Stephen Fleetwood

This complaint is more about an edition from a quick glance, than the work, but I doubt there will be a second edition

This is a book funded by Kickstarter, and it's clearly amateur hour. The broad spine is missing the title! The author's name is missing from the entire book! There is no title page! In a black and white book, there's a shaded greyscale background reducing contrast for most of the book, and every page is surrounded by a irregular black bar, reminiscent of nothing. Capitalization is often missing; it's the Fate RPG, not fate, it's the Holy Roman Empire, not the holy roman empire, it's the Thirty Years' War, not the 30 years war. There are some inconsistencies here, which indicate it's clearly not intended. The text size changes for no clear reason; paragraphs are separated by space instead of indentations, which is not wrong in and of itself, but then certain paragraphs lose their spacing. There's no page numbers, despite appearing in the table of contents. There's no chapter numbers, despite appearing in the chapter listing in chapter two.

I pushed through chapter one and glanced through the rest of the book. The setting could be interesting, but I'm not feeling it. The Rebellion is impossibly modern and progressive; it's the 17th century. It would be another hundred years before the American and French Revolutions, it would be two hundred before Karl Marx and the American Civil War, and three hundred before universal suffrage reached the rest of the world. Australia and Canada didn't let Natives vote until the 1960s. Tell me again how a major political movement in the 17th century is going to be egalitarian in race, gender and religion. There is some handwave about this, but it is so incredibly out of place. As a game master, I can gloss over these issues in play, if my players don't want to deal with them, but I can't handle a major political movement with sensibilities dating from the 21st century dropped in the middle of the 17th. That's part of the cost of using a historical setting.

Maybe there's something here that could work for someone. But not for me, and not for anyone who wants their works to be properly edited and properly typeset.… (más)