“100 Books to Find on a Mage’s Bookshelf” is a 7-page document, of which four pages are stuffed to bursting with content. It outlines, like the title says, 100 books you can drag-and-drop into your Mage chronicle. There are a handful of books on this list which could easily be modified or expanded to become a major item in a chronicle because of a secret it might contain.
Writing
There are small errors throughout the document, and some of the descriptions are a little confusing the first time you read them, but when you get a sense of the writing, it becomes easy to pick out how a sentence is meant to be read. There are also issues with the punctuation in places, but all these errors are easily overlooked when the content itself hooks you, which it definitely did for me.
Content
There is a fine, almost shallow kind of depth in this work. Whilst the books’ descriptions are short, there are some interesting things noted in them. An example includes nr. 98 which mentions that, whilst the book attempts to define the Umbra by religious views held by its author, it outright ignores and dismisses certain contradictions that don’t fit within those views. There are many small touches, either to the contents or the authors, of a nature which makes you think that the author originally wrote up much more for each fictional book than what is given in the document.
Potential Use
This piece would work well for a Storyteller looking to use mystery and lore-gathering as part of their Mage chronicle. As the title says, there are 100 fictional books to use, and if you only used one per story, that is still 100 stories which could use one of these books to further the plot or create a divergence.
Conclusion
All in all, for the size (4 densely-packed pages of game material) and price ($1.25) of this piece, it packs a LOT of bang for the buck-and-a-quarter. I would recommend this product to any Mage Storyteller who has a dollar to spare.
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