While not a typical roleplaying game supplement, I think that this one is a must have for anyone with a twisted sense of humor. Buttery Wholesomeness has some of the funniest character creation charts and other supplemental material that you will ever see.

She-Wolf has a secret. She and her mate are on the move, traveling through wetlands and snow covered forests. The earth stands still to listen to their song as they howl beneath the moonlit sky. They hunt together preying upon rabbits or swamp crabs. They are in search of a den. As they near a farmhouse a farmer shoots at them and they lunge into a cold icy river to escape. Struggling to survive, they search for higher and more distant lands far from humans. In spring their pups are born and we are left hoping that humans will allow them to live in their world. Again, Jonathan London magnificently captures the spirit of these great creatures while Daniel San Souci's illustrations reflect the true beauty of the endangered red wolf. In 1987, red wolves were released into wilderness areas. Now over one hundred inhabit the lands of "Red Wolf Country": Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, Bull Island, Horn Island, St. Vincent Island and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Roland Smith, the former red wolf species coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service writes in an afterword an informative history about the red wolf. Red Wolves were plentiful in the southeastern U.S. until the mid-1960's when, through the destruction of natural habitat and thoughtless activities of hunters, trappers, ranchers and farmers, they became extinct. A few wolves were found in Texas and Louisiana and, for their own protection, they were placed in captivity and later released in N. Carolina's islands off the shores of Florida, Mississippi, and S. Carolina and , in fall 1991, in Tennessee's Great Smokies National Park. Now there are approximately 100 red wolves running free.

Tempted by super-vamipres, when I got around to running an Elysium game it was a total disaster. I would suggest this book only to those serious roleplayers who can create monstrously powerful characters and not get into a single barfight with them. You really need to know your stuff to make this one work!

Elysium describes the society of Elder Kindred, with all their philosophy, their intrigues, their squabbles and their struggles for power. It contains new backgrounds, merits&flaws and Gehenna cults. It is well written and provides details about daily life in a Camarilla city (though everything happens behind closed doors). The book claims that every Elder behaves like that, what I guess can't be true. Like in mortal society most people don't want the trouble a leadership brings. And after centuries of "Salon"-affairs Elders could get bored by kindred politics as well. Unlike Sigmund Freud mentioned, not every son wants to kill his father, likewise not every childe wants the final death of her sire. Apart from that, Elysium offers many good facts about vampire high society.

But again, there is absolutely no conjunction between age and generation! On the first pages Elysium even claims that older vampires have a younger appearance, what sounds completely nonsense.

Ever wanted to play a Vampires campaign at a "slightly higher" level of power? Or are you just a power gamer? Either way, you'll love this book. It's got rule for creating Vampire characters that are hundreds of years old, and that have all the power that conveys (and all of the problems too. There's nothing like having your arch-enemy be in control of military forces equal to a small country. Oh well, such is the price of power). It's also very useful for GM's creating mentors, Princes, sires, or anyone else that's just damn powerful

Here we have 3 smart kids (nat, izzie & grace), The twins, Izzie and Grace are stratospherically wealthy. Nat is poor. When Nat's mother loses her job ending Nat's collage edu., the twins come up with a plan to pull a kidnapping on themselves? Yeah right, I don't think so. Given the two wealthy girls prior generous and forward behavior with money and people they would have just gone and paid Nat's (and his mothers!) bills whether he/she liked it or not. So for me the story ended on page 221 with this way-out of character kidnapping scheme.

I did read the rest regardless tho because I sometimes like the way Mr. Abrahams weaves his stories and characters.

But right away comes another glaring out of characterization. Nat, who has fallen in love with Izzie and can tell her apart from her twin sister -easily- suddenly fails in recognizing Grace when the girls switch places at the last minute (Izzie becoming the kidnapped instead of Grace).

I think Mr. Abrahams would of done this story a favor if he'd of toned down Freedy (the bad guy) with his Andro/speed/bodybuilding obsession and gone into and expanded on the Freedy and Professor Uzig connection. Professor Uzig being Freedy's "Father: Unknown".

Also, why would Nat be prosecuted for attempted extortion? The kidnapping wasn't his idea! He came down against it but the twins had acted before he saw them again. Why didn't Izzie come to his defense?

All 'n all this reads like an unfinished draft. I don't see how something like this could of made it past anyone! especially anyone in the business. Too many discrepancies. Too many
avenues left unexplored.

Body>This book is a victim of the author's previous works. Once you've read other offerings, you come to expect dynamic chacterization, a rock-'em-sock-'em pace along with a surprises thrown in. Crying Wolf doesn't quite cut it in all areas. The characterization is there. First we meet Freedy, a swimming pool cleaner who just doesn't get it, an Abrahams' trademark. Freedy thinks he's smarter than he is; he thinks he's sexier than he is and in demand, and he doesn't understanding what the woman's (whose pool he's cleaning) problem is when he tries to have sex with her. On the other end of the spectum is Nat, the mid-west son of a single parent, basketball playing high school kid whose intelligence and essay wins him enough money to go to Inverness. While Freedy momentarily fades from the picture, Nat goes off to college. Because he can't afford to go home for Christmas, he must spend holiday on campus--until he meets the twins, Grace and Izzy. The twins, who are filthy rich, introduce Nat to a seductive new world he could not even begin to imagine. They take a jaunt to the Carribeans on the twins' family jet where Nat meets Leo Uzig, a philosophy professor at Inverness. From there, the plot thickens and the pace, which has faltered up to this point, picks up consideraly. Under the guidance of the professor, the twins and Nat become involved in a "harmless" plot that turns deadly very quickly.

I'd purchased "Crying Wolf" for a friend at work. Because he was out of the office and I'd run out of books, I borrowed this from his stack. I actually went to work half an hour early the day after I started reading it, so that I could finish the book before he came in to claim his prize.

I was looking for the suspense since, on the cover, Stephen King is quoted as having said that Peter Abrahams is his "favorite American suspense novelist." I really didn't find suspense. However, I found a good plot with likeable characters. While this book takes place in college - a boarding school, if you will - I kept thinking that Inverness was NOT Hogwarts...

Nat is a young man who wins a scholarship that takes him from his working-class town to Inverness College. Freedy is a young bodybuilder thug. Their paths parallel but never quite meet until...

Nat happens upon Grace and Izzie, very rich twin sisters who attend Inverness (and very different from Patti, his hometown sweetheart). The three students hatch a kidnapping scheme to try to obtain some much-needed money from the girls' father. However, as we learned as children, if you Cry Wolf often enough, when a crisis emerges no one will believe you.

While seldom actually "suspenseful," "Crying Wolf" was nonetheless a good book and a good purchase. I do recommend it; and I will be looking for more books by Peter Abrahams

(Man, this site is slow today!). I learned 68000 assembler using this book. It teaches you not only 68000 assembler, but also how to set up assembler programs on the Amiga. It gives you a lot of include files which you have to type in, these include files can come in very handy for writing your own programs later. Debugging these programs for the typo's you made is your first practice at writing assembler! The learning curve is a bit steep at first but the book is very well written with not too many ambiguities (unlike the Abacus book "Amiga Machine Language" which is full of them). The book is of course a little outdated as Workbench 2 + was not out when it was written, however this book will give you a very thorough grounding in the basics of programming 68000 assembler on the Amiga. I do have criticisms of this book. Each chapter consists of a new program you have to type in and debug, all these programs then go together to make a programming environment you can use for your own programs. However this is a pretty intimidating process and it locks you in to a programming environment which is not your own and which you may not entirely understand, and furthermore an environment that may be larger and more complex than necessary for some small programs. For this reason I would say the book is not an ideal method to learn 68000 on the Amiga, nor is it suitable for those with little or no prior programming experience. However, I personally enjoyed the challenge of working my way through it. It's not a bad double as a 68000 reference either. In summary, it's a flawed book but all the information necessary to begin 68000 programming on the Amiga is there for those who persevere. 3 out of 5.