Free Role Playing Game Supplement Review: The Sandbox #2

The Sandbox #2 by Kevin Crawford is a free role playing game supplement published by Sine Nomine Publishing. This is a collection of articles related to the games published by Sine Nomine. This is the second and, currently, last edition (only this and #1 have been published) of a free periodical.

This is a twenty three page bookmarked PDF. Two pages are the colour covers and one page is an advert for the, since funded, Kickstarter for Starvation Cheap, a supplement for adding military campaigns to Stars Without Number.

The Introduction is half a page and explains what’s in this edition as well as promoting the Starvation Cheap Kickstarter.

Lifepath Characters for Stars Without Number is an optional way of creating characters for that system. This is a more complex lifepath generation method (that seems similar to Traveller/Cepheus Engine methods). Players can generate life events, origin worlds, which are primitive, modern and spacer habitat, profession, expert, warrior and psychic class and psychic knacks. Each section has one or more tables for generating results.

The Blademaster is a new class for Scarlet Heroes but it should also be compatible, perhaps with some tweaking, with other OSR games. This is a warrior class that also has secrets that may use essentially magical forces. Two schools of Blademasters are also detailed, each of which has a whole host of extra abilities – in some ways resembling Feats seen in later editions of Dungeons & Dragons.

A Quick Temple or Shrine is a collection of tables, d4, d6, d8, d10, d12 and d20, for generating a shrine.

A Quick Religious Revolt is a similar collection of tables, but this time for a religious revolt.

The PDF is decently bookmarked with the various major and the more important minor sections linked, although it lacks a table of contents. Navigation is decent for a short supplement. The text maintains a two column format and no errors were noticed. There are a number of black and white illustrations and one colour; all would appear to be from various Sine Nomine products.

The new lifepath generation method is fairly complex and thorough and does add more depth to the basic Stars Without Number method. It might also be possible to utilise it for other science fiction settings.

The Blademaster looks to be quite a dangerous class, but it should be usable with other systems, although a GM would be advised to look it over carefully first. The different schools also make it possible for different characters of the same class to be substantially different.

Both sets of quick generator tables should be easily adaptable to most systems and settings.

The Sandbox #1 is a decent and interesting collection of articles and it can be downloaded for free by clicking here.