Sunday, April 14, 2019

Musings about reviews

You know what people like? Reviews! It's been so long since I've done a review here that there must be a couple dozen products that I've read or even played in the meantime. Fish in a barrel.


Image result for philosopher
"If you just wait upstairs, I'll send you my reviews!"

The difficulty is now choosing one product out of so many. This is going to be a quick post where I brainstorm about what I could review; I can amend it as more possibilities come to me.

Here goes:
  • Masks of Nyarlathotep
  • Mothership and Dead Planet
  • Forbidden Lands: Raven's Purge
  • Silent Titans
  • Dark Streets and Darker Secrets
  • The Road to Hell
  • Spiral Isles
  • DCC Lankhmar
  • Godbound
  • Over The Edge 3rd edition
  • Kult 4th edition
  • What, Ho, Frog Demons!
  • Delta Green: A Night at the Opera
Suggestions and other input are appreciated.

5 comments:

  1. You put Silent Titans up there two times. So your subconsciousness obviously wants to tell you something ;)

    You could try to sort them into small and big stuff.
    I mean reviewing Mothership and Dead Planet together would still be quicker done than reviewing Godbound or Kult alone each.

    So instead of putting out one big review, get out a couple of smaller one

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    Replies
    1. I think my subconscious is telling me to be a better editor!

      My first glance at Silent Titans was kind of disappointing. It's not the excessive indulgence that one might expect from Patrick Stuart; it actually looks pretty well-grounded with some good GM advice. So that's good. No, the problem is the fact that most of the content is organized strictly with bullet points of different levels. Unfortunately, my mind doesn't think in a purely tree-based structure, and on top of that, the indentation isn't big enough to clearly distinguish hierarchy. I suspect that's because Stuart discovered that indentation was killing his page count with whitespace. These are poor layout decisions that an editor should have fixed.

      Half of my Silent Titans review is now complete, so I guess I can remove one of those entries :)

      I'm definitely going to review Mothership and Dead Planet. I actually ran DP, so I have Actual Insights. Godbound and Kult are on the list mainly to motivate me to finish reading them. Same with OtE, sadly (I say this as a big fan of the first two editions, having played them back in the 90s).

      I just read through Raven's Purge in the last couple days, so that's probably going on the list, too. Interesting stuff.

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    2. The indentation did kill space. The bullets are distinguished by colour though.

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    3. I did notice the colors, but be aware that the yellow bullet points don't show up very well on the white page background. At least not on an LCD screen; I'll see how it looks when I get my hardcopy.

      I've been slowly working my way through Silent Titans; I have to say that I'm enjoying the content. I'm still not a fan of the bulleted approach. I tried the same thing for my soon-to-be published adventure, at first, but I found out that it was easier to read as paragraphs under sub-headings, and more compact, too (all those line feeds add tons of whitespace on the _right-hand_ margin).

      And I should also mention: I love the art.

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    4. Patrick, FYI I posted a preliminary review of Silent Titans: https://artifactsandrelics.blogspot.com/2019/04/silent-titans-hot-take.html.

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