Tagline: If you’re the type that likes GM screens or interesting tidbits of knowledge concerning the World of Darkness, this product will probably be a satisfying purchase.

The Storyteller’s Screen and the accompanying Storyteller’s Companion are both very good products for what they are, but there’s nothing particularly exciting or innovative about either – nor do I consider them crucial products to the gaming experience. Surely with the plethora of materials available for the Vampire game you should be able to find something else worth spending fifteen dollars for.

The Storyteller’s Screen is made up of four 8” x 11” panels. The GM’s side has: A list of the five traditions, the armor chart, a chart summarizing the thirteen generations, a summary of aura colors, a hierarchy of human sin, a blood pool chart, a combat maneuver chart, a chart for judging feats of strength, two weapons charts, a combat summary chart, an experience chart, a summary of difficulties, a summary of hunting, damage charts for fire and sunlight, plus a general health chart and a summary of various vehicle types. This is an impressive array of information, and I found it was generally useful. I was also impressed that White Wolf avoided the temptation of including a summary of character generation on the screen – something almost every GM’s screen seems to possess despite the very obvious fact that you will never, ever need to access that information in the course of actual gameplay.

The opposite side of the screen is a very nice mosaic comprised of various vampires looking either threateningly or seductively out at you. I found it be an excellent choice of art because the choice of colors meant that it wasn’t overly distracting, but at the same time it was not so monotonous as to become easily boring to look at after a short time. In general, if you’re into GM’s screens this one is extremely admirable.

The accompanying book – the Storyteller’s Companion — on the other hand, cannot be so lauded. This is your typical hodgepodge of material thrown together so that the GM’s screens doesn’t have to stand on its own. Included are three new bloodlines (the Daughters of Cacophony, the Salubri, and the Salmedi) along with their associated disciplines. There’s also an extensive list of new equipment and an expanded character sheet. All in all, fairly boring stuff in my opinion which could have been more effectively integrated into other products instead of being thrown together without any sense of clear purpose here.

The most useless section in the book, however, would be Secondary Abilities. These are a new set of rules meant to supplement the Primary Abilities found in the main rulebook. In general I saw little differential between these abilities and those in the rulebook (why, for example, they felt that Interrogation would be used less often (and therefore qualify as a secondary ability) than Performance (a primary ability from the main rulebook) is beyond me), but these secondary abilities are cheaper and subject to a slightly different set of rules. The net result, as the book itself says, is that these “Secondary Abilities add greater complexity to the game, but they also add greater complication” (you’ll note that the words “complexity” and “complication” can be seamlessly interchanged here). Nothing is really accomplished by their inclusion except unnecessary headaches. Personally if I were to use any of them I would treat them exactly as I treat Primary Abilities. It should also be noted that since the expanded character sheet takes these Secondary Abilities into account, the other nice features of the character sheet (an expanded background and history section) are rendered rather useless. Oh well.

In general I found the product uninspiring, although generally adequate for this type of thing.

Style: 4
Substance: 3

Author: Clayton Oliver
Company/Publisher: White Wolf
Cost: $14.95
Page count: 70
ISBN: 1-56504-259-9

Originally Posted: 1999/02/17

One of the weird things about getting comp material for review is the essentially random nature of what you end up reviewing. You also end up reviewing stuff that you would never have actually bought for yourself, which creates a strange dynamic in which it becomes difficult to accurately judge the value of the material for people who actually are the target market. (Of course, one of the skills of a good reviewer is the ability to step out of your own shoes to judge the material as objectively as possible… while remembering that objectivity doesn’t mean relativity.)

In other news: Landscape screens are awesome and I’m not sure how we ever endured the taller screens of yore. I have also just realized that it’s been over ten years since I last played Vampire. That makes me a little sad.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

Tagline: I’ve given my thumbs up to the Trinity Field Reports before, and this product is no exception.

I offered hearty compliments to the first Trinity Field Reports: Extrasolar Colonies for fixing almost everything I found to complain about the main Trinity rulebook in an elegant, creative, and engaging manner. Just so you’re warned, I’m going to rave about Alien Races.

First, this product possesses all the strengths of the first Field Report. It would be very difficult to produce a roleplaying supplement for $4.95 in which I could not find some scrap of information which would justify the purchase price – and these Field Reports come nowhere near that minimal threshold. The pages are all glossy, full-color affairs with high-quality artwork which is directly related to the text. The text itself is not only well written, but also tantalizing in that it says enough to begin working with what the subject matter is, but leaving everything you wish you knew unsaid (I literally finished reading these 25 pages and had an uncontrollable urge to pick up another Trinity supplement because the cliffhanger full of questions which this book left me with meant that I desperately wanted to fill in more of the picture). Finally, because the entire product is cleverly presented as a field report to Aeon Trinity operatives (as the title suggests), it is a handout you can safely give to your players.

Second, this product improves upon the example laid down in Extrasolar Colonies in a couple of ways. First, as mentioned above, the loose ends and half-answers are beautifully constructed to leave you begging for more. Second, this report provides oblique references to the Darkness Revealed series of adventures. If you didn’t use those adventures it doesn’t matter – the references aren’t all that important and are self-explanatory in the context of this product – but if you did the minor mention here provides an extra feeling of importance to your PCs. Because of the nature of the comments made the players can really feel as if the actions of their characters are having a long-term effect on the setting. Definite kudos.

There’s really nothing bad which can be said about this Field Reports : They’re a great read, they’re high-quality, they’re cheap, and they’re useful. Is there anything else you could possibly want in a roleplaying supplement?

Style: 4
Substance: 4

Author: Bryant Durrell
Company/Publisher: White Wolf
Cost: $4.95
Page count: 25
ISBN: 1-56504-772-9

Originally Posted: 1999/02/17

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

Tagline: The classic dungeon crawl designed by the master of dungeon crawls, Gary Gygax.

The Tomb of Horrors module is one of the great classics in our little industry. It would be truly surprising to me if someone who has been playing RPGs for more than a handful of years would not have heard of this module, if not played in it or run it themselves.

The Tomb of Horrors was first released in 1978, as one of the first modules available for the AD&D game, after being used for the Official D&D tournament at the very first Origins convention. Recently it has been re-released as part of The Return to the Tomb of Horrors boxed set and can be obtained there if you can’t track it down through the used section of your local game store.

At the time it was published this was a fairly innovative product. In addition to the “map and key” presentation which was standard at the time, Tomb of Horrors also came with a pamphlet of forty illustrations – each presenting some part of the module which could be shown to the players at the appropriate time. This was cutting edge stuff at the time. Honest.

By all merits this should be an absolutely awful product by current standards – substandard writing, sub-par art, and a linear plot. Okay, I take that last one back: There is no plot, just a bunch of rooms full of traps and monsters.

Despite all this, though, there’s something about the Tomb of Horrors which still tantalizes me. Part of it is the fact it’s a classic. Like Queen of the Demonweb Pits it’s one of those things which “every” gamer has experienced at some point. There’s a sense of history to it, which adds to the experience. The other part of this is that sometimes you just gotta kick up your heels and take a brief detour visit back to your youth. In other words: Hack ‘n slash can be fun if you’re looking for hack ‘n slash.

The Tomb of Horrors was and remains a classic not because it dots all the i’s and crosses all of the t’s of what the current popular consensus of roleplaying is (or even of the type of roleplaying I enjoy most of the time), but because it accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do.

So when you’re looking for a quick one-shot relax from your normally roleplay-intensive campaigns, you might want to look back at an old classic once in awhile. It can’t hurt anything. Actually, I’m thinking about adapting it to FUDGE for a quick run sometime real soon. See you there.

Style: 2
Substance: 3

Author: Gary Gygax
Company/Publisher: TSR / Wizards of the Coast
Cost: n/a
Page count: 50
ISBN: 0-935696-12-1
Originally Posted: 1999/02/17

This review is another example of how 3rd Edition and the OSR have rehabilitated first D&D and then old school D&D in the RPG community. There are, of course, still haters out there. (There are always haters.) But even I occasionally have difficulty appreciating just how much “D&D Sucks” was the received wisdom of the online RPG community pre-2000.

I was no exception (nor am I now): AD&D is a terrible game and there are many, many reasons why I stopped playing it. But I did recognize that there was a fun game hiding away inside of AD&D, and this review was basically an attempt on my part to say, “Hey! There’s fun to be had over here!”

Several years later, my own adaptation of Tomb of Horrors to 3rd Edition became one of the earliest additions to the website. Check it out. It’s still a ton of fun.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

Take a moment to consider this:

A four-legged pigeon is the size of an apatosaurus, and in combat a display of feathers rises behind the creature’s head. (…) At will, the giant pigeon can shape-shift into a giant yellow spider.

If that sort of thing — along with 7′ tall parrots who are always on fire and 12′ long blue jays without legs — sounds interesting and useful to you, then you’re going to love Isle of the Unknown. If it doesn’t, however, then you’re probably going to be struggling to find much utility between its covers.

Isle of the Unknown presents an interesting contrast to Carcosa (Geoffrey McKinney’s other deluxe hexcrawl product from Lamentations of the Flame Princess). Unlike the bland and boring key entries for Carcosa, Isle of the Unknown — which describes an island roughly 150 miles wide — is generally specific, clever, and creative. Unfortunately, it presents a very different set of problems which, nevertheless, cripple the product for me.

First, there are the monsters. Although occasionally spiced with some interesting abilities, they really are giant pigeons all the way down: Pick a random animal. Make it bigger than normal. Randomly determine the number of limbs it possesses. Now, randomly combine it with another animal; light it on fire; have it ooze pus; or give it a random spell-like ability. Ta-Da! You’ve re-created the vast majority of the monsters in this book.

Second, although in a hex-to-hex comparison Isle of the Unknown is much improved compared to Carcosa, in totality it ends up being just as bland by over-saturating its themes.

Let me explain: I think themes are very important in creating interesting hexcrawl or dungeoncrawl keys. Themes give a location its identity and make it memorable. Without a proper theme, a ‘crawl turns into a random funhouse. But if a theme is too narrow and relied on too heavily, then it becomes repetitive. (For example, enchanted vales which remain perpetually in springtime regardless of the weather outside simply stop being magical when there are something like a dozen of them scattered around the island.)

In the case of Isle of the Unknown, McKinney describes the scope of his key like this:

To aid the Referee, only the weird, fantastical, and magical is described herein. The mundane is left to the discretion of the campaign Referee, to be supplied according to the characteristics of his own conceptions or campaign world. Detailed encounter tables (for example) of French knights, monks, pilgrims, etc. would be of scant use to a Referee whose campaign world is a fantasy version of pre-Colombian America. Similar considerations led to the exclusion of most proper names.

Couple important things to understand about this: First, it’s untrue. The key includes a lot of “mundane” detail (most notably all the major communities on the island). Second, it’s nonsense. You can’t say “if I don’t give this guy a proper name, then it’ll be easy to slot him in as a pre-Colombian American” and then describe him as “a robust and jovial man of middle years with blue eyes and curling reddish hair and beard (…) he loves nothing so much as the hunt, save perhaps his dozen Scottish Deerhounds”.

What McKinney really means is that 95% of his hex key is going to be broken down into three categories: Monsters, Magical Statues, and high-level Magic-Users/Clerics who all live by themselves as bucolic hermits.

And on an individual level, most of this content is at least interesting. But if you attempted to actually run a hexcrawl using this hex key, the result would be incredibly boring due to its repetition: “Magic statue, bucolic hermit, bucolic hermit, giant parrot, magic statue, humanoid bluejay, magic statue, magic statue…”

So, ultimately, I’m forced to conclude that the book is not very useful in its intended function as a hexcrawl. However, it may have some value as an inefficiently organized bestiary and the like… but only if you like giant, flaming parrots.

In closing, it must be noted that, once again, Lamentations of the Flame Princess have created a book which is both beautiful and useful. Although completely different in its aesthetic from Carcosa, Isle of the Unknown is nevertheless gorgeous: Excellent illustrations, rich lay-out, high-quality paper, durable binding. (My only caveat would be that the map of the island, while very pretty, does not clearly identify the terrain type in each hex. From a utility standpoint, that’s a fatal flaw in a hexcrawl product.)

Style: 5
Substance: 3

I was thinking about writing a full and proper review of the Star Trek: New Frontier novels by Peter David. It was not necessarily going to be a review full of sunshine and happy thoughts (the prose and plotting are both sloppy; the characters are frequently off-model; the exposition is clumsy and redundant; the continuity is inconsistent and contradictory), but I was certainly enjoying them as pulp fiction.

But having just finished the fifth book (Martyr) I’m afraid I’ve hit the straw that broke my back:

Robin Lefler’s mother was kidnapped by an alien race called the Momidiums? Her MOM was kidnapped by the MOM-idiums?

No. Sorry. After a book filled with clumsy puns, you have officially crossed the line from “eye-rolling” to “Cheap Xanth Knock-Off”. And I want no part of it.