This product come with only a referee's screen, with forty some pages of downloaded material to be accessed via a password located with the screen.
Referee's Screen
Material: While unable to stop bullets it is fairly durable, being made of glossed cardboard.
Artwork: The art depicted on the cover is a scene of Good versus Evil on an epic scale. It helps to set the feel for the game, if not most of the material associated with this screen. Although the art looks poor from inside the shrinkwrap, when unfolded the screen looks very nice.
Game Mechanics: Nearly half the tables in the screen consist of character creation information, namely skill lists and game descriptions of each race. Of the rest, approximately half contains rules associated with combat or magic, especially special rules for such things as blind fighting and gaze evasion. The remainder consists of tables for weapons and roots (yes, roots), which all contain enough mechanics to be of some use during play.
Downloads:
The Pereyshian Empire: This is a 31 page nation book which details, history, politics, law, major building types, and every city, town, and village in the empire of Pereyshia. It is also exceedingly boring, both as a game supplement and as a nation for adventuring.
The Pereyshian empire is run by a High Lord and a Politic, basically a dictator and a nobles only senate, respectively. It has strict laws, which severely limit education and transportation. These laws affect adventurers seriously. For example, it costs 10 silver per mile per person to be legally permitted to travel in Pereyshia, this fee must be paid in advance, and your location recorded before you can leave. The only exception is merchants who are assigned a route by the all powerful merchants guild, and are likewise fined for deviating.
The supplement itself suffers from the author's attempt to convert repetitive lists into prose. For example, each town and village has a two to three paragraph description. This description includes only: the population, current economic state, main products, current ruler, and the status of the militia, for nearly all the towns and villages. As prose paragraphs this information becomes much harder to find than simply listing, and it reads worse than the list of vital statistics usually present in cases like this.
Amnesia: This is a clever little adventure, that would work great for an introduction to Forge: Out of Chaos, except for some risk of overly powerful opponents at the very end.
The basic premise of this adventure is that the PC's find themselves in the middle of a dungeon with the last thing they remember as a meeting with a potential employer. The rest of the adventure involves finding out what happened, and trying to gain some advantage, either material or political from the situation.
Most adventure writers shy away from drastically affecting the PC's at the beginning of the adventure, as this seems at the onset to reduce the Players' freedom, however it seems that subsequent railroading can be just as invasive and less fun in the long run.
Healing Stones: This is a one page description of partially alive stones capable of one use healing. While descriptive and well written it did not stand out as exceptional.
Iron Pot: This is a three page description of a tavern. As it stands this location is only really useful as a place to rob. Only one character associated with the tavern is mentioned, namely the manager, and he only barely. The majority of the detail lies in describing the different rooms and secret locations where money and valuables are stored.
Summary:
While the Referee's Screen is standard fare, the downloads run the range from useful to useless. Not a bad buy for Forge: Out of Chaos Referees, but not necessary by any stretch.
Note: In investigating these downloads two potential problems were discovered. First, the link to the adventure is faulty due to a typo. Second, these materials may be available free of cost via the World of Juravia membership. For the purposes of this review this was assumed not the case.
Go to forum!
(Due to spamming, old forum discussions are no linked.)