Neil Randall

A very tidy, well produced adventure for role players using the James Bond 007 system from Victory Games. It's got enough to intrigue new players and some elements to keep old hands interested. Completely set upon he island of Jamaica, a limited set of locations is one of the deficits which drops this from being a five star product, but then based upon the film as it is, perhaps this is understandable. Some elements of it have aged, and it would be well, I would think, for games masters and players to adjust to a 1960's setting and set it back in the early 60's with little to no modification. It could be updated but that would require a lot of work. The presence of TAROT as the backing organisation makes it less time specific however. Good NPC's, film based in the main, apart from the vacuous Honeychile Ryder, means that support can be offered to the player characters too. I think that this woul be a good start to a TAROT based campaign.… (més)

An average fantasy book all around. We have your dark outsider, your disguised royalty, your country bumpkin maturing into greatness, your forbidden magic saving the day, your evil and mysterious outlanders plotting the fall of civilization as we know it, your occasional lapses into horribly purple prose, and so on and so forth. By the end the plot gets a little contorted, what with characters suddenly warping between two major points of conflict and talking through psychic channels, which tore down the sense of isolation and urgency that one might expect in a book about a three pronged assault against a distant fortress at the edge of civilization. Inconsistencies like describing fire as the ultimate insult to the dead in one chapter and the ultimate honor in the next tend to pop up now an again as well.

While Lord of Cragsclaw is nothing special, it makes for a decent popcorn read, and its cast is sympathetic enough that I'll be spending a few hours to read the second book in the series.… (més)