Post originally by Jeremy at 2004-05-28 14:20:00
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The Face that Launched a Thousand Ships

It's a very nice looking book. Not the fanciest, but clean looking and has some nice touches. Not all that much in the way of art, not completely bare, but a bit on the sparse side. Most the pieces are also pretty small. One artist really stands out, though he uses a logo to sign his work, so I don't know whose (looks like two Es surrounded by a | ). He does some really nice landscapes (and very colorful). Another noteworthy piece by different artist is an Egyptian style Tomb Raider (as in Tomb Raider the franchise). Kinda funny. All of the artwork is good quality and does use color to its fullest (being bright and vivid). Many color RPG books don't actually use color to it's fullest, but this one does.

Also nice is that the graphics in the outer margin contain the name of the chapter. On the down side, there is no index, which is a big enough deal to give it a 4.5 out of 5 on style, instead of a 5. Also in some cases, it can be a bit cluttered, like when the descriptions of the Greek gods is superimposed on a picture of them. Similarly, the tables sometimes have a gigantic eye on them, presumably of some Egyptian god or maybe Liz Taylor. I don't find it hard to read, but some could.

There are a couple of editing quirks. But pretty much what you generally find in books that were cut down from a larger manuscript, not the terrible blunders that marred OGL Conan. There are a couple items in the equipment list that might have inadvertently been left in from the SRD, like the "Alchemy Lab" and the "Silk Rope". There is no alchemy skill in the game (though maybe that was an oversight, supposedly Alchemy started in Egypt, with the emerald tablet of Hermes Trismegistus) and while silk was available, through trade from the east, I imagine it was a bit too expensive to be used as rope. (Actually, silk is listed in the precious goods table as costing 60 dinars a lb. But the price of silk rope is 25 dinars, and it's 5 lbs. So I guess this was mistakenly left in).



Achilles' Last Stand

This is an excellent book. Not only does it do what it promises, it's a great resource for those running a Conan game - the vast majority of things from this would fit into Conan as is. To a certain extent, there is a lack of GM support material, ie, there are no NPC stat blocks or all that many monsters. But I'm not sure that could be helped, and there is actually little to no wasted space in the book. While there is some copy & pasting from the SRD, there seems to be very little, most of the book is original text (unlike say, OGL Cybernet). So it seems like a good value - it would have been nice if it were longer, but there is no white space, and the space in the book seems to have been used well.

I also believe Mongoose has a OGL license that will let others put out affiliated books, though I'm not sure if it extends to OGL Ancients, or is just for OGL Cybernet. But the book is actually almost entirely open content (everything but how to roll up characters and the XP chart), so anyone could expand on this if they want...

A solid A.




Final ramblings almost as long as the Odyssey

I do have to say, how you like this book depends on what you expect from it. I suspect it's something of a love it or hate it book. (Though I do think you have to give the author credit for writing a lot of new material).

It's essentially a rules book, if you want to play an RPG set in the Ancient World. It's not really a setting book, while there is some setting, you'll likely need history books. It's also far grittier than you expect from d20 or even RPGs, as I said in the beginning, this is not something you would use to recreate the Hercules/Xena TV shows (which did occasionally have people die, but it was fairly rare, and never all that messy). You can recreate the Iliad or Odyssey pretty well.

Personally, it was exactly what I was looking for. Frankly, I've never been much of a fan of various other historical d20 products that simply used the default D&D rules or just tweaked them a bit. Like most of Avalanche's stuff - you'd have clerics and wizards and sorcerers and paladins traipsing about medieval Europe, China, etc, etc, etc. That made no sense to me. Similarly, there is an otherwise excellent looking PDF product about the Trojan War, from Steampower Publishing, but in the preview, we see that Paris is a D&D style Ranger. WTF? At least he doesn't use 2 scimitars and have a pet tiger.

While I'm hardly an expert on the region, I do have several books on the Ancient Egyptians and Greeks and I have several books on mythology. And I have Clash of the Titans on video tape. So I don't really need setting material, I really need rules material tailored to the setting, and this delivers. I would have liked to have seen a bit more rule material for the Persians, since they were pretty big back then, too, but they at least got some coverage.

If you are looking for something more D&D-ish, you might wait for the upcoming Relics & Rituals: Olympus from Sword & Sorcery/White Wolf or the upcoming Troy book from Green Ronin (they also have announced an Egyptian boxed set. Though it seems Egyptian themed D&D, sort of like Nyambe was African flavored D&D). If you just want a setting sourcebook for Greece, then you might check out Gurps Greece and Gurps Egypt (which is mostly setting). But I'm very happy with this.