I saw the Untold Encounters of the Random Kind book on Amazon a while back, and having liked the Loke Battlemats 2-book sets, I added it to my RPG Stuff list. It's a very long list. Today, I found it at one of my local hobby shops, just sitting on the shelf tucked away among a whole lot of other things I wasn't particularly interested in. I picked it up to give it a look-see and my immediate thought was, damn this is a heavy book. It feels disproportionally heavy for it's size. My second thought was, why do they have to wrap all these books in plastic? I'd really like to give it a flip through. It was $10 less than on Amazon, so I bought it. Having taken the plastic wrap off and given it a flip-through, I can now give you my initial thoughts on the thing. It's a heavy, 339 page book of random tables and idea prompts. There's not a bunch of highly detailed ideas and tiny adventures, this is a book of generalities. Which is how I like my ideas. The back cover br...

My copy of the Shadowdark RPG has arrived. I've had the PDF for a few days. I ordered the hardcover book from The Arcane Library website and got the digital version immediately so as to tide me over and quench my curiosity. To put my feelings right up front; I really like this product. I like the idea behind it, the feel of the book, the look of the art, and the presentation of this particular flavor of 5e. It's very nicely done. This book presents a game that is very much classic fantasy roleplaying. Dungeon exploration is the main course, but there's rules here that extend that feel beyond the catacombs and into a world that meshes together nicely. This whole product gives me the feels that I had when I was first running and playing D&D in junior high. The players are adventurers on an adventure. They might become heroes, but they are not assumed to be heroes from the get go. They'll need to face the horrors in the dark and survive those horrors before they get ...