Tuffy's Good Time Palace describes a rather shady establishment that can easily be dropped into just about any campaign world. The pdf is short (21 pages, not including the front and back cover, two of which are devoted to a forward/table of contents, one to the OGL, and another to coming products, leaving 17 pages of content.)
The Good: The aforementioned table of contents makes navigating the PDF a breeze, and the whole thing is laid out in a straightforward manner. The various employees/regulars of the Tavern are given a few paragraphs each describing their general appearance, personality, and motivations; as well as stat blocks for several of them. The included map is small, but still easily readable (however, see below.)
The Bad: The art is a mixed bag, and the included map lacks a scale. However, it is possible to extrapolate a suitable scale from the other map features, so these are both minor quibbles.
The Ugly: The layout is a clean two columns, with various NPC portraits contained in or near the paragraphs about the relevant NPC.
The pdf, weighing in at 159 pages is divided into 4 main sections, not including the introduction/TOC and a few short appendices. Features and Events, which details items about campsites, castles, caves, ruins, haunts, and severe weather. Folk, a variety of bandits and travelers. By Land, details divided up by and concerning various terrains. By Sea, which includes coastal, sea voyages, shipwrecks, and pirate ships.
The Good: The PDF presents a wide variety of items to dress up wilderness encounters/areas. One part I particularly liked was the NPC bio thumbnails, short (approximately 2-3 sentences) descriptions of the motivations/background/reactions of the various NPCs.
The Bad: A minor quibble, but there are a couple of places where an entry is broken up over two columns or two pages.
The Ugly: Formatting is a clean, readable 2 columns. The art consists of a few pieces in black and white, all of it quite nice, and evocative in its own right.
Final Verdict: I quite like this, and it will see quite a bit of use at my table. I highly recommend picking it up, as I consider the sheer volume of information in the book well worth the price. (I also plan on purchasing a print copy in the not so distant future.)
Front Cover - 1 page
Introduction to Motivations - 2 pages; General rules for use in play
Motivation descriptions - 8 pages; Descriptions, specific bonuses for each motivation, 1 new feat
OGL - 1 page
The Good: The motivations provide both interesting role-playing hooks for the characters, and specific game mechanic benefits. Suggestions for general kinds of things the motivations might apply to help round out the motivations.
The Bad: Some might not like the Motivation check mechanic, as it has the potential to dictate a character's actions. However, this should not come up too often as they are only really called for if a character wants to resist his/her motivation.
The Ugly: The layout is clean, and fairly printer friendly. Illustrations are fairly minimal, but what there are are in color and quite good. None of them seem to particularly relate to any specific motivations though, being more character illustrations.
Overall I found the motivations and mechanics useful and varied, and plan on introducing them in my Carrion Crown campaign that will be starting soon. The only thing I think I would have liked to have seen was perhaps more motivations, but the ones given cover a fair amount of ground.
Front Cover - 1 page
Chapter 2 - 2 pages, Exploration rules
Chapter 3 - 12 pages, Kingdom building rules
Appendix - 4 pages, various forms
OGL - 1 page
The Good: The sidebars are quite helpful, putting turn steps in one place and in an easy to reference format, ensuring steps can be taken in the right order and nothing forgotten.
Several new buildings are added, mostly consisting of various new types of craftsmen.
Several new events are also added, organized into Bad, Adventurer, Leadership, and Good sub-tables. The adventurer and leadership sub-tables have both good and bad events in them, but the categories all work and quite well.
The Kingdom form is roomy, and includes places to list the names of the kingdom's cities, and the values they contribute for the kingdom stats.
The Bad: There are a few spelling errors, though certainly not so many as to make the product unusable. Most notable of these are the spelling of burden as burdon, and spelling of edict as edit in several places.
The kingdom form in the appendix has places under the edicts section for Economy changes for Promotion and Festivals, and Unrest for Taxation, though none of those affect said traits. The Promotion/Festivals should have been slots for BPs and the Taxation for Loyalty.
The Ugly: The front cover is nice, with a parchment look and simple graphics that isn't overdone.
The interior illustrations are sparse, but good, and fit well with the product. I like less well the margin graphic on all the rules pages. It, while not bad-looking, is dark and increases the amount of ink that will be consumed when printing the book.
Overall I found this a good product, and liked the new rules additions. I would liked to have seen a more printer friendly layout, but it's not as bad as some other products have been in that regard.
The Good: The NPCs were creative, and I can see uses for all of them in my current campaign. Overall quite useful, and the additions of the new feat and spell are great bonuses.
The Bad: I would liked to have seen actual play rules for the King of the Stump game, in addition to the abstraction for in game play. But as I said in the title, this is a minor quibble.
The Ugly: The art while not bad in any sense, is not really to my taste. (Not ugly, but the term is part of the set. :D )
Overall, I give it 4 stars, only because I couldn't give it 4.5.
