I lost several thousand pages of my initial review due to connection boredom. Enjoy what's left.
I remember WAY back in 2008 or so listening to Ed Healy, Rone Barton, and Nick Logue talking about this bad boy on a podcast and immediately flying to my computer to throw piles of money at it. When I found out the project died, well, I've thrown money into plenty of dead projects back when I used to have it (anyone else subscribe to GameGO! but me?), and it seemed worthy enough to show my support and call it good.
This was well before KickstarterGoGo, kids, when we used to IM about our Compuserve BBS with updates to our Ultima MUD in the Angelfire webrings on Geocities. It was a dark time. But I digress.
Fast forward to, like, 2012, where Bill Webb's throwing bourbon down my throat and talking about Lou Agresta, He of the Many Tentacles, revitalizing the project with new content and putting our long-lost money where his gaming mouth is. They literally had to find me. I feel weird about that. But when gaming veterans are putting a flintlock under your nose and offering you cake or death, you take cake 'til there's none left.
Ahem. Review.
I love this book. Really. I do. Not because of all the above reasons (again, I counted that money as lost), but because it takes sandbox games to the level only found in Ed Greenwood's basement.
Not the one full of redheads. The other basement.
The one with every square inch of the Realms mapped, written about, codified, distilled, folded, spindled, and mutilated into thirty-thousand little flood-stained cardboard boxes.
We've all put together something akin to a sandbox game, whether we know it or not. When the PCs are s'posed to go right but they go left, BOOM. Into the sandbox they go. When the alcoholic artist offers a game at PaizoCon but makes the pregen PCs half at lunch and half at the table and everyone has a blast anyway, we all have to shake the sand out of our shoes. When we're thirteen and haven't even bothered to read the rules and we base it all off a console RPG we played last year, my god but the granules are up in our shorts. And it's about time someone with a lizard head and twelve feisty pseudopods helped us turn all that stuff into a campaign, dammit.
And Razor Coast delivers.
Not only do you get a massive pile of encounters to build into a campaign, but you get HOW to pick said encounters, WHERE to put them, and WHY to put them. And suggestions on how to do it yourself, for ANY campaign. That itself is worth Gary Gygax's weight in gold.
I should know. I dug him up for a special, unreleased Crystal Caste set.
On top of this, you get several easily portable locations for adventure, piles of stat blocks, maps, more maps, a new prostate (that's a lie), NPCs, villains, monsters... serious goodies for less than 19 cents per page.
An interesting concept with this book is something I'd like to call "more allies than you can handle." By this I mean that there's serious RP options with a load of characters, but chances are your group won't even know half of them are alive until they're not. Seriously. NPCs of note that the PCs don't get invested in will go bad, die, or go bad and THEN die. Which means even if a group decides to re-play Razor Coast (and like a handful of modules out there from days of yore, that's a serious possibility), even if they pick the same general alliance (did I mention those? No? Sowwy), they can go looking for those same dead bodies/former villains and team up with THEM instead. Or team up with them AND their old buddies.
It's like a Bethesda game. But with more replay value, built-in multiplayer, and literally unlimited expansions.
"But Ashton," you cry, "you're just a schill for the man, whose tentacle blorts from your mouth-parts even now!" Don't be fooled, dear reader. I gave it four stars for a reason. And Agresta hasn't even bought me a drink yet, so don't call me a sellout.
There's a handful of typos. Let's get that out of the way. It annoys me, it annoys you. We move on. Crap happens.
The occasional non-challenging NPC. That bugs me. Frog God essentially promises to stab my PCs in the aorta with the simplest of encounters, and after watching my group make a buffet of my tears, I see CR 12+ dudes doing 1d6+1 damage per attack and cry. Are they all gringo-salsa? Hardly. But enough of them are that I see some important villains getting chopped like gumbo just so's they can die spicy-like.
It's not enough to ruin a book that can seriously spawn a skrillion campaigns, though, believe me. Gygax put out a book of names well after Google came out and we could just search name lists for free, and people still bought it. YOU may have bought it. Hell, I looked at it, thought all the above, and I wanted to buy it. But this book, pennies per page, is damned impressive, even as a resource.
Hands up on who bought the 3.0 D&D Map Folios.
K.
This is worth WAY more than those. Trust me. I only fail 3 out of 5 times, and that's WAY worse than this book.
