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This one I've got in both paper and digital versions, and like the other area-specific sourcebooks, it suffers from a general lack of mechanical content, and heavy re-use of text and images from the larp. The primary market here appears to be getting cash for bits of additional IC information for the larp, as I've been unable to get anyone to actually play the tabletop version, and others seem to have similar luck, even online. Honestly, there's a lot of product out there that covers the whole "undead apocalypse" genre much better. These have about six pages of rules per $20 book, and that's a bit much by my standards.
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Paranoia's wild and crazy, and not every adventure's gonna be everyone, but it's a lot of fun as a con game or a one shot break between longer campaigns. Doing so avoids the fatigue that comes from attempting to run a serious, long term adventure with it, while maximizing the silly stress relief.
I highly suggest running 'em with the various handout packs that have been created for it over the years. Asking players to fill out customer satisfaction surveys for their deaths never gets old!
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I'm very pleased with how easy this is to run, as I've been running a ridiculous amount of 5e AL. Some of the earlier bits had various rough edges, but by Strahd, it's mostly cleaned up, and you're not running into things that feel unsettlingly easy/hard as you might with say, Hoard of the Dragon Queen. Now, you do have a general expectation of running all of the Ravenloft stuff back to back for a given character, but thematically, that works out pretty well, so as long as everyone's on board with that expectation, it'll work out fine.
As always for 5e AL, fantastic graphic design, with very clear, standardized statblock formatting and room keys.
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There's a large number of errors in the product, including basic typos. It badly needs a good proofreading, and some editing wouldn't hurt. The ruleset is unfortunately not actually accurate for the larp, with some sections, such as farming, working entirely differently than as described here, so the rulebook actually leads you wrong, and a few bits of the rulebook actually contradict themselves(such as being required both to, post theft, both hold a players item for hours, and also to turn it in immediately at ops). However you feel about the larp system as a whole, the rulebook is badly in need of a round of updates at present.
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Look, 4th Ed is not my favorite system. Both 3.5 and 5e were better at a number of things, in my opinion. That said, this book is very cleanly laid out, and is quite successful at its objective of getting you to understand 4e swiftly. So, if that's what you're after, it's a fine choice. The art is quality, and even if you're not a fan of the rules, both 4e and 5e introduce a large amount of interesting fantasy art. Also, it doesn't hurt that it's made available for free.
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Art is generally simply reused from the core book, and the book contains almost no rules for actual play. Very little space is given to interesting concepts such as Arcadians(about a paragraph), and instead, it's mostly a rehash of things already available elsewhere. Ultimately, this book offers very little new content to enhance play, and end of the day, you're getting six advantages/disadvantages in total, six monster entries for...pretty mundane creatures, and a single table of alchohol names. That's pretty meager for $15-20.
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