PC Pearls
PC Pearls is a generic fantasy book about character inspiration from Goodman Games. The paperback book is filled with ideas and creativity to help a person flesh out the background and character of their creation. The book is a collection of works and ideas from over two dozen writers. It includes materials for character creation, the early levels of the character’s life, as well as the mid and high levels. The book is designed for fantasy games but does not limit itself to just Dungeon & Dragons. It keeps itself generic enough to apply to the many fantasy and D&D clones on the market.
PC Pearls is well written, but many of the ideas are typical for gamers. The book will be more useful for people that are new to gaming and that might have troubles developing characters on their own. The book is all about the details that have no bearing on the mechanics. The generalness of the book allows it to be used for many games but that also limits its usefulness. It is one thing to come up with an interesting background but at times it is nice to be able to mess around with the mechanics and options of the game to really reflect these details on the character. But for a source of inspiration used when a person gets stuck, this could defiantly be a good stepping-stone toward more creativity.
The book spends much more of its pages on the character creation then on the other areas. There are many resources on fleshing out a newly created character already available, so I would have liked to see a little more then three little articles on the high level information. The process of creating a memorable character gets over four times as many sections. This focus on character creation reinforces my feelings that the book is aimed at people newer to the game rather than the old veterans.
There are some interesting articles in the book. I really enjoyed the section on playing illiterate characters and life without letters. It was not hugely in-depth but it gives some neat ideas for playing a character that cannot read. There are some good notions for bringing a group together and binding them together. Many groups do not need additional help with bringing their characters together but the thoughts in here will help – sometimes it can be tough to have something more meaningful than the characters all meeting in a bar.
For the later levels, PC Pearls has some good ideas, like how to question a captured foe, what to never leave home without, and luxuries in the wild. There is a nice section of ideas for distinct voices, although I fear many people might be like myself and tend to annoy people when they try on a different voice. PC Pearls is a defiant hodgepodge of information. It is going to be one of those books that will stay close at hand as I am not sure exactly when it will be useful, but it could be almost any time.