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The book is soft cover, about digest sized although a little wider. The cover is black and white and depicts a line drawing of what is probably a special forces officer holding a gun as well as line drawings of four guns from the side. The text throughout the book is smaller than what I'm used to but it is also well spaced. Every single gun is illustrated with a detailed line drawings. It's nothing that knocks your socks off, but considering the price everything is well done and I wouldn't feel ripped off if it cost more, I just wouldn't rate it as high. I give it a style rating of 4, "Classy and Well Done" sums up this book very well.
The content of this book is essentially write-ups of a bunch of modern guns with important stats listed. This book is intended to be used with any role playing system, and considering that it has almost no game specific information I'd say that's about right. It's a reference guide to check so you can easily write up stats for any weapon in whatever game you're running. It does have a section for dice to be rolled to determine tissue damage, I can only assume that this would be appropriate for one of Palladium's RPGs but I've never played any of them so I can't say for sure. The damage dice seem to be in line with d20 damage although they seem to be a bit more lethal than most d20 weapons.
The book starts out with explaining how it is to be used, lists all the terms and abbreviations. The first thing that's listed is cartridge types - it covered every cartridge I could think of as well as a few I didn't know existed. I'm not a gun expert so it might not be complete but it looks good enough for the types of games most people would run. Cartridges have both a tissue damage rating (from 1-9) and a penetration value (1-7). It seems tissue damage would be used in every system, but penetration value would probably depend on the armor rules used in the system.
All the guns have basic stat writeups for them, they list what type of cartridge they use, their feed (how many shots they have), weight, barrel length, muzzle velocity and approximate effective range. It provides more detail than I'd need in most systems I play but it does cover everything that's important. The cartridge type determines damage, how many shots you have is of course also important as is effective range. I guess muzzle velocity is important if you have characters that are capable of outrunning/flying bullets.
The types of guns that are given stats for are pistols, revolvers, sub machine guns, rifles, shotguns and machine guns. Each type has it's own section that can be found easily in the table of contents and the guns are organized alphabetically by country and then by gun name. If you happen to be gun savvy then knowing the country of origin is useful, otherwise there will be some searching. The copy I have doesn't have an index, but because some pages were torn out I don't know if it's actually supposed to have one. Each gun is illustrated above it's stats. Over 250 guns are statted, but I didn't count exactly. That's more than I'm likely to ever make use of but at least I'm not likely to run out of information either.
This is basically a book on gun stats with an explanation about how each gun type works. If that's what you're looking for then this book is great. If you're looking for more info then this will likely still be useful but you'll have to get the rest of the information elsewhere - depending on what other information you want the short bibliography on the last page will be useful. Considering the intent of the book it does it's job quite well so I want to give it a rating of 4, but I can't seem to find any stats for shotgun shell tissue damage ratings. There are only a few shotguns listed but it's still a rather large oversight. So I have to give it a substance rating of 3.
Now, since it's designed to be used with any game system I decided to try it out on a few.
BESM 2ER: The rulebook just has stats for 9 contemporary guns, Assault Rifle, Light Pistol, Heavy Pistol, Hunting Rifle, Machine Pistol, Medium Pistol, Shotgun, Sniper Rifle, and Submachine Gun. Damage is rated from 5 to 15, so tissue damage ratings from 1-3 should probably do 5 damage, 4-6 probably 10 and 7-9 would do 15. This might vary on a case by case basis but it seems to be a good rule to follow. Weapons with Tissue Damage ratings of 8 or 9 might also do 20 or 25 damage. Since number of shots is handled by the Limited Shots disability which handles 1, 2, 3 or 6 shots the magazine feed isn't too useful. BESM probably isn't a game where most people would want to go into incredible detail about the guns they're using but it does work reasonably well if you do happen to want to.
Cyberpunk 2020: Cyberpunk has a section on old guns which are still in use, so I figured the easiest way to figure things out is to compare the old guns that are listed with the Book of Contemporary Weapons. Most of the damage ratings for the guns in the Book of Contemporary Weapons are listed in Xd6. Since Cyberpunk uses d6s for damage that should convert quite well. Some of the weapons vary by 1d6 damage and there doesn't seem to be much consistency. I guess the Cyberpunk researchers came to different conclusions from the Book of Contemporary Weapons researchers. Since there' s a lot more weapons in the Book of Contemporary weapons it would probably be easiest to just scrap the Cyberpunk damage ratings and group 1d6 and 1d8 together in 1d6. It might change the feel of the game slightly but I don't see any concerns for major game imbalance.
D&D/D20: Obviously guns don't have much place in a D&D campaign and the book only covers contemporary weapons and no renaissance weapons. I don't have d20 Modern however so this is the best I can do. The best I can do is compare to the damage scaling for medium, small and large weapons. Damage scales pretty consistently from rating 1-7 after which it takes a large jump at 8 and 9. I think the best might be to use damage ratings ranging from 1d4 to 2d10 on the medium weapons table. I've also read through the d20 Ultramodern Weapons book briefly and damage seemed to range from 2d6 to 3d6, so damage ratings 1-2 would be 2d6, 3-4 would be 2d8, 5-6 would be 2d10, 7 would be 2d12, 8 would be 3d6 and 9 4d6. That's a crude way of doing it but it seems like it should work fine.
GURPS: The damage for GURPS weapons has much less variance than Cyberpunk or the Book of Contemporary Weapons, pistols range from 2d-1 to 2d+2 with a 3d at the top. Shotguns do 4d, and Rifles do between 3d and 7d+1. According to GURPS pistols do less damage, shotguns do medium damage and rifles do the most damage. I'm guessing this is a balance issue, pistols are easier to conceal so they do less damage, shotguns have spread so they can't do as much damage as rifles and rifles are unweildy, but don't do spread so they can do the most damage. GURPS isn't one of my favorite systems so I didn't spend much time trying to convert and I wasn't able to come up with much useful. I imagine if you spend enough time making comparisons a good system should be possible but it takes more work than I'm willing to do.
Traveller d20: I only have the lite rules so it might be easier with the full version. Traveller being a futuristic game doesn't have many stats for modern weapons, however it also considers projectile weapons to be more practical so they could be in use. There's no direct comparison that I can make so the best I can do is look at the range of damage. The damage seems to range from 1d8 - 1d12 for weapons that are equivalent to modern weapons, except for shotguns which deal 3d6/2d6/1d6 damage depending on where you're caught in the spread. Tissue Damage ratings 1-2 would work for 1d8, 3-4 for 1d10, 5-6 for 1d12, 7 for 2d8, 8 for 2d10 and 9 for 2d12. Standard d20 damage ratings wouldn't be appropriate as T20 uses a different hit point system in which individual shots are a lot more lethal. In this case I guess it works just as well that the Book of Contemporary Weapons doesn't have damage ratings for shotgun shells as shotguns do a lot more damage than any other contemporary weaopn equivalent. The only question would be if you'd actually want to use a bunch of current weapons in a futuristic campaign.
To recap, it seems to work best with Cyberpunk 2020, which is good as that's one of the systems it's most likely to be used with. BESM works well, although BESM seems to work with anything as it doesn't focus too much on the details. The different guns wouldn't be used for much other than flavour - but it's good flavour nonetheless. It also seems to work quite well with Traveller d20, especially as T20 handles the shotgun gaff quite smoothly. Standard d20 should work quite well although not quite as smoothly as T20. GURPS just doesn't seem to work with the book of contemporary weapons as any of the other systems I tried. It just seems to be designed with different damage standards in mind. So 2 work very well (Cyberpunk 2020 and Traveller d20), 2 work reasonably well (d20 and BESM) and one doesn't work very well at all (GURPS). I guess that's a 4 out of 5 success rate, which would sync with the 4 substance rating I was going to give it if it hadn't been for the shotgun gaff. If BESM and d20 are counted at half value because the damage has to be essentially winged, then it would come out with a 3 out of 5 as well.
Overall I'd say it's a worthwhile purchase considering the price, even if it were a little more expensive, but if you only play systems that have similar balance systems for damage like GURPS then it probably isn't worth it unless you really want to put a lot of work into converting the weapons to make them work.
