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First, let me rate the content of this monster book. Creates of Rokugan is organised like the official d20 monster books and use the same keywords and formatting. It is intended to be used for adventures in Rokugan, the default campaign setting for Legend of the Five Rings, but is a nice addition for every game master who would like to use some oriental monster in his campaign.
Creates of Rokugan features more than a hundred new monsters, a few templates, items and sample NPCs as well as prestige classes, new magical items and rules for Tainted character that have been corrupted by the Taint of the Shadowlands. Many creatures are established creatures from Legend of the Five Rings, though some (like the tengu-like kenku) come from D&D. Most monsters are evil supernatural creatures like undead, oni and other spirits. This is alright, though, as there are enough d20 books with mundane monsters already.
The illustrations are good too excellent, but all are black-and-white, as the entire interior of the book. And sadly, this is the last positive aspect of this product.
The book was originally published in 2001 (as a physical product) while this PDF is available since 2006. This makes me wonder why it is a scan instead of an actual digital book? Did they accidentally delete the original digital files? However, this is mentioned in the RPGNow sidebar, so I knew it before I bought this product.
However, I was not informed about the absolutely abysmal quality of the scan (the preview as too short to show how miserable the scan is)! Firstly, the resolution is very low. There are no sharp edges, which means that the PDF is probably a collection of JPGs (as opposed to an image format of higher quality,). There are white lines on all sidebars which I'm sure weren't in the original prints.
Furthermore, the PDF has no hyperlinked table of contents (halfway understandable as it's a scan) and not bookmarks at all, which is simply not acceptable. An amateur with a PDF editor could add bookmarks for all the monsters in about an hour, so I expect that from an established publisher as well. Needless to say that the page numbers reflect the total page numbers of the PDF, not the ones that are actually on the page. Also, the back cover is not where it belongs but is the second page for some reason.
The OCR (optical character recognition) is unacceptable. Entire paragraphs as not selectable at all. Only black text on white background is selectable. This was scanned in 2006. That's not very long ago. Scanners back then were solid. Even the amateurish scanner I have at home delivers better results than this. Sure, I could simply OCR the PDF again, but that's not possible without cracking the file as the PDF is secured. And I'm sure not all buyers have the necessary software for that. Oh, and due to the aforementioned low resolution of the PDF, not all text is transferred correctly when copied to a text editor.
Don't buy this product. Don't support abysmal service like this.
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