Pyramid Review
Gladiator: Sands of Death (for d20)
Published by Mongoose Publishing
Written by Matthew Sprange, with additional text by Teresa Capsey and Ian Barstow
Illustrated by Anne Stokes, Luis Corte Real, Nathan Webb, Scott Purdy, Anthea Dilly, Judy Perrin, Danilo Moretti, and Brent Chumley
Edited by Alexander Fennell
80 page b&w softcover; $16.95
Mongoose Publishing has put out several D20 books this year with mixed results. The Slayer's Guides and Encyclopedia Arcana books have presented interesting material, but each book has seemed a little light for the subject. Gladiator: Sands of Death is a more substantial treatment of an exciting topic, but it falls prey to some of the same problems.
The subject is timely for a couple of reasons. Ridley Scott's movie Gladiator was a huge hit last year, but professional sports are in an unusual cultural position right now. Americans love their sports teams, but they're also conscious of the absurdities of big-time sports: the expensive stadiums, the athletes called who have been called heroes simply because they can hit or throw a ball. Gladiators are both glorious and scary, and Gladiator writer Matthew Sprange explores both aspects well.
The first third of the book explores the basics of gladiatorial combat, with an emphasis of different arenas from seedy pit fights to the grand arenas of kings. Five kinds of arenas are described in detail, with enough backstory presented that they would be easy to drop into almost any d20 campaign. No . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: November 23, 2001
Copyright © 2001 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.