide to building mystery scenarios from the ground up. I'd also say it was a successful experiment by Steve Jackson Games in selling a book manufactured with Print On Demand technology, at least in terms of quality if not sales. |
| GURPS Technomancer | 8 | |
| GURPS Thaumatology | 8 | Impressive. The breadth of different kinds of magical systems gave me ideas for campaigns with every page turn. |
| GURPS Time Travel | 8 | |
| GURPS Weird War II | 8 | Kenneth Hite let loose on topics clearly close to his heart: weirdness and World War II. It's a good read. |
| Iron Heroes | 8 | The game, as presented in its initial printing, felt rough around the edges, but overall, it was an excellent place to begin with getting away from the traditional treasure-laden style of fantasy gaming encapsulated by D&D. The revised edition, available only via PDF, does a lot to answer questions and fill in the gaps. |
| Jovian Chronicles | 8 | |
| Lawyers, Guns, and Money | 8 | |
| Lost Paths: Ahl-i-Batin and Taftâni | 8 | |
| Mage: The Sorcerers Crusade | 8 | Just lovely. Easily the least charged and most accessible rendition of Mage. |
| One Shots | 8 | Jail Break and Fly to Heaven are the two stars in this collection, but they're easily worth it all on their own. |
| Paragons | 8 | A little rough around the edges -- mostly a shocking number of typoes -- but overall, a solid toolkit text for building a game in the style of Heroes, Powers or even The Authority. |
| Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game | 8 | |
| Suppressed Transmission 2 | 8 | Somehow, not as awesome as the first collection, but still very cool. |
| Tradition Book: Akashic Brotherhood | 8 | Another night and day difference between the original and revised versions. The latter is awesome and the former decidedly not. |
| Tradition Book: Euthanatos | 8 | I think they're both actually very good. The revised version goes into more depth, but I found the original book very readable. |
| Transhuman Space | 8 | Intimidating in its depth with a scarcity of easy hooks for the quote-unquote party. Nice read, though. |
| Tuala Morn | 8 | Something different from HERO Games, a unique setting with its own quirks and special elements, rather than the catch-all kitchen sink worlds they've published previously. |
| Ultimate Power | 8 | |
| UNTIL Superpowers Database | 8 | Exhaustive and mildly repetitive, as every special effect gets its own equivalent of the 12d6 Energy Blast. Still a great source of inspiration for thinking laterally about game mechanics and special effects. |
| Werewolf Storytellers Handbook | 8 | Marvelous stuff. I attribute it entirely to Ethan Skemp the way that Werewolf books do their best to give the GM and players tools, and then get out of the way. |
| Werewolf: The Apocalypse | 8 | It's a different take on werewolves and one that appeals to me. There are a lot of disparate elements in this game. I think one must tread carefully when choosing what to emphasize or relegate to the sidelines. |
| Wraith: The Oblivion | 8 | Marvellous, evocative book. I doubt I'll ever meet a group of gamers interested in playing it as presented. |
| |
| 7 |
| Abomination Codex | 7 | Lots of neat powers and groups for characters to join and interact with. |
| The Bitter Road | 7 | I love it for the fact it's really about PC empowerment, as the book focuses on the players' characters making a difference in the world. The hard reset of Mage Revised stings all the same. |
| Blue Rose | 7 | |
| The Book of Crafts | 7 | I've often gotten the feeling from reading various discussions and game logs on the web that supplements like The Book of Crafts fired a lot of people's imaginations more than the core game itself did. |
| Book of the City | 7 | The nice thing about this one is its non-specific utility. Instead of describing a specific city, it talks about how to build one's own, or insert Werewolf elements into an existing one. |
| Buffy the Vampire Slayer Roleplaying Game | 7 | A strong contender for the coveted title of "Contains everything you need; just add dice." |
| C.J. Carella's Witchcraft | 7 | It's a wonderful tree with no leaves on it. If you want to create your own hidden magic and horror world and not worry about rules, this is for you. |
| Changeling: The Dreaming | 7 | The urban fantasy game that wasn't. Changeling needed a strong designer to enforce the core concepts, whatever those might have been. Unfortunately, it never got that strength of vision, so the game just wandered wherever its writers took it. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it makes for an unfocused, often self-contradicting game. |
| Conquerors, Killers and Crooks | 7 | Even if you're not a HERO GM, this is a terrific repository of bad guys for just about any kind of adventure you might want to run. Just flavor to taste. |
| Conspiracy X | 7 | Second edition is an almost-solid corebook. It has the same flaw as WitchCraft, where many antagonists are only sketched out lightly and left for following supplements. On the whole, though, I think it's very cool. |
| Corax | 7 | |
| Dead Magic II: Secrets and Survivors | 7 | |
| Executive Decision | 7 | Fun concept. Hope to get to play it some day. |
| Fantasy Hero Grimoire | 7 | |
| Feng Shui | 7 | |
| The Fragile Path | 7 | Very moody. Porthos' all-caps ranting at the beginning seems out of place, but what can you do? |
| GURPS Basic Set: Campaigns | 7 | |
| GURPS Basic Set: Characters | 7 | Solid book, if dry. |
| GURPS Cliffhangers | 7 | |
| GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 1: Adventurers | 7 | Reading this got me really intrigued at the idea of running a traditional dungeonbash in GURPS. |
| GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 4: Sages | 7 | I don't know if Dungeon Fantasy needed more character types before it had more GM tools, but it's a well proven sales model. |
| GURPS Goblins | 7 | Slapstick in Georgian London. Who'd've thought such a thing could be done? |
| GURPS Infinite Worlds: Collegio Januari | 7 | Great content, but frustratingly short. I wish this had taken the place of the time travel material in Infinite Worlds. |
| GURPS Lite | 7 | |
| GURPS Swashbucklers | 7 | Very solid, with interesting details about the era. |
| GURPS Warehouse 23 | 7 | Fun book. I've never gotten to throw any of its contents at my players, alas. |
| GURPS Who's Who 1 | 7 | The best part is the "what if?" sidebars, although too many begin, "History would not have changed appreciably if this person hadn't existed." |
| HERO System Fifth Edition | 7 | HERO is a marvelously crunchy and detailed system. The trick is decided where to pare it down to suit your tastes. |
| Kindred of the East | 7 | Florid prose and the text is almost entirely obscured in some places by the grayscale background art, but it's a cool idea for vampires all the same. |
| Kithbook: Redcaps | 7 | Really helped me get a mental grip on a kith that gets stereotyped as mindless bruisers and omnivores. |
| Lands of Mystery | 7 | It's a fun little supplement, with good advice for managing roleplaying games in general. Zorandar itself is pitch perfect for a lost world game. |
| Millennium City | 7 | Nicely detailed in places, but I can't buy into Millennium City as a credible, living place for some reason. Great resource for ideas, though. |
| Mokolé | 7 | Design your own dinosaur character creation. I love it. |
| Mutants & Masterminds Archetype Archive 1 | 7 | |
| Mutants & Masterminds Archetype Archive 2 | 7 | |
| Mutants & Masterminds Archetype Archive 3 | 7 | |
| Mystery Codex | 7 | Fun stuff in this one. A little too preoccupied with the undead for my tastes, but it demonstrates how WitchCraft's universe can contain a multitude of types of beings. |
| Nobilis | 7 | Amusing, but its ability to be easily understood and played is hampered by the obtuse and florid prose. |
| Northern Crown: New World Adventures | 7 | A fun, inventive setting. It'll be my first stop if I ever get a group willing to try an a-historical campaign. |
| The Order of Reason | 7 | When read waking, it's a solid book that puts a very playable spin on the Order of Reason as defenders of mankind who could very well not turn into the dehumanizing Technocracy of Mage: The Ascension. |
| Over the Edge | 7 | |
| Players Guide to the Changing Breeds | 7 | |
| Power and Privilege | 7 | This book made me think twice and come to enjoy a group I had previously dismissed altogether. Don't let others' casual dismissal of it as "useless fluff" stop you giving it a look over. |
| Pulp Hero | 7 | Has a ridiculously complete timeline of the pulp era. However, the text often overly dry and reserved when it would be better suited by a more bombastic, active treatment of the topic. |
| SJR4: Practical Planetology | 7 | Fun stuff. I love having more weird and atypical worlds to visit. |
| Slayer's Handbook | 7 | Technically and dramatically, it's very good. It just doesn't excite me the way it does others, unfortunately. |
| Space: 1889 | 7 | |
| Stargate SG-1 Roleplaying Game | 7 | Solid, if over-crowded with feats. |
| Statosphere | 7 | |
| Technocracy: Iteration X | 7 | I rate Convention Book: Iteration X a 7, while Technocracy: Iteration X is probably a 3 or a 4. Night and day difference. |
| Tradition Book: Order of Hermes | 7 | I think the Hermetic splatbooks are my favorite of the bunch, despite preferring the Virtual Adepts as my favorite Tradition. Somehow, the Hermetic books sing to me with energy and verve, even if they are presented as one of the stuffier, more hidebound Traditions. |
| Transhuman Space: Fifth Wave | 7 | A shocking barrage of information. Numbing, even. |
| The Turakian Age | 7 | So big and detailed, I've no idea where to start with a campaign set in Ambrethel. |
| Uresia: Grave of Heaven | 7 | It's a funny little book. I don't think it's amazing or anything, but it is certainly quirky and unique. |
| Wild Talents | 7 | Unfortunately skewed towards the Iron Age style, but still a very neat system. |
| World of Darkness: Mummy Second Edition | 7 | |
| World of Darkness: Sorcerer | 7 | You can take or leave the crunch as you like, but this has a surprisingly interesting and varied mix of occult societies and traditions. |
| |
| 6 |
| Alien Wars | 6 | |
| Ars Magica | 6 | The mechanics seem robust, if somewhat impenetrable. The corebook is severely lacking is more than the most cursory overview of the Mythic Europe setting, unfortunately. |
| Ascension | 6 | Bit of a wash for me. The best of the scenarios in this book is, for me, mildly interesting. |
| Autumn Nightmares | 6 | A useful pile of above average ideas, but it doesn't really pop or anything. |
| Blood Treachery | 6 | An interesting read, but it's about as useful as a regular novel in terms of running a Mage game. |
| The Book of Hod | 6 | A wonderful grab bag of places, characters and story ideas in the dream realms. I think WitchCraft could have done without yet more powers, but what can you do? Crunch sells. |
| The Book of Madness | 6 | |
| Book of the Wyrm | 6 | |
| Champions Battlegrounds | 6 | Solid stuff if you're stuck some evening for an idea, but most of these scenarios presume your group is the type that prefers to follow laid out clue trails. |
| Champions: Superpowered Roleplaying | 6 | Stolid's a good word to describe this one. It covers all the bases, but leaves you wishing it'd covered them with a little zip. The character generator's pretty awesome if you or one of your players is stuck for a character idea. |
| Chronicler's Shield | 6 | The booklet isn't anything inspiring -- just stuff that was left out of the corebook for space issues, I imagine. At least it's a gorgeous GM screen. I like to use it in my modern occult games, regardless of whether it uses the WitchCraft rules. |
| Crooks! | 6 | Very quirky villains. Not your run of the mill rogues gallery. |
| Dark Ages: British Isles | 6 | There is a surprising density of information here, but it's often at the 20,000 foot level. For example, every county in England gets a paragraph, but that's never enough to give a real sense of what's going on there. The dearth of maps hurts, too. |
| Dark Ages: Fae | 6 | This book had a lot of pre-development and -publication buzz among Changeling fans as being the end-all, be-all replacement for a faerie RPG. So I think perhaps disappointment over not getting the game many people wanted translated into not giving Dark Ages: Fae the credit it was due.
That said, I think I found the basic premises and set-up of the Fae interesting, but it seemed so cursory as to lack enough meat for those of us not blessed with excessively fertile imaginations. |
| Dead Magic | 6 | |
| Demon: Servants Of Darkness | 6 | It see-saws between a creative story outline for your players to try to wreck and a by-the-numbers bad guy book, with lots of generic characters, weapons and powers. If you want a mystical antagonist organization that's actually surprisingly horrific for a super hero setting, DEMON may be up your alley. |
| Digital Web | 6 | The first Digital Web is extremely evocative of Mage's original "anything goes" feel, where a mage's magic didn't depend on paradigm, just whatever seemed neat. It also has a certain flimsiness to it, like the authors didn't spend much time thinking about what they were writing.
Digital Web 2.0, on the other hand, revisits the Web after the crash, an event that radically changed the geography and denizens of the realm. It has a grimmer, less fantastical tone, and actually spends a lot of time talking about GMs and players using the internet to aid their game. |
| Discworld Roleplaying Game First Edition | 6 | It wouldn't have been my natural choice for a system, but on reflection, I think GURPS works. By virtue of its simplicity of the core mechanic, the rules get out of the way to let the players focus on generating the humor from their characters. |
| Dreaming Cities | 6 | It's good, but not great. The mini-settings don't really speak to me and the Tri-Stat system is pretty much take it or leave it. I did enjoy the discussion of urban fantasy and the general tropes and conventions. |
| Gadgets & Gear | 6 | Another great book of examples on how to bend the HERO system to fit your vision. |
| GURPS Arabian Nights | 6 | |
| GURPS Celtic Myth | 6 | Good info on Celtic story traditions, but it's dry enough you can only read it in small bites. |
| GURPS Discworld Also | 6 | I've found the character templates to be the most useful portion of the book. They're a curious example of fusing the typical activities of player characters with the conventions and tropes of the Discworld. |
| GURPS Powers | 6 | Comprehensive and vast in reach and scope, but it suffers in my opinion from being excessively dry. Even the genre and campaign sections are nearly arid. |
| GURPS Robin Hood | 6 | I like the idea of exploring the tropes of Robin Hood in a variety of settings, but they each receive such cursory content -- particularly the chapter exploring the original material, citing stories without placing them in context -- that I was left dissatisfied with the overall book. |
| GURPS Supers | 6 | It has lots of details for the GURPS set and thorough in talking about super hero games, but there's little here you won't find in other genre dissection books. |
| GURPS Vikings | 6 | A solid historical brief, but nothing to knock your socks off. |
| Hellboy Sourcebook and Roleplaying Game | 6 | I went back to look at this book for some inpiration in creating BPRD agents. I was surprised by how little content there was towards making one's own BPRD game. It's mostly a grand summation of the comics. But it's still very nicely laid out. |
| The Hero System Bestiary | 6 | I was surprised by the breadth of content. It's not just regular animals or just fantasy beasts. The template section is a welcome resource as well. |
| Hot Rods of the Gods | 6 | Pretty clever. I dug the gameboard for the climactic drag race over New York City. |
| Hush Hush | 6 | |
| Immortal Eyes: The Toybox | 6 | |
| Infernalism: The Path of Screams | 6 | |
| Kithbook: Nockers | 6 | Enjoyable read with a lot of character. |
| Land of Fire & Ice: The Sourcebook of Mythic Iceland | 6 | |
| The Legend of Spelljammer | 6 | |
| Mage Storytellers Companion | 6 | Worth getting just for the section on creating Wonders. |
| The Mage Tarot | 6 | The art veers between evocative and well done and murky and plain unclear. |
| The Magic Box | 6 | Pretty clever stuff. Certainly a useful resource for Buffy/Angel games, but I have to wonder if the combination of intensive layout and paperstock was a good choice. |
| Mars: The Roleplaying Game of Planetary Romance | 6 | |
| Monsters, Minions and Marauders | 6 | Feels more like a companion volume of the races of Ambrethel than a book of things to kill. Not a terrible thing, but that's not how it presents itself. |
| Mutants & Masterminds Gamemaster Screen | 6 | |
| Northern Crown: The Gazeteer | 6 | |
| Players Guide to Garou | 6 | |
| Postmodern Magick | 6 | |
| Pour L'Amour et Liberte: The Book of Houses 2 | 6 | |
| Spelljammer | 6 | Spelljammer is just a fun setting. It's kind of a shame so much D&D baggage was brought along. |
| Star Hero | 6 | A thorough text on generating a galaxy and planets, but frustratingly short on useful material for running science fiction games. Touches much too briefly on genre conventions and tropes like psi powers and time travel. |
| Stellar Frontier | 6 | |
| Sundered Skies | 6 | Great art and an interesting, non-standard setting. My suspension of disbelief was stretched by the fact voidglow as written ought to have killed everyone off long ago. Was it me, or does the book never explain how ships fly through the air? |
| The Swashbuckler's Handbook | 6 | Very florid style, but it does suit the tone. In fact, this book is so concerned with tone, sometimes I think the authors forgot it was meant to an aid to gaming. I found Ars Cupiditae as a style of magic to be very creative. |
| Tradition Book: Cult of Ecstasy | 6 | Both versions of this Tradition Book are very readable. The revised version has more substantive suggestions as to how Ecstatics work their magic. |
| Tradition Book: Dreamspeakers | 6 | |
| Tradition Book: Sons of Ether | 6 | All the energy and verve of the first version seems to have drained away from the revised Tradition Book. |
| Tredroy | 6 | Run of the mill in terms of what it covers, as it's essentially a gazetteer of the city, but it gets bonus points for melding cultures and weaving a rich history of Tredroy. It's the present that's a little less inspiring. |
| Trinity Field Report: Media | 6 | Short, yet wandering, as this booklet is a random mix of clippings from the Trinityverse, giving a glimpse into how media is produced and consumed in the early twenty-second century. It has some great elements to help flavor your game. |
| Vibora Bay | 6 | It's good, but not great. Robert Caliburn's my favorite part. |
| Villainous Archetypes 1 | 6 | |
| Villainous Archetypes 2 | 6 | |
| Weep | 6 | |
| |
| 5 |
| America Offline | 5 | |
| Arcane Adversaries | 5 | Without the context of The Mystic World, it's a really random grab bag of magical villains. In a way, I think the information in TMW would have been more useful paired with this content, rather than the high level baddies included with it. |
| Armageddon: The End Times | 5 | A lot of ideas that make the brain buzz; but overall the execution is dry and somewhat lacking in punch. |
| The Art of Mage: The Ascension | 5 | |
| The Ascension of the Magdalene | 5 | A standard dungeon crawl set in historical Prague, with notes for both fitting it into your traditional fantasy milieu, as well as the Unknown Armies universe. |
| Ascension's Right Hand | 5 | It's not mindblowing by any means, but it's also pretty much the only dedicated discussion of custos and companions you'll find in the entire Mage line. |
| Aurora Australis | 5 | |
| Bastet | 5 | I imagine it helps to be a cat person to really enjoy this book. Otherwise, it just seems very full of itself. |
| Book of Magic | 5 | Mostly about applying the existing power mechanics to have magical special effects and the kinds of stuff mystical heroes get up to at different power levels or styles of campaign. Unless you're really desperate for official material on magicians in the Freedom City universe, you can come up with this stuff on your own. |
| The Book of Mirrors | 5 | Unless you're really interested in charting the development of Mage, skip this and go straight to the Mage Storyteller's Handbook. |
| The Book of Shadows | 5 | It's a fun grab bag, althought frequently illegible. There's no other book quite like in the Mage line. |
| The Burning Wheel: Fantasy Roleplaying System | 5 | Too concerned with being precocious and different for the sake of difference. Scripted combat is tiresome and unengaging. |
| Castles and Covenants | 5 | It's yet another location book by White Wolf. It's almost background noise at this point. |
| Changeling Storytellers Guide | 5 | |
| Crusade Lore | 5 | It's a GM screen. What else can you say? The art's nice, although maybe not terribly in-line with the world presented in the books. |
| Denizens of the Dreaming | 5 | Look, it's more Changeling splats! Just what the game didn't need... |
| Dragons of the East | 5 | I think I sleptread through this one. I'll have to look at it again sometime. |
| Emergency Response | 5 | More or less a standard scenario, but there's a fair bit of NPC backstory to make the whole thing make sense which would seem to interfere with the ability to drop it wholesale into your campaign. |
| Emergency Response II | 5 | The first half's solid, then everything gets weird and aimless in the second part. |
| Fantasy Hero Grimoire II | 5 | The "schools" of spells in this second volume are more narrowly-focused in application and special effects, and thus of less general utility than those found in the original Fantasy Hero Grimoire.
And, perhaps more importantly, they're all kinda dull and mechanically flimsy. Why does someone using song magic make an attack roll based on their DEX characteristic? Just what constitutes a True Name and how do you go about discovering one? Nice ideas, but they need more work, not just system write-ups. |
| Freedom City Archetypes & Legacies | 5 | |
| Freedom City Atlas: Pyramid Plaza | 5 | Useful in the sense that now I know what the inside of a skyscraper looks like. Seriously lacking in story material. |
| Guide to the Technocracy | 5 | Good, if you like a fat hardcover of nothing but tongue-in-cheek in-character satire. Even when discussing rules, it seems the book is written from the perspective of the Technocracy. This colored a lot of people's views of the Union, to the point that I wonder if they ever figured out Guide to the Technocracy is almost one huge joke showing what makes the Union so reprehensible. |
| Guide to the Traditions | 5 | Was it really necessary to put so much of the primary text in handwriting fonts? |
| GURPS Black Ops | 5 | Sort of like Paranoia meets World of Darkness. It's average at best, which is substandard for a GURPS worldbook. |
| GURPS Creatures of the Night | 5 | Nifty ideas, but the writing lacked panache. I'll definitely flip through this one next time I run a game that needs some things that go bump. |
| GURPS CthulhuPunk | 5 | I was not really taken with this. It could be my own non-enthusiasm for most cyberpunk or unfamiliarity with SJG's Cyberworld setting, but this felt tacked-on and incomplete -- which it says it is right in the introduction, so maybe it's not a criticism but a caveat. |
| GURPS Fantasy Bestiary | 5 | Plenty of straight-up invented and borrowed mythical creatures here. The borrowed monsters lose something being presented without any context. |
| GURPS High-Tech | 5 | Very thorough, but really aimed towards the gun bunnies. I would have liked a broader overview of technology with less emphasis on weapons. |
| GURPS Illuminati | 5 | I was not amazed by this. All the useful content in here seems to have suffused most related books that came after it. |
| GURPS Loadouts: Monster Hunters | 5 | Really, I wanted some more outre equipment for hunting monsters, but that doesn't really fall into the remit of a book like this, I suppose. It's a time-saver for games where your pack inventory and type of gun in hand make the difference. |
| GURPS Mage: The Ascension | 5 | I can't speak towards its usefulness for playing a Mage game in GURPS, but it's an interesting snapshot of the development of Mage at the time.
Also, the in-character fiction of someone learning the basics of their paradigm is a whole new angle on a mage developing their magic; less gothic punk, more scholarly and thoughtful. |
| GURPS Magic Items 1 | 5 | Decently imaginative magical gear. I'm amused the ad copy promises sorcerous shops, then the text goes on to talk solely about how magical items would be sold through specialty brokers with little in the way of stock. |
| GURPS Magic Third Edition | 5 | Nothing but spells, really. It touches on some other topics, but you're almost always better off hitting up Thaumatology instead. |
| GURPS Time Travel Adventures | 5 | A motley assortment of scenarios. The rails are pretty firmly laid in the first two, but the third, "Soulburner," seems more flexible in terms of the presented material. |
| Hero High | 5 | Certainly a better written resource than Hero Games' Teen Champions, but I still question the utility of such a book, considering most of its target audience has gone through the public high school experience themselves. The material on the Claremont Academy in the Freedom City universe is pretty uninspiring and general. |
| Hidden Lore | 5 | |
| Immortal Eyes: Court of All Kings | 5 | |
| Initiates of the Art | 5 | |
| Kithbook: Pooka | 5 | Decent, but it focuses overmuch on "they can turn into animals!" rather than the pooka's dominant role as tricksters and teachers of hard lessons. |
| Kithbook: Satyr | 5 | |
| Loom of Fate | 5 | Amusingly ridiculous. |
| Luna Rising | 5 | |
| Mage Storytellers Screen | 5 | It's a screen. Just how much can you ask for? The raging gun battle in the Umbra on the players' side is worth a laugh. The adventure seems in keeping with the sort of stuff going on in other Mage scenarios at that time in the line's development. |
| Mage: The Awakening | 5 | Didn't do it for me, alas. It's very much about a particular genre and style of magic, so if full-on horror and Hermetic magic are your thing, go for it. |
| Manifesto: Transmissions from the Rogue Council | 5 | Talk about your crowbars. |
| Masterminds & Madmen | 5 | A copious number of characters, but they all share the same staid, workmanlike style with no real imaginative zest to make them jump off the page. The formulas behind pulp characters really start to show when you concentrate so many in one book. |
| Noblesse Oblige: The Book of Houses | 5 | |
| Players Guide for Changeling: The Dreaming | 5 | Wayyy too much attention given to the Nunnehi here, particularly when you consider that the space they get is insufficient to do them justice. At any rate, it's just another player's guide and thus hit-or-miss. |
| Shattered Europe | 5 | |
| Silhouette CORE Rules Deluxe Edition | 5 | |
| SJS1: Goblins' Return | 5 | This is barely Part One. There's the set-up, details of the ship the PCs have to infiltrate and then it's like, "See you in Part Two!" |
| Sorcerer Revised Edition | 5 | |
| Spacer's Toolkit | 5 | There's little in this gear book that a GM couldn't just come up with off the cuff. It's all standard stuff. |
| Tales of Magick: Dark Adventure | 5 | It's a great idea, but the text seems inflated with purple prose and hyperbole to hide the fact that it's really a 64 page book. |
| Teen Champions | 5 | Dreadful art, but the material's solid, even inspired from time to time. |
| Terra Verde | 5 | |
| Terran Empire | 5 | Total snoozeathon. One of those books where all the big action has already been charted out by the timeline. It's short on hooks for the PCs. |
| Tradition Book: Hollow Ones | 5 | |
| Tradition Book: Verbena | 5 | The first version of this book stank to high heaven. The second version was just bland and uninspiring. |
| Trinity Field Report: Psi Laws | 5 | An interesting smattering of examples of how noetics interact with the law in the Trinity universe. |
| Trinity Technology Manual | 5 | |
| The Ultimate Mystic | 5 | There's a lot here, but not enough of anything to make anything stand out. Representing hermetic theurgy with a handful of spells just does it a disservice. |
| Witches and Pagans | 5 | |
| World of Aldea | 5 | While I enjoyed reading about the world of Aldea in the main Blue Rose book, the book that's all about the setting was kind of a letdown. It's very muted and low key without much zip to anything. |
| Worlds of Freedom | 5 | Nothing spectacular. It's really an anthology of variant settings in the Freedom City universe centered on the theme of the past and future, with occasional looks sideways in time. |
| |
| 4 |
| The Artisans Handbook | 4 | Enh. I kept having this expectant "And?" thought running through my mind as I read this one. |
| The Book of Chantries | 4 | God help me, I like Porthos as written here. I also like Doissetep quite a bit. The rest of it is fairly missable. |
| Book of Lost Houses: The Second Coming | 4 | Another symptom of Changeling's splat glut. First it was Kiths, then Houses. |
| Firstborn | 4 | |
| Fool's Luck: The Way of the Commoner | 4 | Dry and dreary. |
| Forged by Dragon's Fire | 4 | Lots of off-beat magical Wonders here. Off-beat, unfortunately, does not equal keen. |
| Godsend Agenda: M&M Superlink Edition | 4 | In serious need of a competent editor. Typos aside, the text is frequently repetitive, echoing the same ideas and facts in multiple sections. While it's gratifying to have a complex back story that doesn't leave key elements for the GM to determine, perhaps less detail on the organizations of GODSEND Agenda and more about what kind of games one might run in the world would have been helpful. |
| GURPS Operation Endgame | 4 | I played through part of this, rather than read it, but was not super-impressed. For one thing, there are no international luge assassins in this adventure, as the cover implies. |
| Halls of the Arcanum | 4 | Snoozefest. I finished the book wondering why anyone would want to buy something that told them what they already knew. |
| Hidden Agendas | 4 | Lame. It's just an overflow book with nothing terribly interesting for setting material, a weak, seemingly pointless adventure and a muddled, unattractive GM screen. |
| Horizon: The Stronghold of Hope | 4 | Pretty lame. A proper sourcebook on the Traditions' stronghold should have been crammed with information about the city, people who live within it and run it and what role it plays in the Ascension War on Earth. The book is unfocused and maddeningly short on useful details and engaging plot hooks. |
| Immortal Eyes: Shadows on the Hill | 4 | |
| Kithbook: Sluagh | 4 | Weak and wandering, with lots of broad generalizations and little material useful to the default present day setting. |
| Litany of the Tribes Volume 2 | 4 | |
| The Mystic World | 4 | Ugh. One gets the feeling that the big heavies like Tyrannon were written to see just how out of hand their stats could get. |
| The Orphans Survival Guide | 4 | Much like Destiny's Price, there's something comical about gamers playing out "life on the streets." |
| Rage Across the Heavens | 4 | Best read in small doses, when you're looking for some Aetherial element relevant to your game. |
| SJR1: Lost Ships | 4 | Weak sauce. It's just more of the same. |
| Technocracy: New World Order | 4 | Some clever ideas for that point in the history of Mage, but this one is even more scattered and confused that most White Wolf splatbooks. |
| Technocracy: Syndicate | 4 | Mildly amusing, as these books go, but there's so little meat here. And how exactly do Syndicate members use their money-based paradigm to achieve supernatural longevity and other impossible things? |
| The Technomancer's Toybox | 4 | It's not that hot. |
| Tradition Book: Virtual Adepts | 4 | I really like the Adepts and what their Tradition wants to accomplish, but both their splatbooks are weak at best. |
| |
| 3 |
| The Autumn People | 3 | |
| The Chaos Factor | 3 | It really is as poor a book as everyone says. |
| Destiny's Price | 3 | Kinda overwrought. For some reason, the thought of your average gamers roleplaying "life on the streets" seems silly in a way the usual elves and wizards never do. |
| The Fallen Tower: Las Vegas | 3 | Ergh. All the zip and wow of something not very zippy or wowful. |
| Farscape Roleplaying Game | 3 | An empty d20 adaptation with no real reason for it to be d20 at all. |
| Gimmick's Guide to Gadgets | 3 | The new rules don't particularly keep to the spirit of an effects-based powers system and the art is almost uniformly dreadful. And M&M 2E almost entirely outmoded the entire book. |
| GURPS Villains | 3 | A weak hodgepodge. Worth it if you find it in a bargain bin. |
| Hero System Resource Kit | 3 | Not so hot. The screen's useful, but everything else is of limited use. I know this is Hero Games we're talking about, but the plainness of the design disappointed me. Screens should be at least as much eye candy as they are game resource. |
| The Infinite Tapestry | 3 | Sometimes I wonder if the authors intended to make this book as dry and difficult to read as possible. In contrast to its spiritual predecessor, The Book of Worlds, The Infinite Tapestry literally put me to sleep on several occasions. |
| Kinfolk: Unsung Heroes | 3 | |
| Mutants & Masterminds Annual #1 | 3 | The problem with grab bag books is the odds of liking everything in the book are fairly low. Add to that the fact that nothing in the Annual particularly sings, and it's a pretty unimpressive book. |
| Seal of the Wheel | 3 | There's lots of stuff, but it lacks that precious X factor of coolness to come alive. |
| The Spirit Ways | 3 | |
| Time Lord | 3 | Bland writing, weirdly distorted art -- why is everyone so short and stocky? -- and detrimentally slavish adherence to the source material. |
| Werewolf Chronicles Volume 2 | 3 | |
| |
| 2 |
| Dark Champions: The Animated Series | 2 | One of the few books I wish I could get my money back. The art's dismal, even by Hero Games' standards and the writing is uninspired at best. |
| Forge: Out of Chaos | 2 | Rubbish. They get credit for making it happen, but it's rubbish. |
| The Kinslayer Wars | 2 | |
| Legacy of the Darksword | 2 | That was rubbish. |
| Masters of the Art | 2 | The timing was ironic: Masters of the Art hit the shelves shortly before Mage Revised did. The latter effectively removed Master-level mages from the default setting. Masters of the Art isn't all that great, either. It's like eating Wonder Bread-flavored cotton candy. |
| The Qualinesti | 2 | |
| Technocracy: Progenitors | 2 | Insipid and uninspired. It goes for the "this group controls everything" shtick, as was the style of the time, but never even considers motive or profit. This book came out early in Mage's development, but it's really hard to look past its glaring flaws, as there's little beyond them. |
| Technocracy: Void Engineers | 2 | Dismal book. Dry and unevocative. It also suffers the indignity of the introductory fiction starring the PC party from hell, with a mage, a werewolf, a vampire and a changeling -- maybe even a wraith. |
| |
| Unsorted |
| Dark Ages: Europe | 0 | I bought this thinking it would be like the similarly-titled Dark Ages: British Isles. Whoops. There's nothing in here but vampire-related material. I wound up briefly skimming the whole thing. There's a lot of historical information, but frankly, it's more like a text book than a resource for generating roleplaying campaigns or story arcs. |
| Leaves from the Inn of the Last Home | 0 | Ha! When I asked for this for Christmas as a 12 or 13 year old, I had no idea it was attached to a roleplaying game, or even what a roleplaying game was. It was just more information about the series of novels I was eagerly devouring at the time.
I wonder what it would be like reading Leaves today? |
| PG1: Player's Guide to the Dragonlance Campaign | 0 | My very first RPG supplement. I didn't even realize it was an RPG book -- or what an RPG was -- when I bought it. I just wanted to read more about the world of the novels I was devouring at the time. |
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