– President Barack Obama calls America’s alliance with Israel “unshakeable.” The Masada Complex questions this assertion with a realistic political thriller taking place in Arizona, Washington and Jerusalem.The Masada Complex unveils a chilling scenario. Its hero is Masada El-Tal, a beautiful Israeli expatriate, currently an investigative reporter in Arizona. Her exposure of a bribe payment causes a disgraced U.S. senator to commit suicide. Angered by Israel’s supposed culpability, an angry Congress moves to terminate all military aid to the Jewish state. At the same time, someone repeatedly attempts to assassinate Masada, whose relentless investigation becomes a race against time, leading to a shocking discovery and a spectacular climax.

    Next Level Magic is a comprehensive course on realizing your goals in playing Magic the Gathering.

    Give somebody a floorplan and theyll GM for a day show them how to make 30 floorplans in 30 seconds and theyll GM forever. Need to know how to get from here to there even if neither here nor there are listed on a map? Even if there is no map? Need a random encounter? Need instant stats for that random encounter? Need to know why there was a random encounter? This book was designed to help you make a city happen now. In addition to details on Vornheim, adventure locations, and player commentary from the I Hit It With My Axe girls, every single surface below this jacket including the back of the jacket, the book covers underneath, and the inside covers has been crammed full of tools to help you build and run a city no matter what edition game you play.

    Charles Bernstein here proves them alive and well in poems elegiac, defiant, and resilient to the point of approaching song. Heir to the democratic and poetic sensibilities of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, Bernstein has always crafted verse that responds to its historical moment, but no previous collection of his poems so specifically addresses the events of its time as Girly Man, whichfeatures works written on the evening of September 11, 2001, and in response to the war in Iraq. Here, Bernstein speaks out, combining self-deprecating humor with incisive philosophical and political thinking. Composed of works of very different forms and moods—etchings from moments of acute crisis, comic excursions, formal excavations, confrontations with the cultural illogics of contemporary political consciousness—the poems work as an ensemble, each part contributing something necessary to an unrealizable and unrepresentable whole. Indeed, representation—and related claims to truth and moral certainty—is an active concern throughout the book. The poems of Girly Man may be oblique, satiric, or elusive, but their sense is emphatic. Indeed, Bernstein’s poetry performsits ideas so that they can be experienced as well as understood. A passionate defense of contingency, resistance, and multiplicity, Girly Man is a provocative and aesthetically challenging collection of radical verse from one of America’s most controversial poets.

    Shan Hai Gaaru". This 2011 U.S. edition features an excerpt of the author’s WNYC Leonard Lopate Essay Contest-winning new novel "Memoirs of a Eurasian". In the post-Cultural Revolution Shanghai of 1984, university senior Sha-fei Hong longs to study in the U.S. for graduate school, ostensibly to pursue the American Dream, but partly to escape her sexually-harassing Communist cadre stepfather. She meets the visiting Chinese-American businessman Gordon Lou, who has political ambitions and ties to the Chinatown underworld in the U.S. He takes Sha-fei to the American Consulate in Shanghai to look into studying in America. There, Sha-fei meets the intern Edward Cook, a young, Caucasian American lawyer who has a strong preference for all things Asian. Within a year, these three people of entirely different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds cross paths in New York. Value systems and self-interests clash. The curtain falls on a dramatic stage of ambition, sex, intrigue, and murder.

    You spend hours setting up the perfect encounter, your players are out for blood, the swords are drawn—and then you realize that you've forgotten to build statistics for the enemy characters. Or perhaps your players go left when you expect them to go right, leaving you without any encounters prepared.Such problems are a thing of the past with the NPC Codex. Inside this tome, you'll find hundreds of ready-made stat blocks for nonplayer characters of every level, from a lowly forest poacher to the most majestic knight or ancient spellcaster. Whether you're planning out future adventures or throwing together encounters right at the table, this book does the work so you can focus on playing the game.Pathfinder RPG NPC Codex is a must-have companion volume to the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook and Pathfinder RPG Bestiary. This imaginative tabletop game builds on more than 10 years of system development and open playtests featuring more than 50,000 gamers to create a cutting-edge RPG experience that brings the all-time best-selling set of fantasy rules into the new millennium.The 320-page Pathfinder RPG NPC Codex includes:- Statistics for more than 300 characters, including at least one for every level of every class in the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook.- Tactical suggestions for every character, ensuring that you get the most out of each individual's gear and abilities in a fight.- Tons of flavorful names and backgrounds to give characters personality, plus ideas for using them in both combat and roleplaying situations.- Statistics for characters with lower-powered NPC classes to help populate your world with ordinary people, as well as characters with specialized prestige classes.- Animal companion statistics for druids and rangers, from level 1 through level 20.- Multiple versions of each Pathfinder iconic character, perfect for pregenerated player characters.- Encounter groups for conveniently crafting battles on the fly.... and much, much more!Cover art by Wayne Reynolds

    The priestesses of Lloth, the Spider Queen, demand (and receive) complete respect from the citizens of this mighty city. But what of the common folk - the drow of non-noble birth, the humans, and others? What is their lot in life, in this magnificent den of intrigue?Three books in this boxed set explain the ways of Menzoberranzan in detail. Book One: The City gives the reader a tour of the streets and districts, a wealth of information on various practices and customs, and an overview of daily life for each class of citizen (and non-citizen). Book Two: The Houses presents all eighteen major and minor Houses of the city, including the Matron Mothers and their immediate families, as well as any important advisers and associates. Book Three: The Adventure gives players a chance to take their characters into the web of deceit and intrigue woven by the denizens of this famed city.Additionally, this boxed set includes:Four connecting poster-sized maps of the city proper;one poster map of the House Baenre compound;a poster showing the rivalries and alliances among all eighteen major and minor houses; a 16-page House Do'Urden retrospective and the collected essays of Drizzt; twelve cardsheets containing in-depth statistics on main characters from Houses Nurbonnis and Millithor, and small maps for use in the adventure; and a full-color poster of the stunning box cover art by Jeff Easley.

    New options for wizards, warlocks, sorcerers, bards, and swordmages...This tome focuses on the arcane heroes: characters who wield strange and mysterious spells and rely on their mastery of magic for survival.This book provides new archetypal builds for the wizard, warlock, sorcerer, bard, and swordmage classes, including new character powers, feats, paragon paths, and epic destinies.

    The Pathfinder Chronicles campaign setting provides classic adventuring style and cutting-edge game design perfectly suitable for the world’s most popular roleplaying game!Note: Pathfinder Campaign Setting: The Inner Sea World Guide has replaced this volume as the main Pathfinder campaign setting book. The newer volume has been expanded and updated, and is designed for use with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. And the PDF is cheaper, too!Cover art by Wayne Reynolds

    Sometimes all we need is a little color -- or six -- to reintroduce us to what truly makes life worth living.Link: https://docs.google.com/a/gapps.uwcse...

    This is the Rise of the Underdark. In Iltkazar, the last subterranean kingdom of the once resplendent dwarven realm of Shanatar, King Mith Barak faces a siege of drow soldiers, spies, and assassins looking to seize the powerful city and the ancient magical artifacts hidden there.  Somewhere in the city, the Arcane Script Sphere—a mystical orb touched by Mystra, the long-dead goddess magic—calls out to heroes and adventurers, beckoning with whispers of power and knowledge. Mith Barak hears it and knows he cannot hold the artifact much longer, but fears what the drow may do with it. Enter Icelin, Ruen, and Sull, Waterdavian wanders whose desire to understand their own spellscars sets them in search of Mystran mysteries—they hope to understand magic and thus understand its plague. As they move from town to town, city to city in search of knowledge, Icelin hears the siren call of the Arcane Script Sphere, and it draws the trio deep into rocks of the Underdark where they find themselves at the center of the struggle between the dwarves and drow. Only King Mith Barak can initiate them into the mysteries they hope to illuminate. But first they must help him with a mystery of his own—a dark elf assassin, himself a seeker of the sphere, lies in Iltkazar’s dungeons shrouded in the mystery and magic of Lolth. Icelin might be the one to see past that shroud and determine the true goal of the Spider Queen’s schemes.  As the dark elves intensify their attacks, the trio realizes their quest for knowledge has taken them into a new and dangerous realm . . . a realm dictated by the whims of spider and stone.

    This book is stocked with everything needed to design any fortified structure imaginable, including: Over 150 new magic items . More than two dozen magical augmentations for stronghold walls. Rules for magic portals, mobile strongholds, and trap creation. Five complete strongholds, including maps, ready for immediate use. Players and Dungeon Masters who want to create customized strongholds will find all the construction materials they need within these pages. To use this accessory, a player or Dungeon Master also needs the "Player's Handbook."

    The crystal shells that encase them bob and drift in a turbulent, rainbow ocean which fills all the cosmos. Sturdy merchants, bold pirates, and daring explorers venture into the great, unknown vastness of the universe, seeking wealth and adventure.The SPELLJAMMER Game puts you in command of a fantastic ship capable of spanning the tremendous distances between planets. Graceful elven flitters, stately illithid galleys, deadly beholder tyrants, and the awesome Spelljammer itself carry trade, emissaries, and heroic action throughout all the worlds of the AD&D game.

    

    Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master uses the experiences of thousands of GMs to help us focus on how we prepare our games, how we run our games, and how we think about our games. It includes practical steps for focusing our preparation activities on those things that will bring the biggest impact to our game. Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master builds off of the concepts of the well-received GM's guidebook Lazy Dungeon Master, updating that book with five years of new experiences, new approaches, and new observations of the way people prepare and run RPGs. This new book is a completely self-contained work, which does not require anyone to have previously read The Lazy Dungeon Master. Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master offers a new focused approach for preparing and running our roleplaying games. The book includes an eight-step guide for lightweight game preparation and is focused on how we prepare for our games, how we run our games, and how we think about our games. Prepare what benefits your game.