I'm still trying to decide if I got my money's worth from this product (PDF). I found it to be quite a mix of content, with some that I greatly enjoyed and some that I found useless. First, some of the material I'd already read on blogs. That, in itself, doesn't bother me. That it wasn't expanded or collected with similarly-focused materials from elsewhere greatly diminished the usefulness, even if I really enjoyed the original blog posts.

A lot of the charts were horribly laid out, so much so as to be nearly useless. I'm not particularly interested in most of them, so I can't say that they're frustrating to use--I won't be trying to use them. I can imagine a lot of people wanting to use them will have to create their own version that's readable to use at the table.

I can also report that I didn't find much of the rest of the presentation useful, at all. I didn't care for much of the art and certainly didn't like much of the layout. I much prefer simple layouts that focus on the content much more that those that seem to focus on ambience, so the background art was often annoying. The different colored backgrounds also were annoying. Odd typefaces, irregular columns--all that sort of stuff made reading the text more difficult.

That said, there were some articles that I found really interesting and useful. I'm still pondering how to use some of that content in what I'm creating for play, so it's certainly accurate to describe it as thought-provoking. I'm just not really seeing that there was enough material I find useful in it to warrant dropping money on the second issue; especially considering the troublesome layout.