Absolutely love this product. Sometimes coming up with combat flavor on the fly can be difficult. These bad boys do wonders for my DMing skills. I got both digital and physical, so I even have them on the go.

Storyteller Cards: The Storyteller Cards add details and descriptions to your RPGs, storytelling games, and even adventure games. The tarot-sized cards are visually clear, and you can often just draw a random card of a particular set, and find a description. The sets are: Character Distinctions, Expressions, Ill-Intent, Pain, Environment: The Labryinth, and Environment: Smells and Sounds. The Storyteller Card deck has eighty cards, and each set is about 12 cards. While the cards are a better fit for generic fantasy roleplaying, they're also suitable for other genres, such as the Cthulhu Mythos, westerns, noir, etc..

Character Distinctions: The Character Distinctions cards have three different physical distinctions each, such as Gangly, Deep-Set Eyes, and Shuffles. Each distinction has a negative connotation and a positive one, each one sentence long. Fantasy gamers can also use them for non-human encounters, while Cthulhu Keepers will use negative descriptions for those unsettling villagers.

Expressions: The Expressions cards include Bias, Confidence, Fear, Love, etc. Each card is divided into about single-word ten Physical Clues, and ten Emotional Clues. For example, the Arrogant/Snob card has Sneering as a Physical Clue and Demeans others as an Emotional clue. While shorter in description than the other cards, the cards have more suggestions per card. They should also be useful to gamemasters who have important NPCs with their own plots and subplots (eg. two characters who are in love, or a servant fearful of his master).

Ill-Intent: The Ill-Intent cards have three different descriptions each for villains and enemies. One of the card's descriptions, for example, are Selfish, Wicked, and Slaughterhouse. The descriptions on each card cover intelligent opponents and savage ones. Each description is divided into a non-combat description and a combat one, a sentence each. They're a bit on the "telling instead of showing" side (eg. "You sense that this person is motivated by their own selfish desires"), but should be convenient for random hostile encounters with throwaway enemies that don't need much detail or depth.

Pain: Pain might be more suitable as part of the Combat Description cards, but they do a good job for any genre. Each of the twelve Pain cards has three traits, such as Vice-Like, Convulsive, and Ache. Each trait has two descriptions, one localized, and the other more general. Use the Pain cards for critical injuries, death throes, Mythos deaths, or other climactic drama.

Environment: The Labyrinth: Ostensibly for indoor dungeons, these cards are quite useful for haunted houses and other unsettling places as well. Each card has a Sounds, Sight, and Smells section, such as Scurry, Blood, and Smoke. Obviously, if you randomly draw a card you can't use, just draw another. If you play Call of Cthulhu, why not have a temporarily insane character hear something that might not -- or might -- be there?

Environment: Smells and Sounds: These environment cards are for the outdoors. Each card has four terrains: Forest, Jungles, Woods; Marshes, Swamps, Bogs; Mountain, Hills; and Desert, Plains. Each of these terrains has two descriptions, anything from something visual, to a sudden noise. While vivid, the descriptions often have connotations that might not fit the current situation: "Bird calls and lazy leaves float down from the rich canopy above" may not be suited for a dark forbidden forest setting. Personally, I would have found more useful outdoor environmental cards which had a "quiet" description and an "unexpected noise (or movement)" one.

Art: The deck has six different card backs, each with three characters, mostly generic fantasy human males. Use them as important NPCs in your campaigns!

Blank cards: The Storytelling deck comes with a blank card for each category.

Combat Description Cards are ingeniously set up and easy to use. The cards divide themselves into three types of damage: Piercing, Blunt, and Slash. Each type is then broken down into one of three attack styles: Finesse, Power, and Range. Each style has a clear readable one-word Action-Word (eg. For a Blunt attack, it's Impressive for Finesse, Batter for Power, and Thump for Range) with its description. The first half of the description describes the successful attack by the hero, and option second the vanquishing of the foe! The deck consists of 120 tarot-sized cards. Pretty obviously, you'll want to use these cards if your games involve combat.

Combat Description Cards is available on RPGNow as a PDF, Amazon in deck format, and the publisher's website for both. The cards will also be available as an app in the future.

Well I read about this and knew I had to get these cards! I recently created a finesse type fighter-rogue but was having a hard time "seeing" how she fights with two daggers. The descriptions really helped me write up a background and they're gonna really help at the gaming table too.

This was a mistake on my behalf to buy. I should have read the description and looked at the pictures a bit more. I thought of using this to use as damage cards but it is just a description of how the hit happens. Nice for adding colour to a combat, true. But really not worth the price. Not at least for me.

These maps are not VT ready, none of them have dimensions that allow for an easy grid to be laid over them. One even has different grid positions for inside and outside. A disappointing purchase.

Three very nice maps are included in this pack. I have to say they are VERY interesting tactically speaking. All three maps, the Keep, Atrium, and Baths, are situated like a first-person shooter multiplayer map. Each side is balanced with minor variance between them to make it interesting. The maps are very high quality with great artwork. They are quite large, so you have plenty of room for your group to fight their way across and utilize the landscape. The only thing I would love is premade files for MapTool or other virtual tabletops. It definitely helps me out. If you use only printouts, this is a great option. If you use virtual tabletops, it'll just take a bit of work if you want to import it and size it so the grids line up. Oh, they do have grids already, so that's taken care of.

All in all a good set of maps.

These maps are exactly what the title says (For those who failed to read it, "HI-RES BATTLEMAP PACK"). They do this job quite well, being at respectable dimensions (not quite what I'd call high-resolution for printing, but high-resolution for on-screen if you don't zoom in too far). They'd work with a virtual tabletop, probably, assuming it didn't fuss too much about resolution and scaling on their grid (if they have one), in which case you may have to mess around with it.

It's good, and I like it a lot. The one thing I do feel could hurt it is that it is an Unreal-Tournament map styled pack, so you can't get too much normal story-driven play, but you could have a ton of fun with it in a competitive session, or as an courtyard or whatnot.

That said, high-res screams that it's at a print-ready dpi, which it isn't really. I mean, you could, but I'd have gripes with doing so. It's better than a lot of stuff, but it still just feels like they were afraid to burn more than 3 megabytes on a map and were religiously trying to reduce file size at cost of quality. Speaking of which- file formats. I love jpeg as much as the next guy, so I try to burn it and throw it away as much as possible. Seriously bad format. But better than the gif one of the maps is inexplicably in. If it were in .png format, my gripes would be pointless, but I'm curious as to the choices for the format.

The quality is decent, but there are a few underlying issues that hurt this product when the time comes to rate it. It's just not high enough resolution to advertise as being such, and the formats used are questionable.

I was sent a free review copy of the Conflict Roleplaying Rulebook recently by Conflict Roleplaying, and have perused it. Conflict is a roleplaying game supplement by Mark M. Scott for the Pathfinder and OGL d20 rule systems, allowing for a group of players to play PVP combat while making sure the game is balanced for any rules the players may be using from any supplement. The book is 120 pages of gaming goodness, providing some very interesting ways of dealing with arena type campaigns where your sole goal is to wipe your enemy off the map. The book details types of matches, map elements, feats, and some pre-generated characters. This almost completely redesigns how character creation is done. You aren’t trying to create a compelling character, you’re creating a battlefield terror, intent only on destroying your enemies. The cover of the book is a well painted piece of art detailing two knights in combat (as you can see on the right) and the rest of the book is in greyscale, with decent art throughout. This book looks like it took a lot of time and a lot of playtesting to pull off. The idea of the Battlepoints system is that, based on your level, you are given a certain number of battlepoints to spend on your class, magical and non-magical items, as well as different battlefield conditions. The DM plays the role of the referee, which allows for secret movement and orders by the players through sheets called “passcards” which let the players write out their plans on them, including what attacks they’ll make, what square they’ll be moving into, and any other condition the DM needs to know. There are many different game types, including “Ambush,” “Kill of the Hill,” “Hellbreak,” “Regicide,” and “Brother’s Keeper.” Each one has specific win conditions that must be met in order for one team or the other to win. Within each type of game, there are other variants, so you aren’t likely to run out of options any time soon. Conflict Laws are special rules the DM can apply to nearly any game, adding even more options, such as Dead Lands, which cancels out all magic in the battle, or Fog of War, which makes it more difficult to attack the enemy with range attacks. There are 15 team feats presented, which allow you to benefit not only yourself, but others on your side. Mostly involving distracting an opponent so the other can move in for a hit, or holding the enemy while another lands blows on him. There’s also a pair of hefty guides within, once for the DM, the other for players, and gives some good tips on different conflicts and how they can be run. In the game Bridget and I tried, we had a blast, pounding the snot out of each other across the excellent map provided. It was pretty awesome. Overall, this is a very solid product, with some great options for a game group who is tired of the standard grind and wants to take their aggression out on one another. It’s definitely a book I would recommend to any Pathfinder and 3.5 players out there.