One of the great things about the current tabletop roleplaying game landscape is the relative ease of publishing.  With PDFs and print on demand options, it’s not like the old days.  A person doesn’t have to scrounge up all the money and gamble it on a single print run in their basement, hoping that enough copies will sell for them to recoup and maybe…just maybe, make a bit of money.  Because of this, folks can feel safer making hyper-specific, niche products, hoping that whoever might want or need them will find them, without worrying about printing a thousand copies that might sit around collecting dust.

Inter Paolo Greco’s Kefitzat Haderech: Incunabulum of Uncanny Gates and Portals.  This is a book about doors.  Specifically doors that allow you to travel from one place to another.  In video game terms, “fast travel” nodes.  That’s it.  Thirty two pages on portals.

There’s a brief essay discussion on the nature of magical portals, their uses and varieties.  Then the book switches to random charts that allow you to generate or (if you just choose instead of rolling) shape how portals will work in your game’s world.  These cover things like what the gate is made out of, what the “event horizon” looks like, and what hidden dangers might be associated with using them.  The largest section of the book is devoted to the D666 chart.  It’s full of various ideas of what your portals might be like.  For example, on a roll of 2-4-1, you get “Outside a stone hut at the corner of the world. Plenty of stars to be seen off the edge.”  Or on a roll of 3-4-4, you get “In a bedroom of the Viscounti Castle, 13th century Milan.”  

As a hyper specific book, I’m not sure how useful it will be, overall.  Perhaps, like me, you will read it, take in some ideas, scribble down a few notes, and feel you’ve gotten what you need out of it.  Or maybe you’re thinking about running some sort of High Fantasy answer to Stargate SG1, where your party of adventurers are going to be gate hopping all over a multiverse of madness, and this book will serve as an ongoing resource (I could see this being a handy tool to have for a Planescape DM).  Either way, for what it is, I enjoyed reading it.

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