Trick "Meatrace" (Madison, Wisconsin, USA) -

And I was so excited about this too. The Forgotten Realms books are generally pretty good, the FR campaign setting, monsters of faerun, magic of faerun, races of faerun, all solid books. And i had low expectations for this, all I wanted was a 3.5 update, with all the player race information as well as regional and racial feats and spells rolled up into one handy dandy place.
I got none of this. They refused to reprint the write-ups for the PC races (WHY?!) so you still need the campaign setting book. They refused to reprint any spells from magic of faerun or the campaign setting. The prestige classes they did re-do they either changed virtually nothing, completely botched, or attached an arbitrary region-specific name to (shadow thief of amn? what the hell? what's wrong with guild thief?
the regional feats are now only available at 1st level, and exactly who is eligible for what has been obscured beyond all recognition.
to top it off, the ONLY reason i was super-psyched about this was the purported inclusion of the fire-knives assassin which was removed for space. SPACE? this book has little to nothing of worth in it. there are two things that are sort of interesting in this book: a section noting various psionic organizations. for a psy-freak like me its enough information to stoke my curiosity, but its still very little. and the other is the Yathrinshee prestige class. which by the way is very cool, and ridiculously overpowered.
please people, dont waste your money.

if you REALLY want one i'll sell you mine cheap.

I was really looking forward to this book for a long time. When I first got it in the mail, it was a bit of a disappointment. I guess this was because I was comparing this to other FR releases like The Silver Marches, The Unapproachable East, Underdark, Lords of Darkness, etc., books whose quality were top notch (for WotC books) and had a good amount of fluff (for my taste). I started liking the PGtF when I started planning for a new campaign because it lessened the time for character creation significantly because I didn't have to look through multiple books for feats and stuff. The 3.5 revisions weren't too bad overall. My only real gripe now is the fact that the book had tons of typos. I had not seen any in the earlier FR campaign supplements.

Sadly, Wizards of the Coast (or Hasbro, you decide) has become the bastion of corporate, "for-profit" literature at the expense of publishing quality and gaming innovation...

The trend of the 3.5 revision, admittedly largely unecessary and done primarily to renew a revenue stream from gamers willing to be duped into buying it (ist' in many gamers, who will compulsively purchase any new material.

The only useful items (I won't go so far as to say novel) include the Initiate section (2 1/2 pages), the compiled spell list (made your own already?) and the magical item section (7 pages). Out of 191 pages, I will be using these 20 some odd pages.

Additionally, Wizards has failed to understand their own customers... Each new book excitedly proclaims how many new FEATS, PRESTIGE CLASSES and SPELLS that the book contains. At this point, with Dragon, d20 OGL products and WotC material, there are a mind-boggling number of each of these, with only minor and typically insignificant differences between many. While I like choices as much as the next RPG player, the novelty of splicing different class abilities together and calling them a prestige class has become tired.

What we're looking for, if I may be so bold to speak for my fellow gamers, is new contextual material. The "Campaign Journal" section of this book was billed as 'Current Events', but rather than breaking new ground, or exposing new information, it merely regurgitates the plotlines of recent FR novels.

So if you're one of the slavishly devoted purchasers of WotC products, a earned dollars) to publish respun garbage under the guise of NEW and IMPROVED.

Let's band together and vote with our dollars. Support the d20 labels putting out quality literature for discerning gamers (Malhavoc Press), not the tripe that's rolling out of what seems to be the nadir of WotC products.