San Angelo: City of Heroes 1.5
From: Gold Rush Games
Reviewed by: Butch Curry
San Angelo: City of Heroes 1.5 is a new Action! System and Mutants and Masterminds Superlink supplement from Gold Rush Games. With kudos from gaming luminary Ken Hite and comics genius Kurt Busiek gracing the cover I'm not sure what I can add to the discussion about San Angelo: City of Heroes, but I'll give it the old college try.
From the back cover:
"The Origins Award-nominated modern city setting is now available for the Action! System and M&M; Superlink! San Angelo: City of Heroes details the fictional city of San Angelo. Contains hundreds of NPC's and locations throughout the city and surrounding environs, including important and notable "normals"."
How does it play?
First things first: You might be wondering what the '1.5' business is all about. San Angelo was originally published as a Hero System supplement (released back in '98, I believe). This version strips out the Hero stat blocks and replaces them with dual stats, for both the Action! System and Mutants and Masterminds. More recent Gold Rush products like The Dragon's Gate have been triple-statted with all three. The upcoming San Angelo 2.0 will be triple-statted as well as receiving some other revisions and updates. In the meantime, though, Action! and M&M; fans have something to sing about with San Angelo.
I only have one complaint (albeit a minor one) about San Angelo, and since it relates to the books previous edition I'll go ahead and mention it here at the outset. There are a lot of NPC's in the book, many of them super-powered as you might well imagine. These super characters have a 'Powers/Tactics' section in their write-ups, and although the Hero System statblocks are long gone, the Powers/Tactics for most of them still refer to the Hero versions of the characters. (Amok, a brick supervillain, attacks opponents 'at full OCV', for example.) I imagine most of these references can be interpreted, so at most it's just a rather annoying oversight.
Don't let that dissuade you, though; it's just a tiny glitch in comparison to the sheer volume of good material here. Every aspect of life in the city, from the local government to the religious centers, from organized crime to professional sports, and from the hottest new restaurant to life on the streets is laid out in detail. It's not the detail that's so amazing, though. It's impressive, of course, and the amount of time and research that had to have gone into the book was certainly many times that of books of similar size. The real trick here is that not only is all of this interesting to read, but the authors have also found a way to apply even the smallest details to your game in one way or another as well as maintain a feeling of verisimilitude in every corner.
This is accomplished mainly through judicious use of boxed text peppered on almost every page. If an NPC or location doesn't have an obvious game application, as likely as not you'll find a Campaign Tip right next to it with a clever idea or two on what to do with it. The quotations from various San Angelo citizens - printed in comic style word balloons, naturally! - seemed like a waste of space on my initial scan of the book. The more I read the book and the quotes, though, I realized how much they added to capturing the feeling of San Angelo as not just a real place, but a place I wanted to game in. (My favorite: a mother's excuse note to her son's school, stating that he'd missed school because he found a weird key that opened a dimensional gateway, and that the school should contact the local superhero group HQ if they wanted more details.) That the city is so fully realized in so little space (under 200 pages!) is the crowning achievement.
And one last bit of praise: I've done about 150 reviews for GamingReport. That's a lot of books that've come across my desk. Most of them, once the review is written, go up on the shelf and don't come back down again. (It's a metaphorical shelf for PDF books, but you get the idea.) Not so for San Angelo; my long-running San Francisco-based Mutants & Masterminds game has now taken up residence in San Angelo, and my players and I couldn't be happier.
How does it read?
The density of material here makes San Angelo remarkably readable and re-readable. This is one of those books that you can keep coming back to over and over again, discovering inspirational and informational new material each time. None of the subjects are beaten into the ground; it's more like a really good travel guide to a city, with stat blocks.
How does it look?
This edition still has the 'classic' art of the original; it's kind of fun to look at the artwork of some of my favorite artists, like Storn Cook, and compare it to their recent work to see how far they've advanced. It's still good, but compared to more recent RPG's it does come off as dated.
The overall look of the book is admittedly very busy. With all the quotes, campaign tips, newspaper clippings, and other sidebars, therei s a lot going on here. Once you realize that the book doesn't take itself too seriously, though, it stops feeling busy and just starts feeling fun.
Is it worth it?
If you just can't wait for (or just aren't interested in, if you don't play Hero) the 2.0 edition, you'd be hard pressed to find a better superhero sourcebook than San Angelo: City of Heroes 1.5. And even if you don't play a supers game, the city of San Angelo can serve as a backdrop for almost any sort of modern game. It's simply brilliant. Check it out.
For more details on Gold Rush Games and their new Action! System and Mutants and Masterminds Superlink supplement "San Angelo: City of Heroes 1.5" check them out at their website GoldRushGames.com, and at all of your local game stores.
(Product Summary)
San Angelo: City of Heroes 1.5
From: Gold Rush Games
Type of Game: Action! System and Mutants and Masterminds Superlink supplement
Written by: Patrick Sweeney & Mark Arsenault
Cover Art by: Storn Cook
Interior Art by: Steve Bryant, Storn Cook, et al
Number of Pages: 176
Retail Price: $27.95 (US)
Item Number: GRG3201
ISBN: 1-890305-04-9
Email: mark@goldrushgames.com
Website: GoldRushGames.com
Reviewed by: Butch Curry