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Player’s Guide: a disappointed review of a wonderful book
Just a few comments:
Well, I find the equipment packages quite useful.
My style of Conan games is more REH-like with different stories, not a long D&D-like campaign, and so each time I like my players to start with different equipments sets, just as Conan did in the original stories.
So, if my players just come out after 6 months in an Argossean Pirate vessel they will possibly start the adventure with packages similar to Argossean pirates, if they have been scouts for the Turanians they can maybe take packages similar to Turianian borderers, etc..
Furthermore those packages (and names and noble titles) help in creating realistic NPCs.
The names part is great and help in giving the right cultural fealing to each NPC (GameMasters with frequent games usually have problems in creating new names which sound realistic and not generally Fantasy names which are all the same as "Thork, Thark & Therk"...).
I realy enjoyed some of the new weapons (especially the Yataghan...although it looks slightly more lethal than the original Turkish Weapon) but I still do not understand why the Kopis (a Greek Sabre/Sword) should be a typical, regional Iranistani weapon...).
Hyrkanian Silk Undershit is great (straight from Gengis Khan ideas!), but it appeared already in Return to the Road of the Kings.
The lists of previously published feats, maneuvres and spells are quite useful..unfortunately they are limited to those published BEFORE the guide (not include Secrets of Skelos but Scrolls of Skelos).
They would have been more useful if they include alos those in the 2E Core Rules, by they do not.
Furthermore there are editing errors in the Spell list (Summoning and Weather Witching are a bit mixed).
In general, this is a great book, although there are a few faults (as explained in the topic "Player’s Guide: a disappointed review of a wonderful book").