First off, the book continues the same rushed, dreary, uninspired, "I wrote my high school term paper the night before it was due" layout. Worse yet, the site advertises a cover which doesn't actually exist on the PDF.
This particular series focuses on machine guns (and automatic rifles misclassified by the author as machine guns). Once again, the author provides pages and pages of rules in regards to automatic gunfire. To be honest, the author, Jim Wardrip, should be publishing a whole new game system for himself, rather than trying to shoehorn his game system in D20 Modern. I've been told that the most important thing in writing new rules for an existing game system is to keep with the feel of the existing system. He's not feeling the D20 system; he's got a death grip on it and he's trying to choke the life out of it. We've once again been handed a stack of overly complex rules that don't bear a lot of resemblance to D20. I don't want to have to break out calculus and geometry schoolbook and a bunch of rulers and calculators just to see if I can apply one of his particular rules in an attempt to shoot something.
And once again, we have a gun book that's thin on the guns. A grand total fo 22 weapons are in this book. Aren't the guns supposed to be the most important part of a book about guns?
Let me play with some numbers for you for a moment: GFQ: 48 guns in 2 books for $10.00 or $0.21/gun Ultramodern Firearms D20: 311 guns for $28.00 or $0.09/gun Ultramodern Firearms (MIllenium's End): 300 guns for $20 or $0.067/gun Edge of the Sword: 289 guns for $20 or $0.069/gun GURPS High Tech: 164 modern guns for $21 or $0.128/gun Compendum of Contemporary Weapons: 460 guns for $20 or $0.043/gun Big Bang series: 287 gun for $15 or $0.052/gun
This ratio is absolutely horrible! More guns, more guns, more guns! Thankfully, I haven't had to actually pay for this particular book. I just feel sorry for the poor saps who want guns and buy it without being able to really look at it first.
There's another thing that bothers me, too. Eight pages in the back of the book are dedicated to duplicating a document produced by the U.S. Government detailing Weapons Classified as Curios or Relics Under 18 U.S.C. Chapter 44, National Firearms Act. Looking through the credits and the D20 licensing, this document is not accredited to anyone, even though the entity known as the Federal Government of the United States owns the copyright on the document. And the section about legally obtaining a weapon capable of automatic fire is essentially another ATF document with a few lines edited in regarding the application of some D20 Modern rules. This isn't credited, either.
And once again, I can't help but to get the feeling that this book series is desperately attempting to ride the coattails of other guns books being released by other publishers on RPGNow. GFQ2 was added the the upcoming product list about an hour after a competitor's gun book was added with a release date one day earlier, not to mention the fact that GFQ is a quarterly book that's been released two months in a row.
And as a last curiosity, why is a PDF full of open gaming content have the cut'n'paste feature locked out?
I really hate writing a review in which I am unable to find any redeeming qualities for a book. But it needs to be done so these authors can realize their mistakes. Let's hope Jim Wardrip actually let's this critique sink in so he can improve the next volume.
Well, now I'm off to review gun books for Twilight 2000.
