Now here's a product that I was surprised to see and excited to read. The Book of Mormon's setting has many similarities with the Tolkienesque world D&D was based on, in fact it was penned over a century before The Hobbit was. The author here has taken advantage of this and has done a wonderful job translating the setting over for 5E, keeping in mind cultural sensitivity and even working out a way for the Nephites to have a monotheisitc diety inside the D&D world. The artwork is impressive for a small publication and justifies the otherwise slightly overpriced sum for a small pdf. Overall, I'm impressed by the quality of this publication and would welcome more future content.

This splatbook does some neat worldbuilding, a place that feels heavily inspired by Wall-E, Megaman, and Yu-Gi-Oh 5Ds. Sadly, I was disappointed with the white-background pages and general "incomplete" feeling of the book as a whole. While useable and containing some good ideas, I'd like to see this fleshed out more as well as some page borders and backgrounds applied. It's a good, perhaps overpriced, beginning to an interesting setting.

This looks like a fun ruleset that worldbuilds through the use of extensive tables. In some ways, it's far more engaging than chapters and chapters of lore to memorize, and it seems as though it would complement solo and small-group play very nicely, since the book acts as a gamemaster in a lot of ways already. My only concern and question to the author is this: can students team up to do a task and how would that work mechanically? I know that Risus has a system that allows multiple characters to fight together, with one person assigned as the leader, and the others basically rolling only for 6s to add to the score. Disbanding costs one or more dice per person, which could be stress points in this system. A simpler approach could be D&D 5E's "help" action where, if a character is suited for the task, they can help another by using the help action and giving the other player an extra "advantage" roll. Perhaps each character helping could allow one die reroll each? I'd like to know how to handle an action such as multiple students working together to open a large, heavy door into a haunted cellar. If forming a team is not possible, another way to approch this might be to assign various aspects to the door that must be solved before it will open, allowing the characters to act as a team, but mechanically individually. I'm rating this a 4/5 for now but will reconsider my rating if I'm able to get a grasp on the teamwork aspect. A big thanks to Ewen Cluney who has been hard at work for many years, providing us with all sorts of zany games, rules translations, and roll tables.

This product does what it promises. What you get is a nicely formatted page with Risus-like rules, traits to build characters, and roll tables for scenarios. While it is a tad too simplified for what I wanted, it's certainly attractive and usable it its own right. My main complaint is the price. At $2 a page, a 150-page book would cost $300! I feel that $2 is asking a little too much for what this is really worth. That said, if you can snag this on sale, I'd say you can do so with no regrets. It's a fun little system and the first commercial one (that I know of) which specifically nods to SEGA's popular franchise. Later this year, SEGA is releasing an "Encyclo-speed-ia" which could potentially pair nicely with this. When you're ready for something more complex, other systems to consider for roleplaying this franchise include Risus, Toon, Albedo, and VeloCITY.

I picked this game up, way back when the Kickstarter happened. Back then, it was just a fun thought to have a resonably priced zombie-setting book, perhaps something I could use for a Scooby Apocalypse-esque setting. Skimming through it, but busy with work, I ultimately set it aside. Little did I know, months later I'd be frantically searching for a good generic survival system with nothing fitting the bill. Enter this game, saved in my old downloads folder, surprising me with every page flip. Now, this doesn't have say, GURPS-level detail in it, but I'd say that's a good thing! You have all the basics streamlined and ready to go, from combat to foraging to repairing. Teamwork is possible, and stealth is implemented by way of an "enemy attraction gauge". You can even pick from a list of traits to, for instance, have your character smell bad, resulting in distrust. There are stats for a large variety of vehicles and weapons. My only real complaint is the fact that nowhere did I find any sample stats for enemies, which makes this less of a core rulebook and more of a player's handbook to me. Thankfully, the quickstart does provide a small set of enemies to begin with. I imagine that it wouldn't be too difficult to homebrew stats for Tremors-style graboid worms and walkers. I believe this system could lend very well to that sort of setting. Overall, I am impressed by this offering.