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Although many companies over the years have attempted the systemless RPG supplement, few have succeeded. RPG players tend to want supplemental material that expands on all elements of the game, including the mechanics. Yet another fantasy world gazetteer tends to be pretty boring because without a clear understanding of how the characters (created and detailed by and through mechanics) will make their way through the world, it doesn't feel like something that can come alive at the table. You're better off reading even a third-rate fantasy novel, most of the time. In the past, companies often did this in order to dodge the litigious anger of T$R (remember that acronym joke? Come on, you know you loved it when you were fourteen in that AOL chat room). In today's more open world of open licensing, gamers have become more open to the concept of RPG supplements not tied to particular game material, but few products have really nailed it down. However, "5 Questions" accomplishes this in exemplary style, going far beyond the basics and relentlessly focusing on usability at the table in every aspect of its presentation.
"5 Questions" is, as advertised, 500 character creation questions, divided into 5 100-question categories, like "NPC Relationships" and "Character Secrets". What impresses me about 5 Questions is that it could just be a simple list, and if the questions were good, it would be worth it. But the format goes beyond that. It presents them as ready-to-print questionnaires, with one questionnaire containing one random question from each of the 5 categories. But that's not all! There are also "specialized" questionnaires. Say you're playing a game like Smallville/Cortex+ Drama, where NPC relationships are one of the key factors in the game. You can pull a questionnaire with just "NPC Relationship" questions. There are detailed instructions at the front of the document explaining different ways to use the questions to prompt character action and depth. And of course at the end of the document the whole list of questions is reproduced for the GM's reference.
What elevates "5 Questions" above the rest is its relentless focus on usability at the table, and a focus on something that every game needs - vivid, forward-moving player characters. Maybe skip "5 Questions" if you're the type of person who doesn't name their characters or if you're playing a game where you can just say "I'm a fighting man" and be done with it. But if you are playing a game where your characters are going to be anything more than that, "5 Questions" will knock your socks off. It's well worth the price and I'm giving it my highest rating.
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For years I've gotten my hexmaps through free downloads from websites that look like they were abandoned in 1998. Now both my aesthetic desires and design needs are handled with a buck fifty download. You may ask, "but JD, why should I pay for what I can get for free?" Well, there's a few good things going on here that are worth at least a hundred fifty pennies or so.
First, the design notebook is intended for note-taking, not necessarily just the production of something with the paper. Each of the notebook pages has both a type of design, and a column of lines for taking notes or, crucially for gamers, writing a legend for whatever map or diagram you're creating.
Second, every page in the PDF is mirrored, so you can put it on the left or right side of a binder or other notebook without difficulty (and for lefties out there, you can use the one that fits your needs best.)
Third, every page has a box for a page number, though I've also used that spot for symbols helping me sort sheets in campaign notebooks. For example, in one of my exploration-based campaigns, a notebook is based on a location; NPCs have one symbol in the corner, monsters another, organizations another, and so on. It makes it easy to quickly identify what type of page I'm looking at.
Finally, there's map styles like the really smooshed down diamonds that are fun to draw maps with (it's great for isometric multilevel dungeons!) that you can't easily find like hexes.
If there was one suggestion I had for the Design Workbook, I would suggest adding a version ofthe hexmaps with heavier lines. In Traveller, for example, compared to other hexmap usages, a hex is best identified as a discrete area of space, filled in with a code to indicate what's there. The present hex map is great for things like fantasy mapping but there are other things hexes can be used for. I also would suggest a writing page with larger lines, for younger users, and perhaps a page of card-sized rectangles for the sketching (or importing, maybe?) of NPC portraits. But you know it's a good product when all my suggestions are how to add things to it instead of how to fix what's there. Definitely recommended.
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Let's talk about pregenerated characters for D&D3 et seq. (You can't make me stop using "et seq"!! I'm a rebel!)
When D&D3 landed in 2000, it was at the tail end of a somewhat stumbling and haphazard assemblage of AD&D rules. One of its great strengths was to gather in all of the various mechanics into a single volume in a way that hadn't even been attempted in years. Still, making a character in D&D3 was the most arduous part of playing it, unless you were a cleric player in 2006 trying to pick out your spells for the day from a list of three or four thousand, a 15th level fighter trying to figure out why you exist, or any living being trying to grapple any other being.
What's interesting about D&D3 character creation is that it puts the tools of character creation almost entirely in the hands of players, but eschews the worldbuilding that would have to wait until the DM's Guide. In other words, characters are created by people who not only have no means of establishing the situation that their characters exist in, and are given the sole responsibility to launch them into an adventurous situation that not even the publishers of the game know very much about. Only the DM knows these things.
If we have the luxury of a leisurely conversation about what the game will be, then this isn't a serious concern. But if we're going to play in an organized play situation (in which published materials that may not even exist yet control the adventures we'll be on) or at a convention (where our time is limited), we often turn to pregenerated characters.
People will post their characters online for free. So what does purchasing pregenerated characters do? It gives us an opportunity to play not just someone else, but someone who we didn't even fully create. This can be a fun challenge even for experienced characters. Raging Swan Publishing brings something solid to the table with Iconic Characters. Sticking to the more central Pathfinder classes in order to make it easier for characters to be brought into various campaigns, the main advantage of Iconic Characters is that the characters all have strong reasons to go on adventures: to find a sibling, to escape evil spirits, to get revenge. Even the most simplistic motivations make dungeon crawling more exciting and psychologically real-feeling roleplay.
As always, you can count on Raging Swan Publishing to have simple, workable layouts and well-turned mechanics. The only area of improvement I can suggest is to make the layout less a typical character stat layout and more usable at the table. The attribute bonuses are connected to so many things all over the sheet, the most used thing on the sheet (current hit points) will be repeatedly erased and rewritten until it wears through the sheet faster, etc. Maybe it's unfair to hold Raging Swan to these standards when the whole rest of the D&D3-playing world makes the same mistakes, but, as I say, I'm a rebel!
All in all, the iconic characters bring simple, interesting motivations to fantasy action-adventure scenarios, which is something that elevates it above the simple assemblage of statistics, but doesn't overstep its boundaries. Another top quality, simple release from Raging Swan.
(An earlier version of this review was posted when I had a brain fart about the name of the publisher. I apologize for the error.)
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Because of its recent inclusion in a Bundle of Holding, it seems an apropos time to talk about Brave New World, perhaps the first RPG ever to be unfairly scuttled by the Internet.
BNW eschewed the "everything and the kitchen sink" approach of prior superhero RPGs, most of which were aping the bizarre, unplanned conglomerations called the Marvel and DC universes. Just thinking through how the Marvel and DC universes happened (mergers! soft reboots! hard reboots! office coups! lawsuits!) should have been a huge warning sign to RPGs that maybe this was not the needle we wanted to try to thread. But okay, we wanted to know whether Superman or the Hulk was the strongest, and hadn't noticed that the answer to that question depended on the dramatic needs of the comic book creators instead of a beep boop computer analysis of how many pascals are exerted by a Hulk punch. The result was Champions and its successors, which I regard with the kind of reverence reserved only for the accomplishments of mad geniuses.
But even the independent superhero RPGs, for the most part, didn't pursue an independent setting capable of standing on their own two feet. Instead, they leaned on existing comics and tried to pursue their aesthetics instead of their own. The exceptions started to hit at the end of the late 90s. In 1999 we got two big ones: Aberrant, White Wolf's deconstruction of superheroes, starring superpowered wrestlers, religious figures, and superspies, all with lovingly detailed haircuts and sunglasses, and Brave New World. I'll defend White Wolf stuff all day and all night but in this matchup, Brave New World wins walking away.
The premise of Brave New World, as implied by its literary-reference name, is that America (and much of the rest of the world) exists in an alternate 1999 as a totalitarian police state. A great deal of effort is put into grounding this in reality; how do people live in such circumstances? How do they accommodate themselves mentally to it? How do people come to support a police state in large or small ways? And how do they resist, in large or small ways? The need for the police state, naturally, is the emergence of superpowered beings, extremely powerful in the WW2 generation, and somewhat less so by 1999. Some of these beings are more or less leashed thugs working for the government; others are rebels trying to expose the truth and tear it down. Propaganda urges non-powered people to hate and fear powered people, and they do. The X-Men rarely gave us this kind of detail even when they remembered that humans hated mutants (which they often forgot).
There were two elements of the game that the Internet (at the time, primarily Usenet), responded to negatively. Bizarrely, they identified two of the best elements of the game as deal-breaking flaws.
First, in Brave New World, you can't just be any sort of superhero you want. Character - both player characters and non-player characters - powers fit into established categories. The super-strong person, the super-fast person, the psychic, and so on. This has numerous advantages: it makes character creation faster and easier, it makes tactical decisionmaking in fights faster and more reliable ("that guy's super strong, therefore I don't have to worry that he's going to take over my mind") and it encourages players to come up with new cool ways to use an established power versus ceding the field to someone who happened to toss a few points into the right ability, or feeling that because they didn't, they can't. The fact that the system smoothly utilizes power stunts within the options for using these limited powers multiplies this advantage - you can see how to make a power stunt and what they should be like.
The Internet absolutely freaked about this. After so many years of being told "you can do whateeeeever you waaaaant" without noticing that this produced a ton of shitty, boring character building before you got good at it, and impeded quickly getting into play, the idea that you couldn't be Dr. Strange with Weirdly Undefined Abilities was just beyond their comprehension. "Incomplete" was a word thrown around. Ugh.
The second thing that BNW did well that the Internet freaked about was not say anything about the "origins" of the superpowers that spread across the world. There was some implication they would be handled in later supplements. but of course by 1999 we had all forgotten what the word "supplement" meant and assumed that if something was bad in a supplement that it would be bad in all games around the world forever. In practice, BNW's decision to withhold this information worked because everyone assumed the evil government had it in a computer somewhere, or that they were undertaking evil experiments to GET it in a computer that had to be stopped. It became actionable primarily in response to villainous undertakings, which of course, is what superheroism actually is.
It seems like when we talk about our RPGs, we often measure them by what we already think a RPG should be, instead of what the RPG actually is. We take our prior experience as the center of RPG play and regard games that don't support that experience as deviations from the norm. Perhaps the better way to handle ourselves is to try to take each RPG from zero. Brave New World can't "do" the X-Men - christ, about 73 percent of the time, Marvel Comics can't. But that's not what Brave New World is. It's not a comic book, nor a simulator of a comic book world - it's a superhero RPG, and a damn good one.
All in all, Brave New World was a tremendous experience. The high stakes of being a superpowered rebel and trying to keep your identity secret created a heightened environment for throwing a car at a guy shooting lasers. It is one of my all time favorite superhero RPGs and I'm psyched that the Bundle of Holding might bring it to a new audience. I definitely encourage picking it up!
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"Hey, wouldn't it be cool if President Roosevelt sent a bunch of investigators to stop Hitler from summoning Cthulhu?" is a thing a gamer might think when they were fourteen. Then you learn a little about World War 2 and which side, if he had lived that long, Lovecraft would undoubtedly have sided with, and suddenly the bloom is off the rose. The concept of a mad Nazi sorcerer is frankly, stupid and a waste of everyone's time. They didn't need sorcery to be horrible. Sorcery is fictional and Nazi mass murders were real. What would they have done with sorcery that they didn't do with their own determination? Spread their evil further, win maybe? But that doesn't make them a different kind of evil; they don't become more horrific if you give them tentacle monster shock troops, they just become more successful at spreading the horror they launched. The more I learned about World War 2, the less I liked attempts to shoehorn the Cthulhu Mythos into it. Let's not even get to the Victorian anxieties that bubbled just beneath the surface of Mythos writings; suffice to say the Allied armies (racially diverse, eventually even racially integrated!) would not be the good guys in a Lovecraftian Mythos tale. Thus, for many years I put down the recurring idea of a WW2 Mythos game. I may have even been mean about it once or twice!
So when I saw World War Cthulhu: Darkest Hour, I was fairly decidedly disinterested, even though it was Cubicle 7 and I normally quite like Cubicle 7 games. Nevertheless I decided to give it a look and I'm very glad that I did. WWC has a very different attitude towards how to design a Call of Cthulhu scenario in World War 2 which transforms the war from a shorthand 5th grader's scribble of bad Nazis seeking forbidden knowledge to a setting that presents tremendous challenges to investigators seeking to achieve military and potentially occult goals at the same time.
In your typical Call of Cthulhu scenario, investigators receive a weird invitation or see a bizarre story in the newspaper that is in their professional field. They gather up because they know weird shit might be going down and start digging into it. Importantly, in Call of Cthulhu scenarios, you can lose. It is quite possible to miss clues, miss events on a timeline, misinterpret the clues and go to the wrong place, and you never solve the mystery, and then you see another horrible newspaper article and you FEEL AFRAID at the unknown horror that you almost spotted, and lose Sanity. This makes a typical Call of Cthulhu scenario a self-contained episode. However, in WWC, a different methodology is at work.
In WWC, you identify a location and determine what's going on with the war as an environment that the investigation takes place in. The sample campaign (more on this below) is a small town in Vichy France near a mysterious wood and a copper mine the Nazis really want to keep open. Then you create the occult threat and what might draw the investigators to the area. This approach guarantees you're not going to have your team of rowdy investigators winning the war singlehandedly, and also guarantees that they will have to thread some very difficult needles. In a (separately published) scenario, for example, there's a mysterious occult plague in a town controlled by Italian fascists. They believe (and spread the word) that they are being targeted by an Allied biological weapon of some kind. But it isn't; it's a MONSTER. You can definitely see how investigators who come into that situation will have to walk a tightrope between the danger of the Mythos and the danger imposed by the war. And when there's a plague monster around, maybe calling in an artillery strike is the worst thing to do. ("Are those spores or smoke?")
WWC asks not that you treat WW2 as a pulp setting, but instead asks that you treat it as real, with real stakes. And that, to me, is the innovation that makes it work where other WW2 Cthulhu scenarios have failed.
The sample campaign (which I'm going to be running soon!) is a great example. The characters are Special Operations Executive agents parachuting into the Vichy France countryside in April 1941 (seven months before the Americans even get into the action!) with the mission of putting together an intelligence network in the countryside, and finding out what happened to the investigator who disappeared before the Nazi invasion. He was looking into a cult, naturally, but the investigators can't just pop in to a Vichy village and start asking questions and avoiding attention because then they'll be pegged as spies immediately and killed by the Gestapo, and the cult will be about its evil business unimpeded.
And there are questions about how much to trust the Resistance that's helping you...or even if you trust them, how much to involve them? They have different goals and restrictions, and they may or may not know about or believe in the occult problems the investigators have to deal with. If a monster's going to eat a bunch of people, you have to balance whether you want a suave lady shooting a Sten while smoking a cigarette standing next to you, or whether it would be better if she didn't have her arm eaten and nerve broken so she would have both those things to fight the Hun.
All in all, World War Cthulhu is a tremendous effort, works really well, and the sample campaign gives a very solid example as to how to design a WWC scenario. This game completely rehabilitates the idea of the WW2 Mythos scenario and breathes new life into it with the relentless focus on the war as environment instead of the war as event.
If I had to suggest a way to improve this effort, I would mention there are several typographical errors (the names of characters in the sample campaign aren't always spelled the same way, etc.) and I would really hammer out several different campaign structures other than the SOE structure that's presented. All in all, however, this is an exceptionally solid work that accomplishes something many have attempted but rarely successfully. It's definitely worth your time.
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Lee's Lists, purveyors of ONE HUNDRED PENNY RPG supplements, have a lot of them that are REPETITIVE or SILLY. This one is much more ON POINT (though perhaps the title is a bit MISLEADING.) With the two-page, random-table Plot Device Generator, you will generate a COOL-SOUNDING item or artifact; there aren't any silly entries here. The description of the product is very ACCURATE (okay, enough of that gag) - I definitely could see the unstoppable overlord of my fantasy world only able to be defeated by the Gems of the Heavens, which mark those of great destiny throughout the ages, the remnants of a civilization before this one. (That's an actual artifact I generated with this product.) If you're like me, the actual in-world physics/magic of how the PCs might defeat the bad guys is somewhat beside the point since all the mechanics of the games we play are normally about the struggle to do that. So sometimes I come up with a macguffin that sounds stupid or wasn't thought through. Thus, the Plot Device Generator helps me out.
And it's only 20 shiny nickels!
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The Big Bang series has for many years given us a solid historical overview of weapons development, distilling its information from many public sources. The US Army Future Combat System supplement is one of my favorites of the line, since it attempts to sort out what the future of the US Army (circa 2003 when it was written) would look like from procurement, demonstrations, prototypes and other materials. It also demonstrates the two areas where I feel the Big Bang line could improve the most, so it's what I selected from the line to write an in-depth review of.
Your typical Big Bang entry is a detailed history of the need for the weapon, the process by which the weapon was developed, a comparison to past and contemporary weapons, and then some stats in various systems so that people can pick out the weapons they want and the system they want to put it in.
To the extent that this approach is justified, Big Bang does a good job with it. My criticisms of this approach are more based on my concern that the Big List Of Guns we see in many modern RPGs is rarely justified in the mechanics either by realism, tactical or strategic game decisionmaking, or narrative. (Is someone really going to tell me which of two extremely similar cartridges are going to deliver 2d4 damage and which are going to deliver 2d6 damage in a way that is going to make me interested in choosing between them?) Whatever beef I have with the Big List Of Guns concept as implemented in RPGs, Big Bang didn't invent it and at the very least it attempts to situate the guns in the needs of a particular fighting force (the US Army) in a particular time frame (what the US Army thought it would be doing in the next 5-10 years.)
This particular supplement focuses on the US Army Future Combat Systems developments. I actually like it better as it is - a snapshot of what we thought in 2003 that Future Combat Systems development would look like. In 2003 we barely launched the Iraq War, and didn't know what the immediate needs of the Army would be in that time frame. The entries reflect this, with descriptions of interim projects ordered to fit into interstitial periods between when older weapons were to broken-down to use and when newer weapons could make it through development. I sort of hope the supplement isn't updated as time goes on and what the Army's working on changes. I want to see this as a historical document.
The content of the supplement is well-covered in other reviews: a list of guns, cartridges and other types of weapons, how they were intended to be developed, and how they function in several systems. I won't go too much farther into it than that. The supplement is extremely well laid out for printing (no background images; all images are already greyscaled, used sparingly, and tables are clean and clear). Bookmarks can get you straight to the weapon you want (though frankly for laymen remembering which weapon belongs to which name can be difficult.)
If there was one area that I would urge the creator of the Big Bang series in general to address, it would be in expanding the supplements beyond the "official" story of the weapons detailed. Often times the story of a weapon extends beyond what it was intended for, how good it was, and how much it cost. Soldiers have always manipulated and customized their weapons and their uses. Corruption and incompetence cause weapon development to go off the rails. Weapons develop reputations and those reputations may be the flashpoint for internal conflicts inside organizations and fighting forces. (Ask the Army about the A-10. Now ask the Air Force!) I would love to see Big Bang entries, especially those that are forward-looking talk about potential problems that the weapons described might run into, or potential advantages that were unplanned-for. In reality, the Future Combat Systems program was cancelled in 2009; a review of the program blamed the premature acceleration of a major internal milestone. That could be an interesting problem for those who are testing or stuck with weapons of various kinds - only getting part of a "system" that was meant to work together.
If the Big Bang series is aimed at games where we're playing soldiers (not, say, members of the House Armed Services Committee - wait, why has nobody written this game?!?!) then let's see some thinking about what might work or not work about a weapon in the field. Heck, in a supplement about weapons systems that aren't out yet, you can just extrapolate it yourself!
That's a lot of words explaining a critique that probably doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things. All in all, the Big Bang supplements are well worth their inexpensive price, and are much more interesting than your typical "Big List Of Guns" supplements since they attempt to situate the weapons within a historical moment and organizational context, and are well-organized and easy to use. They cross many system lines and if you're looking for cool stuff for soldiering games (or for my upcoming game about being in the House Armed Services Committee; ORIGINAL IDEA DO NOT STEAL), you should definitely check them out.
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I almost didn't write this review, since the earlier Featured Review covered Valence in such detail, but I wanted to pull a few things to the fore and discuss them. I do think the three-star rating the previous Featured Reviewer gave is on point; although there are lots of good things about Valence, there are certain contradictions and areas where it falls short.
One of the best things about Valence that the other Featured Reviewer didn't mention is its tone. A lot of RPGs take on a very serious, neutral tone in discussing their fictional elf worlds and magic swords. This is fine, but boring. Valence, by contrast, has a casual, humorous tone. When reading this corebook I feel like I'm sitting at a gaming table having a conversation about a really detailed setting that the GM is eager to tell me about. The energy of it buoys my own enthusiasm about the game. One of the species is able to shoot microwaves - this is illustrated by a picture of an alien throwing an actual microwave oven, and captioned that it's a bad joke. I laughed out loud when I saw this, since I have the sense of humor of a fairly immature 7th grader, but you can bet I didn't forget that those were the aliens that could shoot microwaves! The conversational tone and organization is a breath of fresh air. I really felt welcomed by this book.
I do think there are things about Valence that are not well-turned. It draws inspiration from Babylon 5 and although Mass Effect post-dates Valence, I definitely can see the common roots of the two games. A lot of time is spent in Valence developing many cultures, religions, corporations and ideologies. When these clash, I can definitely see how interesting sparks could fly both on an individual level and on a galactic level. However, the mechanics of the game are based around resolving the outcome of very concrete tasks - small-scale efforts. Although the system is simple and straightforward enough (roll a d20! add some stuff! did you beat a number?), neither the GM nor the player section emphasizes how to assemble these tasks into something that could make a difference in the galaxy. In Mass Effect and Babylon 5, the main characters are thrust into situations where their decision is the tipping point for major changes. I just don't see that in Valence; instead, the adventure hooks in the back (very helpfully arranged by faction) are more your typical action/adventure/mercenary scenarios that might be common to a Traveller game. (The font and layout choices are also obvious callbacks to Traveller.) In Traveller, characters are thrust into the harsh libertarian screw-you-got-mine future with a mountain of debt and no clear way to pay it off. They don't make universe-shaking decisions like Babylon 5 protagonists; they will simply never be in the position to do so.
If I had to make a suggestion for the next edition of Valence, I would urge that the GM's section and player's section both be fleshed out. In the GM's section, let's have some guidance or procedures for how to create a world-spanning or galaxy-spanning conflict, how to express what's at stake in play (instead of in narration), and how to thrust the player characters into the key turning points of those conflicts, and to play out the consequences. On the player side, give them ideas for how to make those big decisions, how to emphasize to each other in dialogue and action what is at stake, and to make it "okay" to deal with unexpected or even undesired consequences.
All in all, Valence is definitely a book worth checking out if you're interested in the "clash of civilizations" science fiction genre. The system and concepts are fine. You will definitely enjoy reading and thinking about it. I come away from it wishing that it went further, and that's got to be a good thing!
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As always, I roll into a review ready to talk primarily about things only tangentially related to what I'm reviewing. If you don't feel like reading through all of it, here's the TL;DR version: this is a truly remarkable and above all else, complete, light science fiction RPG. It is worth both your time and your money. The suggested price of $2.99 is a steal - but go ahead and take it for free if you want to make that "steal" more literal.
Often times in roleplaying game rulebooks we hear that among the many unique virtues of the roleplaying game form is that players are both creator and audience. But if players are both performer and audience, who are we playing to, exactly? Each other? Ourselves? Does the GM have a special audience role as well as a special performance role? Let's say there's a line on our science fiction RPG character sheet that says "Alien Epidemiology" and a rating that says we're okay at being alien epidemiologists, and we write that at the beginning of the campaign and nobody else ever knows it's there, a common event that any experienced RPGer can relate to. You thought it would be cool but for whatever reason it didn't ever come up in play. I can see an argument that this skill perhaps informs the performance of the character - the player knows it's there even if no other player (or GM) knows (or remembers) it's there, or knows its significance. The opposite argument urges the foolishness of taking something that's imaginary in the first place (there really aren't any xenoepidemiologists out there reading this, right?) and, instead of making it realer by requiring real people (the other players) to make statements about, challenge, and respond to it, letting it remain pure internal imagination. If that mediocre and irrelevant skill never impacts everyone else's experience, how much value can it really have? Why waste your time with it?
The answer to this apparent dilemma, I am increasingly coming to believe, comes at a lower level than individual players' decisions - it depends on what the mechanics of the games are and the goal of the game. Since I'm a three ring idiot, it always takes someone demonstrating this in the mechanics of a game for me to figure this out. This brings us to Vast and Starlit, a 2013 game by Epidiah Ravachol, a game that has provoked a lot of thought in me about this very challenge.
In Vast and Starlit, the player characters are all escapees from a prison ship, crossing the galaxy in an attempt to find a home. You are told this in the first sentence of the game. Character creation is conducted not by individuals weighing resources against anticipated opportunities which might be provided by a GM, but instead by a conversation centering around the strengths and needs of each character; and you don't get to speak up about your own character until your turn comes. Furthermore, the only people who are able to evaluate whether your strength is sufficient to overcome a situation are the other players. In other words, if I say my guy is a top-notch biochemist due to his long work as a poisoner and chef (to use a character in a similar situation from a past campaign), that's awesome; but the extent of my biochemistry knowledge and skills in a specific situation are decided on by the other players. To put it another way, I'm playing my biochemistry skill to the other players. (There's no GM in the game.)
As each person's turn comes, they set a scene, select who is there and what is happening (old hat to a Primetime Adventures veteran like myself). Some crewmembers will be "focused" on; others will not. You can either play your own character or an NPC in the scene. When something that's Dangerous or Difficult is attempted, that's decided on by the other players. The consequences of attempting it are explained by the other players and the player of the character making the attempt decides what to do about it. If you're playing a non-focused character, then you end up having to take a result without knowing what it is in advance. If you're playing a focused character, you get to hear all the different options before choosing the one that's best.
This is a very simple cycle, starting with the need that your ship has that you can't fulfill right now. As you move forward the cycle will keep the game going - a situation arises, characters interact, if they're not doing anything dangerous or difficult, they go about their business. If they are, then their incremental failure or endangerment drive new situations and new opportunities into the plot.
If there was anything to criticize in the "base rules" (really the complete rules of the game) it would be that it doesn't assist the players in determining how to create interesting injuries, dangers, or needs on an ongoing basis. If you've seen a bunch of space science fiction TV shows and movies, you probably won't have a problem with doing this, but it seems likely that in a group of four you might have different ideas of what seems like a reasonable consequence.
(Oh yeah, definitely try to have at least four to play this game - although it's fine with a smaller number, having different voices and points of view in the choices make for a much more exciting game with many more twists and turns.)
This game also comes with several supplements! The first, Bodies in the Dark, is one of the most provocative supplements I've seen in a while. It provides additional rules for interpersonal interactions. There's a brief look at command, but what leapt out at me was the rules for hostility and romance. Yes, they are tracked on the same track. For everyone who's played Mass Effect, this will definitely spark some ideas about interspecies romance and other transgressions. As always, your fellow players will let you know the consequences of "moves" (ahem) you make with respect to hostilities or romances. If you've ever watched a showdown in any kind of show or movie and thought "These enemies just need to screw each other and get it out of their system" then you will love this system.
There's also a map of the galaxy, which again is primarily for provoking situations for your crew to have to deal with. Similarly, there's rules for introducing or developing new technologies.
The whole packet is done in 16 pages (some of which are front and back covers.) This leads to my main problem with this game, the format. Although the NASA pictures are gorgeous, putting them in the background makes it so printing the book ranges from marginal to a waste of time. There also aren't layers letting you turn off the background (and if there were, the white letters would immediately disappear on several pages.) Even on a pretty decent home color printer you're likely to have plenty of bleed on some of the grey circles in the Technical Manual, be unable to check off those boxes unless you have a white-ink pen (but then how do you erase and move it?) you're unlikely to be able to make much sense out of the galaxy map, there's a giant star flare slightly off-center in the Bodies in the Dark track, and in general it's just a huge pile of blah. I can't emphasize enough that you should copy-paste the text outta this thing, build your own tracks for Bodies In The Dark and Technical stuff, and attach them to the ship drawing your group creates. (You can use the Galaxy Map on your tablet or smartphone, since you don't need to consult it in the same way and it's only one page.)
There is no reason whatsoever for this game to be a PDF. An app or, heck, a HTML or well-laid out RTF document, would be just fine. I can't give this game a perfect score because its form is just way, way off from what its function is.
To sum up, you're going to be in the spotlight when you play this game; and your fellow players are going to be lobbing challenges at you based on their view of the situation, not based on your view of your character's capabilities. You will only be as safe in this game as your fellow players will let you be. You won't be able to hide beneath a really big number on a character sheet. If that excites you, you shouldn't waste any more time on this review, put your money down and Get This Game. If you want more to your character to belong specifically to you, with a game system that will protect that against others' evaluation, then give it a pass. This is a game where you will be forced by your fellow players to make some tight, tough decisions and where they will tell you that things don't work out for you even when you try really hard. In other words, it will be really, really, exciting and tense to try something dangerous or difficult. Isn't that a feeling worth seeking out?
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This top-notch product is one of the better player's guides for one of the better Savage Suzerain lines. Let's break it down.
For just about as long as there have been RPGs with GMs and players there has been a division between player and GM material. This division supposedly existed to keep players from thinking about the game outside the mindset of their characters; for me, this helped about as much as learning to play chess by really trying to get into the mindset of the rook. It makes a lot of sense when you're smoking weed.
Or maybe there were business reasons. There's a lot more players in the world than GMs and so it makes sense to try to sell things to them. So let's put "Player's Guide" on the front of the book we're trying to sell to everyone.
Eventually I got tired of this. How am I supposed to know how to play the game when what the creative director, the GM, is supposed to do in the game is hidden from me? And the same was true for me as the GM. Games began to be more open with their methodologies and my games benefited for it.
However, after the development of open and relaxed game licensing in the early days of the 21st century, player's guides made a resurgence, since they no longer had to get across a whole new methodology of play. Instead, they instructed players on how to use their familiar tools and mechanics in order to achieve a new or more specialized goal. You didn't need to know how to play D&D3 all over again, but learning how to play this cool new class in this cool new fantasy world was worth talking about.
Into this new tradition comes the Noir Knights Player's Guide. I should note straightaway that the Noir Knights is my favorite of the universes of the Suzerain Continuum, a cross-worlds setting in which science fiction heroes can contend with mysterious fantasy wizzards, I mean wizards. As with many such cross-worlds settings, it doesn't quite bring together the reasons people might want to play a fantasy game or a sf game, but that's a review for another time.
Suffice to say that the reason I like Noir Knights the best is because it quickly and effectively establishes a style and communicates it well to the players. The world of the Noir Knights is like the American Depression, though dark forces are at work and the player characters are the only ones that can stand in its way.
I was very excited to see the Bonus Army march of spring 1932 as the catalyst for the beginning of the game and an emphasis on WWI veterans as a core membership of the player characters' Mysterious Group. And with the other significant faction of the game being based on a strange-science immigrant's work in a small town in Florida, the stage is set for a unique type of game. The player characters in most X-Files-esque supernatural-investigation games are backed by (say) a faceless government organization, they are often Company Men or active military with the best at their disposal, necessary against the weirdness right outside their doorstep. Night's Black Agents is a typical example of this.
Noir Knights is different. In Noir Knights player characters are run down to nothing, gassed by their own government for asking for fair pay, or for a widow's share. They are outcasts from normal society and may ride the rails or be the creepy old guy in a shack outside town who runs a huge metal pole out of the top of his homestead every time there's a lightning storm. The government has taken them on not because they're so thrilled with them but because if they don't the communists might get them; and besides, the authorities really are helpless as to what's going on, and the "ruizologists" and the "railwalkers", the thrown-away scum on the bottom of America's boot are the only ones that seem to be able to figure out what's going on.
In this setup I can easily get not just a cool character concept, but I can situate that concept in the world firmly. I know what it's going to be if I was a fresh faced draftee in 1917 - I know what it's going to be if I'm a Negro barnstorming boxer in a railyard - I know what it's going to be if I'm a forward-looking woman aviator. It's going to be contempt from our superiors, who are helpless against the real threat. I absolutely can't wait.
In fact, if there was anything that can be improved in the Noir Knights Player's Guide is that I feel like this core story needs to be brought to the fore more explicitly. There should be something - perhaps in the introduction, or in the gazetteer section - explicitly laying out why it matters to me, the player, that it was Bonus Army veterans and not Army regulars that are in this organization, why it matters that it's rail-riding castoffs that recognize the magical patterns of America and not President Roosevelt's technocratic educated elite. I think this is the key to why Noir Knights appeals to me so much, and the more it was explained and put both-feet-forward in the text I think the better it would be.
In general, this is a really solid Player's Guide, one of the best of this new era of player's guides based more around individual expression than mechanical explanation. It's highly recommended.
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Vigilance Press has a reputation for putting together really thoroughly thought out and well produced material. Kaiju Kultists does exactly everything right in its treatment of incorporating giant monsters into a superhero setting.
It starts with several pages explaining the history of giant monsters in literature, film and comics. I appreciate that it attempts to put giant monsters in the context of their creators in different cultures and places.
Next, it carefully lays out some of the ups and downs of putting giant monsters in superhero games, finishing up with systems to include wrecking cities in Mutants & Masterminds, giving neighborhoods health tracks which heroes will want to protect.
I have to admit I haven't been thrilled with giant monster/superhero crossovers in the past. I really want giant monsters to fight against dudes with missiles on trucks and guns on jeeps, not against Superman. So I was shocked with how happy I was with the Kaiju Kultists organization that takes up a considerable amount of the book.
The idea of the organization is that the badguys in the organization bring kaiju into the world through demonic rituals, tying their power to themselves. They wreck neighborhoods and cities in order to become more powerful - heroes who protect cities and people are cutting directly into their abilities. This does two things that giant monster implementations haven't done in the past: it makes fighting the giant monster a conflict between people, and it makes rebuilding and defending a city an effective way to weaken the giant monster. The former is a key way to heighten dramatic conflict and is especially needed in superhero settings. For example, in the X-Men setting, the Brood, otherwise an Alien ripoff, have a Queen that will taunt our heroes and yell at them when they defeat her. The Kaiju Kultists similarly are people who can interact with our heroes, make their positions about the extermination of human civilization known, get hauled off to super-jail, and so forth.
The element of defending and rebuilding the city to weaken the giant monsters and ultimately defeat the cult is something you often see in comics but rarely see in superhero RPGs - where the whole community comes together to support their heroes and stop the bad guys. And of course, having the community literally weaken the bad guys by living well and being decent to each other is a very superhero comic thing to do - to literalize the values being advanced in the comic book.
Finally, there's Hero Lab files and standees at the back of the book for all the bad guys and monsters, AND several small scenarios introdicing and developing the cultists.
As much as I always expect a good product from Vigilance Press, I'm blown away by Kaiju Kultists not just for its new mechanics, but by the attention to how giant monsters should and can be used in various ways in various games. I didn't expect to love the organization nearly as much as I did; the mechanics also back this up really well.
If you trapped me in a building Godzilla was about to knock over and demanded that I give you something that could be improved in this book, I would say that perhaps having more hooks for how to develop or redevelop parts of the city would help. The ever-lovin' blue eyed Thing often had a struggle with his loyalty to his old neighborhood - when the survival of the city against a giant monster is on the line that would heighten such dilemmas dramatically.
Get this right away. You don't know you need it but you do.
(Also, the cover art is great, don't tell anyone I looked at it, it will ruin my "art in gaming books is worthless" cred forever.)
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Although World of Nevermore has a brilliant and crazy aesthetic which appeals to me pretty much on every level, it doesn't nail down certain aspects of how the setting should be used and so falls (perhaps barely) short of a perfect score.
So let's talk about adventures in dreams. This is a theme in fantasy (and horror) literature for many years, and there've been many RPGs that have attempted it. The core problem is of course that waking up back in a world that hasn't been affected by the dream is unsatisfying: why attempt to overcome obstacles that are simply imaginary? H.P. Lovecraft gave his Dreamlands physical reality; Adamant Entertainment had a Dreamwalker game in the d20 era which tried a similar approach. Shattered Dreams, a badly organized 1990s game had the brilliant idea that monsters from the dream world were invading people's bodies via their dreams and a failure in the dream world meant the player characters would have to face essentially demon possession scenarios in the real world - where they had no dream-altering abilities. (Someday I want to see a dream-adventure scenario where the real-world impact of a success is "you work out some emotional or intellectual problem or anxiety that's been hammering at you in the real world"!)
It's that issue that Nevermore doesn't hit square on the head. When, if things get too rough, a significant portion of the inhabitants can simply opt out of the world every eight hours, it becomes difficult to create actual conflict with consequences. The game seems to recognize this, emphasizing that GMs should make events in Nevermore prefigure or subtly affect things in the "real" game world if the whole game's not going to be set there. However, the brief mention of it doesn't give examples, methods, or principles to make this happen - and that's frankly the most important question that I have when picking up a dream walking supplement. What about this is real?
There are even some indications in World of Nevermore that this question was not too well thought out. It is suggested (for example) that characters should retain their levels gained while in Nevermore once they wake up, typically adept levels. This could result in people in your core game world going to sleep as level 3 folks and waking up as level 18 folks one in-character day later - since time in the "real" world (whatever it is) doesn't pass as it does in Nevermore.
The simple way to handle this is to say "Nevermore's the game world. You can't opt out. It behaves in dreamlike ways but for various reasons none of you will be 'waking up'". Certain character types are like this (such as those born in Nevermore or the fey who are its original natives), a GM can simply require that all characters be one of these types.
The most important changes to the True20 system are a boosted Conviction system which allows dreamlike discontinuities to aid the characters, and an Aspect system which gives boosts to characters based on dreamlike aspects that they take on in various situations - I dream I'm a dragonlike figure, so I take on dragonlike abilities. These seem to be well-founded and since everyone in the game world has them, the balance of them seems well thought out.
The majority of the book is taken up with the campaign world description. It involves many realms, each of which has its own personality, and typical dream-effects that can be found in its borders. Probably the best part is the list of potential adventure hooks for each area. Although I'm experienced in turning area descriptions into actionable adventures, it's great to see how the tone and atmosphere of each area is intended to mesh with the typical True20 action-adventure feel. I wish every location supplement was as straightforward with what its intentions are.
Finally, a sample adventure is at the end. Again, a welcome addition to the supplement, showing me how it's supposed to be done (including what typical badguys in Nevermore get up to.)
I do think that Nevermore has a lot going for it, and it's quite ambitious; not just another game with Oz in it, thereby guaranteeing a high score from JDCorley on the Internet. However, there are certain holes in what it tries to accomplish that keep it from getting my highest marks. While the 8-hour cycle of Nevermore is terrific for keeping things changing, dreamlike and mysterious, it requires some really diligent timekeeping on the part of the GM and players, much more rigorous than in your typical True20 game, and there aren't any tools to help us do that. As mentioned above, the way to tie Nevermore to something real and worth doing is not clear.
Nevertheless the work is imaginative and thrilling, I want to adventure here and the game gives me great tools with which to do that. The abilities of player characters and NPCs alike are vivid and compelling. Expeditious Retreat hardly ever misses the mark and it doesn't here. I highly recommend World of Nevermore as an addition to your dream-fantasy library! (You do have one, right?)
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Before I tell you about Enter the Shadowside, let's talk about the supernatural in RPGs. There are two huge mistakes people make when putting the supernatural into RPGs.
The first is that sometimes they don't clearly define what the supernatural does in their RPG. We generally have some idea of what the real, non-supernatural world is like, and how it works, so we need some type of system or mechanics or at the very least instructions about what to do when something supernatural happens in our game, whether wielded by the players, by monsters, or just as a condition in the world.
The second mistake some RPGs make is that they don't make the mechanisms of the supernatural, whether quasi-scientific or mystic an actionable fact, something that both impacts and can be impacted by player action. If nothing can ever be done about a ghost, that may be fine for a book or movie, because at the end the audience high fives each other and goes about its business, but in a RPG or other type of interactive fiction, you want the player's actions to have consequence in the world.
Some of my favorite settings and scenarios fail at least one of these tests. The Forgotten Realms has a ridiculously detailed and contradictory account of how magic works, but there's never a clear statement of what player characters - even epic level player characters! - can affect even the smallest part of it. Sometimes freeform play or group-customized material bumps up against differing player expectations - quick, can Dracula go outside during the day? (Yes.)
The original World of Darkness games avoided the second mistake in the grandest of fashions, putting supernatural, scary stuff right in the hands of the players from the first time they said "pick a Clan". But over time, the varying game lines developed the first mistake. Players drove each other crazy trying to make the games fit together. (This should never have been done, but nobody asked me, or I suspect, White Wolf.) So a lot of modern supernatural games since that time have worked hard to fix that first mistake, working out complicated ideas for what supernatural abilities really represent, where they come from, a coherent cosmology, and so forth. But few remembered the great strength of the World of Darkness approach was its playability, how it was (at least at first) tightly organized around player-character views and activities. It resulted in a lot of wasted words describing some dumb god or demon or ancient order of magicians that simply did not matter in play.
Enter the Shadowside, which recently went for a new Kickstarter, manages to avoid both of these mistakes, organizing its supernatural world cleanly but making sure that the player characters are situated effectively in the world as well. The world of Enter the Shadowside is one in which characters form pacts with mysterious spirits in order to gain occult power. In order to do this, they normally connect up with one of the organizations that exist in the world. There are nine, organized by whether they are anarchic or orderly (or neutral), and egoistic or altruistic (or neutral). Interestingly, whereas in many supernatural settings the organizations are all centuries old, some in Enter the Shadowside are definitively modern, including a shady Russian corporation and a 4chan-a-like message board.
The system is an interesting one - characters are created via a "turtle shell" of assigning points, in which many stats combine in various ways to create several derived stats. The system is a simple d20 roll with various bonuses or penalties attached, though it's explained in a somewhat strange way. (I couldn't really puzzle it out until I saw the chart comparing outcomes to target numbers and was surprisingly underwhelmed.)
The characters use the mysterious shadow dimension of imagination called the Shadowside for their own purposes; what I find interesting is that unlike many games, the characters are actually more effective and flexible there than the natives, since they bring with them the realities of our world. This also explains why some of the powerful entities there want to partner with characters; it benefits their agendas too.
One thing I very much like about Enter the Shadowside is the clear instructions to the GM, being quite up front about what the first few sessions should be like, what the next sessions should be like and so on. There's even a section of the book that introduces two of the nine organizations that don't appear until the "Endgame" - this is a mystic game that actually expects you, in your campaign, to get to the end of the world in a reasonable time. That's very cool.
Probably there's no need for the "please don't pirate this" page. Who pirates things anymore anyway? Nerds and losers, whatever. All the cool kids buy their stuff at drivethrurpg dot com, while wearing sunglasses probably.
If there's a weakness to Enter the Shadowside, it's that the GM section doesn't clearly indicate how I bring a group of characters together and how I oppose them both effectively and dramatically. Is it best to chase them? To attack them directly? Is this a game where they should be targeted or is it too big for that until they pull something off? What is the roal of individual character goals versus teams in this game? I would like to see a more thorough breakdown of how to get from character creation through the first few sessions, to get that all important inertia going.
And the glossary for what all the various factions call all the various skills and things in the setting is just too much to absorb (and won't actually produce more than one or two good jokes.)
I would highly recommend Enter the Shadowside if you're looking for a well-organized modern horror-magic game that is both well-detailed and clearly actionable. The system isn't anything special - hopefully the new Kickstarter edition will spruce that up a bit - but it seems at first glance to get the job done. And the Endgame concept is really awesome.
It's not that expensive and it's quite solid. Check it out.
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"Hey Jason you only ever give five stars to the most superlative stuff out there "
"No, that's not true at all, sometimes I give five stars to something that's just really good, but has some element that especially tickles my fancy or which has had an unusual amount of use in my gaming, that's what I mean by 'reviewers tilt'."
"So are you really going to give a five star rating to just a bunch of random generators?!"
"Yes, here's why:
Although they're not quite 'tools' so much as prompts, this set of random generators goes beyond the normal 'roll on this table' nonsense that often gets shlepped around on the site as a means of brainstorming. Instead of needing dice, you just click and immediately get five options for your next plotline, short story, poem (!!!), or location. There's a gag 'motivator' telling you to write more words today ('1033 more and you learn the secret in secret sauce!) and, quite provocatively, there's a 'visual' generator that instead of saying someone likes (say) puzzles, displays a simple icon of (say) a rook. Maybe this person likes chess, or castles, or perhaps the meaning is more metaphorical.
Chaotic Shiny does a very good job of putting generators together and this is no exception. I know it's improved my writing and gaming! People who are putting out 'lists of 100 names' might do well to make actual compiled generators to make using them at the table easier!"
"Well that's just great, you give this thing five stars, is there anything it could do better?"
"Yes, two things, first, it would be better if the lists used to generate the material were easily customizable. Perhaps they could call to a particular file outside the .exe file itself. It's nice that the whole thing clocks in at under 2 megs but I think I could find the hard drive space. Second, Chaotic Shiny had best get on Google Play so I can give them all my money when they start designing apps that do these things."
"All your..."
"ALL MY MONEY"
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Call of Cthulhu was the first breakout hit of horror themed RPGs, surprising, since Lovecraft's work concerns itself often with horrors that are literally indescribable and RPGs rely on verbal description to get across their situations and emotions. What Call of Cthulhu, the RPG, brought to the table was a simple, clear system and a methodology of GMing and playing that put players in the mindset of investigators who would put themselves in the middle of horrific mysteries and not run away at the first ominous shadow. Most horror games since that time have mimicked this successful investigative formula, for good reason.
However, few have taken another element of Call of Cthulhu's initial success: a historical setting. As a historical gaming buff, I have always felt that making Call of Cthulhu close enough to reality that we can recognize things like police officers and hats while far enough away as to still put us out of our comfort zone. I like historical gaming quite a bit and a well-realized historical setting appeals to me more than yet anothr fantasy game completely disconnected from reality.
The world offered by Colonial Gothic is one in which mysterious monsters and witchcraft exist in colonial America. The characters must navigate the dangerous politics of the revolution and avert the supernatural threats that could endanger everyone's survival.
In terms of being a True20 adaptation, Colonial Gothic does a solid job. It only introduces a handful of new mechanics, skills and feats, sumarizes them well in a few pages. True20 works well for this kind of game and there isn't a need to significantly alter it. The main shift is for magical powers, which become witchcraft and ritual.
Colonial Gothic doesn't delve deeply into colonial-native relations or the issue of slavery. However, I appreciate that it gives native and former slave characters as a player character option and takes their points of view seriously. In the time frame described, native tribes were seen as equals to colonial forces in strength and importance. Though racism colored all interactions, it was not seen as strange to seek out native allies and partners in conflicts or enterprises.
Based on the world of Colonial Gothic, natives know more about the supernatural than colonists since to a certain degree America actually is a magical land in this world. This decision helps separate Colonial Gothic from the "magic native" stereotype - it simply makes sense that in a world where a certain area has monsters, that people there would know more about monsters. Each of the major native tribes has a full writeup in the gazetteer section of the book.
All in all, I feel that the native characters, both player characters and NPCs, are given a very thorough and fair approach in the book and Colonial Gothic gets high marks from me for making this attempt.
However, I do think the treatment of blacks (not just slaves) in various colonies is somewhat less detailed and specific than it could be. Free black laborers, entrepreneurs, soldiers and leaders existed in New England colonies even very early on, and it was their organization and support that would lead, only a few years after the Revolution depicted in Colonial Gothic, to the emancipation acts that would make the North nearly slave-free in a relatively short time, while in the Southern states an increasingly baroque and stringent infrastructure to control slave populations necessitated targeting free blacks as well. Given that a significant portion of the game is dedicated to creating a real-feeling political milieu that the characters must navigate, it seems an important omission.
There are a few strange historical mistakes in Colonial Gothic - in the area of mental health treatment, electroshock therapy was mentioned, though at the time induction of seizures theraputically was rare and usually accomplished through the injection of Camphor oil. It was also primarily used on those that were comatose, thinking that the seizure could jump-start their bodies. The first electroconvulsive therapy wasn't reported until 1938, almost 200 years after the time frame in the game. The rules for getting rid of psychological disorders in general are strange and ad hoc, which is unusual for a game with sanity mechanics like Colonial Gothic - characters make a roll when they go up a level to see if they can slough off a disorder. That's fine, but it means that high-level characters really aren't impaired nearly as much. Perhaps this is what's intended by the rules, but it does seem odd.
A welcome addition is the "Secrets" section, which gives a thorough analysis of what GMs should do in Colonial Gothic to get across the history effectively while not being straitjacketed by it, as well as some pitfalls to avoid in horror games specifically. In addition, it contains themes associated with villain types (undead, etc.) that can make a game very atmospheric.
Finally there's a sample adventure regarding an evil cult. Although the adventure is straightforward (as befits an introductory adventure), I'm happy to note that the "aftermath" section introduces some fun complications for player characters to face. Some of the cultists may surrender (they think their demonic master will eventually win anyway, so why face tortuous death in this world?), and become prisoners. Transporting them back to civilization along with the captives the cultists had taken is a challenge that often times we overlook in a world of ambulances and police cars.
The file includes bookmarks, and the art is woodcut period-style illustrations so it shouldn't be too hard to print part of all of.
Colonial Gothic is a solid True20 adaptation (and I love True20), a solid historical game (and I love historical games) and a solid horror game (and I love horror games.) Is someone pandering to me specifically?!?! This seems almost suspicious. Anyway, I give it high marks and a strong recommendation.
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