Didn't get the PDF, so i'll only talk about the softcover book: printing is great, the cover is very nice, and if you forget about the white borders on every pages, it definitely looks like a first printing. For a very reasonnable price, i have at last one of my fav books of the original World of Darkness!

This is a review of the print on demand-product, not the book itself.

This is an excellent product. The art is crisp and clear, the writing is perfectly legible, despite the infamous white print on black. I was slightly surprised that they opted for white-on-black, instead of black-on-white like Dark Reflections: Spectres, since the white border produced by the printing process is much more visible against the black page, but this small flaw is easily overlooked next to the wuality of this product. The printing is excellent, the paper quality is good and the cover is colorful, crisp and well bound.

I love this product, and will continue to use DrivethruRPG to purchase PoD World of Darkness books.

I have to agree with the previous review - good book, bad PDF.

The content is good - but you have to struggle though reading white text on black background for the entire book.

This also means that it is pretty-much unprintable; you CAN extract it into a picture editor and invert the colours (which helps), but you'd have to do this for each page individually.

Can't comment on the PDF of this book yet (used to own the hardcopy but it vanished), but, for content, this book is great. If you like having shadows in the game at all, this can only add to your game. New Thorns, tips on playing shadows, all kinds of great stuff. I can see how the white-on-black PDF would be unfavorable, of course, but based solely on content, I gotta go 4/5 at least.

The book: The Shadow Players Guide is an invaluable addition to any Wraith game. CH1 is a general introduction to playing Shadows and what they're after. CH2 is the Systems and Dirty Tricks chapter that not only includes new Shadow archetypes but also a host of new (and very vicious) thorns, tips on Harrowings and a top 10 of techniques for Shadowguides to use which is incredibly useful and is worth the cost of the book by itself. CH3 is an curious chapter that covers how Shadows behave in the other Dark Kingdoms - not exactly useful for every game, but an interesting read. CH4 covers Spectres and the Risen, CH5 covers the Eidolon, and CH6 is the standard series of essays on roleplaying. It's a very useful book, and I'd say it's pretty much essential for Wraith.

The PDF: Unfortunately, this was one of those books that WW decided to do as white text on black paper. While this was fair enough when it was in a printed hardcopy book, it's lethal when it's a PDF. I'd agree with the previous reviewer that a printer-friendly copy of this (and IIRC the Dark Reflections book, which was also white text on black background) would be vastly preferable here (unfortunately the security settings of the eBook prevent the reader from opening it in photoshop and inverting the pages and tweaking the contrast).

An even bigger killer is that the quality of the Ebook scan itself (at the time of writing at least) does not appear to be all that great - I can't tell what the resolution is, but I'd be very surprised if it was 300 dpi. This means that the writing is actually a bit hard to read even on screen - it's just about readable at 100% view but it's a bit fuzzy. It looks like the image compression settings are way too high - the compression blocks around the edges of the text are rather large and make it almost unreadable when viewed at 300% resolution.

So we have a double whammy here - the universal black background will kill the printer if you try to print it as is, and the text is a little difficult to read on the screen. Which is a great pity as this is a really essential book for Wraith. I can only hope that it is replaced with a higher quality, more printer-friendly scan.

So I'll give it 2/5 - I'd give it 5/5 for the material in the book, but the poor quality of the scan and the printer-unfriendliness drag down the mark. I can only hope that this can be changed at a later date.

From the little I've read this seems to be a really good book. But that's not really why I'm writing this review. I'm writing this review to comment on the PDF specifically. I was dissapointed by the scanning quality of this book. It is a scan of a physical book, which I already expected seeing as this book is quite old (in World of Darkness terms) and there probably isn't a digital version available. I do think the scan could have been a lot better. It's also irritating that the whole book is white text on a black background, which means it is anything but printer friendly. I would have liked to see a printer friendly version accompanying this book. This could be done by taking the scans of the pages, inverting the colors and fiddle a bit with the contrast and generating a seperate PDF from that.

Great book, but the PDF could have been of a much higher quality.