This supplement for the Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying Game (see my review) is worth its weight in gold if you're a GM. If you have any thoughts whatsoever of running this game someday, you absolutely positively without any question want to pick the Chronicle Starter up yesterday."A Song of Ice and Fire" is a little different from most other fantasy roleplaying games. Player characters don't spend their time and energies looting ancient tombs-- at least, not in a typical campaign. This isn't a game about fighting orcs or kobolds to reclaim ancient dwarven treasure. This setting is about playing the Game of Thrones-- and when you play the Game of Thrones, you win or die; there is no middle ground. In this context, "playing the Game of Thrones" means advancing the interests of your characters' houses, being continuously wary of betrayal by other houses, and engaging in that sort of skulduggery or courtly intrigue yourself. Physical combat is often incidental to these larger plots and machinations. Everyone is a potential ally-- or a potential betrayer. And that means that to GM this game, you need an entire world full of other houses to interact with-- allies, enemies, friends, neighbors, and so forth. The need to create and populate these other houses puts an incredible burden on Game Masters, and while the Campaign Guide provides information about the mightiest lords and ladies of the Seven Kingdoms, it's the Chronicle Starter which provides the GM with original lesser nobles and their households, ready-made for members of the players' own house to interact with.Each of the minor houses presented in this book owes its loyalty to a different Great House of Westeros, although they're written up in such a way that they could all be located in the central-ish Riverlands region. This means that if your player characters' house is located in the Riverlands, it's incredibly easy to integrate each family presented here into your own game-- and even if your players decide to locate their house in another region, it should also be possible to relocate at least one or two of these houses to that area with minimal or no effort. Each of these minor houses has its own history and defining characteristics, with game stats for all of its major family members and householders. The Chronicle Starter also offers guidance on how each of these houses might interact with each other, as well as with the Great Houses, and even provides suggestions for 'muddying the palate' so that each of these families might not be exactly what they appear to be from the outside.The Chronicle Starter offers one more time-saving feature: it also includes several different ready-made locations which a group of player characters could rule as their minor house's own estate. This means that, in a pinch, your group could dispense with the process of House creation altogether, by simply choosing one of the pre-made territories in this book instead and then skipping ahead to create their own characters.The Chronicle Starter is a great product which will save GMs entire barrels full of blood, sweat, and tears, but its potential to cut down on game preparation time is perhaps its most amazing benefit. Once again, if you have any thoughts whatsoever of running this game someday, you absolutely positively without any question want to pick the Chronicle Starter up yesterday!