Toolbox is a expansive collection of tables for just about any situation that could crop up in a fantasy game. Need a quick type of insanity? Done. Encounter tables for terrain types, dungeon types, creature types? Got 'em. Contents of a picked pocket? Covered. NPC personality traits, motivations, names, distinguishing features? Uh-huh. Just about any table needed for a DM deprived of inspiration in the middle of a story or in between stories.
The tables are organized into four chapters: wilderness, dungeons, cities, and people. Interspersed between sections of each chapter are DM tips that introduce the next group of tables and some ways to use them. If you are looking for commentary of any sort, you will find very little - not even an introductory statement at the start of each chapter. An appendix contains some rules specific to AEG products and some brief statements about running NPCs against a party. However, these blurbs assume the party is good and the villians are bad (!), so what could have been an engaging debate about how to run noble villians or misguided heros is too short. After these blurbs (the only prose in the entire book) are "Supplemental Tables" - just to-hit locations and criticals. Either call it that or make up some more tables to supplement these.
Unlike Gary Gygax's World Builder, these lists are true tables, done up for a simple d20 roll. That simplicity is a bit of a problem, however, if you are looking for a "realistic" breakdown of probability. The table entries are all arranged alphabetically, so there are no fancy ways to influence the frequency of particular results.
One of the best things about the encounter tables is that they list the important stats for instant use at the table, so a combat could proceed immediately after rolling a result. This includes spell lists for casters. The other neat type of tables are the ones that can develop into adventure story hooks with a simple roll of the die: mercenary jobs, treasure maps, even interesting sounds heard in a dungeon.
Some of the things I didn't find useful were about any proper noun generators: command words for magic items, adventuring bands, and names in general. I would rather have seen some random generators a la Traveller language tables, which listed vowels, consonants and clusters together and the means to combine them into words. Also, the dungeon encounter tables are not keyed to levels, encounter or dungeon. As a result you could get vastly over- or underpowered results, so it is best to use these tables with a fairly experienced party - or one that can retreat expeditiously.
This product would be most useful in the thick of a fantasy campaign that is being developed on the fly. The tables are not coherent parts of a whole, but it is nearly impossible not to roll on a table and go "hmmm" at the result. Hyper-prepared DMs will probably find the tables too random, and most likely will already have generated the important tables that this book provides. Still, the sheer content of the book is impressive.
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