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First let me say that this is not really a quick start guide since no actual rules are included for play. And a quick examination of the sample characters shows that this version of FATE has some differences from Spirit of the Century or the Dresden Files, so some explanation of the unique rules would be necessary to play.
That said, the Quick-Start guide is an entertaining read, which also provides an intriguing taste of the strange world of The Kerberos Club. Reading it definitely whets the appetite for more, and I plan to purchase the full book.
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Arc Dream Publishing’s The Kerberos Club has been released three times over the last few years. It’s first version used the ORE system, the second version used Savage Worlds and last but not least the most recent release uses Evil Hat’s highly popular FATE system. What all games have in common is an alternate history/steampunk/victorian superheroes setting. The “Strangeness” has touched the Victorian Era, even Queen Victoria has been changed by it. The Kerberos Club, which the players are members of, is a Gentleman’s Club open to all races, creeds, classes, and *gasp* even to both sexes. Its members have been touched by the Strangeness as well, but use their abilities to defend the Empire against all enemies foreign and domestic.
The 374-paged book not only contains the Kerberos Club setting, but also all the rules actually needed to play the game. What I like a lot about this game is that it allows you to play in three eras. During the early Victorian century, things are already touched by the Strange, but still pretty close to what you can read in history books. In the middle era things start to get more fantastic. While early era games are still almost historical with a hint of the supernatural, middle era games resemble a street-level superhero setting. In the late era you get a full-blown Victorian superhero setting with everything from airships to dinosaur cavalry. So the GM can basically pick between three power levels for his campaign.
Explaining all the details of the FATE system would probably be beyond the scope of this post. I guess most of you are probably at least fleetingly familiar with at least one of the FATE games. What sets Kerberos Club’s version of FATE apart are the following:
a) Skills in the game are measured on two axes. There’s the skill rank like in all other FATE games and the Power Tier. All skills start out in the Mundane Tier but they can later be increased to the Extraordinary, Superhuman, Ascendant and Godlike Tiers. When characters of two different Tiers compete with each other, the player who uses a Skill in a higher Tier replaces one of his Fudge dice with a six-sided die for each Tier of difference. That’s in my opinion a pretty easy and elegant way to simulate super powered abilities in a FATE game.
b) Instead of dozens of Stunts, Kerberos Club uses six “Gifts” that basically serve the same purpose. They can be bought during character creation and character advancement and allow to bend the rules a bit. The Gifts are Companion, Equipment, Impact, Signature Aspect, Skilled and Theme. Veterans of the FATE system will quickly notice that the Gifts are actually a neat way for the player to design his own stunts instead of picking them from a huge list. For example the Equipment Gift grants the character an important or special piece of equipment that has one or more improvements like adding a +1 bonus to a certain skill or it allows the wielder to use one skill in place of another in certain circumstances.
c) Collateral consequences are additional consequences player characters can use to avoid any kind of Stress. But unlike personal consequences they don’t need to be directly connected to what caused the Stress in the first place and they affect the player character’s environment, the Kerberos Club, maybe even the whole Empire itself. Collateral consequences are another narrative device the players can use to affect the world around them.
I have to admit I haven’t delved too deep into Kerberos Club, yet, but it looks like it could be for the Victorian Superhero genre what Starblazer Adventures was for Space Opera. Even if you don’t intend to use the Kerberos Club background you get enough material that you can use in any game set into the era. It also introduces a few new and very intriguing elements to the FATE system.
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This is an awesome product. At 374 pages with very little filler, the book covers everything you need to create and run a Kerberos Club campaign, including a complete set of Fate rules and lots of detail about the setting. This version of Fate, while mostly similar to standard Fate, has a very nicely done system for creating custom skills and powers. It manages to be wildly versatile, yet has a calculus that rarely leaves single digits.
In addition, Kerberos Club uses a power tier system that is unique to my knowledge, which adds a twist to the standard Fate dice and makes advancement seem more meaningful and sustainable over the course of a campaign.
If you're looking for a Fate book with a complete package, here you go.
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For those storytellers looking for a comprehensive and well designed superhero setting, this book is worth the purchase. Progenitor takes advantage of the well designed system and then adds mechanics to make the players able to alter things on a global scale, be they social or physical changes. As for the setting, the themes of responsibility and family are intrinsically tied to every player, since your powers can pass on to almost ANYONE you use them on, good or bad. And since you got your powers from someone, a natural family tree is created of supers who not only know one another but in many ways are responsible for their abilities.
I've never seen a better thought out superhero setting. Period. Combine that with the most abstract, comprehensive and quick rules set I've come across to date, you won't be disappointed.
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This review was written by Paco Garcia Jaen and first published in G*M*S Magazine
I have always been into comic books. I used to read my brother’s Amazing Spiderman, Fantastic Four and many others when I was little (I learned to read at age 4 and by age 5 I had read all the Brother Grimm’s tales). I absolutely adored playing with my brothers and my friends pretending to be super heroes saving the world. Basically, I LOVE them.
In the 90’s, when I was still living in Spain and playing RPGs three or four times a week, Superheroes Inc. came out. A Spanish written game which was truly excellent. The Cyber Alkaline Avenger used his armour to bring plenty of baddies to justice. I was a super hero!
However, after that, my experience with super heroes RPGs hasn’t been good. The following games I ever tried just didn’t grab me. None conveyed the sense of power and might that I would expect from a super hero game.
So I gave up.
Then I saw in January, Wild Talents 2. Never heard of Wild Talents before, but this one is published by Cubicle 7 and it looked gorgeous. Me, being like a Jackdaw, saw something shiny and had to have it. The fact that Kenneth Hite was in the credits was the icing on the RPG Cake that I had to have and eat.
Boy I am pleased I did!
Let’s start with the book itself. Hard-cover and 384 pages of quality paper. The printing is top notch with colourful and vibrant illustrations that fit the content around them to perfection. The way all the ornaments have been subtly tailored to each chapter is a very nice touch that comes to show how much thinking has gone into this book.
However, the book design hasn’t been well thought, at all. There are a two things that really got me annoyed throughout. For starters the amount of references to another pages is staggering. You read about something or something in the book, and there will be 7 or 8 references to other pages much deeper into the book. Try to read where the references are taking you, but because you still don’t know enough about the system or the setting, they don’t mean a lot. Annoying!
Secondly, insets will be placed in the middle of sections and, by being situated at the start of the page, it will cut off a paragraph in mid-sentence. Annoying!
Maybe if you’re reading the paper book it will be easier, but when you’re reading the PDF from a tablet like I did, flicking pages is not as easy and this sort of thing should be avoided. It also matters if, like me, the reader is dyslexic and need a flow of reading to get the full content of what we’re reading.
However, this is all I have to say about this game that annoyed me.
The Rules
The ORE system is a joy. I wouldn’t recommend it to newcomers to the hobby, but it is a terrific system.
You only need one roll of the dice to get all the information you need to perform any action. To achieve that, you build a pool of 10 sided dice based on the amount of dice allocated to each ability or skill. The number of dice with the same number is your width, the number on the dice, the height. Roll high numbers and you’ll be performing better than a player with lower numbers. Roll many dice of the same number and you will have a good chance to do better than someone with a better height but less width.
Some of your dice will be hard dice, which are allocated a 10 automatically, and some dice will be wobble dice, which have whatever value you want to allocate them. Basically hard dice boost the height and wobble boost either.
The draw-back of using hard dice? You’re using your power to the full extent of its power. So if you want to hit someone to knock him/her unconscious and you use your hard dice, you could kill that person. Same goes for shooting, etc.
So the good thing is that you can use a single roll to determine everything, from initiative to damage. The drawback of such system is that it takes a fair amount of experience to interpret the rolls and it also needs a fair amount of cooperation between the players and the GM to resolve situations quickly.
Once mastered, though, the system is a joy to play with. And, if the group you play with is cohesive and experienced, that won’t’ take more than a few rolls.
The Powers
This probably the most confusing part of the book, and the one that will take longer to master. However, it is not a bad thing and the reason is that the super powers, or Talents, system is so well thought that you will be able to create anything, from a vigilante to a god.
Characters are generated on a number of points allocated. From a “weak” character created with 200 points, to a god-power character generated with 700.
The talents can be modified to match what sort of character you want to have. For example, say you want someone who is extremely strong, but you’d like the punches to do fire or electricity damage. Just add the type of damage on top of it and that’s that. You don’t want the damage to be fire based all the time?… add that to your fists and now you can switch that on and off.
The difficulty is that to get to grips with a system that is so flexible can be rather tough. It’s like going to a buffet with 30 different dishes and each dish can be cooked in 5 different ways. You can be totally sure you’ll get to eat something you’ll like a lot, but it will probably take you a while to decide on what to eat and how.
The Setting
Following the flexibility of the powers system, the setting chapter starts with a very detailed section on how to create your own setting.
A way to base your setting based on colours gives way to what I can only call a thesis on world creation. If this part of the book was elaborated upon, it could be a full book by itself. Many articles and books have been written about the subject, but none I have read that dissects the world elements to this point. If you’re the type of player who rather runs adventures written by others, then this part won’t be of much use to you. However if you’re the sort of person who has had ideas for a world to play in in your head, I can promise you this will help.
Of course this would be totally useless for someone without the time or inclination to create a world, so a full setting is offered, created following the guidelines in the chapter. And what a world it is!
The chronology takes us from the start of the Talents to the present day. An alternative history, with enough real-life elements to make it very familiar, and enough fantastic elements to make it truly interesting to play. With conspiracy theories, political unrest, government involvement, alien invasions… Everything is there.
The setting ends with character sheets for every major figure mentioned in the chronology, providing with a wonderful pool of pre-gen allies and antagonists ready to be used, and, almost as importantly, helping to make sense of the events described. It puts things into perspective when you read that someone has destroyed the Eiffel Tower, and then, reading his powers, realising how powerful he actually was and what powers he used.
This is the part of the book I truly didn’t want to end.
Appendixes
This caught me by surprise, I must admit. The last part of the book is a series of appendixes about how to play and how to run role playing games, and they’re actually very, very good.
Even if you’re a seasoned player and GM, there is good advice here worth reading. If anything to get ideas on campaign planning and how to deal with problematic player, how to handle a power gamer and many others.
All in all, a good addition to the book that makes for a great read.
Conclusion
I really love this game, even though it’s not for everyone and beginners will have a tough time getting the most out of it.
However, the mechanics are truly fantastic with plenty of room for interpretation of the dice, utilisation of the powers and skills and speed of combat and resolution. I could see myself utilising those mechanics in investigative games or games where applying various skills at the same time is a common feature.
It’s a shame that the book organisation lets it down, making it very difficult to read at times, but the lush illustrations and the clever ability of Kenneth Hite to produce believable worlds makes this as much a great game, as a great thesis on how to design great games.
Even if you’re never going to play this game, it’s worth getting just for those two features. Thus, I will give this 4 stars out of 5, falling short of the 5 for the lack of thought when organising the book content.
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Originally posted at: http://diehardgamefan.com/2011/07/15/tabletop-review-the-uns
peakable-oath-20/
I’m a long time Call of Cthulhu fan. I still own a ton of materials ranging from the original boxed set Chaosium put out to the green leather bound 20th Anniversary Edition of the game (Soon to be complimented by the 30th Edition). Yet I’ve never picked up an issue of The Unspeakable Oath until now. Hell, I’d never even heard of it. However, the second I saw the cover to The Unspeakable Oath #20, showing only the back of a grizzled Investigator with a Tommy Gun in one hand and a pistol in the other, I opened up my heart to the possibility that Arc Dream Publishing might be putting out a high quality periodical on the Call of Cthulhu/Delta Green titles, the same way TSR and Paizo once put out Dungeon and Dragon – two magazines I still own every issue of.
There are seven sections to The Unspeakable Oath, each with one to three articles in it. Below is a list of each section, the articles they contain and my thoughts on each:
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Columns
The Dread Page of Azazoth -This two page column talks about the controversy that inevitably arises over combat in the Cthulhu Mythos based RPG. We’re no strangers to that at Diehard GameFAN ourselves as we all universally crucified the video game Dark Corners of the Earth for doing things like killing Father Dagon with a rocket launcher and other things that would make Lovecraft weep. Yet, at the same time, we all love games like Persona 2: Eternal Punishment where you can get Hastur to ally with you by reading The King in Yellow and where the last boss battle is against Nyarlathotep themselves. How is that not a paradox? For the same reason given by author Shane Ivey in this article: It’s all in the handling and portrayal of it. In the case of Dark Corners of the Earth, it’s all Deep One killing, all the time and it utterly spits in the face of what the Mythos is all about. In the case of Eternal Punishment, it’s a magical/spiritual battle with Nyarlathotep, as is the entire story of the game, so it goes down a lot easier. This is a great little opener to the magazine and an excellent reminder that some game do need to be heavy with the violence, while others need little to none at all. The only downside is a typo or two (“The players may have one a single skirmish, but does the other side even know there’s a war?”)
The Eye of Light & Darkness -eight pages of mini product reviews by various reviewers. I really hate when magazines split up an article across a magazine, so that alone turned me off this. However, the reviewer looks at a CD, four Chaosium books, three indie published adventures, and a DVD set. That’s nine reviewable items over eight pages, which really doesn’t do justice to any of the products in question. As well, one reviewer consistently makes errors in his reviews, such as repeatedly calling the product Halloween Horror, “Halloween Terror.” If you can’t get the name of what you are reviewing correctly, how can anyone take the review OR the reviewer seriously? This issue is compounded all the more when you realize he’s the one that has written five of the nine mini reviews. I’m also trying to figure out why there are reviews of non-RPGs in here. The CD and DVD reviews shouldn’t be included at all. Many of the reviews are also of pretty old products – some going as far back as 2005. There has to be products that are more timely than this, right? In truth, this is a section to outright ignore because it favors quantity with a decided lack of quality. Sadly it’s also twelve percent of the magazine.
Directives From A-Cell -This four page column is mainly about bringing the timeline and world mythos of Delta Green into the 21st century. I definitely remember my first edition of Delta Green and a lot of it would have to be adapted for how dramatically the world has changed since then. I’m just surprised it has taken them this long to do it. It’s the problem that comes with doing a “real world modern era” RPG I suppose. It’s a nice little column that speaks heavily about a gaming universe’s canon and how it’s hard to have a collective canon when every gaming group is different and has different materials and experiences under their belt. Even more importantly, he brings up the elephant in the room that many Mythos creatures gained their names from the CoC RPG and that Lovecraftian scholars actually debate over whether this is acceptable, canonical and whether those names should be used in Mythos fiction. Also, there’s some subtle V:TM bashing. Hee hee hee.
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Tales of Terror
The Plot Thickens -This is a one page article about how to leave a plot thread dangling to tie one adventure into another. In this case it is a document with the names of prominent members of the community with either a cross or a triangle by their names. The article than gives three possibilities for what it means and lets you, the GM, run while fleshing out an adventure based off this simple hook.
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Arcane Artifacts
The Eye of Daoloth – This little artifact reminded me of Greyhawk’s “Eye of Vecna” when I first started reading this, but it’s hard NOT to think of that whenever you hear of a mystical “eye artifact. In truth this eye is quite different and thankfully isn’t something you insert into your own face. It is however, an artifact that might be way too hard for all but the most experienced CoC players to deal with and I can’t see it being used by too many people. Neat idea and concept, but not so much fun to actually use.
The Arm in the Green Box – This is an artifact for a Delta Green Campaign. It’s your “typical” reanimated limb. Nothing more, nothing less.
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Mysterious Manuscripts
The Monongahela Carver Cipher – This is an interesting article as it’s a combination of a mini scenario, some very specific game mechanics and a specific unique book to be used in a Call of Cthulhu game. This is a very unique and outside the box way of creating/using a Cthulhu Mythos manuscript. Very clever and creative.
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Feature Articles
Assassins – This nineteen page article is very similar to the sort of thing I write for Massive Online Gamer magazine. It’s a long, detailed and mostly (save for the Cthulhu and gaming bits) historically accurate. It’s a bit of a dry read, but it’s something that can work really well with Cthulhu: Dark Ages or a more Middle Eastern oriented campaign. The downside is that the article really does only focus on Middle Eastern assassins. This makes sense due to the word’s Arabic origins, but it could have touched on other cultures as well. Or the fact Shakespeare coined the English version of the word.
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Scenarios
She Just Couldn’t Stay Away (No, No) – This is a short adventure set in modern times for Call of Cthulhu. It’s eleven pages long and it’s a truly brilliant plot. It’s basically Groundhog Day but insidiously evil and a hording crazy cat lady instead of Bill Murray. I will say just the first page of the adventure made me go pet my rabbits in thanks that nothing like what happens to poor Penny could ever happen to them. This is a great adventure and it really dabbles into issues many GMs (or writers) come across with time travel, regardless of the game being played. I really loved this scenario and it alone is worth the asking price of the issue. Also, all proceeds go to the Cleveland Animal Protection League. What’s not to love about that?
Let’s Learn Aklo! – This particular adventure is for Delta Green It’s six pages long . Like the CoC adventure that proceeded it, LLA involves time travel but it’s FAR more violent and a little too disjointed for my liking. The crux of the story along with the potential for paradox means that this adventure is best left in the hands of a VERY experienced GM. The conclusion and why/how the story hook occurs is also unsatisfying.
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Message in a Bottle
Dying Sunlight – well it’s Dying Sunlight in the table of contents, but Signs is the title of the actual piece. Either way it’s rubbish. It’s a horrible trite little piece that reads like it was written by a person that talks to themselves and no one else. That’s the best way I can describe it. Remember the Vampire: The Masquerade kid that all the other V:TM’ers wanted to be up. This is that kid if they were in written form.
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Overall, aside from a few formatting and spelling issues, I enjoyed The Unspeakable Oath #20. If it was up to me I’d scrap the poorly done mini reviews and put in some more gaming materials (such as another adventure) or short story, but that’s just me. The highlights were definitely the CoC adventure and the short but poignant Dread Page of Azazoth column. All in all, this was a good read and I’m sure I’ll be back next quarter with the review of issue #21. It reminded me a lot of when I was a little kid flipping through an old Dragon magazine. The Unspeakable Oath is a quarterly magazine devoted to tabletop games that revolve around or are based on the Cthulhu Mythos. You can learn more about it here. It comes in print, PDF, for Apple products and the Amazon Kindle.
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This is a short and FREE supplement for Monsters and Other Childish Things: The Dreadful Secrets of Candlewick Manor. It is worth more than free, that’s for sure. As a matter of fact, this is one of my favorite types of supplements. You can basically create your creepy child in mere minutes. This focuses specifically on the creepy powers, because you can pretty much figure the stats out on your own. There are plenty of options, lots of diversity between them, and imaginative descriptions so that by the end of your one roll of 5 dice, you have your character’s powers. If you are like me, you’ll probably use it more like a menu and just pick what you want. That’s fine too. Either way, you’re up and running with a creepy kid to explore Candlewick in no time.
This is a must download.
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Progenitor is like half history book, half Wild Talents super-supplement. Pun intended. This is a huge book that describes a campaign frame in which one Talent started it all. From there, the power spread to offspring and throughout the populace. There is a TON of rich history of the world, how Talents have affected it, and how you can run your game during any number of ages. It also provides new options for Talents (intrinsic traits, sources, etc.) and clarifies just how powerful someone with an Xd pool of dice really is. I love the added flavor and this is indeed a robust campaign frame. With the low price of the Essentials book, you can always afford to pick this up and launch an epic campaign with an entire world fleshed out at your fingertips.
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I honestly think that this is the best superhero system I have ever come across.
It's brilliance lies partly with the ORE (One-Roll Engine) system itself, which is a fast and simple system based on rolling a number of d10 (up to 10d10) and looking for matches. In most cases, one roll of the dice determines everything from initiative to hit location to damage, and only in certain cases will you have to make more than one roll per turn of combat. Everyone I know has found it easy to learn and easy to use.
The only complicated part of the game mechanics is power creation, but this is also where Wild Talents absolutely shines. There is a very comprehensive list of ready-to-play superpowers to be used both as written, and as base examples to modifiy for individual taste. They are also good examples of how powers fit together - useful when you are building your own.
Powers are build with one or more of three basic power qualities (Attacks, Defends and Useful) which determine what you can do with the power, and to each quality you can add extras and flaws for added effects, limits and perks. Most of it is pretty easy to understand and self-explanatory, but there are certain parts that take a little effort to get the hang of. However, using this system you can create any power you can think of - and I mean that literally! I have yet to come up with something that can't be designed using the system.
This book contains the complete rules you need to play, including a section with modern day NPCs, a small selection of Animals, and a few sample characters - three of which are used in the book's example play.
Wild Talents can be a quite lethal game, though - it is more gritty than four-color, but the book contains several rules options and suggestions for tailoring it to different styles of play.
Because of the total freedom in power creation, there is very litte inherent game balance. In fact, some places in the text actually encourage min-maxing the system for such imbalance and think outside the box when approaching challenges. There's a three-page chapter on different approaches choose and how to get them to work. As such, the game requires a bit more co-operation between GM and players than many other games.
If you think other super hero games are a bit too limited in their choices of powers, and you want an easy to learn, fast paced combat system that can easily be tailored from realistic to four-color, then this is the system for you!
There are also several different setting books published to date (most of them even come with a free pdf of these rules!), most notably a victorian setting, a civil war setting, and two alternate history 20th century settings; all of them well worth checking out.
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I would highly recommend this aid to any GM who is planning to run Black Devils Brigade.
The Google Earth file marks out all of the important hills and locations, neatly divided into the Chapters of the adventure so you can quickly mark out what you need, and I've found it a great tool to increase the understanding of the terrain and its layout.
Plus, I've used the file to quickly zoom in on the area the player characters are in, and with a quick tilt I can give them (and more importantly myself) an excellent understanding of the topography of the area.
Coupled with Google's street view it will help in descriptions of the area for those who are not all that familiar with Italy.
It's a very useful tool - easy to install, and it is well put together and easy to use even if you only have a basic understanding of Google Earth.
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Progenitor offers up an alternate reality setting for the 2nd edition Wild Talents RPG - the basic idea is that the world split off in 1968 with the empowerment of a single woman whose power turns out to be contagious, creating other super powered individuals creating a pandemic of super humans. It's an interesting premise and the book delivers on what it promises, with 380 pages of dense text (including quite a bit of fluff), nice black & white art, and a pretty cool cover. While I wouldn't consider it perfect, it's a great value, especially if you're a fan of the ORE-driven Wild Talents and are looking for something a bit different than the usual superhero setting.
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When my role-playing group play tested this module back in October, there were some factual errors that we pointed out to the people that we were play-testing for. Unfortunately, they did not heed our advice and left those errors in the module, creating a less than ideal adventure.
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Dennis Detwiller is the co-creator of Delta Green, so it should be no surprise that I'm recommending this scenario. I'm actually unfortunate not to have played the game, but, even if you're also not familiar with the system, you should at least read this if you enjoy horror roleplaying or modern horror. I was intimidated, at first, by the adventure. It starts open-ended, with several important, though modifiable NPCs. A bumbling group of players can easily run afoul of them, making this a short scenario. However, experienced Delta Green roleplayers should enjoy the challenge of working closely with the authorities while maintaining their cover. Dennis Detwiller's own site has several free downloads and I'm going to check them out right now!
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High-quality content from Arc Dream, as always. Most of the magazine comprises of items, people, or concepts that you can drop into your Cthulhu-esque game with little trouble. The highlight of this issue is definitely Black Sunday, though. With creepy real-life history alongside creepy Cthulhu Mythos stuff, the Dust Bowl era is a section of history ripe for the game mining. The Chapel of Contemplation is a nice article as well, expanding on the Call of Cthulhu scenario and providing a structure for a campaign, as well as helping the reader to formulate their own scenarios.
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I'm not too crazy about alternate history, but Progenitor is easily one of the most creative takes on the superhero genre. When I say "creative take", I refer to every aspect of "super" posited in Progenitor - manifestation and transmission of powers, the impact of said powers on history, etc. I wholeheartedly recommend Progenitor for the underlying concept alone.
As far as "crunch", new game mechanics outlined in Progenitor, it mostly encompasses metahumans throughout the Progenitor timeline. There are also rules for Syntergenics, which are basically super-contagious memes. But what really impressed me was the STEW gauge - Science, Technology, Economy, and War. It provides a metric to measure the impact of the PC's actions on a global scale. When any aspect (or combinations thereof) become dominant, there is a shift in global disposition. As with the Progenitor storyline, I absolutely loved the STEW system and heartily recommend Progenitor for this innovative scale.
So, why does this book not have a perfect rating, given my glowing praise? Well, it simply feels that everything is TOO well established in Progenitor. I am aware that we are free to select and incorporate whatever we wish from an RPG text - these aren't video games, after all. But after reading Progenitor, I found it difficult to devise any potential campaign arcs beyond the examples provided. Progenitor would make for an amazing television series or movie, but it seems to me that one is better served poaching concepts and mechanics from this book and creating a setting of one's own.
Progenitor does make for some great reading, though. Regardless of what you plan to do with the book, it is fun to simply skip to random page and read a metahuman profile or blurb of alternate history or whatever.
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