Campbell Books

Summer Bennett was coming home. But even something as simple as that could not happen without misadventure when bandits attack her stagecoach. This kind of thing was always happening to Summer. Where she went, trouble was sure to follow. Although she could take care of herself very well, thank you, what she really needed was a hero.

Jesse Slade, a Texas Ranger, was the kind of man anyone could consider a hero--strong and handsome. But Jesse and Summer, friends from childhood, always mixed as well as oil and water. He was hero material, but her friend was also engaged to Summer's sister. Jesse was supposed to be Violet's hero. So why couldn't Summer stop thinking about him?

Phyllis Campbell has penned a truly heart-warming story, full of action, twists and turns that will keep you cheering for the characters. Holding Out for a Hero is my kind of book, and one that I heartily recommend for those who enjoy a truly satisfying love story.

Reviewed by Diane Wylie, author of "Secrets and Sacrifices."
Secrets and Sacrifices

I just got this book and was inspired by all the clever projects...the book primarily features a blue and white colorway for the holiday themed projects, which I like because it seems more inclusive of winter holidays such as Hanukkah. I'm inspired by the effective uses of striped fabrics in many of the projects...and while the book includes the basic table runners, place mats and napkins, quilts and pillowcases - it also features a lovely window valance and a rollup shade, and some more unusual projects such as a mantle cover, a wall sconce and a very clever fabric jumping jack! A few people on my holiday list are sure to get one of those! Each project is shown in holiday and everyday variations, and full sized tissue patterns are included in an envelope in the back of the book - which makes it a great deal, considering the price of patterns. And in plenty of time to create a houseful of decorations for the holidays.

the two authors, actually Jeffrey Caine and Campbell Black have constructed a terrifying story with no-so-unbelievable overtones when one considers the political and social strivings that are so much in evidence today. the story itself, although convoluted and confusing at times, comes into a clear and truly scarifying focus at the end.....highly entertaining, thought provoking and fear-inducing with its possibilities culled straight out of today's headlines (and today's "between-the-lines"). you may never feel the same way about entertainment OR food additives again....

This author has alot of potential. this is his 1st book and it is excellent!

G. Campbell Morgan's commentaries on the 4 Gospels are the best you will ever read. Next to the Bible, these are the books you want on that desert island. When I saw that his commentary on Hosea was available, I bought it for my wife as a birthday gift. She has been taking it with her wherever she goes and keeps reading me passages. She says this book is changing her life, and from some of our conversations over the past few days, I can attest that there is a lot of healing going on! I can hardly wait to have my own chance to spend a few days reading what Morgan has to say as he unpacks this great book!

I thought this book was great. Ramsey Campbell is one of the best horror writers with a very original unusual way of expressing his words on the written page. His characters seem to view the world as a very strange and sinister place indeed. This is one of his best along with his other novel Incarnate. It centres around the claustrauphobic world of a teenage girl who moves into a building that was previously a mental hospital and is very creepy indeed. She is rebellious and headstrong and often clashes with her father. Everything in her world is unsure and she feels very alienated. She feels strongly the building is evil and she's not the only one. A great novel full of suspence and creepy atmosphere. Well worth reading

In a few minutes of watching the local news on television, you can see the results of living in an angry world. On the television those results seem far removed from our current family situation. Yet each parent needs the coping skills in this book from psychiatrist Dr. Ross Campbell.

As Dr. Campbell explains in his introduction, "No one can rightly handle anger without being taught. The correct skills don't come naturally. Mature anger management must be taught at home, but it is not happening in many homes today. As you look around your community at some of the families you know, you will realize many people have bottled-up anger, they simply don't know what to do about it....This book will help you understand exactly what anger is and how we express it. You'll be surprised by some of the answers. We will discuss the stages of our children's lives and how anger manifests itself at each juncture, each bend in the road. We will discover some practical actions to take when we face anger in our homes."

If you are a parent, you need this book. In fact, buy TWO COPIES--one for yourself and one for a friend. Spread the word about this well-crafted book on a relevant hot topic for any parent.

I've read many parenting books in conjunction with teaching natural childbirth education, but until this book was loaned to me by a good friend and mentor, everthying I had read until then was just surface reading. After reading Dr. Campbell's book, I realized that anything else I had read really didn't make sense without the basic foundation offered by Dr. Campbell. Now, having the foundation, I can use the other books (Nelson, Dobson, Sears) more effectively. The impact it has had on my being a parent is priceless. Both my husband and I saw immediate results and have been more fulfilled as parents. Thank you, Dr. Campbell.

Ballard Campbell edits The Gilded Age And Progressive Era, examining public figures at the turn of the 20th century. Biography blends with historical review and analysis in this important coverage.

This book is the signature setting book for the Werewolf the Forsaken role playing game and as such, it offers a wealth of information to this excellent game.

Essentially, Hunting Grounds takes the various abstract concepts introduced in the corebook and puts them into an actual context. You ever wondered what the spiritual struggle for a city looks like? Denver is undergoing exactly that kind of struggle. You ever wondered what an extended family of werewolves looks like? Bingo. You want to see how the various werewolf packs play off each other in terms of politics? It's in here. You want to see exactly how werewolves act like spiritual police to the spirits that they've been assigned to corral? Hunting Grounds explains it all.

Consequently, there is a ton of ideas that weren't mentioned in the core rulebook. For example, even after all of this time, there's still dinosaur spirits hanging around the spiritual wilds of Denver, although they've survived for so long that they're more a collection of sharp teeth and claws than an actual spirit representative of Denver. There's warped parodies of werewolves left over from a confrontation from a Great Old One-like spirit that was destroyed some time ago. There's too much interesting stuff to list, really. It's the kind of thing where you just have to buy the book.

The opening fiction details the Black Moon Extreme pack as they hunt vampires - and they do about as well as you'd expect a pack with the word "extreme" in their names to do. The fiction seems honestly out of place - more tuned to the cartoon rock and roll of Werewolf: The Apocalypse, rather than the subtle, understated horror of the new World of Darkness. I mention this specifically because there's a fight between a werewolf on a motorcycle and an all-black Hummer on a crowded road, which seems somewhat contrary to the spirit of the game. The chapters breaks do an excellent job of portraying this kind of thing - both the traditional horror roots of werewolves, as in an excerpt from the 18th century man being chased by werewolves, and in the modern day, as in a description of the aftermath of a hunt.

Much of the book is taken up with the various packs that occupy the Denver area. The structure of this book borrows a page out of Vampire the Requiem game line, by detailing the local power structure and then offering new werewolf packs ample space to move in and interact with them. And since werewolves don't infight nearly as often as vampires do, there's options provided for each pack that allows the storyteller (GM) to use them as adversaries or as allies, complete with a story hook for each possibility, which is really nicely done.

The local sample packs themselves range from the interesting to the average. For instance, there's a group of survivalist werewolves - the Red Knives - who have their own compound up in the Rockies, and whose members have names like "Phantom" and "Ranger" and "Snap". They're fairly undifferentiated, but they've got a small cult of humans back at their compound who are fully aware of the existence of werewolves - a fascinating idea that seems to merit more explanation than it actually gets. As a werewolf pack, they're kind of uninspired, but imagine the fun that you could have throwing ordinary humans up against them. The Scar Angels are a werewolf biker gang, but with the sole exception of Smoke, the group's "face man" and travelling salesmen, they pretty much look like the picture that you get in your head when you hear the words werewolf bike gang.

A major NPC pack is the Pickering family - a family of Bone Shadow werewolves who seem to embody the ancestral curse aspect of lycanthropy - two sons have already died before seeing their 21st birthdays, and the third is only six months away and terrified. The rest of the family have their own agendas, but all of them wind up in the family crypt, the site of the pack's locus. The Shadow of Smoke and Fire lost one of its members to an attack by the Pure, and is walking wounded until somebody - either the Pure or the PC's - intervene. Black Moon Extreme is a rock band whose members are vampire-hunting werewolves, but the book makes them work. (Part of that is that a lot of the other werewolf packs think that they're kinda goofy too.)

There are also a lot of packs dedicated to one of the central plot points of the book - Max Roman's attempt to create a true werewolf nation, as opposed to scattered packs with no central organization. Gurdilag provided a major incentive for werewolves to cooperate, and allowed Max to wield a lot of political power, but now that the central threat is gone, many of the werewolves who joined Max - including a legendary werewolf - see Max's vision as contrary to the basic idea of what werewolves are supposed to be like. Some of the multi-tribal packs are beginning to fragment as they question if Roman's plan is going anywhere at all. At the same time, the Pure werewolves somehow figured out how to coordinate a major attack on Denver in the past, so the choice of whether the werewolves will act as a nation or as separate packs may not be as academic as it sounds. The PCs, if they play their cards right, could be the founders of the Forsaken werewolf nation.

The next chapter describes Denver and its environs, and it's here that we really get the good stuff. Denver's recently been freed from the spiritual domination of Gurdilag, but the resulting power vacuum and absence of hierarchy has basically laid everything to waste. Spirits who would otherwise fill specific needs have been forced to find new ways to survive, merging with their fellow spirits for protection and creating monstrosities in the bargain. The spiritual dogfight that's occurring in Denver is spelled out in remarkably clear terms:

"...spirits up and down the hierarchy are jostling for position and influence over their neighbors, making alliances and consuming those weaker than themselves. Spirits of buildings fight one another over who will become the spirit of the block, the winner then vies with other blocks to become the spirit of the neighborhood - at which point new building-spirits fight over who will fill the vacant position of spirit of the block."

The core book may have given general examples of how spirits interact with each other, but this makes it nice and specific - providing an actual illustration of how it clicks together.

The next chapter develops information on the Pure tribes who reside in the local area. We find out more about what the Pure are like - motivations, plans, goals. We get two sample packs - Howl to Mock the Dead, which ripped up the Shadows of Smoke and Fire, and the Guardians of Mountain Pass, responsible for guarding the mountain pass that winds through the Rocky Mountains. We also get the Bale Hounds described, but not as fully as I'd like. Their black and white morality seem rather radically out of joint in comparison to the much grayer world around them, and the suggested activities for Bale Hounds - using a human sex club for worship of the dark Lust spirit. Great stuff.

The Su'ur are werewolves who were radically warped by Gurdilag, usually resulting from when Gurdilag took a spirit and mashed it up against the werewolf without really thinking the result through. The resulting tragic hybrids make much better rivals for Werewolf: The Forsaken than the Bale Hounds do, as they're not entirely at fault for their condition - but they have to be killed. (Not that their new powers make that easy.) There's even a guy who's able to borrow the skills and powers of the werewolves that he eats, which shades into the Skin Changers of the early years of Werewolf: The Apocalypse. While the spirit responsible for creating the Su'ur in the Denver area has been - supposedly - destroyed, it's easy enough to say that all of the idigam who are returning to Earth from their long sleep are starting to pull the same trick.

The book closes with storytelling tips, including a recap of the various roles that the various werewolf tribes play within the Denver area and a general fleshing out of the main themes of the book. There's also a short adventure whose new totem is actually a corrupted spirit masquerading as a catamount - a mountain lion - which is slowly corrupting them. The story involves them investigating the weird afflictions affecting regional loci, then meet up with a dying Pureborn werewolf who fingers the affected pack as the ones responsible.

The artwork in the book really varies. The packs are all illustrated by the same artist, which offers continuity throughout the book.

Overall Hunting Grounds basically follows through on the promise made by the original game, expanding and explaining what the game's actually supposed to be about, predators who hunt. This setting book is a must-buy for anybody who's got Werewolf: The Forsaken.