I just turned the game reviews over to John O’Neill. It’s the last section — save for the Knights of the Dinner Table art — that was needed to complete the upcoming issue, most of which John already has set up for the printer.

You may have noticed lately that all the game reviews are favorable. It’s not that we don’t find bad modules, it’s that we like to devote our rather limited space to describing goodies we think our readers would enjoy.

This time we’ve got a big review for Paizo’s impressive Pathfinder Role-Playing game core rulebook. The indefatigable Andrew Zimmerman Jones (no relation despite certain name similarities) dug in deep and then took the rules for a spin with several Paizo modules.

Vincent Darlage’s excellent Ruins of Hyboria was covered in detail by the EvilDM himself, Jeff Mejia, and I enlisted Vincent to write up some reviews of several Goodman Games products. Though not really a Dungeons and Dragons fan, he was quite taken with Blackdirge’s Dungeon Denizens, as well as the Cortex system from Margaret Weiss games.

New reviewer Robert Rowe took a long look at the Mongoose Games new Judge Dredd hardback.

I’m an unrepentant Traveller fan, so I was delighted to find much to like in the new Mongoose Traveller releases Aslan and Tripwire.  As sword-and-sorcery is my favorite genre, my heart was won by Legends of Steel. .

It’s a big issue, and I think you’ll like our broadselection of product reviews, among them info on an innovative science fiction game, Far Avalon, from one of my favorite game writers, and Shard, a nifty game Andrew stumbled across at Gen Con this year.

Perhaps the biggest surprise to me was a boardgame I’d been sent. I foolishly put off reviewing it until the last possible moment, never dreaming how much fun it would be to run with the family. I tested out the game with HeroScape’s new wave 9 products (I especially liked the Mohican Indians that came in two of the four expansion packets) with my good friend bthepilot and two young gamers I found loitering in my living room, and all four of us were converted. I’ll explain why inside the issue. I hope to cover HeroScape’s wave 10 products and their new Dungeons & Dragons playset in an upcoming issue. Be warned — I’ll probably do my best to convert all of you into players.

All of these products and more will be reviewed in depth in the upcoming issue of Black Gate, available in December. See you there!

–Howard Andrew Jones