What you get- The book is hardbound, and 192 pages in length. The cover is gray in color with some black trim looking much like the other WOTC D20 Modern books. The book is split into eight chapters, and 2 annexes.
The Good- This book has a lot of firearms, and it totally packed with info. Ranging from pistols to Anti-Material Rifles (big honking rifles designed to shoot through the engine block of a truck). I own two editions of Janes Small Arms Guides, and this volume included weapons not found in them. While I do not see an exact number of firearms listed, I would say easily 300+. The other gun book I own is Ultra-Modern Firearms (UMF) has significantly less. I really had to think hard to find a weapon not in the book. Each weapon has a picture (see below), and short paragraph giving a history of the weapon. I find this interesting, and feel it adds flavor to the game. One weapon, the Japanese Type 64 Rifle, has no description, but it is mentioned in the weapon that replaced it later on the same page. In quite a few descriptions there is a ‘Who Uses it?’ listing various units, and nations that possess it.
The Bad-Unfortunately there are quite a few things wrong with this book.
For starters there is no index, period. Good luck finding that obscure Romanian Assault Rifle in a hurry. The UMF listed an awesome index that not only told you just about anything you needed to know about the weapon in question, but the page where it is located. There is nothing like this in Weapons Locker, and it should be a crime. I can find anything in UMF in less then 8 seconds; it took me over 30 seconds to find the same thing in Weapons Locker. The closest thing is a so-called Table of Contents, and, at a ¼ page in length, is this almost worthless. To put it simply there is no easy way to find what you are looking for, NOTHING. In a book with this much volume of data this is wrong. The “Who uses this” feature is nice, but located within the text. Say I wanted my characters to run a mercenary mission into Serbia to capture a war criminal. There is no central source to find out what kinds of weapons the bad guys would use. The GM would have to read the entire book, and take notes. A page or two devoted to things like this is really needed. The point of this volume is to include tons of weapons to make your campaign more like a Tom Clancy novel. It contains all the info you need; yet it lacks the simple tools to make this happen.
The artwork ranges from decent, to complete crap. Unfortunately a majority is in the poor category. It appears the art is pencil line drawings. For some reason (I suspect to make it stand out) somebody surrounded most of them with a thick black line. When the pics were shrunk to fit in the book it went horribly wrong. Most of the pistols are ok, but the rifles are simply bad. The black line is thicker then any of the other lines. On weapons with a lot of ‘bumpy bits’ (Yes I know not a technical term, but I mean things such as iron sights, rails, flash suppressor etc) the black line attempts to follow the contours, and it makes it look fuzzy, out of focus. Sometimes this black line does not keep the same width and it looks even worse. In several cases the line starts thick and slowly disappears to nothing only to reappear further down the rifle. It completely ruins the art, and is very distracting. The M60E3 looks pathetic! It appears to bend (just an illusion). Other weapons have entire sections of the art simply missing.
Quite a few things slipped through the editing process. That includes having the wrong picture posted to a weapon. There is what is clearly an AK model labeled an M-16A4. While it sounds like a nit pick, when you consider that the entire page is devoted to M-16 variants, and all 7 other pictures on that page are M-16s it really makes me wonder if anyone looked at this book before it was published. It really screams “Hey I am wrong”. Incorrect art occurs in several other places as well.
For a book this packed with info, it sure wastes a lot of space. I cannot count the number of times it lists the rules for 3 round bursts, which is a paragraph long. Yes the 3 round burst rules should be in this volume, but why not print it once in the beginning and state; “This weapon can fire a 3 round burst, see page xx”. Quite a few paragraphs at the beginning of each chapter state other redundant rules. Seeing how useful the charts in the UMF are, I would much rather have had less redundant rules, and used this space for something useful. Better management of this could easily have freed up 3-4 pages at least.
Some of the stats are pretty wonky; I am not real sure why the AK-74U (a short version of the AK) has the same range as a full sized AK-74, while the M-4 (a short M-16) has a reduced range. Also some real world info on the weapons such as length, or year in service would have been nice.
Conclusion-A lot of folks out there don’t see any need for a gun book. To be very honest if I tried every combination of the stats in D20, I might find twenty different ways to stat firearms and a lot of weapons in this book are simply the same stats, with different names. For a book like this to shine, it needs to be full of information, and easy to use. A good gun book should let Joe Gamer who has zero knowledge of firearms set up a realistic scenario. Weapons Locker unfortunately does not do this. It is far too awkward to use, and the presentation is poor. This book does contain a lot of useful info, for this reason I gave it a 4 for substance. I suspect if it spent another week or so with an editor, replaced most of the art, and given a decent index, it would be top shelf quality. For a large company like WOTC the piss-poor editing, and awkward set up are unforgivable, and as is I must give it a 2 for Style.
If I had my druthers I would pick up Ultra-Modern Firearms, while it contains less weapons, it is not only cheaper but also miles better.
