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Rating: 
Summary: Do they even know what they're doing?
Review: I picked this up at a local bookstore, since I'm a fan of the entire Slayers franchise. However, as I looked through, half of the book was very basic character summaries, and only a fraction of the rest had anything to do with game mechanics. Also, what they 'did' have looked like the author barely watched the show, and went with cliffnotes.The spellcasting method shows some promise, but needs to be severly altered to work as well as it should. Magical items are severely underpowered (the Sword of Light is a Major Artifact that generates a blade made of pure Force, not a Brilliant Energy Weapon) My suggestion, if you want to use Slayers in a D20 environment, watch the show, and write the thing yourself.
Rating:
Summary: Do they even know what they're doing?
Review: I picked this up at a local bookstore, since I'm a fan of the entire Slayers franchise. However, as I looked through, half of the book was very basic character summaries, and only a fraction of the rest had anything to do with game mechanics. Also, what they 'did' have looked like the author barely watched the show, and went with cliffnotes. The spellcasting method shows some promise, but needs to be severly altered to work as well as it should. Magical items are severely underpowered (the Sword of Light is a Major Artifact that generates a blade made of pure Force, not a Brilliant Energy Weapon) My suggestion, if you want to use Slayers in a D20 environment, watch the show, and write the thing yourself.
Rating: 
Summary: Slayers roleplaying at your fingertips
Review: If you've ever wanted to play a roleplaying game that resembles the Slayers anime, you've probably been dissapointed. Other systems, even anime or fantasy themed ones, had difficulty capturing the unique elements of the Slayers series. But now with this book, you've got all you need to drop your players (or yourself) into the world of Lina Inverse, Gourry, Xellos, and the rest of the Slayers gang. Based on the d20 system, Guardians of Order has done an excellent job of developing unique mechanics that are both balanced and yet allow characters to cast spells all day long, injure their opponents with witty verbal barbs, or fight for truth, justice, and food. The range of base classes and races are varied and interesting and appropriate, new skills are added, and game mechanics are relatively intuitive. The book has a wealth of spells and items, not to mention lots of information about characters and places found in the Slayers world, including stats for all of the main characters (and a lot of the secondary characters) in case you want to have your own characters bump into the legendary Lina Inverse.
All is not perfect with the book, however. Guardians of Order didn't have the rights to add information from the OAVs, novels, manga, or anything aside from the 3 TV series and this hurts the book in terms of proving information on the game world. There are parts where you can very nearly see the authors pulling themselves back from talking about something that wasn't mentioned in the TV series. This also limits the number of creatures and races that the book has to offer, not to mention the spells. As frustrating as this is, it's not crippling as most of this information is easily found online and it's not too difficult to adapt to the game. Another problem, in my opinion, is that some of the prestige classes (namely Pistoleer and Martial Artist) are less utilitarian and more thrown in to cover up for things in the show that don't fit very well into other categories.
Overall, if you want to play Slayers, you owe it to yourself to get this book. GMs may have to do a little more work to encompass the whole of the Slayers universe, but in the end the system is so well done that it's worth it.
Rating: 
Summary: Without Research
Review: Okay, it's an interesting game source, but honestly, I could have written the thing better myself. My major concern is that there's absolutely no research in the book beyond just watching the damned show: apparently they missed the movie, because they think elves aren't a character race. And dwarves obviously exist, despite that they don't allow THOSE as a character race either. It's nice to have stats for all the Slayers characters, but these stats are BS. Look: The Slayers characters are epic. Instead of trying to restructure the system so Amelia's 17th level and Lina's only 19th, they should have just worked with the epic system.
Rating: 
Summary: Very nifty for the Slayers fan
Review: The Slayers d20 book does exactly what it promises to do -- deliver Slayers (the TV series: Slayers, Slayers Next and Slayers Try) as a d20 RPG. Note that due to an almost entirely non-compatible spellcasting system, the bulk of this material can't be brought into a standard D&D game. (That's not to say the spellcasting system is bad -- it looks really nifty -- but rather to observe that if you're buying pre-packaged adventures to GM, this just won't work very well.) The book shines on tying the series to a campaign, races, templates, classes and many creatures. The best part of the book is the addition of all-new psychological warfare skills, feats, and rules -- and these can be integrated with a standard D&D campaign. The weakest parts of the book are the actual spells (many of them just dish out damage in a surprisingly conventional way), magic items (we didn't really need many new magic items anyway), and Mazoku powers (they also just dish out damage in a surprisingly conventional way). Missing from the book would be a pull-out map of the Slayers world (we've seen it in Slayers: Try) like WotC books have for the Forgotten Realms and Oriental Adventures campaign settings. There are some lovely glossies in the middle of the book, but it's just not a replacement. If you're a Slayers fan rolling your own campaign, this is probably a 5-star kind of book. I'm a Slayers fan extensively modding a campaign, so this is a 4-star kind of book. Also be warned that the initial printing of this book seems to have been a bit mauled at the printer -- but by the time Amazon expects to ship, they should definitely have that fixed up.
Rating:
Summary: Very nifty for the Slayers fan
Review: The Slayers d20 book does exactly what it promises to do -- deliver Slayers (the TV series: Slayers, Slayers Next and Slayers Try) as a d20 RPG. Note that due to an almost entirely non-compatible spellcasting system, the bulk of this material can't be brought into a standard D&D game. (That's not to say the spellcasting system is bad -- it looks really nifty -- but rather to observe that if you're buying pre-packaged adventures to GM, this just won't work very well.) The book shines on tying the series to a campaign, races, templates, classes and many creatures. The best part of the book is the addition of all-new psychological warfare skills, feats, and rules -- and these can be integrated with a standard D&D campaign. The weakest parts of the book are the actual spells (many of them just dish out damage in a surprisingly conventional way), magic items (we didn't really need many new magic items anyway), and Mazoku powers (they also just dish out damage in a surprisingly conventional way). Missing from the book would be a pull-out map of the Slayers world (we've seen it in Slayers: Try) like WotC books have for the Forgotten Realms and Oriental Adventures campaign settings. There are some lovely glossies in the middle of the book, but it's just not a replacement. If you're a Slayers fan rolling your own campaign, this is probably a 5-star kind of book. I'm a Slayers fan extensively modding a campaign, so this is a 4-star kind of book. Also be warned that the initial printing of this book seems to have been a bit mauled at the printer -- but by the time Amazon expects to ship, they should definitely have that fixed up.
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