My Life As A Gamer: Pundit Reviews Off-Brand Barsoom

The Pundit reviews Warriors of the Red Sun by Night Owl Workshop.

I share Pundit's opinion of this book. It's clear that Barsoom is the core of this book's source material followed by other Planetary Romance adventure fiction, much of which was also set on Mars back in the day and from which one can see core elements of later classics such as Herbert's Dune.

The issue is that they really didn't think things through, so you get issues where X is really D&D X with different trappings. This is incompetent for a very basic reason; if you make a distinction without a difference, then there there is no difference. It's no different than cloning the Glock, calling it something else (e.g. "Dagger"), and having the balls to sell it as a seperate product. Pundit points out several examples of this.

Therefore, the only useful way to make use of this is to recognize this for what it really is: a D&D supplement with off-branding, and not a particularly good one. There is nothing here that cannot be done just using Basic or Advanced D&D as it is, especially AD&D 1st Edition, following Pundit's suggestion of some narrative archtypes being unsuitable as playable characters (and thus are NPC-only). It will need work to make it into a product that justifies itself as a seperate and distinct product.

Fortunately, this product being small is also rather cheap. Not Basic Fantasy cheap, but cheap. Like all the smarter publishers, Night Owl does Print on Demand, so you can spend $15 for a print copy (plus Shipping and Handling) whenever you want one (and not have to deal with this "Out of Stock" faggotry). Add on a PDF copy for three USD more and you can get both digital and print copies. Not a bad deal for a product like that, assuming that you want it at all.