Well, I just wrote a lengthy review that was devoured by rpgnow requiring me to sign in a second time (timed out I guess) and I lack the energy to rewrite this, so I'll just do a summary:

Style/Presentation: there are 5 books included but they are not indexed. The artwork is good, although the new artist's style took a bit of adjusting to get used to. As with all Troll Lords products it could have used a bit more editing. There is confusion on the extra prime rules introduced in the book.

Stand-Alone Usefulness: The book includes a C&C quickstart rules set but the game is clearly written for use with the main books, and so this is of limited usefulness. It works great as a specific campaign setting for C&C, but it is very high powered, and using much of this material in standard C&C games requires careful consideration.

Usefulness as a Horror Setting: This game is clearly inspired by Ravenloft, but it is much closer thematically to the movie Van Helsing or Underworld: Rise of the Lycans. I would also suggest this was a great resource for a Castlevania style game. Characters in this game are tough, very tough. They face slavering hordes of monsters that are just as tough, however; it's a strange mix that felt like a "fantasy heavy metal" take on horror to me.

Contents: Four new classes, a ton of new magic items, gear and spells, a detailed overview of the demiplane and a scenario for 4th level characters that will put them through the wringer of a haunted former keep turned inn turned bastion of EVIL. There is also a PDF with class-based character records and a quickstart rulebook that is more useful as a hand-out to players new to the whole RPG thing than to running the boxed set as is.

Overall: James Ward knows how to write a fun old-school sourcebook. It's not for people who find and crave balance, nor is it for people who learned everything they ever knew about role playing games within the last six years; if you were gaming in the 80's you will grokk what this set is about and appreciate what it's trying to accomplish. It;s very accessible and full of weird over-the-top ideas. Well worth the attention of old school and C&C fans alike. I could also see this being converted to a more modern game like Pathfinder with minor work involved. Fans of WoD games need not apply, this is a brand of heavy metal dark fantasy that has little to do with the precepts of the White Wolf brand names; likewise if you come to this expecting a Ravenloft supplement with the serial numbers filed off you will only be partially correct; the Tainted Lands is closer to James Ward's homebrew Ravenloft, I suspect, than anything else, and the higher overall power level of this game means it will most definitely play out like some sort of dark heroic fantasy than gothic horror.

Style: 4/5 -- good art, good layout, needs some errata and editing Rules: 3/5 -- useful for its internal setting, harder to adapt a lot of it to a standard C&C game Readability: 5/5 -- James Ward's relaxed and casual style of writing is a pleasure to read and made this more engaging than many existing C&C modules Overall: 4/5 -- I'm using this for a Tainted Lands campaign "as is", the wacky concepts within make for a singularly unique over-the-top splatterfest campaign; if you like old-school and this sounds intriguing, grab it!

This is an "old school" approach to gods in fantasy gaming and C&C in particular, and a product I have been looking forward to for some time. If you were disappointed with the 3.0 edition of Dieties & Demigods as having far too few deities/pantheons and far too large a set of stat blocks, then this book will appeal to you.

Of Gods & Monsters includes fantasy pantheons for the various races (including goblinoids, gnomes, elves, dwarves, and halflings), the Airdhe pantheon (the default setting of many C&C modules) and a large sampling of real world mythologies, including Japanese, Indian, Roman, Greek, Celtic, Norse, Aztec, American Indian, and Egyptian. Each section provides a representative collection of the deities from each pantheon as well as statistics for their avatars (kind of like it was done in 2nd edition AD&D's Legends * Lore). A plethora of new monsters relevant to each pantheon are included, making this a good addition to C&C's Monsters & Treasures book, as well. A load of new spells are also included, and each deity entry includes suggested benefits clerics of the god might receive.

The plus side of this book is obvious: a convenient grouping of gods from real-world mythology as well as some ready made fictional pantheons, easily inserted in to whatever campaign world you desire. The book is gorgeously illustrated throughout, and has all of Troll Lord's signature artists involved, giving a nice range of variation. As always I enjoyed Bradley's art, but the new arist (who ilustrated the Norse pantheon) did some reall cool stuff here, and I really like his style; it's grown on me quite a bit since Tainted Lands.

The down side of this book isn't really a down side unless you're part of the newer generation of gamers who are accustomed to rigidly balanced mechanics. Many of the new clerical abilities, spells and even some monsters/avatars in this book have interesting stats and approaches. Some struck me as peculiar or potentially unbalanced (not many, just a few). From my perspective as an older gamer this is not an issue; C&C runs like older edition versions of D&D, and those did not arc everything along a specific line of balance. Likewise, C&C is famous for encouraging house rules and customization, so if something seems wonky, excluding or changing it does not cause problems. Personally, I've found nothing with which I had issue here, but then again I'm a more story-focused GM/CK so this book's range of diverse pantheons and ideas will greatly benefit my play style. If you are obsessed with balance, however, you might find some things odd or annoying.

Also, the book could have used a second edit. There were some typos that stood out in certain spots. That said, it's still orders of magnitude better than the 1st printing C&C Player's Handbook in terms of look and editing.

In the end, I would reccommend this book to all C&C players and also to OSRIC/Labyrinth Lord/older edition D&D gamers, as this book would prove equaly useful to such games, I feel. I actually plan to use it in reference to my Pathfinder games, as well.

Overall rating: Usefulness 5/5 Mechanics 4/5 Presentation/Art: 5/5 Editing: 3/5 Value for the Dollar: 5/5 Overall: 5/5

This is an excellent starter adventure, both for new players to the hobby who are looking for a good entry-level dungeon and experienced DMs who need a decent low-level dungeon crawl. The production values are good, the interior art is pleasant with an old-school feel (without being crude, either, just simple black and white drawings that evoke the feel of the genre) and the dungeon itself is very clearly described with ready-made blocks of flavor text to read. It's nicely outlined, can be dropped in to any setting, and is good for 1-2 evenings of entertainment. The module also includes several classic monsters now statted for C&C.

Just a short note, as I am still reading and absorbing this amazing setting book. Well written, full of neat concepts that I am going to extract for use in my own campaign, filled with interesting NPCs, several new races and many, many monsters, all themed arounds a region of Wolfgang Baur's Zobeck setting which is dominated by intelligent undead.

Appearance: 4/5 the book looks great and I like how stat blocks are presented (doesn't look like the ink jet threw up on the page, and has its own theme without being a copy of the WotC format). The art is great, though some is copyright-free stuff that has been seen elsewhere, a lot.

Usefulness: 5/5 although I will definitely cannibalize for my own setting, the truth is I am pretty tempted to use this book as-is; Morgau and Doresh are well-developed and very strange regions that I think I'd like to see in play. Especially useful if you're a fan of undead and necromancers in D&D.

OVERALL: 5/5 best value I've gotten for a while in 4E PDF products; the price tag matches the size and value of the content, I feel.

A huge bang for the buck here; I am impressed at how much I got for the price tag. This is an excellent compilation of one-on-one modules, most useful when you have a single player and an itch to play; the rules provide plenty of helpful hints on scaling and balance and I have encountered no glitches or oddities so far, off-hand. The only real problem I have noticed is that they are designed for various separate scenarios aimed at specific character types, and so it would be hard to run this book as a series of continuous adventures in a campaign.

The book is clean and well-edited, and has plenty of great illustrations and maps. Probably my favorite PDF to date for Pathfinder!

This is an interesting class, but could use some rebalancing to make it more effective at low levels. It has several features such as tethering spirits and crafting focus items, but doesn't provide enough guidelines (I feel) for a player to get a grasp on what he can do with the class, or a GM to arbitrate what shouldn't work. I would also have enjoyed an expanded section on the nature of various spirits in the spirit world (the thematics here remind me a bit of spirits in Runequest) as spirits are a new concept to PF/3.X as presented. The book is very clean otherwise and nicely illustrated. If your game is full of god role-players and no rules lawyers you will probably get the most mileage out of this book, but do not let cheesers get their paws on it, as the free-form nature of spiritual benefits a shaman can gain are easily abused.

This is a must-have book for Pathfinder fans, and is essentially backwards compatible with 3.X as well. I have so far already integrated the three new player races (saurians, half ogres and ratkin) in to the game, and have seen several of the classes in play as well. The book includes chase rules that look quite fun (haven't tried them yet), a plot path generator, optional character traits, rules on fantasy firearms, and several new classes as well.

PROS: nicely illustrated, well-edited by and large, and it's easy to see that more than half of this book will see play in my campaign over the coming months.

CONS: not much, but mostly that a couple of the new classes are a bit wonky (I'm still scratching my head at the warlock....not a normal class by any stretch!) or boring (cough warlord cough). Beyond that, I haven't encountered anything in this book that wasn't a nice addition to my new ongoing Pathfinder campaign.

Excellent collection of monsters from Expeditious Retreat, statted for use with OSRIC (and therefore 1st edition AD&D). I am using the monsters with my C&C campaign right now, and the conversion is trivial.

PROS: the book is cleanly illustrated and the monsters all get some great write-ups. There are a lot fo interestign creatures in here, and the book is not an eyesore...even the retro cover, reminiscent of Erol Otus (by peter Mullen, whose got the Otus look down pat) is actually rather quirky and fun rather than an eyesore as in other retro games where the need to emulate the bad art of the 70's and 80's accompanied the retro-rule feel. The book is navigable as well with full bookmarks, a big plus for laptop-equipped DMs. Finally, as a resource designed fors classic style AD&D play, it both looks and feels the part, with all the appropriate bells & whistles, right on down to the layout and design. But the art in this one is much, much nicer than anything in Fiend Folio, I assure you!

CONS: I found that putting the monster description at the end of the entry rather than the beginning was a bit disconcerting....sometimes I needed to reference it first to figure out what the heck the creature's weird properties were. A few of the creatures are very...ah...complicated, which is to say, my head started throbbing thinking about managing the creature in-game, but don't take that as a con unless you are keen on simplicity of design.

Appearance: 4/5 - good cleanlayout, design, and nice art; a portion of it is definitely royalty-free and been seen elsewhere, but it's still good

Content: 5/5 if you need new monsters for OSRIC, C&C, or 1E/2E games.

VALUE: 5/5 for old school gamers.

A great one-box set RPG that still holds true to it's old-school classic roots. This set includes the main rules, two supplemental monster books, a spell expansion, GM's adventure and solo adventure as well as counters and character sheets....probably some other stuff I have forgotten, too. I have both the print and PDF editions, and the print edition is so thick you can't close the box. Just sayin', it's a lot of bang for the buck.

LIKES: T&T in all its glory; the 7.5 edition adds a bunch of additional content to the main rules and four supplemental rule books not seen in the 7.0 edition. A few rule fixes are included (such as the change on experience gain and cost to advancement) as well. The art is great, using Claudio Poyas (sp?) material to good effect; he has a clean, distinct style that is reminiscent of the old days of T&T when Liz Danforth was the chief illustrator.

DISLIKES: Not much to complain about. I've been a fan of T&T since 1981 and in all fairness was a major fanzine publisher for it in the 80's, so I'm an old-school fan who loves this style of game. The game does make enough changes to the mechanics that while I'd rank it as 99% compatible with previous T&T books (solos especially) you will run in to an occasional bit where a judgment call or two will need to be made.

THOUGHTS: It might be too simple for some younger gamers used to the complexity of 3.X these days, but T&T works equally well for extended campaigns, pick-up games, beer & pretzel affairs and as a gateway RPG for new and young gamers. The 7.5 edition is well worth checking out if you want a game that is simple to learn but provides for an immense level of flexibility in what you want to do.

This is the single best reinvention Traveller has yet experienced. The core rules are everything you could ever want, and does a fine job of selling me on the supplements by virtue of its polished and complete nature....put another way, the core book is so well done it compels me to by the supplements.

LIKES: provides an excellent ruleset from which to run classic science fiction campaigns, and touches on expanding to settings outside of the classic Traveller universe setting of the Imperium.Clean layout, good index, and the V2 edition has some very nice art. This edition is spiritually and mechanically closer to the original CT and MT than any later editions, as well...a good thing for me.

DISLIKES: not much to complain about. Early purchasers for the first print dealt with a few odd bits of errata, but those are all fixed in the PDF edition.

This is easily one of the most useful PDFs I have purchased to date. It's universal (system free), filled with handy advice, scenario seeds, and informative data on constructing fantasy medieval cities. This particular version is the compiled set (the individual chapters appear to be sold separately).

LIKES: engaging, informative style of writing, well researched and filled with useful ideas and concepts drawn from historical examples, while also offering ideas on integrating such in to a fantasy environment. Great scenario ideas laced throughout as well.

DISLIKES: This book should have a print edition, but I will be firing up the printer soon to fix that issue.

Let me state right off that this is a good book, and worth getting, but the advertisement does not explain that this is just a re-release with a different cover of the previous Special Supplement 3: Patron Encounters and is the same book, verbatim. I already purchased Special Supplement 3, and would not have also gone on to purchase this had I realized they were one and the same (and yeah, I could have checked out the preview, but let's face it, everything Comstar does is great, and I just thought this was a new book of encounters from them). So....excellent book, well worth getting, but it needs to be marked as a repackaging of a previous PDF for those who already have the other one, please! I could have bought other cool Traveller stuff with this money rather than pay for the same book twice.

Content: 5/5 lots of good scenario ideas for the harried referee, and generic enough to insert in any campaign

Look: 3/5 nothing special, no frills packaging, but this is Traveller, eh? and it gets the job done.

Value 5/5 if you don't already own it, 1/5 if you accidentally bought it thinking this was a new product.

Outstanding book, and I've been messing around with it all day, building characters and enjoying the unusual class combinations and power sets that can be found within. So far I've rolled up some 1st level characters, 16th level characters, and experimented a bit with one of the epic paths, and found them all to have some well-thought out design principles.

This book is definitely better and more evolved than the first Forgotten Heroes book, benefitting from a year of insight and evolution for 4E. It has the following bits, for those looking for a run-down:

4 Classes:

Necromancer - a variant on the classic, with emphasis on summoning powers (plays a bit like the summoner features introduced in Arcane Power). The summonings are of classic undead, and the class models the archetypal D&D necromancer fairly well, I think.

Spiritsworn - Anyone who's played too much Guild Wars will notice more than a passing thematic resemblance to GW's ritualist class (this is meant as a positive correlation with an MMO, I love GW!). The Spiritsworn is easily my favorite new class in this book, with the theme being a sort of necromantic fighter who calls upon the spirits for aid in battle. They like scythes, too. Very creative class, and I easily figured out some interesting power combos with the characters I built on it. I'll be using these builds as NPC allies and foes in my pending weekly game, as well.

Assassin - this is an interesting combat class, which I might call a "necromancer rogue" in how it appears to function. Not quite as exotic as the other classes, but it might give fans of the swordmage and avenger a new class to drool over. It uses a Study Point mechanic to give the assassin an edge over time, something I'd like to see in action, to see how well it works.

Deathwarden- this class surprised me, because I was expecting it to be some variant on the death knight, anti-paladin or whatnot, but it turned out to be a strange and interesting idea: a sort of defender-themed warlord type who has an uncanny ability to sense impending doom and uses this to his advantage to protect those around him. Probably my next most favorite of the classes after the spiritsworn, and a genuinely interesting concept with excellent implementation.

New Stuff: the book introduces a few new rituals of appropriate theme, some interesting and thematically appropriate feats, a selection of magic items (no new armor items though, a pity!) and I was especially happy to see details on setting up NPC versions of the classes in the last section of the book, along with precalculated charts of NPC stats for ease of reference. This is something, I will point out, that not even WotC can do right, forcing DMs to invent their own approach to NPCs in the PHB2 while waiting for a DMG2 release in September.

Presentation: 5/5 Clean and well edited; I've only caught one power so far that felt like it was missing something or needed clarification so far (spiritsworn Vortex of Souls Levevl 5 Daily -- the effect should be until the end of the encounter, I am pretty sure, although it does not state such).

Production Quality: 5/5 Nice graphics and layout, readable and (important) easy to print. I'll be picking up the actual print edition as well when I see it, but it's nice to have the PDF on file as well.

Overall Value: 5/5 I'm using this in my game tonight, and encouraging my players to mine it for new characters. Well worth the money invested, and these classes are interesting and different enough to have legs of their own. As an aside, aspiring developers for 4E who want to get a sampling of new class design done right from a 3rd party source should take a look at this! They did an fantastic job.

Very funny stuff! I've got this and the next four issues now...looking forward to digging for more. The PDF edition is a good clean read; if you like Groo, KotD, Robert Aspirin or even Thrud, then you'll like Pewfell, too.

This is probably the best Remarkable Race book to date (I have them all) and they just keep getting better. The Xax are a weird, unearhtly addition to the roster, and while I shudder at the thought of one of my players getting their mitts on these creatures, I myself plan to use the Xax as a major source strange NPCs and monsters in the next campaign arc. Those of you who shudder at randomization elements (a classic old school trope I love) might want to think twice before diving in, but everyone else please grab it! I love what Alluria is producing for 4th edition, well worth the investment. A+++