VincentDarlage said:
Halfbat said:
is it ever going to come out on pdf, at all do you know?
I don't know. The magazine in print is worth buying, though.
What is I think implied but not stated in Mr. Darlage's reply is that the S&P article has a wealth of info for GMs. The city stat index is replicated from the S&P article into A&Z. The writeups are not cut & paste however. I would say the writeup of Tortage is great for players, at first look (just got my copy today) I don't see anything GMs would scream about players reading over, at least for the city, whereas the S&P article has a nice selection of adventure hooks at it's end for GMs to develop.
With everything he has written, I'm very happy with this book that Mr. Darlage wrote up. What dismays me is the lack of game 'meat' (game stats). Note that this book is similar to the
Stygia sourcebook in how it's formatted, which is also a fantastic book. The feats at the end of the book look great, the NPC types (soldiers, merchants, arbalesters) are nicely made up. But doing a cover to cover skim of the book I don't see defining notes on character builds, although for each of the existing character classes the book suggests you refer to the source book (
Hyborias' F- books,
Pirate Isles for example). In these cases that's to be expected, rather than replicate material partially out of context which is covered in another existing book. For example, the gladiators in the Argos section of the book are nicely written about, but I didn't see any info on how to build them until I came upon the 11th paragraph (found middle of first column, p15) where it says "For ease of use, presume one school teaches a 'barbarian' style of combat..., another teaches a 'soldier' style." A similar obfuscation exists in the writeup on the Zingaran knights (in the chapter "Zingaran Military" pp60-62). Great writeups, but no reference for a player wanting to make up one of the three types of Zingaran knights, although one early sentence stating that they're unlike their Poitanian counterparts, for which I may infer opening my
Aquilonia sourcebook. Note that in
Stygia, there is a build for a
Lord of the Black Ring prestige class. Looking to the back of the book, you could look over the NPC builds for knights (pp89-90; no gladiators statted). So either a new GM or player, or one who hasn't played the game/read the rules books in a long time, will be at a bit of a loss.
That said, I want to re-emphasize the great writeups on these two kingdoms (the honour codes, the cultural assimilitudes, the geographical writeups/cities). But in a trend all too common in Wizards of the Coast's deedle dee releases, there are plenty of references to other Conan line books, where you will need to go to to look up statistical information of one sort or another. But in terms of reading about these lands, very nicely done.
Maybe I can get a better understanding once I've read the book, this was just a cover-to-cover assessment. Also, I've been off these boards for a long time, so I may have missed some things covered in other threads, in which case my bad.

Am very happy for these regional books, and again very happy Mr. Darlage wrote them!