This is another in Arion Game's series of minatures, done in their recognizable 3D, computer rendered style. I'm not necessarily a huge fan of their style, but it is a known factor, so I'm didn't dock them points for it. The cover is a picture of an actual minature from this set, and one can get a good impression of the human characters in this set from the covers of other volumes in their series.

For better and for worse, Arion Games has not taken the "as close to Disney or Dreamworks as we could get without them suing" approach so many others have done. The clothing choices and coloring choices are somewhat unusual. They're all designed in the Medium size range, for Pathfinder and D&D players; if Papa Bear, the tallest, is five and a half feet tall, no one is shorter than about four and a half feet. The pigs, Puss in Boots and Rumplestiltskin come out rather too tall.

It just didn't work for me. There is a number of short sections on particular languages, both real (actually having an existing vocabulary and grammar) and those vaguely referred in fictional works. The descriptions give a handful of vocabulary and often point out trivial features, like when one language is represented in the fictional source, it's written as all caps; since it's alien, likely the Latin script is not its native script. Deeper issues and any real feel for the language is left out. The bibliographic references are generally unhelpful; every single one of Tolkien's languages mentions basically everything he wrote, in a verbatim repeated block, instead of pointing to the relevant texts on the language at hand. Klingon mentions every series and movie by name, instead of calling out the episodes and movies that actually use the language. That's nicer then Kryptonian; searching the Superman comic books, movies and TV series for details is a daunting task, made no easier by the author pointing out that they all exist. Give me some real linguistic information here and some decent pointers for more information (and not the obvious Wikipedia links), not plot summaries and unrelated information like "Before the Wheel of Time, Robert Jordan wrote Conan the Barbarian novels."

The section on Construct Your Own Language I found to be rather shallow and obsessed with superficial, particularly visual, differences from English. On my Kindle this is coming out to 320 pages for the first part, the language-by-language section, and 17 pages for constructing your own language, and accepting that as an existing limitation, that doesn't give much space, but a quick run at basic phonology and grammar for conlangers would have been nice.

I suffered through the the language games, which had nothing to do with the book and could have been compressed into a tenth the space. But then we would have had to loose some of the author's humor, for which I would have been happy.

Mayhap I wasn't the audience for this book, but the redundancy was strictly unnecessary, and there's a distinct lack of linguistic insight.

Sherry Flippe is 30 pages of old comics. Stuck in there is four pages of RPG material, a battle scenario for ROLF and some stats for D6xD6, none of which was very interesting to me.

So, Sherry Flippe? Sherry Flippe is funny, cute funny, full of situations that go wrong in predictable comedic ways. It's nothing terribly surprising, but cute for that. As these are public domain, you can find six of these pages through a simple web search, which will give you a good sample.

Which actually goes to my real issue with these. As you can see if you do that search, the originals were in color. The reproduction is okay, nothing I would complain about had the originals been in black and white, but color would have made them a lot clearer and authentic, and there's no reason a PDF shouldn't be in color.

This is a collection of seven monster templates for Pathfinder, labeled for dragons. None of them feel like they are especially for dragons; Lazy, Masochistic, and Insane could all apply to any creature. Several feel mispriced, and none of them feel interesting, like I would ever use them. Masochistic is unclear on how it works; "If the dragon confirms a critical, then the following occurs: +1 to critical chance +1 to critical confirmation roll +1 damage +1 to hit" when the only one of those that could happen after the dragon confirms a critical is +1 damage. Or does it mean for the rest of the encounter? Typography is inconsistent and not well done, punctuation is missing or misused, and "The javelin is bread to kill other dragons with its wing attacks." (To go beyond a cheap shot at the limits of spell checking, this struck me as one of the most promising and hence disappointing traits. "Bred to kill other dragons" should mean more than just some bonuses to wing attacks.)

I suppose it's possible that this is part of a more interesting set, since they say that Novus Draco is recommended, but I don't see the value as a stand-alone item.

Tyranny has been elected to power in the US! Try to survive the banning of other parties and slow crushing of the opposition, in a setting set in an unspecified near future (or alternate today)!

Structurally, this is 3.5 two-column pages of material and 1 page of general suggestions of what system to use it with, about 3,000 words all told. As the email sent out about mentions, it definitely arises from the US political season (2012 elections, but I suspect 2014 and 2016 will be more of the same) and despite not naming names, it's pretty clear it's a liberal take on things.

If you and your liberal friends are trying to unwind from the election, it might well be worth a one-shot, though that still is going to require a lot of work. (Series bible, not adventure, though there are adventure hooks.) As one of those pieces of "roleplaying material" that is really just fiction in a different format, it was amusing enough. If you want to play such a thing, it's worth it; otherwise it depends on how much you're willing to pay for 3.5 pages of setting.

This is a one page (letter-size) PDF map of a space setting.

On the good side, I'm sure that this would be of some use to a GM running a game in the Extreme Future setting. It's clearly labeled for the most part.

On the bad side, let's start with a technical issue. We're downloading this as a one-page letter-size PDF with generous margins. Using PDF disassembly tools on it, it turns out it's a 3000x3000 JPG stuck in a PDF. It's a lot easier to do things with a JPEG then a PDF; I can print it with my margins, I can easily print it on European-sized paper, I can print it poster-size, etc. The only advantage I can see of turning this into a PDF is that DriveThruRPG can watermark it, which isn't a huge advantage with a free product.

Next, the background of the image is probably a NASA photo. It's sort of pretty, until you realize this is supposed to be our galaxy, but this is not a picture of our galaxy, nor of any barred spiral galaxy; I believe it's a picture of a nebula, not a galaxy of any type.

On top of that are straight lines breaking this up into sectors of some sort. It's interesting that there's nine radial sections. So why are the Core Worlds bounded by circles divided eight-fold? By itself this section is intriguing, though I would hope that some of the irregularities were explained in game.

The top level shows various sections where various polities are. With one exception, the grid discussed above is ignored completely. With no exceptions, the underlying photo is ignored. Every section is a neat rectangle, and The Wall is a perfect semi-circle. The concept that polities in the real world tend not to be neat and even seems to have escaped our cartographers. (And again, the galaxy? If this is supposed to be our galaxy, humanity's homeworld is nowhere near the center.) This whole section looks slapdash; someone loaded up the background in a graphic editor and tossed some rectangles on there and called it done.

It feels like someone whipped it up in a week for a game. Even as such I would still have quibbles. If it were in a RPG book, I would feel it was pretty bad, but still usable. As an advertisement for a system, it's appalling. Surely--hopefully--this is not the best the publishers can show for their setting.

This is 24 pages of purely in-world description. There is no stats for anything and everything is written as if it was a reprint of in-world material. It's an interesting mix that could be useful in game. My biggest complaint is that it's oddly sympathetic to a hate group that engages in assassination.

The sample link, the cover, the preview and description are complete enough that it's hard to write a review; I have little to say that you can't see for yourself. I'm not impressed with the Alice figure; the whole head doesn't work for me. The head of the Mad Hatter, likewise, is off enough that I would hesitate to use it, unless that was part of the point. (Half-dwarf, perhaps?) The Duchess and the Dormouse are both decent (though not impressive) figures, but very Alice specific; where are you going to use a Duchess holding a pig or a Dormouse in a teapot? The Caterpillar and White Rabbit (who looks like he's part dog) could see use in other games, but are Alice-flavored enough that they might be a bit off; White Rabbits holding watches are pretty rare in fantasy. Our King and Queen could see use elsewhere, and the Gryphon is a standard Gryphon. The last five pieces are the ones to buy the set for in my opinion. The Jabberwock looks like a Jabberwock could look like. It could be used for the Jabberwock in Pathfinder's Bestiary 2, but even if you aren't running high-level Pathfinder I'm sure you'll find an excuse to use this unique creature somewhere. The four card soldiers, likewise, cry out to be used. Not mere playing cards with human heads and hands, these cards are one flowing, alien piece, with the card printed on their front.

Physically, they all come on PDF and Powerpoint (which I did not examine), with each set filling a page, and both two sided and three sided pages provided.

Overall, I can't completely recommend these. As an Alice set, I was too unhappy with Alice's head and that of the Mad Hatter, and the White Rabbit doesn't quite look like a rabbit to me. But the rest holds up well. As a more general set, nine of this pieces--King, Queen, Gryphon, Jabberwock, Mad Hatter and cards--might well see play somewhere, with the Alice, Caterpillar, and White Rabbit maybe finding use somewhere, if you don't mind invoking the specter of Lewis Carroll in your player's minds. At the price, I have no problem taking what I need and leaving the rest.