FASA Corp.
118 pp £ 10.99

This book is about the hazards of exloration in a world that's out to get you. First we get an account of a young troubadour's first trip across the wilds of Barsaive as an apprentice to a worldly wise Adept. This is both entertaining and informative; highlighting the mundane but potentially fatal problems that travellers have to deal with.

Next up are a couple of short essays, again presented as adventurer's accounts, dealing with the dangers of jungles, mountains and underground kaers. These are easy reads, imparting enough tricks of the adventuring trade that inexperienced travellers shouldn't die of cold on their flrst night away from home. So far so good and any of this information is handy in exploration themed games, no matter what world you are playing in.

Then we come to the real meat of the book, the hazards that you can expect in some of the notoriously dangerous areas of Barsaive itself. This is where the book really comes into its own as a guide for GMs as well as players. There are settings in which the adventure is pretty much to survive from one day to the next; in places like the Deaths Sea, which is an ocean of magma, the extreme heat is more dangerous than the ravening beasties that frequent such a hellish place and in the Wastes where ash rains from the sky and the area warps magic into strange new effects.

This could be nasty for players whose characters are magical by their very nature. As you read on about swamp riddled Dragon lairs and Horror infested deserts, your mind starts to generate all kinds of ideas that you can start dumping on your players. This alone makes the book a worthy purchase.

With all these nasty new ways to suffer injury, it's good to see that the same level of attention has been applied to the healing arts. There is a lengthy list of herbs and remedies, both magical and mundane that should add balance to the chances of survival in such a hostile world.

As usual with Earthdawn sourcebooks, the game mechanics are left to a separate section at the end of the book so that the rules don't interfere with the narrative. Here we find statistics for all the healing tools as well as rules for diseases and such stuff as foraging and navigation. All of this is useful and by separating it out it allows the GM to hand over the book during the game so that players can refer to the advice in the journals without knowing the ins and outs of the mechanics.

Overall: Expands and builds on premise that players should be exploring and reclaiming their ravaged world. Plenty of useful information. Good stuff.

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