TL;DR - Garbage version of S&W Complete, do not buy.
I began hating this boxed set the moment I opened it. There are NUMEROUS things wrong with it. I think there are several people who need fired at FGG, especially design people. and anyone who had anything to do with editing and layout and production choices. This box MSRPs for $60. Here goes:
1: Empty Space: While the box is constructed tough, it's less than half full. I bought the expansion pack and while it fits in the box, it's still just barely over half full. There is a lot of wasted space in the box, which makes it a bad box.
2: Box Contents: There is some dice, a bookmark, a note from Matt Finch, a player book, a spells book, a referee book, a monster book, and a pack of character sheets. ALL HAVE PROBLEMS. But what is missing is worse: there's no GM screen. There's no map. There's no poster. There's just not a real reason in the box to have a damn box. Luckily I bought the expansion pack. Unluckily, we're going to get to that too.
3: The Dice: The dice are cheap green plastic with white numbering. I don't expect great dice but I expect proper dice molding. The d8 in the set is numbered wrong. Everyone knows opposing sides of a die add up to be one more than the die's total. On a d6, the 1 and 6 are on opposite sides. Total them you get 7. Things are a bit different for a d10 (numbered 0-9, so opposing sides add up to be 9), but that's irrelevant. The d8 of the set is fucked. The opposing sides go up the progression. 1 is opposed by 2, 3 by 4, 5 by 6, and 7 by 8. They followed the standard for every other die in the set. This screams poor quality control.
4: Bookmark: I don't know what genius thought it'd be neat to, as a cost saving feature, make the bookmark the same width of the book rather than length of the book, but fuck that guy. There's a reason bookmarks are as long as books, dumbass! it's so if they fall into the book they'll still be easy to find. Also so if you are transporting the book there's enough friction between the pages and mark to keep the mark from falling out in transit. The bookmark is worthless.
5: General Problems with all four books: They are perfect bound, and in this format, perfect binding means they don't lay flat. They'd have been better if they were saddle-stitched. Maybe even coil bound. Fuck the box could actually fit that format. The covers aren't uniform. It seems like the Player Book was designed separately from the box set, or is intended to be sold later by itself. Either way it's alternate design to the rest of the books is off-putting and overly wrong (pick one cover design and stick with it in a goddamn box set). Considering the binding choice, it's also bad that there's nothing on any of the book's spines. Or rear covers. They are all just a flat color. Clearly a virtually non-sensical cost-cutting decision. Also the header and footers within are woefully inconsistent (randomly vanishing and reappearing), which smacks of amateurish layout. Either have a goddamn header and footer or don't. Don't modify based on how much space you need in the area. Make it work, that's what fucking layout is for. That leads me to:
6: The Note: Yes, I even have an issue with the note. One, its three poorly constructed sentences (nearly all run-on) that go on for nine lines. It ends with "Matt Finch - Author" and it shows that good editing is hard to find. It also proves to me they could have printed the OGL on a piece of paper (maybe even the back of the note) and stuck it in the box set instead of doing what they did. What they did was put the goddamn OGL on the back page of every single booklet. This pushes the narrative that they're going to sell these separate at some point, which is dumb as hell as they already have a consolidated Complete book that includes everything and that's nearly free currently and has been free in the past.
7: The Player's Book (59 pages): Yeah I'm not fucking done by a longshot. The character sheet's inclusion in the sixth page of the player's book was stupid. Not only that, it's not referenced in the TOC and there's no index, so that's triple stupid. Also you can't make copies from the book as it's fucking perfect bound so quadruple stupid. And I'm only on page 6. More on the Character Sheet later because you bet your ass they fucked that up. The class section is fine except somebody has a boner for the fucking Druid and gave them 3 pages, one of which is purely fluff, and the mechanics sections aren't on opposite pages, but instead on opposite sides of the same page. The Monk is also fucked up like this, and it could have been fixed if the level chart was organized better (like the dropped the random GRANDMASTER under the level 16 exp section). The gameplay example is pushed ALL THE WAY back to the end of the book, which is a stupid place for it to be.
8: The Spells Book (39 pages): Firstly, with proper layout work this book is short enough it should have been included in the Player's book. With the layout fixed and bad artwork dropped from both, I'm betting it could easily be made an 90 page book, maybe shorter. That would have been cheaper, and that money could have been spent on better things. Like better art. Other than some bad spell name spacing issues via layout, it's not as badly put together of a book than the rest of the set. It is just a big spell list, so that's very faint praise.
9: The Monster's Book (57 pages): This book is alright until page 42. At that point the picture for Sea Monster ended up halfway through the stat block of the Salamander. Later a skull (for the skeleton) breaks up the description of the Shrieker. Later the picture of the Stirge ends up halfway through the description of the Giant Squid. It's like some late additions where made to these sections then the layout person didn't go see if it fucked up any anchored images. Which it did.
10: The Referee Book (55 pages): Some very poor layout choices (jamming text near where the spine would be, putting wide empty spaces where the pages end). Page 31 has a tiny half-page of art centered on the page, with no wording around it. Looks cheap, should have been a full page image or nothing. It's a bad middle ground. Page 42 has a bizarre tiny table in the lower left corner, surrounded by nothing. A 'sun' background image takes up the upper right of the same page. That's the entire contents of the page. Looks very odd when compared to the rest of the entire box.
11: The Character Sheet Pad: They decided to be cute and make half-page character sheets. The problems are readily apparent: The Hit Points box doesn't have a space for maximum HP. "Alignment" is misspelled, and oddly has too large of a blank. Most other blanks are too small. There's no actual place to write your rolls needed to hit ACs, just numbers. The blanks provided for spells, class abilities, and equipment are each roughly the size of my thumb. Nobody should have seen this as a proof of concept and signed off for the final product. Some of these issues existed in earlier printings of the game, they should have been resolved by now.
Expansion Pack: A monster expansion, an adventure, and a GM screen for $30
12: MOAR Monsters (23 pages): WAY too short for $10, should have just been an addition to the monster's book.
13 Baron's Gambit (20 pages): Not terrible but for the love of god just pay Dyson Logos for his fucking mapwork.
14: GM Screen (icing on the trash cake): This genuinely bothered me. The screen is way too low of profile for DM work to be able to adequately hide notes. But that's not the worst of it. All 4 panels of the GM screen are attack tables. Three are attack tables for PCs, one is for Monsters. Only that last one really needs to be on the screen. This is the worst screen I've seen since I got the 5E screen. Things that should have been on here: Combat turn order, turn undead table, encounter tables, getting lost info, anything on vehicles, etc.
Good things: I like the cover image of the box, harkens back to OD&D woodgrain box, except the woodgrain isn't dark enough. Yeah, they even fucked that up.
