Wonderful example of a well done fantasy setting inspired by African culture without being a thinly disguised Africa copy. The cultures, character classes, and creatures all provide wonderful inspirations for running campaigns or creating your own setting and the game rules make for an excelent system for any Sword & Sorcery campaign set in a Bronze Age or Iron Age setting, regardless of cultural inspiration.

I give it a 2 because it's free. But mostly it's 400 pages of joke gods and monsters, of which none seem in any way funny to me. Appendix A is a 10 page article by M.A.R. Barker about creating religions for realistic fantasy games, which might be worth reading for people interesting in the topic. Sadly, he'd already been dead for 3 years when this book was made, so he probably didn't have any part in making this.

Wonderful rules-light game. Currently my favorite there is for any type of fantasy campaign.

Absolutely wonderful game. Exactly the right combination of attributes, races, and skills with a relatively lightweight combat system I've always been looking for, And of the many Sword & Sorcery games I've seen, this is one of the few that actually has rules that constantly encourage players to really play like Sword & Sorcery heroes instead of just being a generic RPG without nonhuman characters and evil magic and calling it a day. This game shows very well how even very traditional Sword & Sorcery can have great nonhuman characters, they are just rather different from dwarves, elves, and orcs.

One of my favorite monster books I've ever come across. Plenty of original creatures I've not seen before anywhere that are also actually really interesting and quite cool. Barely anything truly bland or goofy in this one.

This one has an excelent reputation which is fully deserved. While being a sandbox campaign setting on the surface, it actually is a very useful model for the creation of campaign settings in general, which should be very useful for all GMs. Even if you're using an already existing setting, it's a great resource to not just create small locations, but to actually come up with groups of people to encounter, who are not just traveling on the road, but have their own motives and problems. Recommended without reservations.

One of the best modules for AD&D. It's not just a location with a flimsy justification for the players to explore at their leasure, but actually provides a solid background for why the PCs went there in the first place and what they want to accomplish, as well as providing an explaination why there inhabitants live in the place as they do.

This is one of the more better modules for LotFP. While the players may not be able to fully understand what is going on and what they are seeing, there is a solid and clearly defined backstory, which explains how the situation came to be. Because of this, players are actually able to accomplish something, as their explorations help them to find more pieces to piece together the larger picture, even if it will remain fragmented and possibly leave quite a few open questions. This is Lovecraftian Fantasy roleplaying as it should be done. Solid, but nothing outstanding or particularly remarkable.

While there are a couple of ideas that could potentially be worked into something good, the content of this module is just a bunch of random junk with no sense or meaning. And it clearly isn't concerned with even pretending that there would be any. It is not meant to make sense and you're supposed to just shrug as the players are staring at you blankly, having no idea what's going on. Mystery and revulsion are great things in an RPG, but to be effective the players need to be under the assumption that there is something going on that is following a pattern they do not understand. But in this case it is painfully obvious that there isn't anything that could be understand, because there isn't any pattern at all. At the very best the GM could try to keep a cold face and ask the players to trust him, that there is something going on, but it's so weird that they most likely will get only a very fragmented and distorted image. Which would be okay, but in this case that would be a blatant lie. And that's just bad game design. It's interesting to read, but for using it in a game, it's just plain useless. It's decent literature, but a very poor game suplement.

AS&SH is the game I've been searching for, for about the last 10 years. It's basically a revised version of the 1st Edition of AD&D, but edited in a way that I was actually able to understand. And not just "able to", learning how to play and run this game was childs play, no problem at all. I've always wanted to run AD&D, but was never able to grasp what the books where trying to tell me.

I really like how the rules deal with attribute checks and thief skills, and initative is both easy to understand, yet adds quite some complexity to the game. Instead of multiclassing, the game has several subclasses in addition to the basic four, many of which combine features of other classes. The only things I would have done differently would have been giving a page to nonhuman characters (which don't exist in the prepackaged setting, but might in other worlds) and converting armor class to positive values (which you can easily do yourself. I agree with some others who said it might have been a good idea to use a different magic system for Sword & Sorcery, but that might have been a bit too different for some players. Otherwise a remarkable game and my personal system of choice.

And the price for the pdf is more than a bargain.

I usually prefer not to add any additional material to the basic rules of a game and very rarely use 3rd party material, but I really like The Secrets of the Oracles. It's 6 mysteries, 6 curses, and 6 archetypes. That's what you pay for and that's what you get. There are no additional pages dealing with making oracle characters or how to implement them into a campaign.

Regarding the power level, nothing appears to be exceptionally good, but at the same time pretty much everything seems to be an actually viable option that can work out well for the character. Something that I usually don't see often in d20 splatbooks, except for the Pathfinder Advanced Players Guide, which brought us the oracle in the first place. Usually it's two or three gems in a book of forgettable stuff, but here everything is actually useful. The mysteries and curses have me completely convinced, but the archetypes are actually getting a bit too far, almost completely replacing mystery spell lists and relevations at lower levels and even at higher level your archetype will be your primary mystery, withyour actual mystery affecting only the list of relevations you can chose from after you got those from your archetype. However, the Ascetic and Mad Prophet are still very interesting choices, and the Tribal Shaman and Wanderer could also find some fans. Among the curses, only Technical Ineptitude seems a bit too situational in its benefits, but the others are all interesting blends of drawbacks and thematically fitting benefits.

I think there's a focus on more "savage" campaigns instead of urban ones, with the Rot and Primeval mysteries and the ascetic, crone, tribal shaman, and wanderer archetypes. The Arcana, Darkness, Luck, and Sound (which could also have been called Voice) mysteries should be useful in an urban setting as well, however, and the curses can work everywhere.

If you play a campaign in which oracles represent a major spellcasting class, and is maybe even set in a wilderness setting, I actually recommend getting it, even if you are not looking for additional character options. The Secrets of the Oracles not only provides those, but also adds new elements to the game world as well.

Compared to other monster books I've read, this one is far from spectacular. It covers about 50 of the most generic and well known creatures, like dwarves, orcs, manticores, yetis, and zombies. I've baught it because the BESM 3rd Edition doesn't provide stats for any creatures, and because of the difference in Edition, you can't use the creatures right "out of the box". However, they make a good starting point for designing your own creatures and can be converrted quiete easily.

The main selling point is the small price. While I wouldn't pay any more for it, it is definately worth its monney.

I really expected a lot more from this. While I usually prefer well written background information to generic optional rules, the writers have gone too far with a good thing here. Though it's well written, it's seriously lacking in real substance. The presented incantations cover only a few very specific situations, and in most cases, you're probably still left with designing incantations by yourself, without getting any useful help. It's really just the basic incantation system from the 3.5e SRD with a couple of additional sample incantations.