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True Naming: A supplement of magic, language, and power [PFRPG]
Publisher: Lee's Lists
by Dennis S. [Featured Reviewer]
Date Added: 11/15/2012 21:32:16

True Naming is pretty well known as one of D&D 3.5's many, many subsystems that was far more flavorful than it was functional, but Lee's Lists has managed to wrangle both the flavor and the mechanics into a cohesive and evocative (and dare I say it, verisimilitudinous) whole. More adaptable and more playable than the Truenaming mechanics of old, the system introduced in this 20 page PDF is packed with content. Of notable utility are the designer notes and the campaign guidelines so you can tailor True Naming to fit the exact narrative niche you want in your campaign world.

Naming can be performed by anyone, theoretically, but there is an included Namer class explicitly focused on Naming, if you wish to make it more exclusive, or for players who want to adapt to it. Using a special skill, players can stack a balanced array of powers into one utterance, which determines a DC that is then rolled against to affect the enemy. True Naming also functions based on the HP of the enemy – an enemy with too much HP will be unaffected by Naming, so it requires some effort on the part of the Namer and his or her allies to inflict the necessary damage to then strike down enemies. The HP threshold is very reasonable, however, and allows True Naming to have a lot of utility.

The system is expansive enough to be interesting but simple enough to be approachable, and is definitely worth a look for Pathfinder fans.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
True Naming: A supplement of magic, language, and power [PFRPG]
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100 Cantrips
Publisher: Lee's Lists
by Dennis S. [Featured Reviewer]
Date Added: 10/30/2012 22:01:48

These 100 Cantrips are a nice combination of funny and quirky spells and some fairly legitimate low-level spells you could take advantage of if so inclined. The spells are limited enough that they fit perfectly in the cantrip level, but they're also just desirable enough over the regular cantrips that players might actually be interested in them (and the special conditions that may be needed to acquire them). For the price there is a lot of content in this book. If you're a spellcaster or DMing for a pathfinder spellcaster, and you're more about the verisimilitudinous flavor and story than just raw power at all circumstances, this one's for you.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
100 Cantrips
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100 Female Japanese Names
Publisher: Lee's Lists
by Dennis S. [Featured Reviewer]
Date Added: 10/19/2012 12:03:58

This product contains 100 well-researched and authentic Female Japanese Names for any era of Japanese gaming, from the most war-torn, to the most cell-phone saturated, to the most anime. Rather than post the first 100 utter gibberish names that came to mind this product has names that were certainly written by a professional in the ancient arts of Japanese Naming.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
100 Female Japanese Names
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100 Adventuring Motivations
Publisher: Lee's Lists
by Dennis S. [Featured Reviewer]
Date Added: 10/16/2012 15:40:40

I don't think I've ever seen a bigger list of cool things to base your character or campaign around. This is definitely worth the dollar and then-some. You've got the beginnings of a great character right here, and an even greater campaign depending on what you choose. It's funny, creative and interesting. Now if you excuse me, a golem looked at me funny so I've got some revenge to partake in.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
100 Adventuring Motivations
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1000 Norse Weapon Names
Publisher: Lee's Lists
by Dennis S. [Featured Reviewer]
Date Added: 10/10/2012 23:12:19

I am inscribing this review with my brilliant blade, "Leg Poisoner" on the corpse of a man whose stupid and inadequate weapon was named "Foe Lover." What a dolt. Frankly I am astounded by the innovations in this product, allowing for 1000 distinct items instead of 100. I hope to see more products that utilize this incredible 1000-item technology in the future. I await them with bated breath, and can only say, for I am running out of corpse real estate, that this product is very entertaining, useful and worthwhile.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
1000 Norse Weapon Names
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100 Fantasy Slurs
Publisher: Lee's Lists
by Dennis S. [Featured Reviewer]
Date Added: 10/10/2012 14:32:07

An absolutely hilarious product that should be stapled to the center of every gaming table, unless it's a huge table and nobody could read it. Then you should staple a copy on each side of the table. Award bonus XP and perhaps attack bonuses whenever someone peppers their speech with baleful decrees against those horrible Crunchies and Half-Ettins.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
100 Fantasy Slurs
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Forager's Guild Guide to the Compleat Shemp
Publisher: Lightspress Media
by Dennis S. [Featured Reviewer]
Date Added: 08/31/2012 12:17:29

An excellent product with some great advice about handling NPCs based on their level of importance and the level of commitment you are looking to put into them. The product is simple and to-the-point, with numerous examples and a frank tone. All the advice is quite practical and nothing you can't do in any game, on any afternoon. If you find yourself struggling to juggle NPCs or create interesting characters for your players, it wouldn't hurt to take a look. If you already feel like a master of Dungeons and are at ease with your own style, then you may still find some useful tips and techniques or a good refresher course on current skills.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Forager's Guild Guide to the Compleat Shemp
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The Intervention: The Official Series Bible
Publisher: Lightspress Media
by Dennis S. [Featured Reviewer]
Date Added: 07/23/2012 12:51:14

The Intervention is another Series Bible by Asparagus Jumpsuit. The premise of these books is that they offer you a system-agnostic campaign idea complete with characters, player roles, backstory and other information. You have enough to jump-start you into playing this campaign if you're interested. The Intervention is a "super-heroic soap opera" where the players are descended from Greek deities and must uphold their mythic responsibilities while wishing to lead normal lives.

Like its sister product The Knights of Torque & Recoil, this book does a great job in organizing its content and dividing things into constituent elements that are easy to digest and understand. It has a clearly defined central conflict, its factions are broken down into their strengths and weaknesses in scope, equipment and personnel, and the detailed character archetypes have stat suggestions listed in abstracts that fit any kind of RPG. There are plot hooks and rumors and a bibliography at the end. It's an interesting read, and I could see it played in anything from a smallville-esque storygame to GURPS. I rate it more highly than Knights because I found the premise more interesting – I'm not really a huge fan of pulp action. If you need an off-beat idea for your next superhero campaign, you might want to look here for Inspiration.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
The Intervention: The Official Series Bible
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Knights of Torque & Recoil: The Official Series Bible
Publisher: Lightspress Media
by Dennis S. [Featured Reviewer]
Date Added: 07/23/2012 12:37:05

An interesting product from Asparagus Jumpsuit, in a fairly original format. This "Series Bible" establishes the details of a specific campaign, centered around the eponymous Knights of Torque & Recoil and their nemesis, the Yellow Perilla Cult. It breaks down each organization and their goals, as well as important characters from each, and the types of roles that the players could play within the campaign. It has enough to go off of if you wanted to play this kind of campaign, but not so much that your own ideas can't be fully inserted into the premise. If you're dry for campaign ideas, it might be worth a look. It's nicely put together and evokes a pulp action premise well, if in a somewhat formulaic fashion (though that seems to be the appeal of pulp). This Series Bible is system agnostic, so you could run it using your favorite RPG.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
Knights of Torque & Recoil: The Official Series Bible
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Bad Attitudes: The Action Movie Roleplaying Game
Publisher: Lightspress Media
by Dennis S. [Featured Reviewer]
Date Added: 07/23/2012 11:37:13

Bad Attitudes is a quick and hilarious action movie cop roleplaying game. Using only d6s and keeping track of only one pool of points (and a few skills) you can play out the scenarios of movies like Die Hard and Lethal Weapon, where action hero types with the titular bad attitudes beat each other up and cause tons of collateral damage. The game can be easily summarized by just saying that there are cardinal skills like Shoot Guns, Kick Ass, and Drive Cars, and most everything else is Basically Worthless Stuff. There's an interesting set of random tables to quickly generate formulaic action movie cop scenarios, and this 7-page PDF is a nice thing to keep around in case half of your group failed to show up for D&D again.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Bad Attitudes: The Action Movie Roleplaying Game
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The One Ring: Words of the Wise
Publisher: Cubicle 7 Entertainment Ltd.
by Dennis S. [Featured Reviewer]
Date Added: 07/09/2012 15:05:17

Words of the Wise is a short, free adventure for The One Ring RPG that is useful for gamers looking to structure their own adventures. This was the adventure ran in Gencon 2011 to showcase the game. It is well organized and concise, with a very narrative feel. Whenever a skill is called for, it is bolded to stand out from the rest of the text, such that it doesn't get lost within the narration prose. The adventure takes characters from a routine hunting trip out to the edges of the Mirkwood, and into a grand domain of the Elves, and finally to a terrible battle at the Woodland Hall. There's a wide variety of interactions possible within the adventure, and it appears overall entertaining for a game of The One Ring. I'm not sure how long the adventure would last you, as it seems very short, but it's a good show of everything The One Ring does as a system, from exploration, to interaction and combat.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
The One Ring: Words of the Wise
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Call of Cthulhu Quick-Start Rules
Publisher: Chaosium
by Dennis S. [Featured Reviewer]
Date Added: 05/30/2012 17:59:08

The Call of Cthulhu quick-start rules are definitely a step in the right direction to get players started on the game. However, it feels as though an opportunity was missed to reduce the size of the game even more and still completely retain its essence when compared to newer games like Trail of Cthulhu. The Resistance Table is still a page-long ASCII art project, for example, and the stats could have been unified under a single simple rolling mechanic, rather than some rolling 3d6 and some rolling 2d6+6 and so on. The Occupations section could've used a bit less trimming than these mechanical elements. The inclusion of character sheets and a small adventure is quite helpful. For free, this is a great product, and a great introduction to Call of Cthulhu, but I feel that it could've been even simpler for newer players.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
Call of Cthulhu Quick-Start Rules
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The Royalty
Publisher: Board Enterprises
by Dennis S. [Featured Reviewer]
Date Added: 03/30/2012 12:42:22

The Royalty is another useful niche product from the people who brought us Grain Into Gold. It does what it purports to do: it comes with a boatload of NPCs. It's sadly not as much of a look at processes as Grain into Gold is – it's a collection. If you need a menagerie of connected NPC aristocrats of various sorts, many of which are relatively generic if not for the intricate family lines, then this would be a useful product. I find that the NPCs could've used some more expansion, and more of a variance – there's an awful lot of whining miscreants and cheeky gossips.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
The Royalty
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Western Keep
Publisher: DramaScape
by Dennis S. [Featured Reviewer]
Date Added: 03/16/2012 12:38:29

The Western Keep is a set of lovely grid or hex maps of a certain keep and some wilderness surroundings. It comes with over 100 pages worth of tiles with various focuses, from the keep at large, to specific areas. Also included are the mapping elements in three large jpeg images representing the layers of the keep, for easy use in a virtual tabletop program, as well as pogs for representing characters. Overall it seems a very worthwhile, straightforward package for the cost. If you need a fairly simple keep to put into your campaign and plan on having something map-worthy go down there, this might suit your needs.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
Western Keep
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Beacon in the Dark (4e)
Publisher: Sneak Attack Press
by Dennis S. [Featured Reviewer]
Date Added: 02/29/2012 13:50:03

Beacon in the Dark is a short D&D 4th Edition adventure module designed for characters levels 11 through 13. It can be tied into an existing adventure, or ran as a one-shot. The players are tasked with escorting a group of spellcasters (who are written as full-fledged companion type NPCs) into the underground to kick out some Drow, essentially. It has serviceable artwork and layout, and at only 21 pages and three encounters, it can be read and included in a game fairly quickly. The companion NPCs are a good variety of characters who offer a decent bit of roleplay fodder, each with different motivations and secrets. Without going into spoilers territory: the first battle seems likely to be over quickly depending on the size of the group, and the skill challenge in the middle is handled in a fairly clever fashion. The final battle will likely stretch PCs to the very limits, as it requires them to pursue a non-standard objective will fighting through waves of enemies. Overall for the price it's hard to go wrong if you want a quick Drow beat-em-up to drop into your campaign.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
Beacon in the Dark (4e)
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