First, WSCA Mighty Thews is a solid rendition of the WSCA rule set. The mechanics are plain vanilla WSCA. There are no mods, nor is there a magic system. The book is 36 very fluffed up pages. The fluff is mostly huge type and an excellent selection of public domain art liberally sprinkled with quotes from Conan stories and similar ilk. I'll leave layout design commentary to the graphically literate, but I have a hard time reading small white print on a black background. I don't care how cool it looks. Same goes for small white and small yellow print on a red page: hard to read.
Skipping the fluff, graphic layout and legibility questions, what do you get in 36 pages? Probably 2 to 4 pages of well laid out text. You know the kind of old RPG where pictures cost money to print so they economized and organized the words? You get the well-chosen, flavorful quotes and a bevy of tables.
As another reviewer said, the tables are excellent. However, there are tables and then there are tables. The tables in Mighty Thews are all single-column lists of twelve. They say to roll 2d6 but, if I weren't manually selecting, I would roll a d2 and a d6 for an even distribution.
There are 22 tables in all. The first 9 help define your character. There is a wonderful table for rolling how you meet your death. (Seriously, it rocks!) There's a table for choosing a deity, one for deific blessings and another for deific curses. The rest of the tables are encounter tables, but they're a mixed bag.
The first encounter table is also the bestiary. Sure, there are only 12 entries, but they are good. The next two encounter tables seem like they're for describing NPCs, but they might be used more broadly. A table of story hooks is followed by four tables for ostensibly filling out your hex map and one — again, ostensibly — for adding features to a given map hex.
The good thing about the encounter tables that follow the bestiary table is that they do not solidly fit into my descriptions. Their "looseness" gives them more flexibility, which is a good thing.
All in all, I give Mighty Thews three stars. When I bought my copy, the price was $12 marked down to $6. I think there is no more than $3 of content. While I really enjoyed the well-chosen art, I judge the title by what I can use at the game table. For $6, it is just a little disappointing. Had Mighty Thews embellished on the WSCA rules, added magic or provided some multi-column tables with the same quality that's already there, I think it would have earned its $6 price. As is, I recommend you apply the $6 toward other Monkey's Paw games like Fool, Knave, Rogue and Unconquered. They scratch different iteches, but both are 5-star excellent.
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