Aiya, mellyn tolkiendili:
I got the Lake-town sourcebook and wanted to comment on it.
My first impression: the sourcebook is thinner than the Loremaster’s Screen! My wife was right to note that it is called “Loremaster’s Screnn and Lake-town” and not the other way round. A shame, since I buyed it for the sourcebook, not the other way round.
The book is good enough to be useful and illustrative (7/10). Its strongest point is its great art layout (10/10!): I highly recommend the city-map and the back art from the Loremaster’s Screen.
I made the fault of going into it expecting a masterwork like “Tales from Wilderland” and I ended extremely disappointed. My general feeling of it was “too few, too late”.
Too few, because it is just a 32 page booklet, with fewer than half of it with material directly related to Lake-town itself. The rest is dedicated to “extra” material not directly related to Lake-town, or source material belonging in my opinion to the main Rulebook. I find this “shortness” not bad in itself, since it gives a comprehensive and compressed view of Lake-town which is actually a good point. But you should not expect more than that.
Too late, because they took _more than a year_ to put out one 32 page booklet. Say, must we wait so much for such kind of _ground_ game material? I would think that such basic descriptions of elemental s for a campaign in Northern Mirkwood would be on the market a long time ago: maps and basic descriptions of towns and fortresses. The rest can come afterwards, specially the fortresses of evil (as I read they plan to do with the upcoming Hearth of the Wild sourcebook). But the basics?
Going into the contents:
1) The description of Lake-town: good made. The only part I feel they missed the right feeling is the Elven Quarter: in my humble opinion they miss the subtle elven magic; and the elven guards are too much reminiscent of real world paramilitary or high-security diplomatic complexes. Another down-part: there are absolutely no maps and descriptions of particular buildings of interest (of which there could be plenty, based on the general description).
2) The minimized character statistics for NPC: this is another good development, showing how “easy” game data can be presented. Until now there are three different game data presentation types for TOR: a) Player characters, Monsters and c) NPCs. The negative point of this is: if it is actually possible reduce the useful game mechanics like those of the NPCs, and it is also shown that the simplified Monsters game data is completely playable… why must the player character sheet have so many hooks and corners?
3) The city map: gorgeous. I find this the best contribution of the sourcebook. But I miss poster-size reproductions of the perspective view and the city floor-plans… without the number guides! Something to show my players without focusing their attention and limiting it exclusively to those numbers.
4) “Things to do in Lake-town”: this could be a great section, but it isn’t. It’s new, special fellowship-phase alternatives for Lake.-town (market, herbs, and citizenship) are so generic that could be applied to almost any refuge of the Free Peoples. Indeed I deem that these correspond to the basic rulebook and not to this sourcebook, giving me a “patchwork” feeling of the sourcebook… and not for the last time.
5) “Dragontide”: this description of the main festivities of Lake-town (in honor of the slaying of the dragon) is good enough, “introducing” the same contest system from “Tales from Wilderland”. Noticing that and not finding any kind of reference to the original irritated me. Does it copies from the Tales? Or the Tales borrowed from this work in progress? I found this contest system very illustrative the first time I saw it on Tales, but I found it repetitive and boring in the Lake-town Sourcebook. I ask me if it would not be better to have just one “basic contest sourcebook”, clearly useable for any and all coming materials without repeating itself. And that said, if we take out this “contest” of the Black Arrow, the rest of this section is almost not worth mentioning.
6) “Secrets of the Long Marshes”: Interesting as a description of the Long Marshes could be, I find this section is fault at place and faulty made, giving it the feeling of the next “patchwork” section. Fault at place: what has such a section to do in a Lake-town sourcebook? Even if it could be interesting, why the Long Marshes and not the Long Lake itself? Why not Seafaring? Why not the ruins of old Lake-town? Why not the blighted place where the bones of Smaug the Great lie?! Faulty made: even if a guide to the Long-marshes could be interesting by itself, this section is almost completely reduced to plants and monster stats. A plants and herbs guide is interesting and useful… but this corresponds to the basic rulebook, not to an aisled section in a secondary sourcebook. And to put some basic, generic monster stats as “extras” in secondary sourcebooks is to miss completely the point. That is why I feel (again) that this section is used as a patchwork destined really to cover deficiencies of the basic rulebook. And that is not a good feeling.
7) And finally, “The Men of the Lake”: I always wondered why they did not develop the Lake-men heroic culture in the main rulebook. And that is why I cannot stop feeling this section as the next “patchwork” in the line. Putting that aside this is an interesting contribution, even if for my taste they make a too-close Dale-men variant; I find the Men of the Lake more a river-faring, merchant culture. But I think they hit the nail with the Tenacious Cultural Blessing, which is a really, really good thing.
So I find this is a good, useful sourcebook with failings to learn from (as series). And definitively one should not expect more than it has to offer.

I agree with the 6th part.