In Dark Alleys, 25th June.
In Dark Alleys is a horror RPG.
Here’s a sample Supernatural Skill from the 288-paged paperback:
"Birth Servant: The PC must be in a body with a uterus and vagina to use this skill. The PC gives birth to a servant which does a pre-determined task or follows orders. Servants look like bloody fetuses which crawl around on all-fours. It takes at least 4 rounds to estate and give birth to the servant."
That’s right. In Dark Alleys is not a RPG for your Catholic grandmother to find on your coffee table and to start to read through. To the credit of Vajra Enterprises there is a page of warnings right at the start of the book; violence, sex ... |
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World of Darkness: Chicago, 2nd February.
This is a dangerous book for me. World of Darkness: Chicago is my first peak at a supplement for the "new" World of Darkness. In many ways, Chicago is a fresh start. My own view is that the previous World of Darkness did not mix well. Vampire was great. Vampire with lupines was great. Vampire mixed with Werewolf was fell significantly short of great. A lack of coordination and a plethora of shoehorns was partly to blame for this. Chicago has a key role here. Chicago is a cross-over book. If you play or Story tell in the new Vampire, Werewolf or Mage then this could be the supplement for you. This is a dangerous book for me because it may wake ... |
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Etherscope, 19th December.
Etherscope is a brilliantly original game. The cooperation between Goodman Games and Malladin’s Gate Press has produced a game with strong and powerful contrasts.
Etherscope blends Victoriana with a fusion of cyber and steampunk. It’s hard to imagine that cyberpunk and steampunk are anything but mutually exclusive or perhaps only possible through time travel or technological differences between planets in a space game. Nevertheless, Etherscope has neither time nor space travel and is, in fact, set in the 20th Centaury.
Imagine that the world did not abandon research into Faraday’s concept of "the Ether". The concept of the Ether, eit ... |
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Timestream, 11th December.
If you’re in a gaming group who regularly discuss RPG publishers like Hamsterprophet Productions then you’re in an elite minority.
Roleplaying a hobby which attracts talented and intelligent individuals and its no surprise that some of these guru-gamers occasionally produce an RPG as a project of their own, as an artistic, scientific or intellectual experiment. Once and a while these intellectually spawned games make it on to the market too as the objective of either exploring the commercial aspects of the hobby, raising a writer or artists profile or the not unrealistic desire to re-coup on the vast effort that goes into each game.
R ... |
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Capes, 23rd November.
Capes is a superhero RPG with a difference. Capes is very different to most RPGs.
There is no Gamesmaster for a start. No DM. Storyteller, Guide, GOD (games operation director) or any other synonym for "the guy who runs the plot" is applicable in Capes. In Capes the players take turns describing what could happen, who tries to make what happen and then what actually happens. In fact, in core rules Capes the players can even play different characters in turn or randomly. Capes quickly concedes that perhaps some people roleplay to get (and by getting) a feel for and into the personality of a character they’ve created. As an optional rule yo ... |
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The Shadow of Yesterday, 31st October.
I’ve had The Shadow of Yesterday on the to-review list for too long. This RPG is one of those indie hits (as tend to dwell in the Indie Press Revolution) which deserves both its success and the tag "indie". We’ve designer notes and a list of influences; kudos calls, pings, pats on the back and in-print networking for other indie RPG designers and essay writers. Every second time I read through The Shadow of Yesterday I found the inspiration / homage too strong, too much of a reference to the "roleplaying is an art form, darling" brigade of clique appointed elite authors. I found it entirely appropriate on every odd reading.
I could have be ... |
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Dark Legacies Campaign Guide, 10th October.
One of my favourite d20 settings of late has been Dark Legacies. This 'dark future’ setting first found its way onto our gaming tables in the form of a player’s guide. It’s a little later on and I’m pleased to have the Dark Legacies Campaign Guide in my collection now.
Dark Legacies is set on a post apocalyptic post apocalyptic Earth. Yes, there are at least two apocalypses in there and as a result the planet really does not resemble our own. We have some fantasy races, a touch of magic and a demon problem but Dark Legacies is quintessentially grim and gritty. The aspect of Dark Legacies which had not sunk in fully from the player’s guid ... |
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Battle Armor II: Bigger, Tougher, Cooler, 25th July.
"Bigger, Tougher, Cooler" … since I’m a sucker for dashing straplines let’s have another from Battle Armor: II. "He Who Lives By the Sword... Better Have Good Armor" Actually, I see that "Bigger, Tougher, Cooler" is emblazed into the title of Interactive Design Adventures’s sequel to Battle Armor. This is just one of many products surface as a result of the latest flurry of activity from Interactive Design Adventures and weirdly it’s not so far flung from the company’s highly respected d20 were-creature supplement Lunar Knights. Power armour, as Owen Stephens (author) points out, is a return to the knight. Here we have the valiant warrior w ... |
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Mindcraft, 20th July.
Mindcraft is a d20 psionics product from Alea Publishing. For the most part Mindcraft is a d20 supplement you would use instead of the usual suspects on the psionic scene. You can use Mindcraft as an additional system and power alongside "traditional" psionics butI'm not sure it's a good idea. Quoting directly from my reviewer’s notes – "replace psionics - or not if you want (and are mad)".
For many gamers the first question to ask might be whether they want mindcraft/psionics in their fantasy romp in the first place or not. Mindcraft does its best to charm its way into our D&D games. At one point I thought the angle it was going for ... |
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The Qalashar Device, 18th July.
If you’re looking for a follow on from Raid on Ashkashem then The Qalashar Device is it. One of the strengths of this Sword’s Edge Publishing product is that you can use The Qalashar Device as a stand alone adventure as well as part two in a series. In fact, there’s even an appendix of plot hooks to help get your characters involved and there are alternative endings. If you’re following from the Raid on Ashkashem, through The Qalashar Device and want to carry on to The Khorforjan Gambit then we conclude with hooks to the next part. If you don’t want any loose ends then they’re tied up for you.
The Qalashar Device is suited for about 4 ch ... |
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Blood Runs Cold, 17th July.
Blood Runs Cold is a classic fantasy adventure from 0one Roleplaying Games. As you might conclude this is a d20 Dungeons and Dragons (3.5) romp.
$6.50 US will get you the 44-paged PDF. 0one Games are masterful cartographers (I just have to mention this every time) and Blood Runs Cold is nicely spiced with great maps and illustrations. The cover is spectacular – if a little creepy. I like it.
This adventure is quite high level. The adventuring party will range from four to six characters and they’ll be between 10th and 12th level. You’ll need a mixed group and will certainly need one mage and one fighter. Need a fighter? I’ve taken that ... |
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Quick & Easy: SRD 3.5: Classes, Skills & Feats, 17th July.
This one is for hardcore techophile d20 authors and few other people. Quick & Easy: SRD 3.5: Classes, Skills & Feats is a re-print of the SRD (System Reference Document) for d20 3.5 edition.
If you have the core Player’s Handbook then you already have these rules. If you have an internet connection you can read the SRD for free (and easily) at the The Hypertext d20 SRD website. This Quick and Easy PDF just looks at classes, skills and feats (hence the name) and costs $3.00. This PDF doesn’t print out very well at all. If you try you’ll find there are gaping holes in it.
The main selling point of the PDF is actually a marketing ... |
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The Conjunction, 17th July.
The Conjunction from Glen Taylor Games is a write up of that old New Year’s Eve roleplaying special – the players find themselves in a dangerous and thrilling fantasy world. If that concept isn’t an old classic for you or if this seems a little unclear then read on. If you know what I'm talking about then keep reading too. The Conjunction will work in either case.
There’s a fake handout in The Conjunction. There’s a player’s handout for the roleplaying game "Conjunctions" published in 1977 by the Silver Equinox Games Company. The supplement is a bare bones edition. Players take five minutes to whisk up some characters (any more time than t ... |
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Kevin and Kell the Roleplaying Game, 14th July.
I must admit that I certainly did not expect to be writing a review for Kevin and Kell the roleplaying game! It’s not that that the super popular web comic by Bill Holbrook isn’t suited to an RPG conversion it’s just that the penny took a while to drop. It's a clever gamer who would have predicted this RPG franchise.
On reflection Kevin and Kell is perfect for RPG adaptation. Why? Although the comic is named "Kevin and Kell" it is actually about a much wider cast and a dominant setting. Just as many of the comic strips themselves work without actually featuring either Kevin or Kell, so could your plot. Domain is a richly flavoured world. ... |
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Slavelords of Cydonia, 12th July.
Yus. Pick up Slavelords of Cydonia and you’ll feel that is has the "Yus Factor!". This is a chunky hardback and, to be honest, this is what you’d expect for any adventure supplement that promised to take your players from Level 1 to Level 20. Chunky adventure supplements enjoy the "Yus factor".
According to Bad Axe Games an 'adventure supplement’ is a product which contains an adventure and has room for standard supplement-esq rules. Slavelords of Cydonia has over 230 pages – it has room for both an adventure and supplemental rules.
One of the reasons why Slavelords of Cydonia appeals to me so much is that it’s a Grim Tales supplement. ... |
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Egyptian Adventures: Hamunaptra, 10th July.
The Mythic Vistas series from Green Ronin is a real winner. Years into d20 we’re still able to attempt to enthuse and reinvigorate players through campaign settings with a twist. I carefully didn’t say "original campaign settings" there because such a tag couldn’t be applied to Hamunptra and it’s Egyptian Adventures. We’ve been to fantasy Egypt before but anything that’s not a Tolkien-D&D clone is worth looking at.
There’s a disclaimer-cum-introduction from Monte Cook at the start of book one which reminds us that this isn’t a historically accurate supplement and the goal here is to create a flavourful campaign setting. It sounds sill ... |
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Frontier Towns: Fort Griffin, Volume 2, 9th July.
Sidewinder: Recoiled from Dog House Rules is one of the d20 campaign settings that Gamers-in-the-Know know about. This is a wild west setting which get the best out of the d20 system whilst maintaining a realistic, strong and fun flavour.
Dog House Rules put a lot of work into the setting and flavour. We’ve already had Frontier Towns: Fort Griffin from them where we were able to tour Fort Griffin, read about interesting locales and the noteworthy NPCs there. Interesting locations combine with NPCs to form plot hooks.
This is a review of the next Frontier Town supplement and it’s for Fort Griffin. Oh? Again? Strictly speaking we’re vi ... |
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The Smoke: 1867 Edition, 8th July.
This is fitting. It’s terribly unusual to be reviewing a supplement like The Smoke: 1867 Edition as it covers Victorian London. I was working on this review on July the 7th 2005 when our own London was hit by a series of terrorist bombs. Through the chance of one cancelled meeting I was not in my seat on the Kings Cross train which was due into the station at the time of the blast. RPGs are nothing on real life but it does seem appropriate to be reflecting on the history of a city. London has seen such strife and recovered, returned and reinvested itself with such strength again and again.
The Smoke: 1867 is a Victoriana supplement and th ... |
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Dark Masters, 8th July.
Dark Masters is a d20 PDF sourcebook from 0one Roleplaying and due to some carefully arranged hair and a belt there isn’t a picture of a naked demon women on the front cover. This is Ishale – one of Baalzebub’s daughters, lovers and generals. She’s able to grant spells of up to the 7th level for people who worship her as a deity even though she isn’t.
It’s this demon/devil worship which forms the core of Dark Masters. This sourcebook lists demons and devils with a mind for not only given them stats but for discussing what they can grant their followers and how their church is organised. If the nearly naked women (with spider legs growing o ... |
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Foes of Freedom, 4th July.
Foes of Freedom is a Mutants and Masterminds supplement from Green Ronin. Our first concern is likely to be; "Is it as good as the other Mutants and Masterminds supplement? Yes, I suppose it is.
The first caveat to make is that Foes of Freedom is very definitely an enemy book. If you prefer making your own your villains – as many gamers do – this probably isn’t the book for you. However, as both a boon and a bane, Foes of Freedom is interlinked with other Freedom City plot strands - the Atom family, Terminus and Dr Metropolis, etc, etc. This means that if you don’t fancy having a mass of NPCs but do fancy having all the canon world comme ... |
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Valus, 3rd July.
Every now and then an original d20 fantasy roleplaying game shows its head. It’s true, even today this is possible. If you are chuckling sceptically then I’ll cite Valus as an example.
Valus can be brutal. This is a world born without love. I tend to make notes as I flick through RPGs and supplements these days (a tell of someone who’s written too many reviews) and as I began to soak up the differences in this world setting from the countless others on my shelves I scribbled down "without love". For all my efforts "A World Born Without Love" is the big strapline at the top of the blurb so I shouldn’t claim any success in divining the autho ... |
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The Magician's Companion, 27th June.
Visionary Entertainment Studio are doing their player-base proud. VISE really is not the largest RPG publisher but they really are giving their "The Everlasting" product line a lot of support.
The Everlasting is slightly unusual in that there are four core books and players only need one of them to get "modern fantasy" game world. The Magician’s Companion is a supplement for any of the core books. Not surprisingly this supplement dabbles with the magic rules and use of magic in the game.
US$17.95 for 100 pages isn’t usual but this is a half sized book – the pages are not as large as most RPG products. Mind you, RPG supplements of this ... |
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Dungeons of Doom, 19th June.
Ed Bourelle is one of the elite cartographers, one of the very best in the industry and his work is often found associated with d20 products. We see that here with Dungeons of Doom where he teams up with d20 experts Green Ronin. In fact if you’re used to Green Ronin products then you might not even notice the d20 logo is missing from Dungeons of Doom: A Compendium of Fantasy Maps.
No d20 logo means no d20 stats. This product is simply a collection of cartography. It doesn’t need stats and I’m glad for however many extra maps squeezed into the book as a result of this.
The introduction on page one is the single largest bulk of text in t ... |
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Blood and Relics, 19th June.
This review of Blood and Relics looks at the paper edition from RPGObjects. The very fact that the supplement made it from PDF to paper is a good sign. The reception of the first Blood and Relics must have done well the toughest test which all roleplaying products face – sales. I can well believe this. The "Blood and …" range from RPGObjects is very good investment for any d20 Modern fan.
I was pleased to see, right in the introduction, a note to say that this edition of the book focuses on the Blood War. That’s the strife between the Sang Real, servants of the High Power, against the Caeder, those aligned with Dark Powers.
The phrase ... |
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Artifacts of the Ages: Rings, 17th June.
Zzzz.
It’s through no fault of the production quality nor quirk of The Game Mechanics’ writing style that this book put me to sleep.
Artifacts of the Ages: Rings is actually 80 pages running through magical ring ideas. It’s US$17.95. Magic rings… hmm. What an original idea for a fantasy roleplaying setting! I must pay for ideas and inspiration there. No really. Just in case we might have forgotten Artifacts of the Ages: Rings reminds us that magical rings feature in such books as Lord of the Rings. The introduction uses a few pages to tell us what to expect in the book (magic rings, perhaps) and how to use the book (as a source of ma ... |
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Dark Inheritance, 16th June.
I like the idea of a godgene. Maybe I have it. Maybe you do? It’s easy to see the attraction to Dark Inheritance. This is a modern setting d20 game with a good twist or two. This is a Spycraft game but rather than being another d20 RPG from the AEG production presses this is an offering from Mythic Dreams Studios. You’ll have to look closely at the hard cover to notice the Mythic Dreams logo though.
Dark Inheritance announces there are no story arches as if it was a good thing. The plot behind the game isn’t going to evolve… That’s not generally what I want to hear. Then again it’s a rare game which actually evolves. Fair call to Dark Inhe ... |
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The Centre of the Universe, 3rd April.
This review is a two-in-one deal. I’m looking at Timeless Games’ The Centre of the Universe which is available as a PDF from RPGNow. This review is not based of the standard PDF though. I have the 230 (ish) page manual in "real book" form in front of me. I’m taking advantage of the new RPGNow and Lulu deal. You can pay to have PDFs sent to you in book form. It’s print on demand.
My first opinion on Print on Demand was a shameless assumption. I just imagined someone with a big colour printer sticking pages into a document binder. This wouldn't be a real book. This would be something I’d do for a report at work. Assumptions are typically wro ... |
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Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, 2nd April.
"Welcome to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay" … begins the introduction. At last. This is a review of the second edition – the new – Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying. I grew up with Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and I, like so many gamers around the world, have had to wait years for the second edition. There’s a lot of pressure to get this right.
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay was a Games Workshop product which was picked up and maintained by Hogshead Publishing. Hogshead blipped when it changed owners (it closed and was then bought) and the original rights for their products reverted back and so Warhammer FRP became a Games Workshop product again. Ga ... |
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The Undying Lands: Minigame issue #4, 26th March.
"Most of us today know that the "fairy tales" we were told as children are watered-down, G-rated versions of the originals. Stories of fairies granting wishes, doing our housework, or replacing teeth with coins are modern sugar-coated versions. In the original stories, the witch eats Hansel and Gretl. These stories weren’t told to children to amuse them; they were told to terrify them and teach harsh lessons. Even children smart enough to leave a trail disappear if they wander into the woods.
The question is, where do they go?"
Why waste effort in writing an introduction for Valent Game’s The Undying Lands minigame when this stand alone ... |
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Emerging Forms - Ryonth, 25th March.
The Emerging Forms series from Primal Urge Games sets out to break the mould. The goal here is to step away from the Tolkienised elves, dwarves and orcs. As a series Emerging Forms makes a good start but starts to dive in originality – the key selling point – as race after race seemed to be an insectoid, swamp dweller which seemed to have a biological personality (a pit trap of design common in D&D).
The Ryonth are different. For a start the Ryonth are not insect like in appearance and do not like the swamps. In fact, the Ryonth dwell in the desert. Ah yeah; the Ryonth do all tend to act the same but this is a valid cultural thing – i ... |
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The Red Star Campaign Setting, 23rd March.
"If you’re new to The Red Star then you are in for something special, as it is not often in our world of remakes you get to read a setting that is truly original. You may have heard rumors about weird telekinetic weapons called "hooks" and "hailers," about sorceresses who can turn themselves into living beams of energy to lay waste to their state’s enemies, about heroes who continue to fight for their people though they have fallen in battle.
Nothing you've heard secondhand will prepare you for just who cool what you’re about to read is. We envy you."
I’m one of these people. I’d not even heard rumours about telekinetic weapons ... |
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The Lostfinders Guide to Mire End, 22nd March.
A|State was a nominee in three categories in the Weird GameWyrd Game Awards in 2004. The dark Sci-Fi game was nominated for "Possessor of the Wow Factor", "The RPG or Supplement Most Likely to Spark the Imagination" and "The Most Original RPG or Supplement". Nominations like that suggest it’s going to be a hard RPG to follow with a supplement. Supplements struggle to wow as much as the first game, don’t have the same first impression impact on the imagination and by their very nature are hard to count as just as original.
There’s a lot of weight on the slim 32-paged shoulders of The Lostfinders Guide to Mire End. Yeah. That is a slim page ... |
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Monster Geographica: Underground, 21st March.
Here’s a blast from the past - Out of the Pit was published in 1985 and was a round up of the best monsters from the Fighting Fantasy series. How many thousands of gamers must be younger than Out of the Pit?
This isn’t a review of Out of the Pit (which, I fear, does best as a childhood favourite rather than a supplement of any innovation) but this might well be a review of d20 fantasy’s own Out of the Pit.
Expeditious Retreat Press’s offering is a 14cm x 21.5 cm book (half size, essentially) and has that browny-red colour. Monster Geographica: Underground, of course, has a front cover dominated by a monster. There’s 200 pages of monste ... |
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Dark Legacies Player's Guide, 20th March.
The biggest limitation in Dark Legacies: Player’s Guide is that it is just a player’s guide. Here we have a refreshingly different d20 supplement which dips into what promises to be a hugely interesting campaign world but doesn’t explore further. This, of course, is what a player’s guide will do – there’s enough world information here to make your character.
This is Earth. This was Earth. The planet fell into the Abyss and with the eternal night came a plague of demons. Mankind lost control of Earth, mankind barely continued. When civilisation returned to the planet it was not humanity’s. The cruel and aloof Assar ruled. Dark Legacies ... |
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NPC Files: Rungie Rampholean, 14th March.
Rungie Rampholean the Master of Traps will set you back a gigantic $1 currently. That’s half the price of the usual whopping figure of $2. The discount might be money back for the entirely unpronounceable name of this NPC.
$1 for 22 pages is the sort of price that only PDF products can do. That’s fantastically cheap. If this were 22 pages, give or take for OGL and index foo, for original content then that would be fantastic. Original content isn’t really the strength of the NPC Files series.
NPC Files: Rungie Rampholean the Master of Traps is hugely crunchy. There are nearly twenty pages of stats. There are nearly twenty pages of d20 ... |
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Ssethregore: In the Coils of the Serpent Empire, 7th March.
Ssethregore: In the Coils of the Serpent Empire is much easier to read than it is to pronounce. Ssethregore. If it has a snake-like hiss about it then the tongue-twisting name has done its job. And yeah; the tag line "In the Coils of the Serpent Empire" does rather like the cat, er, snake out of the bag.
This is an Living Arcanis product from Paradigm Concepts (as Living Arcanis products tend to be).
We get 160 pages for about US$25.00 but In the Coils of the Serpent Empire is especially efficient with text and white space. There’s a lot of text – forgive me for not measuring exactly – but it looks at least one grade smaller than usu ... |
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Tribes of Mother Night, 27th February.
The Tribes of Mother Night are shape-shifters. They are the Ekhaet and share the world with the Haeloti. In the beginning there was Darkness and she had two sons, brothers, Eur and Haelot. I’ll skip the creation myth story… but it’s worth reading in the PDF as it’s written well. Essentially "man" ends up either worshiping Haelot, represented by the Sun, or being harassed by him. Those he harassed are saved by Darkness, she turns them into animals, and then when the danger passes they turn back.
There are seven countries on one small continent. Three largest of these countries are Ylosia, the Sun Empire. We have the collection of cities kn ... |
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Mutatis Mutandis: Minigame issue #3, 26th February.
Mutatis Mutandis is the third minigame magazine from Valent Games. The downside to GameWyrd being snowed under and months behind in reviews is that this magazine is far from being hot off the PDF press. The upside is that you can pick up Mutatis Mutandis more cheaply as Valent Games kindly drop the price for the back issues.
"Mutatis Mutandis" can commonly translate as "with the necessary changes" although the more literal translation would be "that having been changed which had to be changed". I’d like to seem clever and wise but I took that straight from the Mutatis Mutandis MUX website. Although the MUX is superhero based it has no (a ... |
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Emerging Forms - Rin, 24th February.
With Emerging Forms - Rin we return to the series from Primal Urge Games which sets out to break the mold for d20 races but which often dipped into the swamp to find inspiration. To date a decent percentage of the Emerging Form races have been insectoid too and this isn't the case for the Rin. A glance at the kick-arse bird-cum-thug on the front cover confirms that.
We pick up 15 pages about the Rin for a mere $2. This is the usual value for money we see from the PDF market.
Are the Rin thug like birds/humanoids? Perhaps. The usual mistake is to assume they're thick and slow whereas they're actually acute and cunning trappers. These xe ... |
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Bulldogs!, 24th February.
Bulldogs! is a Sci-Fi RPG which uses the d20 fantasy core set. From the outset this puts Bulldogs! at odds with d20 Future. Bulldogs! hit the shelves first but that’s little assistance when you compare the size and relative new appearance of Galileo Games to that of Wizards of the Coast. It’s fair to say that some gamers will be disappointed that Bulldogs! does not (could not) use d20 Future. It’s also fair to say that the fact Bulldogs! uses d20 fantasy – the most commonly distributed and widely played d20 version – is an advantage.
Bulldogs! is one of those d20 roleplaying games which strains against the d20 licensing rules. You can ... |
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The Cavalier's Handbook, 20th February.
This is a review of The Cavalier’s Handbook from Green Ronin. A Cavalier is typically a mounted warrior, a fighter on a horse (or a supporter of Charles I of England). It’s funny how the combination of mount plus fighter creates a new class angle in the way that doesn’t happen with the other classes. A ranger and mount – The Mongol’s Handbook? A bard and mount – The Troubador’s Handbook? A sorcerer and mount – The, um, er, Mounted Sorcerer’s Handbook? So even before I open up the book I already have expectations. I’m running a generic d20 game and I wanted mounted warriors to be significant, significant enough to warrant paying about $20 fo ... |
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Mutants & Masterminds Annual #1, 12th February.
Mutants and Masterminds is a rare RPG product. It started well. There are now lots of supplements for it. Mutants and Masterminds is still going well. This review looks at the first Mutants & Masterminds Annual.
If this supplement was just a list of more heroes or a pre-set adventure then it would… well, it would be just another supplement rather than an annual. The word "Annual" implies (at least to me) that if you’re going to buy one Mutants & Masterminds addition in the year then buy this one.
In fact we get Annual type material from Annual #1. It’s a hit. For example, the last couple of pages in the book are an errat ... |
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Trojan War, 12th February.
Green Ronin’s Mythic Vistas series tends to be jolly good. Ever since the surprisingly on-the-ball and widely acclaimed Testament it has been one to watch. With Trojan War we’re back to Earth of mythic history (and where the series name Mythic Vistas seems especially appropriate). With Trojan War we hit the highs of the series.
The term "Homeric" comes from the famous Homer and is used to safely describe both the Trojans and the Achaeans who besieged the city. Homeric also includes the deities of the time as they took a fairly active role in the ten year war. This isn’t splitting hairs. This is the attention to detail that helps the Tr ... |
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Disposable Heroes: Fantasy 4 (Villains), 6th February.
Politically Incorrect Games’s Disposable Heroes line is a tricky one to judge. Here we have paper miniatures and have not only to judge the quality but whether the series has legs.
The first GameWyrd review of Disposable Heroes discussed this. The quality of the illustration is there. These paper miniatures – shapes to cut, fold and glue – are easily good enough to use. In fact, any individual miniature is great. The biggest decision to make before splashing the cash is whether or not you’re buying a one hit wonder. This is the Fantasy Set 4: Villains and so there’s proof in the title. Politically Incorrect Games are supporting the s ... |
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Modern Backdrops, 6th February.
There are quite a few gems among the RPG PDF publishing world. RPGObjects’ Modern Backdrops is one of them.
The question is, I suppose, does a PDF gem translate successfully into a paper book supplement? Is Modern Backdrops as good on paper as it is on my laptop? It’s the same product but there are differences. For example, I can’t print out the maps in the paper product (though I could mess around with photocopiers). On the other hand the Modern Backdrops book has that nice tactile feeling in my hands. And in truth the physical presence of the book isn’t so important to me (though there are gamers who won’t touch PDFs, so to speak) a ... |
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SRD Illustrated: Core Classes, 30th January.
The Le have bundled together free or low cost goodies to produce a luxury. The text in SRD Illustrated: Core Classes is all free. The Systems Reference Document (SRD) for d20 is a collection of rules which can be used by other d20 products. They’re free. If you don’t mind downloading rich text documents and putting them together then you don’t need this product. If you have the Player’s Handbook then you don’t need this illustrated PDF.
The artwork is nearly as un-original as the text. Some of it comes form ClipArt (as does plenty of GameWyrd’s) and others come from Mongoose’s Character Portraits: Fantasy Heroes.
What’s the point of pa ... |
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Emerging Forms - Grizimilak, 20th January.
There’s a swamp theme running through the first of Primal Urge Games’ Emerging Forms series. The D'Ah Rien and Aegire from the first two PDFs are insectoid races who live in the swamps. In this issue the Grizimilak also tend to live in the swamp but like urban areas too.
The Grizimilak are not insect like. Is that important? It’s worth noting because one of the goals of Emerging Form, in fact the main goal, is to get a way from stereotypical elves, dwarves and orcs. Emerging Forms would be escaping a trap only to fall into a slightly different one. Different stops being different once it’s done often enough. If you couldn’t care less abo ... |
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Battlemaps: Dungeon Rooms Vol.IV, 15th January.
"Get me out of this hell hole!" ... ah, the famous quote from Baldur’s Gate. One of my regular gaming groups still uses it and chances to do so spring up all the time in RPGs. The first map in 0one Roleplaying Games’ Dungeon Rooms 4 is one of those occasions. There are those tell-tale coal cart tracks on the grubby ground, the wooden carts themselves and the fire tinted shadows. It’s only on the second glance that you see (or I saw, with my one point in perception) half the room is stone wall.
The rest of the dungeon room collection is inside the stone building. The first tile casts its influence on to the rest of the 37 paged PDF there’s ... |
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Sweet Chariot, 10th January.
Sweet Chariot is a StarCluster RPG. Or, um, it seems equally correct to say that StarCluster is a Sweet Chariot game. You don’t need one to play the other but the two RPGs are closely tied. StarCluster is a space epic with a sweeping scale. Sweet Chariot picks a focus – the world of Chariot and surrounding system.
The object of Sweet Chariot, we’re told, is to survive. Flying Mice’s occult horror Blood Games feels more like a survival game than this. There you have werewolves and vampires who’d be happy to maul here. Sweet Chariot’s threats to survival are more insidious. Here political rivals, trading opponents and the environment are thr ... |
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Blood & Circuits, 9th January.
When Blood & Circuits first appeared on GameWyrd's radar it was listed as d20 Modern supplement. After reading through it I changed that on the WyrdRanks to d20 Future. You can certainly use Blood & Circuits with d20 Modern it’s just that you get to use more of it with d20 Future. You can’t invent or adapt a sci-fi weapon with d20 Modern (normally) but you can in d20 Future. Blood & Circuits extends up to Progress Level 9.
Don’t know what Progress Levels are? You’ll not have read d20 Future. This is no handicap. Blood and Circuits uses the SRD to reprint the Progress Level rules. This is exceptionally handy and the sort of qua ... |
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Modern Magic, 8th January.
I don’t tend to pay too much attention to blurbs in RPG supplements any more. The first sentence in Modern Magic tells us that magic is no longer confined to dungeons. I don’t need to read that. I know this is a d20 Modern magic supplement. I do like books which set out their goals early. The best way to buy an RPG product you have no word or mouth about nor can find any reviews in the style you like is to go to the local store and skim the first few pages for an introduction with goals. Modern Magic’s goals are worthy; add modern sensibility to traditional RPG magic and to expand d20 modern's repertoire by using real world beliefs.
I ... |
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Emerging Forms - D'Ah Rien, 5th January.
The D’ah Rein are the second strange race to be visited by Primal Urge Games’ Emerging Forms series. The Aegire, the race described in the first Emerging Form, are insectoids. The D’ah Rein are insectoids. The Aegire live in swamps. The D’ah Rein live in swamps. The Aegire are peaceful protectors. The D’ah Rein are peaceful tutors. The Aegire do not have a name until they’re mature. The D’ah Rein do not have a name until they’re mature.
Yeah. It’s true. There are some similarities between the Aegire of the first PDF and D’ah Rein of the second. That’s bad in way. In another way it works quite well. An imaginative GM could work with the fac ... |
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Dezzavold: Fortress of the Drow, 5th January.
It wasn’t that long ago since I reviewed Corwyl: Village of the Wood Elves. It’s a stalwart product. Corwyl is a setting-cum-adventure (the best sort of pre-packaged adventure, I think) and an extension for Bow & Blade. One of my grumbles about Corwyl is that it was fairly heavily entwined with Drow plot. Drow. Mleh. I’ll be stoned by some gamers for daring to suggest that the Drow are done to death and horribly dull. I don’t like them in my games and was disappointed to find them as baggage for Corwyl. This does not mean that all Drow books are boring. One of the best supplements for the dark elves is Plot and Poison.
Wouldn’t it ... |
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Unorthodox Fighters, 3rd January.
I’d argue with you if thought Unorthodox Fighters wasn’t good value at US $2 for nearly 30 pages. Sure, you might have to take off a few pages for the front cover, intro and d20 legal foo. On the other hand you add in 24 pages of appendix for OGL spells and feats. That’s about 50 pages for $2.
Yeah, The Le Games’ Unorthodox Fighers is a PDF product not a glossy hardback. That only matters to some gamers.
The Unorthodox Fighter’s worth, I think, is measured by its usefulness rather than the cost-per-page count. There’s a whole series of Unorthodox Class Books and it’s the "Unorthodox" title that really interests me. Unorthodox Fighters ... |
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Medieval Player's Manual, 31st December.
The Medieval Player’s Manual has 128 pages but it reads like a larger book. There are two reasons why that phenomenon can occur. The first possible reason is a bad one; lead page syndrome, when the book’s so bad and your stamina for it so depleted that pages might as well be made of lead for the effort it takes to turn the page. The second reason is a good one; the book is so enthralling and the author has managed squeeze line after line of killer material in that you end up combing through every word.
The Medieval Player’s Manual is a great book. I found myself pawing through each paragraph looking for more.
There’s a catch. A ... |
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Emerging Forms - Aegire, 30th December.
The introduction to Primal Urge Games’ first Emerging Forms says the supplement is a seed for players and for GMs. Hmm. I’m not sure this is the best tact for the introduction to take. The supplement is a seed for players insofar as it presents a new PC race. It’s rare that a new PC race actually helps inspire current PCs - in fact is can be an anti-seed as it de-enthuses players on their current character. The d20 supplement is more of a seed for GMs as a new race can inspire ideas for scenes, scenarios and even campaigns.
Although I think I see where Primal Urge is coming from with the seed idea –Primal Urge Games is all about allowing ... |
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HardNova ][: Space Opera Adventures, 23rd December.
When is HardNova 2 not HardNova 2? When it’s HardNova ][. Ha! Actually, I poke fun at typographical styling but I do have to admit the effect is quite catching. Politically Incorrect Games have really upgraded their website too. It is not just brand building, bells and whistles as we also have new extremely useful features available from the site. The point? Politically Incorrect Games are quite the wizard of the Indie Games Niche Industry and support their protects well. Sometimes the only risk in paying US $4.00 for a roleplaying game is that the publishers will fold within a year and you’ll be left with neither support nor official forums ... |
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Agility & Athleticism, 21st December.
Agility & Athleticism is the first in Eldersygn Press’ SkillCraft series. This review is based on a paper mockup of the product; with full art, layout and final editing and so is pretty much identical to the shop product in every way.
There are tick boxes in Agility & Athleticism which, in theory, you tick to record an easy reference of which skill variants are allowed in your active game. The concept of pencilling ticks (or checks and checkboxes) in a book will fill some people with horror. I know gamers who wrap their books up in brown paper to keep them safe. I know gamers who don’t consider a supplement accepted until it’s ... |
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Blood Games, 21st December.
Blood Games has "Occult Horror Role-Playing" printed on the front cover twice. It’s printed in text and it’s spelt out with the cover illustration. We see a morbid white hand with long, dangerous, nails hanging idly in the foreground while I weary, blood splattered, t-shirt wearing man rests against a red brick corner. Someone’s in trouble.
A key question is whether Blood Games is an occult horror role-playing game. It’s certainly a horror game with vampires and werewolves in a battle against mankind. The US$10.00 PDF ladles on the atmosphere with fiction text/favour peaces which bridge the chapters.
Although skills and education are co ... |
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Corwyl: Village of the Wood Elves, 20th December.
Corwyl: Village of the Wood Elves is really two books. The first book is an adventure setting and the second book is a companion for Green Ronin’s Bow and Blade.
Green Ronin have a winner with Bow and Blade and I’m interested in Corwyl being an extension for it.
I find Corwyl’s less attractive as a setting. There is a need for a supplement which helps GMs put together a believable elf village. When you have a race which lives as long as elves do, are as gentle on their natural surroundings and are as magical as elves are then their villages should be very different from ours. Would elves have villages at all?
In Corwyl ... |
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Book of Exalted Deeds, 19th December.
Wizards of the Coast’ the Book of Exalted Deeds faces a tough test if it wants to provide 192 pages of worthwhile resources for players who want to do more than just slap "good" in for their alignment and then act like neutral party members.
In the introduction we’re told that the Book of Exalted Deeds is for players. The book aims to ensure that a good alignment mean something. About 70 pages in this "players’ book" is given over to stats for Celestial Paragons and Monsters. Most of the book is full of prestige classes, magic, feats and equipment.
In truth no one was expecting nearly 200 pages of moral argument packaged along ... |
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Tibet RPG, 15th December.
I think the Tibet RPG is one of the surprise titles of the year. It’s perhaps still too early to see whether the Tibet RPG is one of the surprise successes of the year. It’s probably also far to say that Vajra Enterprises isn’t the most widely known publisher in the RPG marketplace either.
Vajra, by the way, is (I think) a Buddhist word. Hmm. We can suppose that Vajra Enterprises are enthusiastic about their Tibet RPG.
The Tibet RPG is good. It’s very good. After reading through the book I feel as if I’m a bit of an expert on Tibet and on Tibetan Buddhism. That’s exactly what the book needed to do. It’s an unusual subject area ... |
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Generic Locales - Devil's Mouth, 15th December.
"Generic Locations" sounds as if it’s going to be a quick, cheap and simple product. It is. Generic Locations is the name of the series. This particular Generic Location is Devil’s Mouth so that’s certainly not a generic name. I’ve got to say, "Let’s go to Devil’s Mouth" sounds about as tempting as "Let’s go to Innsmouth". The sly GM might change the name of the town.
There’s only four pages in Generic Locations – Devil’s Mouth. This isn’t a d20 product so we don’t loose a full page to legal text. We loose a full page to "Contact Eilfin" details instead (which don’t even take a full page). There’s a whole page for the front cover too. ... |
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Unorthodox Clerics, 14th December.
There’s a strong call to action for The Le’s Unorthodox Clerics. For US$2.00 you can download 33 pages of alternative Cleric based classes. That’s the sort of money you could find hiding in the back of the sofa.
If you’re indeed of variant Cleric classes there’s not much to consider here. Is there some catch? Is this a school boy product? Nope and no. The questions are more like; are these classes balanced, are these classes unorthodox (I’m especially keen on seeing classes which push the boat out and so pounce on any suggestion that that’s what I should be getting), are they easy to fit into your game and would you want to fit them into ... |
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EXplore: Alchemist's Laboratory, 13th December.
Um. This is a tricky one. 0one Roleplaying Games have an unusual product in EXplore: Alchemist's Laboratory.
This isn’t one of the fabulous battlemaps which 0one are famous for nor is it one of the pre-written adventures. In fact, the Alchemist’s Laboratory reminds me of virtual tours produced by estate agents.
The Alchemist’s Laboratory requires Mac’s QuickTime and the fact that this software is normally used to view movies says something about the product. The Alchemist’s Laboratory is a 3D tour of a medieval lab.
You begin with a view of a large wooden table loaded up with strange shaped bottles and vials. With QuickTime you can ... |
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Into the Blue, 13th December.
Into the Blue is a decent book. It’s just a hop and a splash a way from being a much better book. Into The Blue is Bastion Press’ d20 sea supplement. We’ve new races and spells as well as suitably detailed studies of different aquatic environments.
Where’s the hiccup? Despite explaining how alien an all water environment is, how hard it is to think in three dimensions and how deadly a mistake that can be – there’s no underwater combat rules here. We’re encouraged to use The Deep from Mystic Eye Games instead. I like license ability of d20 products to cross-reference and cite one another; used correctly this gives us, the buyers, more ... |
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Frontier Towns: Fort Griffin, Volume 1, 11th December.
The significant plot twist in Frontier Towns: Fort Griffin, Volume 1 is that we’re not looking at Fort Griffin but the nearby town known as The Flat. Despite the un-inspirational name The Flat is an interesting town due to the interesting Wild West characters who pass through and dwell there.
Frontier Towns: Fort Griffin is something of a hybrid product but it’s a good and a successful mix. We have some NPC background and NPC stat blocks. We have some adventure seeds. We have some cartography. All this comes together to nicely illustrate a roleplaying town.
This Dog House Rules is a supplement for the rather good Sidewinder: Recoiled ... |
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The Book of Guilds: Minigame issue #2, 11th December.
The Book of Guilds from Valent Games is rather good. The Book of Guilds is the second from the minigame series. Minigame is something of an ezine – with back issues being cheaper than the current one. There’s nothing particularly eziny about The Book of Guilds. It looks, reads and feels like a fully fledged supplement.
The series title "minigame" is especially fitting as The Book of Guilds really is a d20 mini game. There are character creation rules (which fall within the OGL), classes and a campaign world. There’s also a plot and NPCs. I don’t like pre-written adventures but I do like this where we’re given a set up, a really new twist ... |
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Raid On Ashkashem, 10th December.
I suppose you could say that Raid on Ashkashem is the d20 Modern version equivalent of a dungeon crawl. The objective here is to go in, get the baddies, get the goodies and get out.
On the other hand the Raid on Ashkashem is very different from a dungeon crawl. This is a believable scenario. Okay; it’s not a very original scenario and the big picture might require some suspension of disbelief but the nuts and bolts strive for accuracy.
Sword’s Edge Publishing have put together a military game set in the fictional country of Albenistan in the near East. Raid of Ashkashem leans heavily on the d20 modern gurus RPGObjects. You do need D20 ... |
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Lost Prehistorica, 9th December.
Dark Quest Games offer us Lost Prehistorica as a toolkit for exotic lands. The supplement isn’t an off the shelf campaign setting and it isn’t just a splatbook. A splatbook would just have stats and crunchy bits in it. Lost Prehistorica does seem to have a middle ground. There are plenty of stats in here; feats, classes, races and monsters and still plenty of flavour; game world discussions, observations of culture, trade and war.
We have typical PDF value here – 109 pages, new and quality art and Dark Quest’s usual professional layout for about US $6.00. Lost Prehistorica has PDF bookmarks and a "clicky contents" page too. It’s easy to fi ... |
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Charge!, 8th December.
Damn. Charge! isn’t a great book but it comes annoyingly close. Charge! is a good book. It’s one of those times I find myself spending more time wishing Charge! had gone that extra mile and been perfect for me and less time reflecting on how well it does almost everything else.
In my mind Charge gets off to a great start. The book outlines what it hopes to achieve. Charge! is about war and aims firstly to make war an important part of fantasy worlds again (it’s central in Middle Earth, after all) and secondly to ensure Player Characters feel they’ve a real role to play in the war.
This is classic. There are d20 skirmish rules ou ... |
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Unorthodox Monks, 6th December.
Gosh. Two bucks for thirty pages – you can’t fault that. The Le’s Unorthodox series tours through d20 D&D’s core classes and for this review we’re looking at Unorthodox Monks.
With Unorthodox Monks we might expect to find alternatives to the traditional monk class. The first unorthodox alternative I thought of – and hoped for – was that of a monk. The traditional European monk, that is. Sure, since this is an action game we’d probably be looking at a Friar Tuck type monk; a jolly round man, with some mysticism, a belly laugh and a powerful punch. He might even have some healing abilities. But no; we’re not that unorthodox. We don’ ... |
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Seeds: Pulp II, 5th December.
There’s a mass of seeds from Expeditious Retreat Press and each one picks a genre and attempts to offer some inspiration. We’ve previously looked at horror and this review is a brief look at Pulp II.
"Brief" is a good word to use here. Seeds: Pulp is only a 6 page PDF. As this is nominally a d20 product we loose a page to the legal license. So it’s five pages then. If you discount the introduction then it’s 4 and a half pages long – but it’s only US $1.35 and has a print friendly version.
I wonder why this is a d20 product at times. There’s no d20 information here. As is standard for the Seeds series we’re only given a paragraph or th ... |
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APG Paper Tiles, 5th December.
Alea Publishing Group’s paper tiles are a simple animal with a simple purpose in life. We have full colour cartography (and a black and white one to be kinder on the printer).
Unlike other similar products in this market place APG Paper Tiles doesn’t try provide value for money (US $5) by giving us a wide selection of floor plans. Instead APG Paper Tiles (and this is volume 1) APG provides one basic template and offers slight modifications on it such as where the doorway is or whether the floor is stone paving or wooden tiles. The idea, I think, is that you can more easily stack these titles together to create large rooms and straight for ... |
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StarCluster 2, 5th December.
A 287-paged and fully fledged RPG for $12 (currently discounted to $10!) is only possible with electronic publishing. There’s something about StarCluster 2 that feels as if the game should be played around a table with ring bound folders full of rule printouts, game notes and character notes. That’s just as well, perhaps, as it’s the only way I can see StarCluster 2 being played. The PDF is far too large to for a GM to use ad hoc in a game; especially without bookmarks. The lack of bookmarks is surprising given that Flying Mice got the electronic contents page exactly right. You don’t want to flick to the end of a PDF to find the index. Ideal ... |
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The Clinic, 4th December.
This is a flexible product; it’s good for the original Dreamwalker and the Active Exploits Diceless Dreamwalker. The Clinic manages to cover these two bases by being very light on stats.
It’s easy for a Dreamwalker supplement to be light on stats as the alien dream creatures, the Taeniids, only come in a few shapes and sizes and core rule system is incredibly streamlined. You’re not supposed to be very good with numbers when you dream so this is probably a good thing!
The Clinic is free. You can pick it up for nothing at all. It’s 55 pages long, has numerous illustrations, bookmarks and new material. You can’t fault it for value for ... |
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Legends of Excalibur, 4th December.
RPGObjects’ Arthurian d20 series started life as two PDFs and have made it to the prestigious incarnation as a single hardback book. Legends of Excalibur has a mottled yellow-gold front cover which really makes it stand out. The next thing you notice as you begin to flick through the book are the colourful maps in the inside covers.
I’m not one of these people who need to have a pretty book or something to hold in order to order to appreciate good gaming material. I don’t dislike PDFs simply because they’re electronic. In fact Knight's Handbook and the Arthurian Campaign Guide are professionally done, nicely formatted and ... |
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Creatures of Freeport, 2nd December.
I think my initial reaction to Freeport – one of YUS! – is as much to do with the way I’ve fallen out of love with the setting as the supplements which came out after it. I had my own concept of the city setting and couldn’t shift it. The supplements designed to support the city only seemed to dilute my initial view and opinions on the setting. If you’re a Freeport fan, still, especially if you’ve a few supplements then there’s every reason to be optimistic about Creatures of Freeport. It’s a good looking book, it’s typically Green Ronin in presentation and has Graeme Davis’ name on the front cover (and Keith Baker too (who may well have writ ... |
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The Algernon Files, 30th November.
It’s virtually impossible (and probably unwise) to take a pre-packed collection of NPCs and plot ideas and import them straight into your game. We’re reminded of this in The Algernon Files. BlackWyrm Games joke with us, they promise not to send the gaming police around if we do tinker with this supplement. They don’t have time. They’re too busy. Hmm. The thing is... I hope they are. It would be a shame for BlackWyrm Games caught our attention with a 128-paged, hardbound, well illustrated and carefully planned product. I don’t think we’ve really seen them blip the radar much after The Algernon Files.
Algernon is a virtual butler, an ad ... |
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Seeds: Horror, 28th November.
There is a host (a garden, if you will) of seeds from Expeditious Retreat Press and Seeds: Horror is the 5th product.
Seeds: Horror (which I always refer to as Horror Seeds) is a quick hit from the d20 publisher. You’re looking at a mere US $1.35 in exchange for the PDF. That’ll be below the minimum checkout of e-tailers and must be bought as a "top up".
At best, Seeds: Horror is a top up. Each seed suggestion is a couple of paragraphs and there five pages of them (the sixth page being gobbled up by the demon of legal foo).
The first thing to note – and perhaps the only note of significance – is that Seeds: Horror is best used with ... |
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Thieves' Quarter: A City Quarters Sourcebook, 28th November.
The Game Mechanics’ and Green Ronin’s first City Quarter Sourcebook is Thieves’ Quarters. This is a review of the paper version which came out after the PDF original.
Comparisons between City Quarters and Freeport are inevitable so let’s rush to get them over and done with. The Thieves’ Quarter is set in the town of Liberty. The goal of the series (or one of them, I’d hope) is to build up Liberty quarter by quarter. Alternatively quarters can be used as microcosms in their own right. The plan, the hope, is that with just a little tinkering Liberty or the Thieves’ Quarter will be suitable for almost any setting.
I thought of Fr ... |
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1st Appearance: T.O.M.C.A.T.S, 27th November.
Just by doing TOMCATS Blue Devil Games have done themselves proud. Their first product, Poisoncraft: The Dark Art is a solid expansion for a traditional D&D d20 game. 1st Appearance: T.O.M.C.A.T.S. isn’t. This PDF is a Mutants and Masterminds Superlink.
I still remember my scepticism when M&M titled itself as "The World's Greatest Superhero RPG!" … but, as it happens, that superhero RPG has a damn good attempt at actually living up to that title.
1st Appearance: TOMCATS has a similar risky claim. The 1st Appearance series name relates to the wow factor of having the first appearance of a great character in the comic. Imagine ha ... |
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Monster Geographica: Underground, 25th November.
I don’t normally notice whether a PDF opens up to show its bookmarks or not. I like bookmarks in a large PDF and tend to notice when they’re missing or when using them annoyingly re-sizes the PDF.
This Monster Geographica from Expeditious Retreat Press is a large product. We get 200 pages for a mere US $5. It needs its bookmarks and has them. Okay, okay, why start waffling about bookmarks so soon? The first thing I noticed in Monster Geographica: Underground is that there are three lists of monsters. We have monsters by CR. We have monsters by Type. We have monsters by Alpha. Pause there. Have some more coffee. Monsters by Alpha equates t ... |
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The Complete Psionic Power Cards, 18th November.
Psionics are probably the most popular "minority" in D&D after the Drow. For D&D d20 we had the The Psionics Handbook early on in the life of the series. The SRD was updated to include the Expanded Psionics Handbook. There are also numerous third party Psionics products from the likes of Malhavoc and Mongoose.
There are a lot of individual psionic powers and it can be a real pain keeping track of them all. Complete Psionic Power Cards solves this problem with respect to the Wizards of the Cost psionic powers.
Psionic Cards are PDF creations which must be printed off, cut up and then – the tricky bit – aligned and stuck togethe ... |
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Artifacts II: Lawn of the Dead, 14th November.
I recalls rumours about the D&D movie sequel being something about a black orb. Wow. That’s a flash from the past. The Black Orb (commonly known as the Death Shard) is one of the artifacts from The Le Games’ Lawn of the Dead. This is the second product in the Artifacts series and follows on the heels of the Ducks of Doom.
In fact the title is probably the most interesting aspect of the product. The contents are all pretty similar to the Black Orb as we’ve the like of the Grey Club, Bone Sword of even Hazel’s Staff. It’s not all weapons as we’ve Grieg’s Violin too. It’s not a very nice Violin as, once a month; it summons a hoard of ... |
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Nocturne, 14th November.
Sleep comes to the game that’s End All Be All of RPGs. In other words, Nocturne is a supplement for BTRC’s EABA.
BTRC and Greg Porter are well known for their comprehensive game mechanics and, indeed, Greg Porter may say that mechanics is more his forte than game worlds but he can also write very well indeed. I love being won over by an introduction. If in these first few paragraphs I can be tempted into thinking "Hmm. Yeah. I like the sound of this," then that can carry me through to the end. It’s also great when a game gets in the same headspace as you. My train of thought went something along the lines of; ah, this a dream based R ... |
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QuickShots Mission File: Charlie, 14th November.
The Quick Shots series from The Brood is a good idea. For not much money and with the quick delivery of a PDF product you get 20 encounter ideas with just enough set up to get you going. The idea is that you can use them to plug a whole in a campaign or cover up for a lack of preparation (we all know how RealLife can steal much need game planning time). Even better; this is for d20 Modern rather than the already well supported D&D style d20 fantasy.
I quite liked Mission File: Alpha which was just geared towards vanilla d20 Modern but Mission File: Bravo which also used Urban Arcana was less engaging. Sadly, this edition of Quick Shot ... |
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Doom Striders, 12th November.
High fantasy meets mech. My first impressions, based largely on artwork, was of Zoids meets anime. I think Zoids haven’t quite died off yet so hopefully I’m not the only one who remembers them.
In other words we’re talking about great big suits of armour which are driven, rather than worn, by a captain and sometime a crew, animated by mechanics and powered by magic.
As the book itself points out – it’s a logical step for a high magic and decent technological society to make. If you have wizards who can create golems and artisans who might even be able to make printing presses, perhaps gun powder, certainly impressive mechanical ... |
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Poisoncraft: The Dark Art, 11th November.
Poisoncraft: The Dark Art is a d20 supplement on, yup, the dark art of poisons. Although we’re encouraged to look beyond the "dark art" and the role poison can play in nature as a defensive quality or hunting assist.
Poisoncraft is a thorough supplement and weighs in at 96-pages. Blue Devil Games like to use the word "complete" a lot. There’s even a note-cum-apology for the lack of psionics. At the time of release the expanded psionic rules – and edited SRD, the document Wizards release to guide third party publishers like Blue Devils Games - had not been released and it would have been impossible to cover them in sufficient detail. With ... |
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Portents and Visions, 10th November.
Portents and Visions is the Book of Hallowed Might II.
The first Book of Hallowed Might was good! It drew on Monte Cook’s strength and gave as a wider, rules friendly, scope for our divine spellcasters. It was all about options and game balance. We don’t get the same with Portents and Visions. There is less of Monte Cook’s natural talent here as there is much less in the way of alternative, balanced and mechanically clever rules. Portents and Visions is closer to a "traditional" d20 supplement; we’ve new spells, domains, feats, locations, prestige classes and a fresh pantheon of gods to bind them together. These sorts of supplements are t ... |
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Artifacts I: Ducks of Ultimate Doom, 8th November.
The Ducks of Ultimate Doom is a more traditional d20 supplement than you might first imagine. I know it surprised me.
This is a collection of artifacts for a d20 fantasy game. At the minute it costs only $1 but that’s a mark down from the common price of $2. What do you get for this exorbitant fee? You get 21 artifacts. I don’t think that’s bad value at all. This isn’t a Word document simply dumped into a PDF file. We have a landscape version for onscreen reading, a printer friendly PDF and even a rich text file version if we want to copy and paste.
I’m not quite sure what’s open content in the PDF so let me put that to good use, combi ... |
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Quick Shots Mission File: Bravo, 8th November.
Quick Shots Mission File: Bravo is a collection of twenty encounter set ups for the busy or winging GM. The idea here is that if the players do something unexpected, you need to pad out some part of the game, you need to distract the group or you just need something quick then one of these twenty encounters will suffice. Each encounter suggestion has a variant or two and this helps a great deal.
Quick Shots is a d20 Modern supplement which requires the use of Urban Arcana.
"If you don’t like it, don’t buy it" is The Brood’s strapline. It’s a good call. I think there are gamers who’ll throw their arms up in disgust at Quick Shots ... |
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Masterwork Maps: Temples and Shrines, 6th November.
It’s been more than two years since a review of Temples and Shrines first appeared on GameWyrd. Darkfuries have put these two years to good use, their product range has expanded, they’ve moved from HTML products, to PDF and to paper and they’ve built on their reputation.
The original Temples and Shrines was an HTML bundle of maps. It just meant that you flicked between the cartography in the same way as you’d navigate a web site. This version of Temples and Shrines is less hi-tech but more familiar with gamers. The paperback version is greatly enhanced; we’ve fully detailed NPCs (d20 system 3.0 and notes for 3.5) and even the maps have be ... |
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Bloodlines, 6th November.
Gosh, I suppose you might see this review of Bloodlines as being a touch late. It’s just missed Halloween. But no; this review is later than that, Bloodlines has been out for longer than that and in both d20 and for Savage Worlds.
Bloodlines is an adventure. So if you’re worried about spoilers then turn away in a bit – but not yet. Bloodlines is a d20 adventure with homage, perhaps with homage to Call of Cthulhu, but this isn’t Call of Cthulhu and you don’t need the book to play. You need d20 Modern.
Bloodlines is a 12 to Midnight game. That’s why I don’t consider a discussion about horror RPGs as a spoiler. If you know 12 to ... |
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Biplane Barmy, 24th October.
Tally ho! I say old boy, this game’s a bit whiz, wot?
Biplane Barmy is one of those games which just seem to count as roleplay. You "play the role" of a biplane captain. I suppose. At a stretch anyway. You pick up experience points. In truth Biplane Barmy, from Fat Jonny Games, is a very simple biplane war game. It’s the sort of game that roleplayers are naturally drawn to.
Biplane Barmy is certainly the sort of game you can play between roleplaying sessions or just after lunch or dinner and before you resume one long session. This isn’t a minutely accurate system, a war game that strives for perfection through detail or validation th ... |
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Fantastic Fortresses: Castles and Keeps, 19th October.
I despise being here. I have nothing but contempt for my master. I loathe serving another being, but it will soon end.
I think that’s cracking start to an RPG supplement. It grabs your attention. It’s perhaps surprising that Fantastic Fortresses: Castles and Keeps keeps your attention. Essentially, this is a book of maps. Darkfuries are one of the industries best cartography publishers. In Castles and Keeps Darkfuries show their other great strength – writing. Whereas good writing not unusual for an RPG supplement (though not as common as I would like!) it’s not something that’s normally associated with cartography. Brian Moseley is a ... |
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The Crypt Keeper - Volume 2, 17th October.
"Greetings mortal!" not many RPG supplements begin like that. UKG Publishing’s Crypt Keeper 2 actually booms this loudly as it starts. This is if you click the autorun file in the download folder. It’s most likely you’ll download Crypt Keeper 2 than actually buy it on the CD which is why you don’t get to enjoy the naturally occurring "Greetings mortal!" of a loaded CD.
Crypt Keeper 2, like Crypt Keeper, is a collection of electronic material. Most downloads these days for d20 are wallpapers from Wizards of the Coast or PDF material. Crypt Keeper 2 is a collection of web pages combined with PDFs. You don’t need to be online to use Crypt Kee ... |
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Unorthodox Rangers, 13th October.
Unorthodox Rangers is a 25 paged PDF from The Le games. It’ll set you back a massive US $2.00. I know; you can’t possibly afford that! (I know sarcasm is the lowest form of humour) The most annoying thing about the price is that it’s too low to for RPGNow’s minimum checkout value and if you’re not buying many Unorthodox sets together then you’ll have to put it with something else.
There are cheap and rough PDFs and there are cheap but glossy PDFs. The former tend to be someone’s Word file printed to a PDF file. Art? You wish. The latter are kinder on the eye and will have pretty formatting and professional illustrations. Unorthodox Ranger ... |
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Master Plan - Starships One, 3rd October.
I think one of the run away successes in the PDF RPG industry is the busy and high quality cartography market. Publishers like 0one and Darkfuries produce maps for your miniatures. I remember when paper cartography products were a priceless paradox. They were barely above disposable in terms of use but frighteningly expensive and therefore rare because they didn’t sell. It just wasn’t commercially viable to produce paper packs of coloured square (or hex) maps. The PDF RPG world changed this. On the strength Starships One I’m happy to add UKG Publishing to the list of decent PDF map publishers.
It’s not yet a too crowded marketplace. Beside ... |
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Slaves of the Moon: The Essential Guide to Lycanthropes, 16th September.
Sweeping generalisations are wrong… but, there’s one I often find hard to fault. There’s often a big difference between RPGs which begin by describing the game world, setting and theme and RPGs which begin by describing character creation, combat and skill checks.
Slaves of the Moon, The Essential Guide to Lycanthropes, is a d20 supplement which discusses the origins of various were-creatures, their society or culture with organises, ethics and religion, etc to at the start. Then, in later chapters (oh, okay, the very next section), Slaves of the Moon presents the game mechanics.
Strictly speaking and as Mike Mearls points out ... |
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The Other Side: Minigame issue #1, 13th September.
Apologies; I’m working through a backlog here and reviewing a magazine dated April 2004. Sometimes there’s nothing quite as off-putting as trying to review something old and established. Sometimes, though, sometimes you find a little gem.
The Other Side is a little gem. Okay, it’s not a whopping great big gem; it’s a little gem which is as exciting as it is original and useful. The Other Side, the first of the minigame series from Valent Games. This is an ezine. It’s 52-pages and Valent’s pricing structure is $6 for the current issue and $5. I like that – it’s a good and fair pricing structure, it’s going to be a pain in the butt to mainta ... |
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In the Shadow of the Devil, 11th September.
In the Shadow of the Devil is the second in the Coryani Chronicles. Actually, though, you don’t strictly need the first Chronicle to use in the Shadow of the Devil. Similarly the adventure is set in Arcanis – The World of Shattered Empires – but you can get a way with converting it to almost any setting. To get the best out of this good adventure you’d want to set it in Arcanis and you’ll want to be able to use the rest of the Coryani Chronicles too. Arcanis, published by Paradigm Concepts is well supported and there are plenty of other juicy supplements. This is an important point, it makes investing in the Coryani Chronicles a safer bet.
... |
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DM Campaign Tracker, 6th September.
Every now and then a product like Goodman Games’ DM Campaign Tracker comes along. I have mixed feelings about these things as I can be one of those compulsive note takers who seem to be unusually common among gamers. Normally I prefer to take my own notes, in my own format because I tailor everything exactly as I need it. Sometimes, though, I’m a disorganised so-and-so and benefit hugely from a structure suggested by someone else. I’ve also been gaming for years. It took me a while to really realise the benefits of good note taking as a player and of obsessive note taking as a GM.
It’s a single shot victory but perhaps the best use of ... |
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The Codex of the Immortals: The Everlasting, 6th September.
The Codex of the Immortals is a players supplement for the Visionary Entertainment (aka VESI - add on Studio Inc) roleplaying series The Everlasting. It’s often the case in a supplemental product that you need the core product - makes sense? There’s a bit of a twist here. To use The Codex of the Immortals you need one of the four The Everlasting core roleplaying games. You need just one of them – not all four – and it doesn’t matter which. It’s a little unusual which is why I thought it was worth repeating, it is unusual but not unwelcome.
I best know the The Book of the Fantastical from the core rulebook set. In this RPG we look a ... |
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Rune Companion, 29th August.
Rune Stryders is one of those games that comes off the shelf often. Even if the game isn’t being used as the campaign world or system mechanics it is great for inspiration. Rune Stryders is a sui generis fantasy roleplaying game. It tries to sidestep the old clichés that haunt typical fantasy campaign worlds. One of the ways Rune Stryders shakes free from the done-to-death fantasy ideas is to avoid traditional variations of the magic system and use a vocabulary of runes. Runes can either be written or they can be inscribed. The runes are inscribed on huge suits of armour then you end up with the "fantasy mechs" called, you guessed it, ... |
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Aerie of the Crow God, 26th August.
The Aerie of the Crow God is from the Dungeon Crawl Classics series from Goodman Games. The idea here is that it’s done in the old style of D&D. "Old" as in appearance, when the company was just young their products simple, and when people who are now 45 were 15 and busily kicking in dungeon doors. Jumping to the point – I don’t normally like dungeon crawls let alone pre-written adventures but I’ve found its easy to play these "classic" adventures in good humour. Other gaming groups, I’m sure, will relish the tactical challenges here and some DMs will use bits from the game or wrap it in a larger plot.
In fact, The Aerie of the Crow G ... |
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Adventures for Next Age Heroes, 25th August.
This bundle has two adventures for Black Drink Creation’s Next Age Heroes. We have the Dancing Diamond and the The Lost Tower.
The up front disclaimer is that I don’t particularly like pre-written adventures. Why pay? At most you can offer a linear event which isn’t tailored to your suit your party and is something you can whisk up in an hour – or even wing it ad hoc. I suppose in this respect these two adventures get off to a good start; two adventures for US $3 isn’t much more expensive than spending an hour doing it yourself. I do wish that the bundle had been called something more interesting than Two Adventures for Next Age Heroes tho ... |
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Skirmish Tiles, Castle System: upper level, 23rd August.
Ha-ah! There’s an unexpected twist here in 0one Roleplaying Games’ fantastic Skirmish Tiles, Castle System: upper level.
First off I think 0one Roleplaying Games are the best cartographers out there at this point of time (it could all change). There are a few very good cartographers, people and companies like Darkfuries as well but 0one have a steady, trustworthy, release schedule and so you can be sure that there will be great support for the style of cartography you buy into. This castle system tile set is for the upper level of a castle and there’s already a second level. You went get stuck with a few good looking tiles that don’t fit ... |
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Unorthodox Druids, 21st August.
Unorthodox Druids might seem like something of an impulse buy – at US$2.00 it’s below the minimum checkout value at RPGNow (or, I imagine, any e-retailer who stocks RPG PDFs). These Unorthodox Druids will have to go into the electronic shopping cart along with something else. Electronic capitalism is required before these druids can help you – that’s unorthodox for you!
You get five druids for your $2. What’s that? A druid for 40c? Not bad. I’m not talking about NPCs though. You get a complete alternative druid class for 40c – and that’s amazing value.
Lots of people whine about the D&D druid. Druids aren’t really like that, they s ... |
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Bloody Jack's Gold, 21st August.
In some ways Bloody Jack’s Gold gets off to a false start. The front cover says, "Remember the good old days, when adventures were underground, NPCs where there to be killed, and the finale of every dungeon was the dragon on the 20th level?"
Hmm. No. I didn’t play D&D back then because that’s exactly the sort of game I didn’t like! How did the dragon get there? Why? I want to meet a NPC for a second time (as in, not having killed them the first time) and then, on the third meeting, discover he’s been the villain all along! Or a powerful ally!
If it wasn’t *meaningful* I didn’t have much time for it. But I was young back then. I was ... |
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A Magical Society: Ecology and Culture, 20th August.
A Magical Society: Ecology and Culture is one of the most intelligent d20 books I’ve read. The fact that I nearly typed "A Magical Society: Ecology and Culture is one of the most d20 intelligent books I’ve read" perhaps shows that I’m not smart enough to give it a fair review!
This offering from Expeditious Retreat Press deals with world building. So many gamers love world building and I suspect all too often we’re left to articles in roleplaying magazines for assistance on this art and science. Expeditious Retreat Press make two early crucial successes. The first success is assuming we’ll want to build a magical world – but base the b ... |
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Skirmish tiles, fiendish grounds, 19th August.
0one Roleplaying Games make great maps. The Battlemap series is superb. There’s a spin off series in the Skirmish Tiles (and another in Explore) and in reality there’s very little difference between them and so they’re highly compatible. The difference between the battlemaps and skirmish tiles is simply that battlemaps tend to be larger and more coherent and skirmish tiles tend to do individual features that don’t necessarily stack together so well.
The theme in the Fiendish Grounds skirmish tile set is… well, hell. The D&D Planar System is probably the inspiration here but it doesn’t matter. If you need tiles for key parts in an alien ... |
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Aerial Adventure Guide Sky Captains Handbook, 17th August.
Back at the dawn of 3rd party d20 publisher Goodman Games was the one who did the unusual and original supplements (a good thing!). They had intelligent alien dinosaurs! It’s somewhat ironic that Goodman Games now has some of the absolute classics under their belt - the famous Blackmoor - Goodman Games purposely recreates the old ways with the hugely successful Dungeon Crawl Classics.
The Aerial Adventure Guide: Sky Captain’s Handbook is a mix of the two. Here we have an original and exciting book and yet it’s very much in the established D&D tradition. We have a new realm, new PC races, new monsters and prestige classes and equip ... |
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Stand-Ins Printable Figures - Sci-Fi Set #1, 16th August.
I really quite like Interactive Design Adventures’s Stand-Ins PDF set. These PDFs come in two main bits; a black and white section and a smaller colour section. Each section contains pages of small, framed, illustrations. Print a page off, cut a long the lines (even I can do this!), fold them up, stick the bottom flaps together and you end up with a stand up paper figure. It’s much cheaper than miniatures, there’s no heavy box to lug around to which ever house you’re gaming in and you can print yourself out a hoard of monsters or entire company of Shock Troopers.
This is a review of the Sci-Fi set. There’s been a fantasy set and modern &am; ... |
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Rap Sheet Haven: Player Resource Hit, 16th August.
"We know who you are…" says the boiler plate from the back of Louis Porter, Jr Design’s Rap Sheet: Player Resource Hit. Heh. I hope not. Previous GameWyrd reviews of Haven: City of Violence products have not been kind.
If you’re a Haven player then what can you expect from the resource kit? You can expect an extended character sheet. You’ve fairly thick softback covers (I can stand the booklet up on my desk) and you’ve 16 pages to record stats, notes and backgrounds in. You get that for about $5. To be fair, that’s about what you’ll pay for a similar extended character sheet/folio/deluxe.
The first page is what you’d expect – a space t ... |
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GOLDEN Hero Pulp d20, 16th August.
Sometimes you hear an awful lot about a book before you get the chance to check it out for yourself. The Golden Hero Pulp D20 Sourcebook is such a book for me. I’ve had emails from all sides and all directions. People love this book. People hate it. I don’t. I’m in the middle. I can see the weaknesses in the book and I can see the strengths too. In many ways I think of Golden as a diamond in the rough.
Golden is a small book but it’s not a thin one. It’s a half sized 232-paged production; this is actually my preferred size. It’s much easier to deal with while you’re fussing with GM notes. The only causality of the size are the illustration ... |
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Stand-Ins Printable Figures - Modern & Superheroes Set #1, 15th August.
I think the Stand-Ins Printable Figures from Interactive Design Adventures are great value for money. The Modern & Superheroes Set #1 is no exception.
It was a clever move putting superheroes in with modern. If Interactive Design Adventures (let’s just call them IDA) hadn’t mixed the two together then we’d have had too many costumed heroes without plain clothes or too many plain clothes stand in figures for your average present day scenario. There’s a good mix instead. All of the "modern" paper figures could be used either as cannon fodder minions, civilians, law enforcement agencies or in disguise heroes.
There are some other nice ... |
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Roleplaying Tips.com GM Encyclopedia, 15th August.
Roleplaying Tips (www.roleplayingtips.com) is one of the best sites on the Internet. It’s quick, it’s clean, it’s easy to navigate and it has first rate content. It’s free too.
The GM Encyclopedia isn’t free (but at < $10 it’s not expensive) but it has all Roleplaying Tips’ strong points going for it. Johnn Four presents the Encyclopaedia has a better alternative to a donation button and I agree. It’s a chance to give something back (and I’ll vouch its not easy or cheap keeping a site online (and GameWyrd’s barely ankle high compared to the mighty Roleplaying Tips)) and get something in return too.
The GM Encyclopedia is an ... |
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Grim Tales, 14th August.
There is a difference between high fantasy and cheese fantasy. It can be a fine line and it takes a surprising amount of skill, sometimes, for a DM to keep the campaign on the side of the diving line that they want the campaign to be on.
High fantasy campaigns typically feature a plethora of intelligent races, many more different types of monsters, spells galore, magic items and characters either start high powered or quickly become high powered. Dungeons and Dragons is a high fantasy game.
Cheese fantasy should not be seen as an insulting phrase any more than "cheese metal" is an insult to my moshing friends who freely list "c ... |
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Stand-Ins Printable Figures - Fantasy Set #1, 7th August.
I’ve a cable modem. Phew. If you want to download Stand-Ins Printable Figures – Fantasy Set #1 then you’ll need something similar to cope with the 30MB+ file.
That’s 30MB of art; art you cut up and fold. Stand-Ins are Interactive Design Adventure’s offering to the "paper miniature" market. Interactive Design Adventures are not a late entrance to this particular niche; this particular set was published in November 2003 and since then they’ve added Modern & Superheroes set one and Sci-Fi too.
The problem I’ve had with some of the PDF products in this niche is that they’re too small. You end up with a small collection of paper models ... |
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World War II Heroes - Players Guide, 7th August.
World War II Heroes is a d20 Modern PDF from SteelMagic Studios. At the time of this review and at RPGNow there’s a discount of nearly %50. World War II Heroes is good value for money but I find it a little too long. The portrait-size version is 134 pages and, as you would expect, the wide-size version is less than that at 99 pages. Why might that be too long? It’s a little too much. I like the history of this time but the minutia of military detail can be overwhelming. I think I’d rather than a series of PDFs which I could collect or pick or choose from. SteelMagic could publish more little bits and I could custom buy PDFs to suit the battle ... |
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Dweomercraft: Familiars, 2nd August.
Dweomercraft: Familiars is one of multi-branded PDF products that are occasionally born from the primal soup of third party d20 publishers. The most recognisable logo here is, perhaps, the ENWorld one. This is a Dark Quest game though. Think of Dark Quest as the writer and ENWorld as the publisher. The concept design and (by way of alphabetical order) the first named author is Steve Creech (who we might associate with d20 Magazine Rack and Bastion Press). We’re blessed with a good collection of authors, including Dark Quest’s Neal Levin as well as Michael Hammes and David Woodrum.
Dweomercraft: Familiars is a lengthy 124-pages. It represe ... |
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Red Dwarf: The Role Playing Game, 29th July.
Okay, for a minute pretend that you’ve not just clicked on the Red Dwarf RPG review link. Pretending? Good. Guess in which RPG has a secondary character with stats: Fanaticism: Toast (3), Obsession: Toast (3) and Theoretical Physics: 3. Guess which RPG has stats for the Despair Squid? That’s right! It’s the Red Dwarf RPG. How did you guess? We also have creature stats for Mister Flibble and schematics for Starbug.
Red Dwarf, I think, is a pretty nice license for Deep 7. I also think we’re pretty lucky that it was Deep 7 that got the license. Deep 7 are one of those "fuzzy middle ground" publishers that I like. They’re big enough to rea ... |
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The Lords of the Night: Zombies, 23rd July.
I have to wonder whether the brains behind the Open Gaming License and d20’s involvement with it are happy with the way things have worked out. I wonder whether Wizards of the Coast are happy with it right now. I’m not sure. I am sure, however, that an ideal participant d20 publisher, when D&D 3.0 was first released into the wild, would have been Bottled Imp Games. Bottled Imp Games are not prolific but they’ve been very good. Bottled Imp Games are not going to steal thousands of players from Forgotten Realms (though they probably should). Bottled Imp Games produces those sort of products which offer quality and yet just enough twist on t ... |
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Legacy of the Dragons, 21st July.
Ooh, a bestiary without annoying alignment faff. A d20 bestiary without alignment nonsense for that matter! Monte Cook’s Arcana Unearthed is notable for many reasons but one of my favourites is the dismissing of the awful D&D alignment system. So, here in Legacy of the Dragons, we have creatures like Rock Apes and don’t have to worry whether they’re smart enough to be actively or just passively "good" or "evil".
Legacy of the Dragons is a "mere" 162 pages in length. It has that greyscale illustration style which I once associated with Malhavoc but now associate with Arcana Unearthed (a subtle but probably important difference). That’s ... |
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Metal Gods, 18th July.
I suspect this is the 3, 291st time I’ve looked at RPGObjects’ Metal Gods supplement for their rather nice Darwin’s World line. They keep on updating Darwin’s World (revisions and then d20 Modern editions) (I suspect their sanity might break if d20 Future offers mechanics which suggest a compelling reason to re-do it again!) and so core supplements like Metal Gods get pulled into the revision marathon. This is actually a good thing. It shows the dedication and support you would want a publisher to give to an RPG series you’re buying. It shows the strength of RPGObjects’ PDF model and is one of the reasons why they’re so well respected.
But ... |
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The Book Of Unusual Treasures, 17th July.
Don’t get confused. Just sit back and enjoy the rather rare combination of a thoroughly professional, attractive and entirely practical book.
Why could it get confusing? What’s so unusual about Bad Axe Games’ The Book Of Unusual Treasures? It’s not the usual Bad Axe Games mini-book size. That’s not really what draws your attention to the front cover. It’s great front cover; a bloated ogre thing with just the telltale blurring and surreal touches to make me think of Christopher Shy. Oh! It is a Christopher Shy front cover! Excellent. And the author? Philip Reed himself! The Book Of Unusual Treasures is also a Ronin Arts product. Kudos ... |
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Comic Book Heroes Players Guide, 16th July.
A 7-paged index for a 188-paged PDF, this isn’t a lightweight product. SteelMagic Studios’ Comic Book Heroes is a hefty RPG straining against the confines of the OGL. You can feel it. SteelMagic aren’t allowed to tell you about the full character generation process in d20 Modern – and I suspect that drives them nuts. Comic Book Heroes tries to be as comprehensive as possible but it’s hamstringed by the rules and regulations it must follow.
If it’s not obvious from the introduction, SteelMagic’s Comic Book Heroes is a d20 Modern super hero game.
Here’s a good question. What’s the difference between a hero and a super hero? In t ... |
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Blood and Guts: In Her Majesty's Service, 11th July.
The Blood and Guts line is respected d20 Modern series from RPGObjects. In Her Majesty’s Service is a supplement of Prestige Classes for prestigious British units – the SAS, Pathfinders and Special Projects. There’s a group of elite units with minor mechanic modifications too and then about ten pages of equipment.
Fraser Ronald, the author, isn’t British and he’s not in the military. I know this because he says so – but we’re reassured of his commitment to accuracy and accuracy with the caveat of playability. Someone might niggle about the stats for specific weapons and Fraser is content to deal with that. I am British and have family ... |
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Aasimar & Tiefling: Guidebook to the Planetouched, 10th July.
The Planes can be a funny issue in a D&D game. This is a review of Green Ronin product so I might as well use another Green Ronin product as an example. It was a Freeport supplement where it became important that the characters were never able to find a forked metal rod in the entirely of Freeport lest they bugger off to a different Plane. The rod would have been a handy spell component. Couldn’t a smith make one? I like this example (not just because it pokes fun at the difficulties of pre-written adventures and dangers of high magic vs plot) but because it shows both the strengths and weaknesses of the Planes. You can do fantastic thing ... |
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A Question of Loyalty: A Guidebook to Military Orders, 1st July.
I’m way behind on reviews – and it sucks. Sometimes, though, sometimes it is an advantage. Since Alea published A Question of Loyalty: A Guidebook to Military Orders we’ve seen APG Paper Figures: Military Orders and even APG Paper Figures: Gladiators added to their PDF offerings. Okay; these other two are just little things but every bit of support helps. Alea, not one of the publishers to appear right after d20 or even in the initial wave of PDF prospectors, does seem to be doing what it takes to become an established name. Their PDF handling skills have risen too. There’s nothing to grumble about here. Having the paper figures (for inspira ... |
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Wasteland Fury: Post Apocalyptic Martial Arts, 28th June.
Two sets of gamers will be attracted to Wasteland Fury – Post Apocalyptic Martial Arts. The first group are the Darwin’s World gamers who’ll grab this as a useful supplement. If you’re playing Darwin’s World as a low tech survival game then the gritty (and bullet free) aspects of martial arts will appeal. If you’re playing Darwin’s World as more of a battle, fighting tooth, sword, gun and robot, then being able to expand into the always popular martial art genre will be welcome. Darwin’s World is the default, but not necessarily exclusive, setting for Wasteland Fury – Post Apocalyptic Martial Arts. The other set of gamers who might well leap ... |
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Lost Classes: Brotherhood of the Spider, 27th June.
The Brotherhood of the Spider is a stocking filler. It’s an impulse buy. At $0.99 the PDF is way below the minimum checkout value for RPGNow and you need to throw it into your electronic cart along with something else.
If you’re tossing The Brotherhood of the Spider into your electronic cart then it’s most likely it’s going in beside and after another d20 product. For your 99c you’re getting a bit of flavour text and a 5 level prestige class. One and a third pages of the four page PDF is taken up by the OGL legal foo. If this review goes on much longer then it’s in danger of being longer then the product.
The Brotherhood of the Spider b ... |
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A|State, 26th June.
Technically, a|state is a very good game. It has the depth, the flavour, the involvement, the mechanics and pretty things like illustrations and layout needed to be a very good game. This doesn’t mean a|state is bound to be a hit though. In fact, I’m so far behind in reviews that the impressive hardback has been out for a while – it’s been well received by those in the know but I’ve not heard of any shop struggling to re-stock it. A|state is just a little too different from Tolkien-esq fantasy to appeal to Joe Gamer who only plays Tolkien-esq fantasy (often as a Ranger who’s village was attacked by orcs).
So, no, a|state isn’t a generi ... |
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CyborGladiators, 18th June.
Victory or Death. Choose. No Gamesmaster required.
Abducted by aliens, you are now an ultimate fighting machine doing battle in deadly futuristic arenas for the entertainment of your masters.
That’s enough quoting from the back of the book. I thought some selective highlights would grab your attention, they certainly grabbed mine. You are a CyborGladiator and you have been abducted, enhanced and made to fight by alien masters.
Mankind is one of four races which are being made to fight for alien overlords. Our abductees, the human gladiators, are the most technologically advanced and are good all-rounders. They’re most li ... |
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Battlemaps: Divine Alligator's Temple, 8th June.
There’s no doubt; 0one Roleplaying Games’ Battlemap series are jolly good. If you’ve found the cash to buy your way through the expanding collection you will have a decent set. In my last review of a Battlemap I was debating the cons of having very specific battlemaps – maps which can only be used in fairly exclusive circumstances. Ready for an exclusive circumstance? Here’s one: Divine Alligator Temple.
Ah. Okay. That would have been more of a shock if GameWyrd hadn’t just reviewed 0one Roleplaying Games’ Master Adventure "The Divine Alligator". For the sake of avoiding spoilers I’m not going to talk about the adventure except to say tha ... |
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The Divine Alligator, 8th June.
The Divine Alligator is an adventure title that grabs your attention. This 49-paged PDF comes from 0one Roleplaying Games and that’s a company known for absolutely fantastic cartography. Sure enough there are excellent maps in this adventure; we have the usual battlemap tiles and we also enjoy a bird’s eye view of wide area geographic locations. There is, however, a separate Battlemap PDF just for the key building of the adventure.
The interesting thing about The Divine Alligator is that you don’t have to have an alligator in it. Nor do you need to set it in a swamp. Nor do you need lizardmen. I suspect most DMs who buy pre-written ad ... |
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EarthAD: Post-Holocaust Adventures, 8th June.
EarthAD is a Politically Incorrect Games’ genreDiversion game. It’s the roleplaying equivalent of a short story: EarthAD is a professional and compelling but short RPG. If you’re expecting a fully fledged game then you’ll be disappointed. The genreDiversion line is a favourite of mine because they do what they set out to do – and they do it so well. If you just fancy a break from your usual campaign or you have visiting roleplaying friends you need to entertain for a weekend then genreDiversion is just the thing. The games are long enough to offer up the slick and easy mechanics, give some sample characters, adventures or adventure ideas and, ... |
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The Book of Fiends, 8th June.
The Book of Fiends is typically Green Ronin quality. It’s professional, has a nice layout, small and crisp font and its packed full of fiends. Flicking through the book lets you peak into a deliciously awful Abyss.
I remember poking fun at the Fiend Folio (the first d20 edition) because it was nothing more than a Monster Manual III trying to avoid the III and capture the glory of the original Fiend Folio. I also remember reader comments that I was making too much of an issue about the book’s name. It wasn’t really about the name though, it was about the lack of Fiendish atmosphere and yet more monsters instead. I always prefer the thea ... |
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RealmQuest, 3rd June.
This review is based on a nearly finished copy of RealmQuest. That’s an important caveat to make because the game could change quite a lot between now and publication. Thankfully, games only tend to get better as they’re worked on and near completion so this review is more likely to be too harsh than too flattering. A casual glance at this copy of RealmQuest suggests that Fantasy Makers only need to add some pictures and tidy up the formatting (remove some of the empty pages – or put something in them) and they’re finished. In truth; RealmQuest needs more work than that. The editor needs to get their scissors out and needs to be horribly crue ... |
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Squeam 3, 8th May.
Squeam 3 is another insipid RPG from Memento Mori Theatricks. Except it isn’t at all; that’s the publisher’s own self-critical humorous boiler plate. Squeam 3 encourages players to take their clothes off, or at least show some skin, in order to avoid Bad Stuff – how can that be insipid? Author Jared A. Sorensen does firmly state that the game discourages players from attempting to bribe the Camp Counsellor with sexual favours though.
The Camp Counsellor is the Squeam (aka Sque3m) term for the GM. Players are campers.
At only ten pages in length it is tempting to re-print as many of the witty lines and descriptions from the RPG ... |
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The Psychic's Handbook, 4th May.
Psions suck. Psychics rule!
No. No. I haven’t suddenly become a teenager bragging about his favourite class on a D&D chatroom – I’m just being controversial. I do think the rules in The Psychic’s Handbook are very much more persuasive than any of the Psion rules I’ve seen to date. I don’t think I’ll be using Psions any time soon, I’d much rather use these psychic rules.
I must admit that I committed a cardinal reviewer sin with this book. I judged the book by its cover. Before I opened it up I had dismissed The Psychic’s Handbook as a Psion splatbook. Okay; so it might be a splatbook (heavy with new mechanics) but it’s not ... |
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Kult: Beyond the Veil, 3rd May.
I can’t really review Kult. The review would be a lie. If ever there was an RPG which is only what you make – which is everything that you make it – it is Kult. All I can do here is talk about the book. It’s a book that makes you want to talk about it.
Kult was a game I’d heard an awful lot about; raves, rants, pros and cons, but which I never had found the time (or a copy of the book) to look at before. When the new edition of Kult from 7th Circle Publishing arrived in a package from Ossuem I was heel kicking pleased. It’s a paperback but it’s a reassuringly large book. The covers are weird. You’ll be familiar with the way the dust ... |
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Battlemaps: Dungeon Rooms Vol.III, 1st May.
The introduction to Battlemaps: Dungeon Rooms Vol.III says, "This accessory features the amazing rendered 3d maps produced by 01 Games." It’s not often that the standard opening pro-product spiel is right. 01 Games’ maps are amazing; the detail is fantastic.
I’m a funny one. I don’t like the number crunching, dice rolling, miniature wriggling aspect of roleplaying half as much as I like the theatrics, politics and plot twists. But… and this is an important exception, I do like enough action in a game to energise the plot and I like that to be done right. I like the "war gaming skirmish" aspect of party combat and so really do go for a ... |
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Sidewinder: Recoiled, 1st May.
If I had been faster on the draw then I’d be able to tell you how good Sidewinder: Recoiled really was. Instead, buried under reviews, I’ve left it too late and Green Ronin, bless their hides, have gone and announced Sidewinder: Recoiled will be a Mythic Vista and now everyone knows how good Sidewinder is. This is a review of the PDF game.
What we have here is a sensible and historic Western d20 game. Don’t get me wrong; it’s a fun game but it’s also remotely historically accurate. As a Scot I often read people’s attempts to write a Celtic themed roleplaying game and quiver in horror. If you’re passionate about your Western history th ... |
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Black Sails Over Freeport, 24th April.
Black Sails Over Freeport is a large pre-written adventure. The 256-paged book has three distinct Acts but it is one complete adventure. As the name suggests; this is a Freeport adventure. You don’t actually need any of the previous Freeport books, they could help a little but you won’t miss them if you’ve not read them. Overlaps occur mainly in reoccurring characters, references to past events and political situations which don’t have much of a baring on the plot in this adventure. This is how I like my books to overlap.
Black Sails Over Freeport is a very pretty book. It has Green Ronin’s professional touch to it. It’s exceptionally ... |
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InSpectres, 24th April.
"An invisible man sleeping in your bed
Oh, who you gonna call?"
Gho… no, try again. Try InSpectres.
InSpectres is up front about its influences and it really had to be. As obvious and as significant as the influences are in InSpectres the game is the very antithesis of "more of the same". The players have a supernatural mystery to solve. Will they be able to put the clues together and deal with the problem? That’s more of the same. InSpectres isn’t like that. Will the players be able to put the clues together? What if they can’t? The GM has to keep the action going, perhaps a few nasty encounters, one of NPCs takes a more di ... |
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Modern Heroes: Martial Avengers, 15th April.
It looks like a movie poster.
"Modern Heroes: Martial Avengers. MALLADIN’S GATE PRESS presents a D20 MODERN supplement, a NIGEL MCCLELLAND production."
The front cover is bound to get your attention with the giant letters, flames and action posed silhouettes.
This from the same Malladin’s Press who tease us with the gritty DarkLore fantasy setting and the balanced mechanics of Forgotten Heroes; aah, okay, a Heroes shtick. Let’s see what else this supplement offers. Just for a teaser – Christopher Shy artwork. Ooh. Interesting! I’ll always associate his style with the surreal Whispering Vault and alt-real Ronin fantasy ... |
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Iron Gauntlets: Heroic Fantasy Roleplaying, 13th April.
I’m used to games like this popping up every now and then – but I’m not used to them being fantasy games. Iron Gauntlets is one of those games which I think would be a great introduction to role-playing and even better if there is an experienced GM (or Director in Iron Gauntlet talk) looking after newbie players.
Iron Gauntlets flirts with this mixture of experience too. The game begins with a basic introduction to roleplaying and fantasy. Later on the author suggests that the reader might be expecting the usual lists of spells by now – well, not if they’re new to roleplaying. It’s true, though, Iron Gauntlets has magic without spell l ... |
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octaNe, 7th April.
Okay. octaNe has been around for a while and GameWyrd struggles to keep up with the flow of new releases – but sometimes a game is good enough to scroll back, ignore the waiting list and take a look at. OctaNe is such a product. Okay. I normally don’t start a review after a pint or two of beer either – it just takes too much time to fix when I go back for the final edit but octaNe just seems to suit a little haze. Really. Can you think of any other game which begins by encouraging the reader to watch Mad Max III: Beyond Thunderdome back to back with Babe: Pig in the City. No other.
Then there are the monkeys.
"Just a quick note ... |
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Arthurian Campaign Guide, 5th April.
The Arthurian Campaign Guide is the second part of the Legends of Excalibur bundle from RPGObjects. The first half – yet entirely self contained – of the pair is the Knight’s Handbook. You’ll find already reviewed. Ironically enough, the Arthurian Campaign Guide begins by looking at what it takes to become a Knight. Something of a handbook you might say. Don’t let that throw you though. The Knight’s Handbook is an aptly titled product, officially Legends of Excalibur: The Knight’s Handbook, has it gives you what you need to try your hand at a knightly RPG; charging around on horses, saving maidens and being honourable. The first book lets you ... |
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Knight's Handbook, 30th March.
"Welcome to an England that never was," begins RPGObject’s Legends of Excalibur. It’s a good start. It conjures up the myth and magic I always associate with Arthur and his sword Excalibur and it also makes it clear that this game isn’t a reality picky, medieval history, pilgrimage.
This review is a two parter. This is the first part. The core Excalibur rules are a two parter too (hence the review structure) and although looking at Legends of Excalibur: Arthurian Adventures’ components back to back gives a better, stronger, more clear idea of the game I think this first offering is enough to stand on its own. Only with PDF publishing ... |
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The Quintessential Fighter II, 25th February.
This isn’t just a review of the second Quintessential Fighter, oh no, this is a review of The Quintessential Fighter II … Book One. There could be another. Or does "book one" refer to the Advanced Tactics sub-heading? Ah yes, that’s it. This isn’t a Collector Series book, it’s the first of the Advanced Tactics series.
The Quintessential Fighter II doesn’t quite pick up where The Quintessential Fighter left off. This supplement assumes your fighters have had some adventuring success and no small dosage of experience points under their belt. The Quintessential Fighter II isn’t quite more of the same either, which is just as well, I’d ha ... |
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Dice and Dramatics, 22nd February.
There can be a lot of snobbery amongst gamers. There are some gamers who’d freely mock the "roleplaying" abilities of the average d20 gamer (or their perception of one) but they’re also the sort of gamer who wouldn’t be comfortable being called a gamer. I think, perhaps, we’re talking about Interactive Communal Story Tellers or something.
I don’t agree with them (there’s no such thing as an average gamer for one) but I see where they might get their misconceptions from. It just so happens that the most popular, most widely spread, most easy to find in the shops or be introduced to by a friend gaming system is also going to be the one ... |
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Rune Stryders, 19th February.
Rune Stryders is a Politically Incorrect Games RPG from the creator of Ninja Burger. It’s a 242-paged PDF and frightfully cheap at around US$10.00. But wait; let’s just say you’re not a PDF fan and aren’t ever likely to be a PDF fan either; you want to hold a paper product and can’t be bothered with the electronic fuss. Rune Stryders is also available in paperback. Just pick the edition you want.
As you’ve guessed, this review is based on the PDF.
The Ninja Burger reference is likely to imply that Rune Stryders isn’t especially vanilla. If that’s your guess then you’re right. It’s true and one of this fantasy RPG’s strong point ... |
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New Glory Naval Base, 18th February.
Just a little disclaimer to begin with; this review is based off a PDF copy of Urban Designs: New Glory Navy Base and the New Glory Navy Base you’ll buy will be a paper product. What does this mean? Very little. I’ve seen PDF copies of print products before and know what, if anything, is likely to distort the fairness of the review. In the worst case scenario the printed version of New Glory Navy Base ends up on tissue paper or is missing a page – but that’s unlikely. This is especially unlikely since Urban Designs: New Glory Navy Base is a Darkfuries RPG product and that’s a company I associate with perfection and meticulous planning.
... |
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Weekend Warriors, 12th February.
There are two Weekend Warriors. There’s the d20 modern edition and the Savage Worlds edition. Savage Worlds is a Great White Games product, a company under the auspices of Deadlands’ Shane Lacy Hensley.
It doesn’t matter which version of Weekend Warrior you pick up; both systems suit the game well and I think that’s proof of a well written adventure.
Weekend Warriors is an adventure. Make this the last paragraph you read if you’re worried about spoilers.
Spoilers. Um. I suppose you could spoil the adventure since there are few twists – a few, and by twist I guess I mean brain eating surprises. You see; Weekend Warriors w ... |
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Martial Arts Mayhem, 9th February.
There aren’t that many publishers catering to the d20 modern market at all. The Game Mechanics are certainly one of them, they have the advantage of their association with Green Ronin and of their initial d20 modern experience at Wizards of the Coast. There’s also RPGObjects who publisher first to PDF, sometimes only to PDF, and don’t have the benefit of a few famous names. Nevertheless it has been RPGObjects who’ve successfully trail blazed much of the d20 modern path. It was inevitable that both companies would put out a similar product; especially given that d20 modern didn’t explore martial arts as much as it could have.
Martial A ... |
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Rampant, 6th February.
It’s a bit of a lie. Rampant sits in GameWyrd’s tabletop RPG database – but it isn’t really. Rampant looks, at a glance, like one of Living Imagination’s Twin Crown d20 supplements – but it isn’t really. It’s not d20 but it does have "A Twin Crown’s Supplement".
Rampant is a LARP. A Live Action Roleplaying Game. The front cover has a photograph of a bunch of LARPers, in costume and facing off with boffer weapons.
I’ve done plenty of LARP. I did the vampire thing, never with the official Minds Eye rules, but with various custom rule sets and I’ve done sundry fantasy games from the small and exclusive all the way up to the Gather ... |
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Killing Fields, 5th February.
Louis Porter Jr describes himself as almost 6 feet tall, 230 pounds, with 17 inch girth arms and who lives in Florida (where he says it is practically mandatory to work out). He promises the reader that he’ll tell them about his fights with professional football players when they’ll meet up.
Oh shit.
Rather than poke fun at his two page introduction in Killing Fields I’m simply going to quote from it and let you decide. I did mention the arms, right?
"If you wonder what my maximum weight I bench press is I don’t know but I can tell you that I can bench press with 100-pound dumbbells in each hand for a maximum of six to e ... |
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Last Rites of the Black Guard, 5th February.
The Last Rites of the Black Guard is a professional d20 Modern adventure. That makes it a rare supplement. It’s a horror too; twice as rare.
In many respects Last Rites is something new. It’s by 12 to Midnight and they’re not quite (not yet) the highest profile d20 publisher out there. This means your players might not have heard of them, don’t know what to expect from them and probably haven’t read the adventure either. You should be able to throw a few surprises at them. Now that’s a rare thing too. I wouldn’t count on trying this trick twice though as quality products like Last Rites of the Black Guard are likely to introduce 12 to ... |
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Skirmish Tiles, dungeon rooms set 1, 4th February.
What can be said about 0one Roleplaying Games’ Battlemap series that hasn’t been said already? They’re good and with each addition to the set they just get better. They get better because you’re able to build a larger dungeon (not that the tiles are always restricted to dungeons). You’re able to be more flexible in your designs to; the tile map can be based on how you want the dungeon to be, rather than basing your dungeon on which tiles you have.
Collecting all the PDFs will be a little expensive. The series isn’t cheap – unless you compare it to paper products. Skirmish Tiles, dungeon rooms (set 1) is one of the best value in the ran ... |
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The Lords of the Night: Liches, 2nd February.
As I’ll tell anyone who foolishly gets close enough to listen I’m only just shaking off a long and linger sickness. As I’ll point out to any author, publisher or wyrdling who accidentally gets close enough to listen; this means that my whole GameWyrd schedule has been delayed beyond recognition. There have been some advantages to this. Some silver linings.
I first read The Lords of the Night: Liches around about Christmas when my review copy landed on the desk. Back then I was easily able to appreciate most of the book’s strong points and since then I’ve glanced over reviews from reviewers who all think Liches is a highly rated book. ... |
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Chaositech, 19th January.
This is the first review I’ve written in nearly, gosh, nearly a month. So, what happened and what actually does it have to do with Chaositech? I read Chaositech one night and have been ill ever since. In fact, even as I type there’s an unholy amount of slime coming from somewhere. Will it never end? There’s the truth; Chaositech is dangerous stuff!
It’s dangerous in-game as the effects it has on those who use it are startling. It’s also dangerous out-of-game, not because reviewers get ill after reading it, but because it could unbalance your entire game. This isn’t a supplement I’d recommend to a novice. This isn’t a supplement I’d bri ... |
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Discovering Dusters, 22nd December.
Value is relative. Discovering Dusters is a supplement for Elfin's Undiscovered: The Quest for Adventure and as such is a far rarer commodity than A.N. Other's Guide to d20. Without meaning disrespect to d20 supplements (and publishers) I can safely point out that there is no shortage of them. On the other hand, while Eilfin does support Undiscovered, new products for the line are a welcome treat.
You've about 82 pages for your US $7.50. You've about 82 pages because you've always got to slice off a few for the cover and increasingly common adverts in the back. That's still great value for money though - the sort of bang for your buc ... |
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Battlemaps: Corridors and Hallways Vol.II, 21st December.
It isn't just the superb quality of 0one Roleplaying Games' Battlemaps which makes the whole product line such an attractive option for GMs. It's the fact that the Battlemaps are so well supported. This is a review of Battlemaps: Corridors and Hallways Vol.II. You have to wonder how many publishers would bother to offer you a collection of corridors and hallways - let alone how many publishers would do a second volume of them.
The first volume of corridors and hallways had some fairly esoteric hallways - corridors lined with statues or propped up with an abundance of pillars. It's great to see that these "specialist" hallways continue to ... |
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Smuggler's Bane, 21st December.
Smuggler's Bane is an adventure where the PCs go up against some smugglers. Oh no! Spoilers! I've given the plot away! The title says it all though, doesn't it? I maintain that I'm innocent and have spoiled nothing.
Smuggler's Bane is a pre-written adventure for Deep7's Arrowflight RPG. Smuggler's Bane is actually a Politically Incorrect Games' product and we benefit from their PDF expertise and wizardly. It's US $5 for the PDF and that represents the value for money we've come to expect from PIG.
Pre-written adventures need to do something special to impress. I just don't see the attraction in them. A quick search of the archives will ... |
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Blood and Vigilance, 21st December.
Vigilance was one of, if not, the first d20 superhero games to hit the market. It was Vigilance Press' flagship product and it came out first as a PDF and then as a paperback. This is a review of Blood and Vigilance. Charles Rice, author of Vigilance, has been writing for RPGObject's d20 "Blood and" line for some time now and he's able to wear both hats at once as the author of Blood and Vigilance. The "Blood and" line includes such titles as Blood and Fists and Blood and Relics. Blood and Vigilance is, as you might expect, the merger of these two RPG lines.
Vigilance was written back at the time of 3.0. Blood and Vigilance is good w ... |
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The Elements of Monsters, 20th December.
Ah, the science of dungeon crawling. The Elements of Monsters is going to save everyone through professional developers to ambitious new DMs a whole lot of time, more importantly, it's going to save the time without sacrificing any quality. Despite this tremendous success and despite The Elements of Monsters painstaking efforts to be as clear as possible the supplement is will leave a few DMs scratching their head. The risk is that a too formidable supplement will persuade DMs that they can't be bothered with it.
For 3eDnD.com members this PDF is less than US$6. It's 135 pages long. That's great value. There are 135 pages because every p ... |
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Noble's Handbook, 18th December.
I like the regal side to fantasy. Give me courtly intrigue. Give me terse diplomatic relations with the Dwarf Mountain Kingdom and a cold war style standoff with barely secretive cross-border raids with the Hobgoblin Empire to the West. For this sort of game you need nobles; these "nobles" might be those people born into the position or they might be the elected officials, town mayors, or headsmen. This is the point that Green Ronin's Noble's Handbook makes and that makes for a great start. It is this reviewer's option that great starts are a good thing (tm) for a book to manage. Unfortunately the Noble's Handbook promptly forgets this and co ... |
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Dragon in the Smoke, 10th December.
A successful British RPG publisher once wrote "an unsupported product is a dead product" – or words to that effect. It wasn’t Heresy Gaming. Heresy Gaming are British though, they’re still new and their first RPG and they’re supporting it. Victoriana is too good, in my opinion, to become a dead product. It is pleasing to see Dragon in the Smoke. This pre-written adventure is the first supplement for Victoriana.
Although I’m far from the world’s greatest fan of pre-written adventures I do have several friends who make the compelling argument that one pre-written adventure from the original authors is important as it illustrates exactl ... |
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En Ferreus Veritas, 7th December.
"Heyoka Studios rejects all claims of liability associated with acts performed after you read this book. We have no liability for acts performed with, but not limited to, this book, knives, bats, home made PVC claymores, those shuriken you buy from Army/Navy stores, beer bottles, tequila, freaky German porn, bowling shoes, Apple Quadras, the Accursed Temple of Cazic Thule, flying monkeys, coconut Zingers, the truth about the grassy knoll, duct tape, or hamsters."
This seems like such an import disclaimer that I just had to begin the review with it too!
En Ferreus Vertias is about rapiers. If you need to be told that that’s a typ ... |
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Disposable Heroes Paper Minis, 29th November.
I reckon I’m a strange gamer. There’s nothing I like more than a bit of politics, history and complex plotting in my games. I easily get bored if combat becomes the focus of the adventure. On the other hand, I do appreciate a climatic action scene! When it comes to the melee I prefer either one of two extremes; I’d rather keep the entire encounter nice and abstract or I’ll go for a paper battlemap and miniatures. It seems pointless to faff around in between. Is that strange? I suspect so.
As usual, there’s a catch. I don’t really have time for minis. I can’t paint – that’s a major point. I’m poor – there’s another issue. I don’t want t ... |
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Quick Shots - Mission File Alpha, 29th November.
Quick Shots: Mission File Alpha is a cost effective collection of encounters from E.N. Publishing. There are 20 encounters, a gun, a big new monster (the Junkyard Golem) and some templates in the 40-paged PDF. This will cost you less than $5.
The encounters in Quick Shots are just that – they’re encounters. Some of the events will last just one scene, they’ll be the focus of the game and then they’ll pass. Other events, although not so common as the first, are unusual circumstances that’ll last a little while, shake things up for a bit and then fade. Almost every one of these later examples has an optional variant where the strange cir ... |
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Mindshadows, 29th November.
I was really looking forward to Mindshadows. It wasn’t so much the promise of a psionics heavy campaign world that had whet my appetite but the flavour seeping through the crunch of the bestiary Monsters of the Mind.
Monsters of the Mind managed to do that "similar but spookily slightly different" and get it right, Mindshadows manages only "similar but slightly different". It’s a good book. Don’t get me wrong. It’s just not Testament good.
There’s an Eastern flavour to Mindshadows, not the Far East but the Near East. If your historical geographical references are a bit shaky: I’m talking about India and the subcontinent. We hav ... |
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Macho Women With Guns, 24th November.
"Macho Women with Guns is a game unconcerned by characterisation, deep and meaningful background or quality and realistic portrayal of a "part". The aim here is simply to kill things, ogle the illustrations and have fun with automatic weapons and hot chicks in bikinis."
They’re not kidding. The character generation in Macho Women with Guns includes rules for working out your chest, waist and butt size. You’ll be playing a chick.
Mongoose books are not without their titillation and although there might just be more bare titillation in /other/ Mongoose books, Macho Women with Guns is in colour and the illustrations here don’t cl ... |
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Heroes of High Favor: Halflings, 20th November.
The Heroes of High Favor is a d20 series that seems to provoke comments like "You’ll either love the series or hate it" – but it’s not true. I wasn’t enamoured with the Heroes of High Favor: Dwarves much but I really did like the Heroes of High Favor: Half-orcs.
The Heroes of High Favor have a good shtick. The book takes the preferred character class of the race in question and pairs that off with every other core class in the style of a multi class to produce a prestige class. This didn’t do anything for me for the dwarves because fighter prestige classes are ten a penny and pretty boring. The half-orcs, on the other hand, are still ... |
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Next Age Heroes, 19th November.
Next Age Heroes is a PDF campaign setting for 3.5 d20 from Black Drink Creations. It’s a big project for a small company.
Next Age Heroes comes in three pieces. There’s one PDF to let your players read safely. There’s another PDF for the players that offers up the in-game worldview of different races. The worldview is important in Next Age Heroes. The PCs are different, are the Next Age Heroes, because they’ve travelled further than a few days ride and are interested in what lies beyond. The third document, some 217 pages, is for the GM and it tells the reader what is really going on in the world beyond the starting region.
Yeah. Ther ... |
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Novice to Master, 14th November.
About a year ago I reviewed Bane of the Salt Fen Lich from Heathen Oracle. It was a pre-written adventure and I think most pre-written adventures are as original as a book of fantasy d20 prestige classes. From Novice to Master: The Manual of Classes is a PDF full of prestige classes.
But wait. There was a welcome catch, an added extra, with Bane of the Salt Fen Lich and there’s an important boost with From Novice to Master too. It was the use of artwork in the Bane of the Salt Fen Lich. The pre-written adventure was well written, professional and nicely constructed but it was the innovative use of character portraits that players could ... |
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Silven Trumpeter 04, 12th November.
Bare with me while I try and work out how much value for money this issue of the Silven Trumpeter is. On one hand we’ve a professional looking ezine that’s packed with news, reviews and interviews but on the other hand it is terribly expensive.
Oh.
Wait a minute.
It’s not expensive at all. The Silven Trumpeter is entirely free. It costs ziltch. Nadda. Dingo. Zip. Nothing. Now that’s value for money!
The Silven Crossroads is the latest success in the RPG fan cottage industry. The site, much like their ezine, is full of news, reviews and forums. If you’ll allow me a moment of hubris, I think I know something about ru ... |
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Dragonwizards Fantasy Graphic Story E-Book, 11th November.
It might be best to ignore the GameWyrd rating for this product. Why is it so low? GameWyrd’s review guidelines just aren’t designed to deal with this Dragonwizard’s e-book. They’re designed to deal with RPGs, supplements, splatbooks, accessories and paraphernalia. They’re not designed to deal with graphic fantasy novel.
What’s a graphic fantasy novel? In this case it’s a 171-paged PDF document that’s liberally pepped with trading card like graphics. Well. The graphics are trading cards – just electronic. You’ve the eye-catching illustrations, a decorative boarder and then some game stats. If you’re putting this Dragonwizards e-book in ... |
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DarkLore Campaign Primer, 9th November.
DarkLore is really good. It’s really good. Don’t say, "Malladin Who?" or "Who’s Gate? What? Where?" say, "DarkLore is really good".
This isn’t Malladin’s Gate first product. The small company has been praised for their sharply designed Forgotten Heroes and Academy Handbook series. I’ll be amazed if a fulfilment house/imprint deal isn’t set up for them by the end of the next year. Why would I be amazed? I’d be amazed because DarkLore is really good.
DarkLore is, as the name suggests, dark. It’s a d20 game too. Oh now. Stop laughing. It might be possible. In fact, it is possible, Malladin’s Gate have done it. Out goes the stratosphericall ... |
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Path of Rage, 5th November.
I haven’t been kind to Haven: City of Violence and its supplements at all. I’ve been harsh but I stand by that. There’s a special sort of frustration served for RPGs that have a good idea but which only come close. I haven’t described the game as a piece of crap though. Since I’ve not been especially enamoured with Haven it is rather unfortunate that the book begins...
"So you’re are back for more..."
Unfortunately, that’s their typo, not mine. The introduction goes on...
"Just like an addict on crack, you couldn’t stay away from us. I knew the second that you picked the book up that you liked it and it would only get bet ... |
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Battlemaps: Corridors and Hallways Vol.I, 2nd November.
Mmm. I'm here to wax lyrical about 0one Roleplaying Games latest set of Battlemaps. Don't get me wrong, I'm not taking bribes from these Italian padroni, I've simply seen these Battlemaps go from good to great.
Without a doubt 0one are some of the best cartographers in the gaming industry. They might be the best. The battlemap series has always produced wonderfully detailed maps. The series has gotten better because the company has listened to the needs of gamers. There are now three versions of every map in a battlemap volume. There's the almost photo-real quality colour map. These are the maps that you pull out for an important battl ... |
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Modern Backdrops, 2nd November.
When I say that RPGObjects are the company producing the best d20 Modern material there are a lot of people who will agree with me. It isn’t just products like Modern Backdrops, which presses all my happy buttons, that leads me to statements like that. RPGObjects has a history of quality d20 Modern supplements and of producing them first. Blood and Fists: Modern Martial Arts is a prime example. I can think of a few companies that are making strong moves to take RPGObjects’ modern crown, The Game Mechanics, for example, but RPGObjects has pushed the level higher still with Modern Backdrops.
Modern Backdrops really is what you might expe ... |
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Bow & Blade: A Guidebook to Wood Elves, 30th October.
Occasionally a lucky reviewer will discover that a fulfilment house, people who work for and with a whole bunch of publishers, has sent a package of new supplements and games to review. You can tell when reviewers might have received the same package because they start to review the same bunch of books. I noticed this for the package of RPG supplements that I found Bow & Blade In. I also noticed that almost every reviewer reviewed Bow and Blade: A Guidebook to Wood Elves first. I’m reviewing it last (and late). Whereas I didn’t mean to review it late on purpose, I did intend to leave it to last. Why? Trepidation. I’m not the greatest spla ... |
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Campaign Planner, 26th October.
A campaign planner is a good idea. Let’s take a step back there. A campaign planner is a framework, a set of notes, where a GM can marshal all their ideas. If you’ve made changes to the rules for gnomes, dropped a spell, added a new god and introduced a new common monster to your campaign then it’s convenient and wise to note all this down in one master file.
A campaign planner is a good idea because it organises changes, edits and tinkerings. When it comes to tinkering, roleplayers are ubermeisters. I use make shift campaign planners all the time. Aside from the players and the player characters, the most important element in my games ... |
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Modern Player's Companion, 23rd October.
The Modern Player’s Companion is a post Urban Arcana supplement. In other words, this The Game Mechanics d20 modern supplement has advanced classes and prestige classes in it. We’re not quite at the many thousand supplemental classes that pepper the fantasy d20 landscape but if I hadn’t intended to review the Modern Player’s Companion I would have flicked through the new Advanced classes and Prestige classes here.
Advanced Classes include the Adept, Arcane Scholar, Bounty Hunter, Confidence Artist, Criminologist, Dead Shot, Enforcer, Fixer, Gentle Warrior, Hacker, Opinion Maker, Profiler, Survivalist and Transporter. Favourites would ... |
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Forbidden Arcana: Magical Diseases, 22nd October.
Magical Diseases is one of Ronin Art’s Forbidden Arcana series. I like the series. I try and keep my fantasy off the shiny plate mail and fireball throwing paths and move it to darker more gritty roads. The notion of dark and dangerous magic appeals to me.
The PDF points out that magical diseases are nothing new. That’s true enough. I’ve whisked up plenty myself, my favourite being for a non-d20 game where a psychic picked up an alien disease after using the Total Recall ability on it (and then spread it around with empathy). Other GMs will have other evil things to do to the players stories too. It’s harder to find GMs who are entirely h ... |
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Crooks!, 20th October.
No. I’m not here to gush about Crooks! Nevertheless, I am here to tell you that it’s a wonderful book.
Green Ronin’s Mutants and Masterminds has been the best game to date to say "So long and thanks for all the fish" to the d20 logo. The colourful, slick and professional superheroes d20 based RPG is simply excellent. This tradition of superiority continues for Crooks!
It’s a thin book for a hardback but the page count of 128 is not to be sniffed at. Those are 128 pages of glossy colour and atmospheric artwork. The result is a book you like to hold. It’s almost like an illustrators portfolio; you can just pick it up, flick thro ... |
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101 Legendary Treasures of Medieval Europe, 14th October.
The 101 series from Ronin Arts has been and will continue to be surprisingly successful. I was surprised by its success even after I’d read and reviewed a few of the early ones, back when the names Spider Bite and simply Philip J Reed where being used before Ronin Arts. After reading and reviewing a few for myself I could see the quality but I just didn’t think Gamer Joe would be tempted by such an apparently mundane product. I guess I was wrong. I guess I didn’t credit Gamer Joe with enough intelligence. (Or would it be Wisdom?)
The title for this particular 101 is far from mundane though. 101 Legendary Treasures of Medieval Europe should ... |
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The Village of Oester, 12th October.
This review is based on the pre-print copy of The Village of Oester. I’m only pointing that out in case a disgruntled employee at the printers decides to tip a bucket of yellow paint into the press at the last minute. I’ve seen pre-print copies from Open World Press before and they always turn out just as good as you’d hope for. Actually no, that’s misleading. I’ve seen a pre-print draft from Open World Press before. There’s only been one, The Hamlet of Thumble, and I rather liked that.
World of Whitethorn 1B: The Village of Oester follows on from World of Whitethorn 1A: The Hamlet of Thumble in the way their prefixes would lead you t ... |
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Anger of Angels, 12th October.
Anger of Angels is a d20 supplement all about angels (you guessed, huh?) from Malhavoc Press and by Sean K Reynolds. It’s a PDF at the minute; I dare say a paperback will be along shortly. Some people will go buy this supplement because of the d20 logo, others because of the Malhavoc logo and others because SKR is the author. The best reason to go buy Anger of Angels is if you just want a whole lot of angel involvement in your game with no questions asked.
I like to ask questions though. Anger of Angels is one of those products that, I think, asks all sorts of questions about the typical D&D alignment system. Angels are, by and lar ... |
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Personal Artifacts, 8th October.
I suspect many people will think that I’m being rather backwards about this. I like Ronin Arts’ 101 Mundane Treasures so why am I not so impressed with Personal Artifacts? I don’t get 101 of them for a start.
Mundane treasures are hard to think up. They require a bit of lateral thinking. Magic treasures, especially the game mechanically powerful ones like these Personal Artifacts are easy to conjure up. In fact, they’re all over the Internet, leaking out of Geocities and Tripod pages, begging people to come and pay attention to them. Well... I suppose the idea of a "personal artifact" took a little guts. It’s not quite an artifact, that’s ... |
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Forbidden Arcana: Burning Spellbooks, 5th October.
It’s all about value for money, or time versus effort, I suppose. I think Forbidden Arcana: Burning Spellbooks represents pretty good value for money. The PDF might only be 12 pages long, 9 pages of which are worth printing, but for less than US $2 you get a complete set of rules from Philip J Reed and art from Larry Elmore.
Burning a spellbook is beneficial unless it’s your own spellbook. That’s why the arcane science fits nicely into the Forbidden Arcana niche; it can’t be something that wizards are keen to promote at all. Leave my spellbook alone!
The idea, Reed tells us, comes from a story about Nostradamus. It’s written somewhere ... |
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Skull & Bones, 5th October.
I was really looking forward to Skull & Bones. This tends to doom the book. My expectations are generally high, too high, and this is enough to take the shine off an otherwise brilliant book. I’m disappointed that Skull & Bones doesn’t have more illustrations in the Hollywood sexy pirate style. This Mythic Vistas book tends to default to the more historically accurate portrayal of the pirate, in silly (but truthful) period costume, and with scratchy line drawings for that ye olde effect. Hmm. Let’s see. What else? I was disappointed that Skull & Bones doesn’t get up and make me coffee in the morning. There’s very little else to be ... |
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A Question of Honor: A Guidebook to Knights, 27th September.
The Alea Publishing Group are one of the new generation of d20 publishers to spring up. They don’t have a 3.0 edition legacy nor do they have 3.0 edition baggage either. Their PDF d20 products are entirely 3.5 and so, hopefully, everything will be smoothly cross compatible. Mind you, having said that, one of the new feats in the supplement is marked with a great big 3.0.
It just takes a quick look at A Question of Honor: A Guidebook to Knights to see that Alea have got the tricky stuff exactly right. The PDF is slick and pretty. It’s decorative, illustrative and yet uncluttered and trim. More importantly, although there’s the usual dos ... |
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Dreamwalker d20: Modern Day Roleplaying in the Land of Dreams, 25th September.
Humanity is under attack. This is another RPG that’s been converted to the d20 system. Soulless and hive-minded...
Oh wait. I’m muddling up my introductions.
"Humanity is under attack. The enemy is an alien species that assails us in our most vulnerable state – while we sleep."
That’s the rather catchy introduction for Dreamwalker d20. My introduction to the review was to simply point out that this is the d20 conversion of the game. There’s been two before it, the original Dreamwalker and the diceless Dreamwalker in the Active Exploits series by Politically Incorrect Games. This issue is by the original company, a small ... |
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Terrors of the Twisted Earth, 22nd September.
This issue of Terrors of the Twisted Earth shows how clever PDF publishers can be. RPGObjects are especially good at winning these successes. There was the original Terrors of the Twisted Earth in PDF format, then the paper edition and now there’s this Darwin’s World 2 PDF edition and in the near future (December 2003) this will be the final of three parts in the hardback Darwin’s World 2 book. Or, if you don’t want to wait, you can get a paper version of this PDF from RPGMall. Yup. This is the third time I’ve reviewed this product. None of this is the clever bit. The bit added extra that impressed me is that first edition of the PDF is inclu ... |
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The Everlasting: Book of the Fantastical, 21st September.
There’s a warning in the first pages of the book; this is a roleplaying game, it isn’t real, don’t take it too seriously. Immediately there’ a second warning, forgive the author’s pretentiousness, he is too passionate about the book not to take it seriously. To be harsh, Steven Brown should have taken the first warning to heart rather more and shouldn’t have taken it so seriously. Actually, we’re told; "Do not take the seeming pretentiousness contained within this book seriously". So just how are we supposed to take it then? With a laugh or a pinch of salt? The pretentiousness is annoying. We’re not roleplaying, or even storytelling here, we’ ... |
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Modern GM Screen, 19th September.
Let’s look at this GM screen. $20 is too much for a three paged screen, with misaligned tables and an adventure based around an ill cow.
That’s some other GM screen though, one I reviewed just a few weeks ago. I’m not going to link to that review, that would be rubbing salt into the wounds.
The Modern GM Screen is an entirely different animal. For a start, it’s only $14.95. For a second, it has a four paged screen. For a third it comes with an adventure with scary zombies.
What a comparison. I haven’t even mentioned that the Modern GM Screen carries the Green Ronin logo. It’s rare to see such a difference between so similar products ... |
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Gaming Frontiers: 5, 18th September.
Wow, what a come back. The first Gaming Frontiers was something special. I remember thinking of it in terms of being more of a book than a humble magazine, of urging people to consider a wise collector’s choice, for the horrible cost and the certainty that it couldn’t possibility on in the same style. I was right. The subsequent Gaming Frontiers were still professional but each one less appealing than the previous. Gaming Frontiers #5 bucks the trend. This should be another strategic issue in the Gaming Frontiers collection.
The magazine is still quite expensive at US $19.95. But wait, there’s a trick, a success of lateral thinking that gi ... |
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The Taverner's Trusty Tome, 16th September.
The Taverner’s Trusty Tome is one of those RPG supplements I’d probably never buy as a book; unless it was a joke gift to a roleplaying friend. It’s exactly the sort of product I’d be tempted to buy as a PDF. It’s easy. It’s fun. It’s the sort of thing to make a session unforgettable. The current price tag of US $6.95 is perhaps just a little on the high side; we’re long past the days of US $5.00 PDFs as standard but I still remember them.
This is a book of drinks. This is a book of taverns. This is a book of tavern staff; including several wenches and rules for exotic dancers. Oh. Yeah. There are a few game mechanics in here – new fe ... |
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Aten: City of Life - Book I, 12th September.
There aren’t many Children of the Grave Press products but their distinctive PDF style is already memorable. Each page is bordered in a thick black line. It reminds me very much of a web page table border. This box divides up into columns and there’s a solid black line between those two. Everything’s tightly framed. I remember a previous Children of the Grave PDF product suffered horribly because when the columns of text weren’t exactly the same width it looked as if these dividing black lines where flying off all in directions. Aten: City of Life – Book 1 does not suffer from this fate. It changes from three columns, to two and even a single ... |
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The Diamond Throne, 5th September.
Arcana Unearthed, The Diamond Throne, Dor-Erthenos or Serran. The campaign setting for Monte Cook’s variant d20 player’s handbook (and run away success) can be called many things. We can smile wryly because this is a setting where truenames are important. The Diamond Throne is a large area, a kingdom, ruled by the giants on the continent they call Dor-Erthenos. The world itself, a planet slightly smaller than our Earth, is called Serran by humankind. The Diamond Throne is also a supplement supporting the setting from Malhavoc Press. This is a review of the PDF, as is typical of Malhavoc products, a paper edition of the book will follow the PD ... |
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Campaign Guide, 3rd September.
Oh! Darwin’s World just seems to keep on growing. It isn’t just we’re now looking at a d20 modern edition of the rules in the form of Darwin’s World 2 but that I had thought the Survivor’s Handbook was the first of two parts and now I think it’s the first of three. This is a review of the Campaign Guide. If the Survivor’s Handbook is the Player’s Handbook equivalent then the Campaign Guide is the Dungeon Master’s Guide. The "new" third PDF will be the updated Terrors of the Twisted Earth book and that would be the Monster Manual equivalent. The plan is to merge all three PDFs into one tempting hardback edition.
Given that the PDFs are ... |
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Survivor's Handbook, 2nd September.
"I do not know what weapons will be used in World War III, but I assure you that World World IV will be fought with stones. "
-Albert Einstein
There. I thought I’d begin with one of my all-time favourite quotes simply because it comes early in the Survivor's Handbook. This book is the first half of Darwin’s World 2 and the Campaign Guide is the second.
It’s almost poetic. Darwin’s World is heavy on the evolution. The world as we know it has been destroyed but mankind struggles on. Mutant kind struggles too The original Darwin’s World came out in PDF. Since that time we’ve seen revisions, a unified edition and even paperba ... |
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Complete Spell Cards, 31st August.
There you go. It is possible to come up with a product that’s both a good idea and not for everyone at the same time. It’s the wittily titled The Other Game Company who is responsible for this paradox slaying and they manage it with their first product at RPGNow. I don’t think it’s right to say that Complete Spell Cards will make or break your d20 game but I do think they can deal 3d6 Cure or Inflict.
The spell cards are those standard d20 spells from the core rules printed into a card layout. You’ve the name of the spell at the top, the school and descriptor just below. There’s the spell’s level, components and casting time above the ... |
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The Slayer's Guide to Games Masters, 30th August.
Mongoose Publishing have a small collection of these parody Slayer’s Guides. The Slayer’s Guide to Games Masters will find space on the shelf beside The Slayer’s Guide to Female Gamers and The Slayer’s Guide to Rules Lawyers. It’s a different author this time though. James Desborough, author of the first two, was probably busy writing the d20 conversion of Macho Women With Guns and so the Signs & Portents contributor Jonny Nexus has picked up this title. It works, it might be British humour and therefore alien to many readers, but I find it funny. It’s a different style of humour than the first two; it’s more aggressive and Jonny talks ab ... |
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Wrack & Ruin, 30th August.
In many ways Wrack & Ruin marks a special moment for Oathbound. The cleverness, the flexibility, the flavour and the sheer scope of this colourful high fantasy setting come together in one distinguished product. Wrack & Ruin just bristles with life, it is packed to the hilt with information, plot bytes, game mechanics, flavour and artwork. The City of Penance feels more real than ever before. It seems that the book’s authors know their creation inside and out and are tripping over themselves to share as much of their knowledge as possible.
Wrack & Ruin isn’t just a splatbook. Splatbooks are typically a whack of mechanics ... |
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Signs & Portents #2, 29th August.
This is a review of the second issue of Mongoose’s d20 magazine Signs & Portents. I knew it couldn’t last. The first issue was incredibly cheap. It was less than US $5, it was in full colour, was about 70 pages long and came with a free Slayer’s Guide. I knew prices would have to rise. I was expecting a price hike. I wasn’t expecting /this/ level of price increase. It’s tiny. A dollar jump in price is hardly a jump at all. It’s only the absence of the attached Slayer’s Guide to Minotaurs that allows for unfavourable (and probably unfair) price-per-page comparisons.
Signs & Portents #2 is very much the same magazine as the firs ... |
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Torn Asunder, 28th August.
I like the abstraction in the d20 rule mechanics. Torn Asunder is a Critical Hit system which has the honour of awarding +4 AC to anyone wearing a codpiece. Actually, to be fair, it’s only +4AC in response to any called shots to the protected area – but that didn’t stop me chuckling when I noticed the +4 in the summary table first. Critical Hits and armour values for parts of the body is, for me, a step away from the abstraction I hold so dear.
So, if Torn Asunder is a step in the wrong direction then I must not care for it at all. Right?
Wrong. Torn Asunder’s critical hit system is fairly fluid. It snuggles nicely into the cur ... |
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Bloode Island Diceless, 28th August.
Politically Incorrect Games are getting rather good at this. They’re increasingly skilled at finding the roleplaying equivalent of a Midnight Movie and producing an Active Exploits Diceless version of the game. This is a smart move. The type of game that tends to fill this Midnight Movie niche is also the type of game that’s likely to appeal to diceless roleplayer. In this case we’re looking at Bloode Island Diceless and it’s a conversion of the Deep 7 original. There’s a boost for Deep 7 too, I don’t imagine I’ll be the only one who’ll be inspired to go shuffle around their website after sailing into Bloode Island from PIG’s website.
... |
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The Clockwork Heart, 26th August.
One way or another The Clockwork Heart will irreversibly change your campaign world. The Clockwork Heart is a capstone adventure that’ll bring your campaign to a close.
Yeah. This is a pre-written adventure. If you think it’s likely your GM will run this for you then go read something else on the site. If your GM is a Philip J Reed, or Spider Bite, or Ronin Arts fan and tends to run pre-written adventures then go find something else on the site to entertain you. The Clockwork Heart works best when there are no warnings, when the players don’t see it coming.
Actually. Hmm. Let’s clarify that. The Clockwork Heart works best when the p ... |
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Arcana Unearthed: Grimoire, 25th August.
The Arcana Unearthed: Grimoire is very good. The PDF is the last of three sizable chunks from Arcana Unearthed. It isn’t a supplement; it’s the magic rules and spells from the hardback. You don’t need any other of the Arcana Unearthed products to use this one but there are references to classes and ideas from it. You don’t have to have the other Arcana Unearthed products; you’ll just want them.
You can use this PDF on it’s own. If you want to replace your d20 spell system with something familiar but yet different then this is the way to go. In the introduction we’re told that these rules are for those people who’re tired of the ‘prepa ... |
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Arcana Unearthed: Way of the Staff, 24th August.
I’ve not yet read Arcana Unearthed but the PDF trilogy of Way of the Sword, Way of the Staff and Grimoire are there to give poor people like me the core chunks of the book. I read Way of the Sword first (it has the lower publisher number) and although the missing links into the full version of Arcana Unearthed were clear, I could see it would be easily possible to use the PDF as an individual entity. This isn’t the case for Way of the Staff. Way of the Staff has races, the magic using classes and feats but the magic system, different from the core rules, is missing. Buy either the hardback Arcana Unearthed (which seems unlikely if you’re usin ... |
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Arcana Unearthed: Way of the Sword, 24th August.
Nightmare. Horror. Disaster. The last thing I saw before my hard disk gave up the ghost was the email Amazon voucher which would have bought me Arcana Unearthed. It’s a big hardback book and unlucky, unemployed, webmasters won’t be the only people in search of affordable access to Monte Cook’s alternative handbook. (An alternative to the alternative?)
There is hope. Malhavoc Press have a PDF solution. You can’t buy Arcana Unearthed in PDF but you can buy three significant chunks of it in the form of Way of the Sword, Way of the Staff and Grimoire. If you’re buying these supplements for Arcana Unearthed, as seems most likely, then it’s ... |
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Agents of Faith, 23rd August.
Gods are real. They reward loyalty and those who follow their teachings with power, with divine spells. This is true in a typical D&D style fantasy game. Your character is as wise as mine, your character is as devout as my mine and your character spends the same amount of time in the local temple as my mine, we worship the same deity in the same way. My character is able to wield the magical rewards of his loyalty by casting spells and yours cannot. Is this fair?
It might not sound fair but most people can probably guess that the spell caster here is a cleric and the other is not. That’s why my character can cast divine magic and ... |
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Monsters of the Mind, 23rd August.
I’ve come across Monsters of the Mind before I’ve read Mindshadows Mythic Vistas campaign setting from Green Ronin. I think that’s because, at the time of writing, Mindshadows hasn’t been released. By accident or by design this has served to turn Monsters of the Mind into a rather successful appetiser for Mindshadows. I know I’m looking forward to getting my hands on it. Given the full-page illustration of the Mindshadows cover on page 2 of Monsters of the Mind we might jump to the "by design" conclusion.
I’m a Lovecraft fan. I thought I’d mention that because I get Lovecraftian vibes from Monsters of the Mind. The illustrations are s ... |
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Artifacts of the Ages: Swords and Staves, 23rd August.
Magic swords... Zzzzz Zzz, oh? Huh? Let me wake up and try again.
It’s not just that I don’t find books filled with magic swords and staves boring, I think they’re one of the faults AD&D didn’t manage to shake in its evolution to d20. I hate the fact that challenge ratings /assume/ characters will have X amount of Y strength magic items. Even worse is the suggestion that entire classes – d4 hit points – are balanced on the assumption that there will be plenty of magical healing around. Too much magic can be a bad thing.
I want carefully paced, tense, and dramatic fantasy. I’ll play high fantasy as readily as low fantasy but ... |
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Pirates!, 22nd August.
It’s a pirate’s life for me! Hmm. Especially if the ratio of hot chick pirates to run of the mill thug pirates is the same in real life as it is in Living Imagination’s Pirates! The front cover sports one of the most skimpy pirate costumes ever. It’s not a case of "arr!" but "phour!"
If you asked around in search of the best d20 naval supplement then I think you’ll find a large percentage of people you ask will recommend Broadsides! This is handy. As the exclamation mark suggests, both books are by the same company. This allows Pirates! to plug nicely into a well established set of nautical mechanics. Do you need Broadsides! to use pir ... |
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Bulletproof Screen, 22nd August.
Oops.
I say ‘oops’ because although I’m often tempted by attractive GM screen, I don’t think I’d be willing to pay US$20 for one.
Breasts. Let’s start with the good parts of the bulletproof screen. The players’ side of the three-fold screen is dominated with a colour illustration of a martial arts babe. She enjoys large breasts and top that only bothers to loosely lace itself closed from the belly button down. If you’ve female gamers in your group then perhaps you can claim it’s a girl power/female empowerment design.
The swords and ninja motif is perhaps an unusual choice for a game that made a point of putting firearm fight rules ... |
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Character Record Folio, 22nd August.
There’s some subtle clues on the front of Character Record Folio that the d20 product one to consider. The "Now 3.5 Updated!" is a pretty good clue, even the Green Ronin logo is a fair guarantee of quality but perhaps the biggest clue is the Origins Award Winner badge. Actually, since we were supposed to be listing the subtle clues I’m going to mention the white bar on the front of the otherwise colourful and illustrative front cover. The white stripe is there for you to scribble your character name’s on.
The Character Record Folio is a treat; it’s a luxury for both you and your character. On one hand paying US$ 4.50 for the Record Folio w ... |
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Battlemaps: Dungeon Rooms Vol.II, 22nd August.
Here’s my theory. When Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 was published and it added "battle grid" to the list of requirements the good people at 0one Roleplaying Games leapt for joy. Why? For some time now the company has been making a name for itself producing extraordinarily high quality battlemaps. These battlemaps are, you’ve guessed it, nicely gridded.
A textual review doesn’t do full justice to the product. Check the 0one site again and nose around for the free copies, there are some and they’re worth grabbing.
You’re able to grab battlemaps off the internet because this is a PDF product. You can view these highly detailed and ext ... |
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Invasion of Monster Island, 21st August.
Be enraged. Be very engaged.
Invasion of Monster Island is a supplement for the smash hit Monster Island. By "smash hit" I mean Godzilla’s foot through your ceiling smash hit. The series, also supported by Escape from Monster Island, is one that turns your household toys or paper figures into infamous kaiju creations. Giant monsters, giant robots and hopelessly persistent human armies have all previously featured in the series and now we can enjoy messing around with the mind-controlling, teleporting, shape-shifting Delok aliens!
Invasion of Monster Island is refreshing light hearted and yet it’s safely professional. The 30-pag ... |
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Ruined Keep, 21st August.
It’s an old style dungeon crawl. The 32-paged PDF product even refers to dungeon level one and two. You’d probably guess it was a dungeon crawl rather quickly. The Prince is getting adventurers to empty the hills of monsters and explore ancient ruins. The ruins? The ruins are remains of castles and keeps from an antediluvian war. There is a mysterious land of wizards to the north, protected by a line of mountains. No one’s ever returned from this land of wizards but people are fairly sure they’re there anyway.
Huh oh. Readers familiar with this reviewer’s personal preferences may well be bracing themselves for a 1/10 review.
I ... |
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Cry Havoc, 21st August.
Cry Havoc isn’t what I had hoped a War Event Book would be. That’s my bad news. I was hoping for a nicely abstracted system that could quickly handle any numbers of creatures, in a magic wielding fantasy battle and allow the PCs or important NPCs to stand out. I wanted to know what the side effects of a magical war might be. The good news is that Cry Havoc doesn’t mess up any attempt to deliver this because it doesn’t make the attempt. Cry Havoc takes the harder approach for a War Event Book and soldiers on with that instead. If you want to convert your d20 roleplaying session into a d20 wargaming session then you’ll benefit from the bulk of ... |
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Signs & Portents #1, 21st August.
Money. Not your money – but theirs. Mongoose’s money must go in as subsidies as to ensuring a rock bottom price. That’s the only way I can see Signs & Portents being possible. The magazine, issue one anyway, is super cheap. US$ 4.95 gets you 72 shiny, glossy, full colour pages. You get a free copy of the 24-paged The Slayer’s Guide to Minotaurs and that alone costs US$9.95.
Okay. There are a few adverts in Signs & Portents but it’s a magazine, that’s what you’d expect. There are a few adverts if you discount Mongoose Publishing products. You can’t count adverts for Mongoose Publishing because Signs & Portents is a Mongoose mag ... |
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The Slayer's Guide to Minotaurs, 20th August.
If you compare the count of 24 pages to the US$9.95 then The Slayer’s Guide to Minotaurs looks extremely expensive. If you go down that route then you’re unlucky. This, the smallest of Slayer’s Guides, was given away free with Signs & Portents #1. Signs & Portents has a cover price of US$4.95 (at least the first issue did). You can look at that offer backwards if you want and buy the Slayer’s Guide to Minotaurs for half price and get Signs and Portents #1 for free.
The small size doesn’t seem to effect The Slayer’s Guide to Minotaurs that much. I’m sure, though, that those gamers who like their libraries to be consistent will alrea ... |
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Unbidden, 20th August.
I like games like Unbidden and I especially like Unbidden. With taste comes tolerance and perception. If you’re not fond of "monsters are real but only yourself and a few others know" reality horror/chiller games then they all might look pretty much the same to you. If you’ve some experience with them then you’ll be able to pick out the finer details. The same is true for other genres, if you don’t play much fantasy then there’s not much dividing the different fantasy settings out there or if you don’t dabble in sci-fi then the nuisances of galactic travel could be lost on you. It’s worth looking at Unbidden, the finer details here help push ... |
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The Fiery Trial, 19th August.
This book is one of the reasons why I’m sure Mongoose Publishing will make the Babylon 5 RPG license work where others have failed. The Fiery Trial is one of the many supplements the British company will produce for the line.
The Fiery Trial is a 128-paged paperback. It’s in full colour. Inside there’s a combination of illustrations for maps and devices and stills from the B5 series. The text switches from black to italicised blue to highlight those paragraphs GMs can read allowed. There’s a blue backdrop for stat blocks. The best use of the colour is for the collection of double-paged Universe Today newspaper handouts. These handouts ... |
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Blood and Guts: Modern Military, 19th August.
I’ve a funny story about Blood and Guts: Modern Military. In an instant messenger conversation an American friend recounted the heroics from his tabletop RPG the previous night, his commando had leapt from a roof, slit the throat of a terrorist on guard duty, sprayed machine gun fire through the window to kill two more and then, since the terrorists had already killed their hostages, he blew the whole building up and made sure that there was no one left alive. In the same conversation he complained about Blood and Guts because it doesn’t censor out the f-word while explaining military slang. In summary: kill the bad guys and anyone in the are ... |
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Earth: 2089, 18th August.
The WarMek roleplaying game Armageddon: 2089 from Mongoose Publishing is glossy, rather slick and exceptionally crunchy. Armageddon: 2089 is allowed to be crunchy, it should be crunchy; it is a game which returns the war to roleplaying. If the original Chainmail was spawned by players roleplaying their favourite generals on the eve of battle and then again afterwards to divide up the spoils, in some ways, Armageddon: 2089 is the point where the evolutionary cycle begins anew.
With just a quick glance Earth: 2089 looks similar. The 128-paged supplement is in colour. The illustrations are of similar quality and style. Now, I think the il ... |
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Into The Green, 17th August.
It’s ever so slightly ironic that Into The Green is one of the first Bastion Press products to stray from the glossy colour format and into black and white. The decision seems like a fair call. If you’re re-aligning your publishing style to better suit industry tastes and buying habits then I can see why the prestige products might keep their colour and the run of the mill ones covert to trusty greyscale. Is it cruel to call Into The Green "run of the mill"? Slightly. It’s a bit like calling the cake in cake run of the mill because the icing is your favourite bit. An RPG supplement about encounters, creatures and the environment of woods, pla ... |
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The Quintessential Sorcerer, 8th August.
The Quintessential Sorcerer was one of those books that were due out round about the release date for D&D 3.5. Mongoose Publishing did the sensible thing of holding it back by a week or so to ensure it could be published afterwards and be entirely 3.5 compatible. It is. This waiting for the best release time has meant that the Quintessential Sorcerer has been published along with Encyclopaedia Arcane: Familiars and the two books complement one another exceptionally well. In fact, the familiar section inside Quintessential Sorcerer uses similar rules introduced by the Encyclopaedia Arcane.
All the Collector Series (the Quintessential bo ... |
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Encyclopaedia Arcane: Familiars, 5th August.
Encyclopaedia Arcane: Familiars is responsible for one of _those_ moments. The d20 sceptical little brother was visiting, he picked up the book from the to-review pile, flicked through it and commented, "Oh, you can have a Tyrannosaurus as a familiar now."
I hadn’t actually read the book at that point but I felt compelled to defend it. "It makes sense in some circumstances," I pointed out, "Would a lizardman shaman have a cat as a familiar?" Thankfully he didn’t counter by pointing out that a toad familiar would suit the lizardman perfectly, I was even more fortunate that he didn’t know the d20 rules well enough to point out how silly ... |
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Two Fisted Tales, 5th August.
Pulp fiction is a sort of super genre that encompasses many smaller pulp genres. There’s sci-fi pulp like Flash Gordon and Buck Rodgers, there are westerns, detective stories like Sam Spade, Tarzan, and even superhero stories like the Shadow. Two Fisted Tales does itself proud by being a complete pulp RPG that supports all of these sub-genres and more. It’s not the different types of pulp that Two Fisted Tales copes with but different scope within them. You can play a gritty game where the heroes are pretty much run of the mill people, an escapist game where the heroes have a distinct edge, a fantastic game where the heroes are nearly better ... |
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Forgotten Heroes: Sorcerer, 29th July.
Okay. To be fair, Malladin’s Gate don’t quite rank as the most famous d20 company but I’ve only heard effusive praise for them from the people in the know. Why? The small company manages to walk that terribly fine line between familiar D&D style fantasy and something a bit different. Their Forgotten Heroes line is a good example of this; it deliberately picks out those less widely supported classes and does something interesting with them. So is this crunch? Yes, but the good sort of crunch. The mechanics here are designed to encourage flavour rich games, providing tailor made classes and working through extrapolations of game workings fr ... |
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The Unholy Warrior's Handbook, 28th July.
The Unholy Warrior’s Handbook is part of Green Ronin’s Master Class series but the book’s connection to the widely successful and hugely popular The Book of the Righteous can not be understated. The Book of the Righteous introduced the Holy Warrior and gamers quickly adopted the class. If the Holy Warriors serve the good gods then surely there are Unholy Warriors for the vile gods too? Yes, there are, and they’ve got a US$16.95, 80-paged, supplement all to themselves.
It doesn’t happen right at the start of the book (that’s were the rules for this core class are) but the Handbook does explain the difference between the unholy warrior ... |
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Fang & Fury, 26th July.
The Races of Renown series from Green Ronin presents Fang & Fury as their Vampire race book offering.
If the 80-paged book seems slim when it’s on the shelf then pick it up and flick through the pages. The text size is small and the density good. Green Ronin really are giving you value for money on the word-per-cent count. Fang & Fury is marked at US $16.95. The only place where the text size is different is at the very back of the book for the appendixes where it is smaller still.
The artwork is excellent. The opportunity to draw sexy vampire babes was not missed. Its pretty book in strictly layout terms too. The shade boa ... |
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Monsters, 24th July.
Monsters is a PDF full of... right, monsters, from Gaming Frontiers. That’s an interesting idea. Gaming Frontiers is a d20 paper magazine. I’ve seen e-zines and I’ve seen paper magazines (duh) but I can’t think of any successful amalgamation of the two. You can buy Monsters from Gaming Frontiers, or, more correctly, from United Playtest as the people behind the magazine. You can get Monsters free by pre-ordering Gaming Frontiers #5.
So, on one level, Monsters is a freebie. Huh-uh. But wait. No. If you were ready to equate freebie with quick’n’dirty then Monsters is going to be a very pleasant surprised. It’s bookmarked and it has inte ... |
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The Slayer's Guide to Goblins, 24th July.
It seems like an age since I’ve looked at a Slayer’s Guide but if we’re only just at The Slayer’s Guide to Goblins then there must be plenty of mileage left in the series.
Goblins are green, right? No, of course not. Goblins are imaginary creatures. I imagine them as green, though. The Monster Manual says they come in many colours, ranging through yellow to red. The Slayer’s Guide says that they always come in a shade of red, yellow or orange. Yeah. I know. It’s far from being a big deal. It is about the only lingering gripe I have with the book.
As Yoda would say, "A lack of lingering gripes does not a good book make." And yes ... |
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Almanac One, 24th July.
Almanac One is, as the name suggests, the first Almanac from Transfinite Publications. Pay your money and download this d20 PDF magazine. Yes. Pay money. Almanac only costs a couple of bucks though. It only barely registers on the "need to pay" scale and, in fact, US$3 is less than the minimum purchase at RPGNow. There’s no doubting it; the Almanac is cheap. The catch is that most d20 e-zines are cheaper; they’re free.
The Almanac’s focus is on ideas rather than crunch and numbers. This doesn’t mean that there are no numbers in the PDF; there are stat blocks for NPCs and maintenance costs for exotic mounts in one of the articles. This ... |
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Encyclopaedia Arcane: Conjuration, 21st July.
I tend to read supplements twice before attempting to review them. The first time through Encyclopaedia Arcane: Conjuration I thought the book did well enough, it would make the "does what it needs to do" mark and settle about there. Certain things from the book, new types of spells, observations and quirks in the prestige classes, stayed with me through out the day, lingering in the back of my thoughts. The second reading had me revise upwards my impressions of the book. Why? On the first read I saw the glass as half empty, on the second read the glass was half full and so I think its safe to label this supplement as something of a grower.
... |
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Character Customization, 20th July.
"This book is not meant to be read cover-to-cover." I think that’s true of many rpg supplements but Throwing Dice Games’ Character Customization is the only one that I can think of that makes the point of saying so. With the aim of writing a solid review I sat down, ignored the advice and read it cover to cover. Ouch. My brain. It didn’t really work. The next day I printed it off, sat down with the pages beside me and tuned in the TV. During the commercial breaks I picked up a page or two at random and read them. I found myself reading through to the natural conclusion of the section even when cute animated policewomen from the future were tr ... |
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Testament, 19th July.
"You’ve read the book, now play the game!" announces the back of this mystery d20 product. What could the book be? It’ll have to be something that publisher Green Ronin is confidant that most gamers will have read. Lord of the Rings d20? Nope. Not that. It’s a more popular book than the Tolkien omnibus edition. Harry Potter d20? Try again. Less popular than the most recent tales of the boy wonder. What’s this? You’ve read the title of the review? That’s cheating.
Yes, this is a review of Testament, the d20 roleplaying game set in the Biblical Era. Sodom and Gomorrah don’t seem to be Open License. The Bible doesn’t appear to be in the r ... |
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Behind the Gates, 18th July.
Following on from Beyond the Walls in the Foul Locales series we have Behind the Gates. Behind the Gates aims to provide interesting locations for small towns, villages, hamlets and small communities. There are all sorts of things to stress there. This isn’t a book of adventures; it’s a book of places that should spawn encounters. These aren’t places or people that would be best deployed out in the wilds, they need to be associated with some community but it would be fairly easy to adapt a few. Similarly, these encounters wouldn’t work in a busy city without adaptation. The idea is that these locales are here to adopt, not adapt. Your running ... |
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Victoriana, 17th July.
This is good. This is very good. I’ve been able to watch interest in Victoriana rise. It was first pointed out to me by a gamer who wanted to spread the word. GameWyrd has lucky enough to host some previews of the game and they’ve been popular. There’s hype and then there’s the snowballing of interest that occurs naturally when something new looks promising. Victoriana enjoyed the latter. Thankfully, Victoriana lives up to expectations. Did I mention it was good, very good?
The book is a satisfying 300+ pages and although we’re only given soft covers we treated to wonderful illustrations, good text size and density. I can see people bu ... |
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Dark Ladies, Villainesses in RPGs, 17th July.
Dark Ladies is a PDF collection of villainess from 0one Roleplaying Games and has Andrew and Chris Hind as the lead writers.
There are seventeen Dark Ladies in the supplement and so that’s seventeen portraits, character sheets and backgrounds. A few of the backgrounds are world neutral. I’d consider a world neutral background to be one without reference to any significant place, event or person. A world neutral background is one that can be applied to your own campaign with minimal fuss. The majority of the backgrounds are written for a fantasy version of historic Earth.
We’ve a low fantasy background and stat block for Cather ... |
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Babylon 5 Roleplaying Game and Fact Book, 14th July.
Ooo! Shiny! Purple! I’m not describing some mythic twenty-sided die but airing my first impressions of the new Babylon 5 Roleplaying Game. Unlike the new d20 license from Mongoose Publishing this review does not have the luxury of a forward from J. Michael Straczynski. Straczynski admits his own roleplaying experience. He played Cthulhu, discovered that roleplayers aren’t like normal people and never roleplayed again. This means the B5 creator has not used any of the previous incarnations of the B5 RPGs. I wonder if this one will win him around.
This review isn’t a satisfying hardbound collection of 304 glossy pages either. The game i ... |
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Vice Squad: Eighties Police Adventures, 9th July.
You can get tired of even your favourite RPG. Sometimes a player whose character is central to the on-going plot has to miss a gaming night. There are those evenings when a gaggle of gamers arrive at your apartment and you’re expected to provide entertainment. What do you mean you forgot your character sheet? No, you didn’t have strength 18! The genreDivision series from Politically Incorrect Games is a collection of quick games designed to solve this sort of issue. Since we’re being Politically Incorrect here, let’s describe genreDivision as the one night stand of the roleplaying world. You have fun with the game for a night and then put it ... |
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CORPS: Diceless Conspiracy Roleplaying, 9th July.
The non-believers would dismiss it as a coincidence but those of us in the know can be certain that it’s a result of careful planning and behind the scenes cooperation. BTRC and Politically Incorrect Games are two of these most respected RPG companies operating in the PDF market. In the form of CORPS: Diceless Conspiracy Roleplaying these two industry illuminati have come together. The keyword there is "Conspiracy". CORPS stands for Complete Omniversal Role Playing System and, as the name suggests, is a generic set of rules that can be applied to any sort of campaign setting. CORPS uses ten-sided dice. Politically Incorrect Games’ diceless sy ... |
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Lunar Knights, 8th July.
This is nice. This is good. It seems like an age since I’ve been able to say, "Hey guys. Come have a look at this." – somebody else always seems to beat me to it. As I look around the Net I can’t see many other people talking about Lunar Knights or Interactive Design Adventures. That’s a shame because I think this particular d20 supplement is worth talking about. It’s all about lycanthropes and is it’s good. It’s also the first supplement from Interactive Design Adventures (though their webpage tells me they’ve got Hick: The Roleplaying Game on their list of products).
First PDFs are often tricky. There’s definitely an art to getting ... |
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Arcane Strife, 7th July.
Twice the Arcane Strife for the price. You get two editions of the PDF when you buy one, an on screen version and a printer friendly version. This is a good thing. The on screen version is as about as printer unfriendly as you can get. The background to the PDF isn’t plain paper white but ancient paper yellow and brown. This colouring trails off with a torn and worn edge effect. Both editions make use of an arcane-rune-like font for background text and headers. It’s quite appropriate. The on screen edition is properly bookmarked. That’s the basics of PDF publishing done and they’ve been done right.
Arcane Strife is about harmonious di ... |
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HeartQuest Diceless, 7th July.
A match made in Heaven. Soul mates. It’s a perfect union and it’s so romantic. I’m talking about HeartQuest meeting Active Exploits. HeartQuest is the Shoujo Manga roleplaying game and Shoujo is the style of manga that’s targeted a young, teenage, female audience. Active Exploits is the diceless roleplaying system. How many young teenage girls do you know who relish rolling buckets of dice? Active Exploits is particularly good as an Internet forum gaming system and that’s probably where most Shoujo roleplaying goes on.
The original HeartQuest game (available in both PDF and paperback) made use of the Fudge roleplaying system. This was ... |
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Thrilling Mysteries In Space #2, 7th July.
Exclamation mark. Exclamation point if you’re American. If you’re a computer programmer then it might be a shriek, pling or a not. What ever you call it, I feel that we need Thrilling Mysteries in Space! We’ve got Thrilling Mysteries in Space instead.
If Thrilling Mysteries in Space sounds pulpish to you then you’ve got a good eye for such things. That’s exactly what it is. The super-cheap PDF product takes two old pulp stories, fixes them up a little, presents the re-write and then throws in some d20 mechanics at the end. If you want exact figures then super-cheap is exactly US $2.00. This is a review of Thrilling Mysteries in Space # ... |
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TimeLords, 7th July.
In one shape or form the TimeLords RPG has been around for over fifteen years. It’s one of the first time travelling RPGs, it’s the one I hear people in the know and gaming veterans talking about. This is a review of version 1 of the EABA edition. Version 1.0, no less. This is the newest incarnation of the game. You need a copy of the "End All Be All" of roleplaying systems before you can use TimeLords. That’s the down side – even though a separate book for the rules and one for the campaign setting is the norm now. The plus side is that this leaves all 164 pages of the TimeLords PDF free to concentrate entirely on TimeLord issues. Actually, ... |
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Dreamwalker: Roleplaying in the Land of Dreams, 6th July.
Roleplaying in the Land of Dreams. It already sounds interesting. I’ve Dreamwalked before, my introduction to this game was via the Active Exploits Diceless version published through Politically Incorrect Games. This is a review of the PDF original. There’s a paperback version too and talk of a d20 Modern edition in production. If it takes a d20 conversion of the game to ensure it gets the success it deserves – then so be it. I loved the diceless version but gaming without spinning plastic polyhedrals isn’t for everyone. This Dreamwalker is a 152 pages long, that’s significantly more pages than the 78 of the Active Exploit edition. The page c ... |
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Blood and Fists: Modern Martial Arts, 4th July.
A martial arts supplement for d20 modern was always going to be a bit of a gamble. It’s a do or die scenario. RPGObjects’s Blood and Fists is, I think, the first such product out and so it has no one else to learn from. There are other problems too. D20 Modern was written with guns in mind. If you want a martial artist to be on equal footing with the other heroes then you’d need to jazz things up. If you jazz things up then you’re going to have little chance of producing realistic rule mechanics. Fast kicks and swift punches just aren’t as dangerous as fast bullets and deadly rpgs (rocket propelled grenades, of course).
Blood and Fist ... |
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Gnomes - Masters of Illusion, 3rd July.
Gnomes – Masters of Illusion is a Dark Quest produced product for EN Publishing. What this means is that we’re looking at a d20 product and one that’s going to be soaked in well written flavour. Some people really don’t go for the flavour; in fact some people use term as a synonym for filler. I think they’re wrong. I think flavour, the inspirational stuff, makes the supplement worth buying. You can faff crunch. You can’t faff flavour. And what of crunch? Masters of Illusion isn’t short on crunch either. There are more new school of Illusion spells in this supplement than there are in some paperback Illusion Spells Only products. Gnomes – Mast ... |
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The Vault and Time, 1st July.
Stalkers go anywhere and anywhen but this doesn’t mean time is meaningless to them. Thankfully, The Vault and Time doesn’t get lost in complex, Stephen Hawking-like, science lessons about the nature of time, paradox problems and reality. In fact, The Vault and Time reminds the reader that Forbiddance is there to ensure the time line doesn’t get messy. A Stalker could try and take out Hitler but wouldn’t get very far before Forbiddance thwarted their plan, in fact, most Stalkers find that they need to tread lightly
That’s right. You have to resist the temptation to cast an Unbidden in the role of Genghis Khan or Caesar Borgia. Why? If ... |
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The Quintessential Gnome, 27th June.
"As elves have drow and dwarves have duergar, the true evil counterpart to gnomes are not the deep gnomes, but these little devils." That’s a quote from the last sub-race of gnomes mentioned by The Quintessential Gnome. Who are these little devils? Why, Garden Gnomes of course! The Quintessential Gnome is not without its humour.
There’s quite a lot of humour in the book. It’s clearly something that Mongoose staff writer Alejandro Melchor put a lot of thought into since its something he talks about in the designer’s notes. He tries to get the balance right. This isn’t one of the comedic Slayer’s Guides; the Quintessential Gnome is supposed ... |
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Urban Arcana, 26th June.
Bugbears and half-dragons are out shopping the local mall and no one sees them because no one wants to see them. Urban Arcana is a d20 Modern campaign setting where fantasy creatures have been pulled through the Shadow Plane and into a world very much like ours. Mankind, the average Joe on the street, can’t cope with this. Man only wants the familiar and refuses to accept anything as strange as a gnome with an iPod. Urban Arcana has these fantasy races wandering around in a contemporary world where only a few people actually notice them.
There’s a risk of irony here. Wizards must really believe that people want the familiar and that th ... |
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Mastering the Vault, 23rd June.
The title is self-explanatory; Mastering the Vault is a Gamesmaster supplement for the Whispering Vault.
The series of Whispering Vault PDFs being published by Philip J Reed and Christopher Shy aren’t cheap and so the $5 price tag is as eye-catching as it is curious. The catch? Mastering the Vault is only 25 pages long. Further more, if you’ve read Dangerous Prey then you’ll recognise some of the comments on the Unbidden and the plot ideas in the section advising the GM on the power of symbolism.
So, has the unthinkable happened? Is there a weak Whispering Vault product? The answer is – no, certainly not. The supplement has val ... |
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Dangerous Prey, 23rd June.
Dangerous Prey is a supplement for the fantastic Whispering Vault horror roleplaying game. This time round we’re getting something a little more traditional for the series; Dangerous Prey contains more Shadows, more powers and a pre-written adventure. That said, Dangerous Prey is still entirely Whispering Vault, the illustrations are surreally spooky, the tone is intelligent, the content mature and the crunchy bits (yeah, the Shadows, Unbidden and powers) are wrapped in scary flavour and are only as crunchy as the streamlined mechanics of the Whispering Vault allows. If you’ve ever wondered whether an Unbidden can escape the Whispering Vault ... |
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Haven: City of Violence, 20th June.
Get on with the game already.
Actually, you’re probably not thinking that as you start to explore Haven: City of Violence. The chances are pretty good you’ll admire the front cover – which is nicely done, the "design" in Louis Porter, Jr. Design is evident from the outset. It looks nice. I wasn’t thinking "Get on with the game already" as I flicked through the 14-paged, full colour, comic strip that introduces the book. I was too distracted by yet more pretty pictures and by trying to work out who was after whom and how many assassins there are.
Then there’s the two page personal statement from Louis Porter, Jr. He tells us tha ... |
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Ultimate Games Designer's Companion, 19th June.
The Ultimate Games Designer’s Companion - there, you’re curious already, it’s an "I want to buy this book" title. It’s a clever title; a psychological critical hit from Mongoose but it’s a title that follows perfectly innocently along in the Ultimate series.
It’s official, at the time of writing, the Ultimate series now out sells Mongoose’s Collector series. This is understandable, the Ultimate books are newer, they offer up the best of the best and although they might cost US$34.95 they’re also 250+ pages and a nice hardback frame. A real book for real gamers.
Yeah, the Ultimate Games Designer’s Companion is a real book – but ... |
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Tournaments, Fairs & Taverns, 19th June.
Tournaments, Fairs & Taverns is a roleplaying games supplement about games that includes a roleplaying games substitute which can be played in a tavern or perhaps at tournament or fair too. Just to repeat that without the confusion; Tournaments, Fairs & Taverns is full of games.
This is a great idea. It only takes two seconds for the GM to mention, as way of adding detail, two fellows playing some sort of game in the tavern and only two more seconds for a player to ask which game and that they’re trying to join in. The opposite side of the same coin would be a fair or tournament where it could be take the GM hours to plan the details f ... |
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Time of Crisis, 13th June.
Ooo. So preeety. Time of Crisis is the eye candy we’ve come to expect (thus demand) from Green Ronin’s Mutants & Mastermind hero line. It’s full colour. There are wonderful full-paged illustrations.
Oh, there’s a pre-written adventure for six characters at Power Level 10. We’re told we can adjust the villains’ Power Levels or add more minions from Freedom City to suit if the party of players are tougher than that. If I was going to ask for more from Time of Crisis (which I always want to call Time Crisis) then it would be for a little more in way of examples of just what level of minion to add in order to balance Power Levels. Cl ... |
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Mortal Magic, 12th June.
Mortal Magic is a supplement for the Whispering Vault. In the Whispering Vault players take on the role of immortal Stalkers and Mortal Magic is for mortals. Yeah. The clue was there in the name.
So does this work? It works extremely well. The Whispering Vault appeals to a certain type of roleplayer, those of us looking for something different and thought provoking. Games in which players end up hiding behind the sofa and refusing to come out until the GM quits being so spooky count as both different and thought provoking. Magic in the Whispering Vault setting is alive. Magic requires Essence. Essence is life. So, magic itself is aliv ... |
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The Hamlet of Thumble, 10th June.
This review is taken from the final draft of the The Hamlet of Thumble the day before it goes to the printers. Baring demon possessed printing machines, alien ink or yellow on white formatting choices we can be confident that this review represents a fair set of comments on the final product. This is good for the Halfling’s Hamlet because it looks rather good.
This is the first pre-written adventure I’ve seen for 3.5 rules and it’s more than just an adventure. The Hamlet of Thumble is the first stage of some World Building, the prefix "World of Whitethorn 1A" is the clue. Better still, through out the scenario there are points where t ... |
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Heart of the Machine, 7th June.
This is a review of a pre-written scenario. If you don’t want spoilers then jump in your spaceship and buzz off. Heart of the Machine is a licensed Dragonstar game. As a licensed game it’s not written by Fantasy Flight Games but by Mystic Eye Games instead, that’s alright, Mystic Eye have already proven they can do this successfully enough with Raw Recruits.
The Heart of the Machine is nice and clean. The book has a nice feel to it, a crisp layout, a bold front cover, good quality paper and exceptionally sharp cartography. The 64-paged paperback adventure is split into three parts and designed for fourth level characters. GM tips pre ... |
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Friends & Familiars, 6th June.
Friends and Familiars is a very pretty book. It’s a luxury. I suppose it’s a bit like an extra generous slice of chocolate cake at the end of a meal; it’ll cost you extra, you can skip it without ruining the meal, it might not be worth it if you’re not fond of rich chocolate but if you’re a connoisseur then you’ll appreciate the quality, it might just be enough to add that special something to your meal and its hard to go wrong with chocolate.
It’s hard to go wrong with illustrations of this quality. Friends and Familiars is, for me, a book of fifteen wonderful illustrations that have been bundled with some stats and brief background ... |
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The Whispering Vault, 6th June.
"One warning: try to be sensitive to the feelings of the other players. If you know someone will have trouble with certain imagery, leave it alone. A little blood between friends can be a good time, but there is no reason to offend anyone. Butcher responsibly..."
Whispering Vault is a horror game. That’s a warning from it.
This is a review of the PDF version of Whispering Vault. I was vaguely aware that it had been sold printed on to dead trees in the past but I didn’t know much about it. There are lots of great PDF products available in the RPG industry and the Whispering Vault is just one of them. The Whispering is something ... |
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Possessors: Children of the Outer Gods, 4th June.
Okay. I admit it. I just love the combination of Philip J Reed’s writing with Christopher Shy’s art. It’s a harmony of oxymorons, succinct depth in the writing, gritty surrealism in the illustration. The introduction makes it clear that they work together, tossing ideas back and forth and maturing the product together.
Possessors: Children of the Outer Gods is a one horse show or perhaps more accurately, a one monster bestiary. Mind Flayers, there, I said it. We’re told that the Possessors are an effort to produce d20 open gaming license material for Philip J Reed’s favourite monster. This is just this reviewer’s guess but I suspect the f ... |
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Pocket Universe, 3rd June.
The advent of the PDF RPG industry has led to a healthy rush of quality lite games. By "lite game" I’m thinking of the traditional combination of a catchy campaign idea; a Western, occupied Earth, ghost story, etc along with a set of quick but functional rules. Pocket Universe is a quality lite game but it doesn’t follow those rules. There’s no campaign idea and there aren’t any token game mechanics either. Pocket Universe provides quick but thorough rules so that you’ll be able to apply them to almost any campaign setting of your own imagination.
The concepts of quick and thorough sound as if they should be mutually exclusive but aut ... |
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The Legend of The Steel General (2nd edition), 1st June.
The Legend of the Steel General was the first ever roleplaying PDF product. The adventure has been dusted down, edited, corrected and brushed up for a second edition. If you’re a fan of 0one Roleplaying Games cartography then you’ll be pleased with the Legend of the Steel General since it oozes quality maps and if you want a solid, exciting and epic adventure then the download is well worth looking at too.
Epic is a good word for the Legend of the Steel General. There’s a sweeping back story to the plot, gods, armies, magic swords and powerful heroes. There are even original races, feats and spells. In fact, there’s so much going on th ... |
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Fiend Folio, 31st May.
The Fiend Folio is so-called because it has lots of extraplanar creatures in it, although there are plenty of Material Plane creatures too, and that some extraplanar creatures happen to be fiends, although there are plenty that are not. In summary the Fiend Folio gets its name because there are some fiends in it. At least we can be sure that it’s not an attempt to ride on the success of the original Fiend Folio: Tome of Creatures Malevolent and Benign or avoid calling the book Monster Manual 3. Ahem.
If you did happen to want a Monster Manual 3 then you’d be in luck. The Fiend Folio begins with an alphabetical list of monsters and con ... |
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The Quintessential Bard, 31st May.
The Collector Series from Mongoose Publishing has done well to follow the style first introduced in the Quintessential Fighter (book one) and yet remain flexible and innovative enough not to look dated today. One of the selling points for the Quintessential books for me has been their efforts to avoid simply doing power ups and to try to include material that fleshes out the class, providing more roleplaying options for GMs and players alike.
The Quintessential Bard was always going to be a challenge. More options for the Bard wouldn’t impact this Jack-Of-All-Trades class in the same way they’ve effected the specialised classes. Too many ... |
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Blood and Space, 30th May.
Blood and Space seems to confuse people and I don’t know why. It’s not a campaign setting; it’s a "Starship Adventure Toolkit". Oh. Okay. I suppose that slightly buzz-wordy and perhaps the inclusion of "Adventure" confuses people. I really don’t have that much sympathy; "Starship Adventure Toolkit" looks nothing like "Sci-Fi Roleplaying Game" and Blood and Space has "Starship Adventure Toolkit" printed in bold text right on the front cover. If you’re looking for a complete Sci-Fi game, you know, like Star Wars, then look elsewhere. If you have a Sci-Fi game of your own imagination and you want a rulebook to help you through the nuances of st ... |
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Todd Gamble's Cartographica, 29th May.
Wow. Okay. Let’s try that again. Wow.
No. There’s no escaping Todd Gamble’s Cartographica’s "wow factor".
Mind you, there’s no escaping the "Get your dirty minis off my lovely maps!" factor either. If you don’t have access to a colour photocopier then don’t go near Cartographica. You’ll go insane as you attempt to balance the urge to use the wonderful maps in your game against your instincts to protect the book.
The maps are supposed to be used as battle maps; the square grids on them are proof of that. The urge to photocopy the maps must also be perfectly valid since Green Ronin grant permission for personal photocopyi ... |
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GM Mastery: NPC Essentials, 29th May.
The contents page is a bit of a mess. It’s nice and thorough - that’s good. The page entries are out by about four - that’s bad. Subtract four from the apparent page number in the table of contents and you’ll be much closer to where the entry actually is.
It would be entirely wrong, it would be a roleplaying crime, to judge GM Mastery (book one) – NPC Essentials by the mismatched page numbers in the table of contents. The first appearance of this GM Mastery book was as a PDF offering from RPGObjects and Johnn Four, it really was a must-have product. This incarnation is the very same book except its on paper and that’ll make very many peopl ... |
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Tarot Magic, 29th May.
Take your copy of Tarot Magic and being careful not to bend the front cover, use your thumb to quickly flick-book the top right hand corner. You’ll see that the cup sidebar graphic jumps up and down and left to right.
That’s about the only distraction in the book. Aside from the dancing cup, Tarot Magic concentrates on giving GMs what they need to use tarot magic in their game and that’s what I like to see from a d20 supplement.
Tarot Magic begins with very large tables designed to emulate tarot card draws and readings by using dice. You don’t need to know anything about tarot to use the book; you certainly don’t need to know t ... |
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Ghost Stories: Horror Mystery Adventures, 23rd May.
Politically Incorrect Games’ Ghost Stories are a bit like haunted bullets; quick and scary. The experience points paragraph in the game starts "If your character survives an entire scenario..." and that should dismiss any lingering thoughts you had about Casper the Friendly RPG. Ghost Stories isn’t just about horror though, it’s mystery too, the sort of investigative horror that does without chainsaw murderers – for awhile, at least.
Ghost Stories is part of the genreDivision series and it would therefore be entirely wrong to compare it to a fully-fledged RPG. I think. No wait. I take that back. Ghost Stories is a fully-fledged RPG in ... |
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Epic Tales: Volume 1, 22nd May.
The four component parts of Epic Tales: Race for Retribution have been kicking around for a little while, available, I think, as downloads from the Bard’s Productions website. Epic Tales is a set of four adventures and as adventures and that’s the sort of thing you’d want to print out and have in front of you while you’re DMing.
Epic Tales balances several competing elements rather well. The pre-written adventures are clean and succinct enough to suit a new DM and yet the flexible and broad enough to suit a more experienced gaming group. Pre-written adventures really have to be linear but Epic Tales is designed so that a DM may (and p ... |
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When the Sky Falls, 21st May.
When the Sky Falls is an event book. An event book, by its very nature, is a one horse trick. An event book is only ever going to interest GMs who are tempted to use the event in their campaign world. When the Sky Falls is about the effects of a meteorite impact on a fantasy setting. When the Sky Falls is a stand alone book; whereas some other Malhavoc offerings have looked back to previous books in the series and use prestige classes and feats from them, the mechanics in this PDF are entirely self contained. The book does relate to other Malhavoc books though. The first event book from Malhavoc dealt with the death of a god and it just so h ... |
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Guilds and Adventurers, 19th May.
Mystic Eye’s Guilds and Adventurers contains some victories on the battle ground of lateral thinking. The book contains a guild system that makes me far less uneasy that most.
Guild status becomes an issue of Prestige Class, unless you’re an NPC, in which case there’s an expert-based NPC class for you. A prestige class approach to guild status makes sense for d20 fantasy, especially given the way the prestige classes have come to rule the system. A prestige class for guild membership is simpler and cleaner than an extra mechanic and note on your character sheet. The first obstacle to overcome with a prestige class approach is the inhe ... |
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The Penumbra Pentagon, 16th May.
It just doesn’t work.
Sword & Sorcery’s Scarred Lands campaign setting is one of very few campaign settings that I actively watch and wait for the next new release. I couldn’t help be horribly disappointed by The Penumbra Pentagon isn’t crunchy when it needs to be and it entirely messes up the flavour attraction of the Scarred Lands.
The Penumbra Pentagon is a 96-paged paperback. The book is about the rise of the Penumbra Lords; the Penumbra Lord is a prestige class that isn’t re-printed anywhere in the 96 pages. You need to buy the expensive, hardback, Relics and Rituals if you want to really use the Penumbra Pentagon. I really ... |
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Tombs!, 14th May.
Tombs! bills itself as "the definitive tomb adventure design guide". We could start to debate the minutia of definitive here; dictionary.com lists four options, two of which are "Supplying or being a final settlement or decision; conclusive." and "Authoritative and complete: a definitive biography." I don’t think Tombs! has the final word on tombs but it is certainly authoritative. Let’s say that Tombs! is _a_ definitive tomb adventure design guide.
I’m not going to lambaste Tombs! for encouraging the dungeon crawl. Sure, the infamous dungeon crawl can be fun at times and banal at times... but we don’t even get into that debate with To ... |
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Dreamwalker, 10th May.
Have you ever tried doing any maths in a dream? Just adding two numbers together? I have. It’s crazy. Even if you’re a fairly lucid dreamer (colour and all) like myself it is next to impossible to deal with numbers – and I’m told this is because the part of your brain that best deals with the logic of arithmetic isn’t active while you’re dreaming.
Politically Incorrect Games’ Dreamwalker is an ideally themed game for the Active Exploits Diceless Roleplaying system. That’s right, no dice. You need to have the core Active Exploits rules before you can use Dreamwalker but this isn’t a problem. Active Exploits is entirely free. You should ... |
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Blood and Relics, 7th May.
San Greal - Holy Grail. Sang Real - Royal Blood. Easy mistake to make.
The Holy Grail is a relic, a bloody relic since it was supposed to have contained the blood of Christ. Royal Blood is just blood, but religious blood. Blood. Relics. Blood and Relics is one of the very first supplements to support D20 Modern. It should already be pretty clear the angle the PDF takes.
Blood and Relics introduces gothic conspiracy to D20 Modern, it introduces demons, cultists and those who fight against the darkness. This is a theme that d20 fantasy players will be familiar with and it’s therefore a good idea for an early D20 Modern supplement. ... |
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HardNova, 6th May.
A key focus for any Wyrdmaster written GameWyrd review is whether the product does what it sets out to do. I think it makes sense; it’s not unknown to find a RPG supplement that promises to be a Guide to Zombie Sheep but gets entirely distracted by MooBad the evil sheep god. Er, for example. Politically Incorrect Games’ HardNova is part of the genreDiverson series and has a far more practical goal than being a guide to zombie sheep. HardNova is designed to be a one night wonder, a break from the stress of a long running campaign and although it doesn’t explicitly make the claim, I think such a product should be able to come to your rescue if ... |
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Freedom City, 6th May.
If you’d ask me to name a top five d20 list then Mutants & Masterminds would be included in it before I had to think. The GM Screen was pretty good too, but we’ll not count that as the first support for the game, Freedom City has the honour and the challenge of being the first book to try and carry on the tradition of excellence.
Excellent? No. Pretty damn good? Yes.
Freedom City is in a style that superhero RPGers will recognise but might just be a little too alien for "We-Only-Play-Fantasy-With-Elves-Dwarves-And-Fighers" RPGers. There are no stats for new monsters – instead there are plenty of stats for individual heroes, ... |
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Dogs of War: Series 1: Issue 1, 3rd May.
Dogs of War series 1/volume 1 is short and to the point. You know, a bit like a pitbull or perhaps a particularly ferocious terrier. Since half-breeds seem to be the flavour of the month, both the NPCs in the download are, perhaps that should be short and to the point - like a pit terrier.
Short and to the point means 16 pages, $2.50 and two NPCs. The two NPCs are used to hang a bunch of other stuff off, templates, prestige classes and spells. It’s the usual d20 fodder. Some of this – not an insignificant chunk either – isn’t new. Author Charles W. Plemons III has collected bits and pieces from the OGL that seemed to interest him and ... |
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Gaming Frontiers: 4, 3rd May.
Gaming Frontiers #4 is the second of the d20 supplemental magazine series to be in black and white, it’s the fourth to be packed to the hilt with bites of d20 supplements and therefore maintains the 100% record where it counts the most.
The Uncharted Territory sections in the magazine might be the most popular corners of the magazine; within them are the exclusive extras from supplements yet-to-be-published or "cutting room floor" outtakes from books already on the shelf. Just watch that yet-to-be-published bit, in the chaotic d20 publishing world some books makes it to print faster than expected and others are delayed. I’m not sure whethe ... |
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Faeries, 30th April.
Where are the illustrations? Rather surprisingly that was my first reaction to Faeries, I don’t think it’s entirely unjustified but it sounds a bit harsh. I’ll say from the start that Faeries does well enough, it’s just not a wild success.
The book begins with a character race faeries: Bogies (and there’s no illustration), Deep Fey (re-visited in full from Minions: Fearsome Foes), common Faeries (without illustration), Feeorin "noble fey" (without illustration), half-fey, Scath and Sprites. Spirits are about two feet tall - so is that a very small sprite posing on that leaf or is it a very large leaf? I might have been spoiled by publi ... |
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Lords of the Night: Vampires, 28th April.
Lords of the Night: Vampires is Bottled Imp Games’ first book. If you don’t believe me, then I don’t blame you; it doesn’t look like a first book. I can’t imagine there’s much room left in the scrum at the bottom of the d20 ladder these days. If Vampires represents Bottled Imp Games’ attempt to launch themselves by aiming somewhere higher, further up that ladder, then they’ve succeeded. They’ve certainly got a finger or two (or should I say fang?) on that higher up rung anyway. The 128-paged book has an enticing front cover with a nice matt black feel to it, good text density, a two column layout that switches to three columns for the spell ... |
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Spellbound: A Codex of Ritual Magic, 27th April.
Recently I’ve enjoyed reading Broadsides! and Streets of Silver by Living Imagination. Both book was packed from cover to cover with on-topic rules and game meal and yet for each book there was the slight hiccup where I couldn’t use the tempting looking rituals because I didn’t have the core ritual rules. I think there’s in Living Imagination’s main campaign book Twin Crowns: Age of Exploration and that’s fair enough, it’s a good place for them. Buying a whole (and fat) campaign book just to use the ritual rules isn’t on, it’s just a non-starter and so (and very acutely Living Imagination gives us Spellbound: A Codex of Ritual Magic instead.
... |
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Dry Land: Empires of the Dragon Sands, 25th April.
"Special Thanks to: My mother and brother, for making fun of my stories early in life and thus instilling a bitter determination to one day see my writing in print just so I could stuff the hardcopy down their throats."
Dry Land: Empires of the Dragon Sands has plenty of bite in it – and not just in the opening remarks above either. Dry Land supplements the Bluffside Campaign setting, specifically it covers the dragon sands that dominate the southern part of the Great Northern Continent. The Dragori have an embassy in the city of Bluffside.
A great thing about Dry Land is that it doesn’t have to be in the Bluffside setting. You ... |
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Bastards & Bloodlines, 25th April.
"Are You Ready To Get Freaky?" asks the back of the entertainingly titled Bastards & Bloodlines. I suppose it’s fair enough, some of the crossbreed races presented by the book are freaky; especially those half-Beholders depicted on page 4. The freak factor isn’t anything to sing about though. I’m much more impressed by the book’s professional shine and player friendly vibe. Bastards & Bloodlines is concerned with those half-breed fantasy races that could be used as a PC or NPC race, it’s more of a handbook than it is a beastiary.
Okay, so it’s a crunchy book. There are lots of game rules for new half-bred races, a new type of ... |
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The Colonies, 24th April.
"There is a d20 alternative", claims an EABA banner advert. The banner is talking about the EABA gaming mechanics themselves, of course, but in order for the claim to have any gaming table creditability I think we’d need to see some games converted from their own system and then successfully run with EABA. Bring forward The Colonies RPG.
The original The Colonies RPG is a compact little hit from Politically Incorrect Games. The original game works perfectly well, I’d happily recommend it to anyone – especially if they want a PDF with game rules and campaign setting all in one. This version of the game has the advantage of not being a ... |
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Broadsides!, 18th April.
In the world of movies there are two kinds of successes: the blockbuster and the sleeper. The blockbusters are those movies that launch with much fanfare and acclaim; blockbusters make their impact and their revenue in the first few weeks. The sleepers are the movies that have a much lower profile but which people keeping on coming to see and then have DVD/videos that keep on selling. Over the course of a few years sleepers make as much money as the blockbusters. If Broadsides! was a movie then it would be a sleeper success. It’s not the money making that interests me, it’s the inherent quality that a sleeper needs to have to make it successf ... |
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Dangerous Dungeons: Goblins' Lairs, 17th April.
Wow. How cool is this? Dangerous Dungeons: Goblins' Lairs is a 66-paged PDF (great value at the current price of $6) and the jaw-dropping part of the download is the first 54 pages. The remaining section of the product is a collection of page after page of goblin stat blocks. They’re all sorts of goblins here, scouts, warriors, shaman and even goblin vampires. The Challenge Ratings start at ¼ and finish at 18. There are several of these high level goblins too. There’s a goblin for every occasion.
But I’m not drooling over the goblin stat blocks.
The electronic cartography market must be one of the most competitive sub-sections ... |
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Factory, 15th April.
Perpetrated Press have done it again with Factory. Their first technomagic book, Arsenal, was really quite good. The smart move was to ensure that there was enough of a twist and enough tempting flavour to support the crunchy bits so that people like me (prone to falling asleep if he sees too many numbers in a supplement) found it interesting. Those games buying Arsenal for the, er, arsenal, weren’t disappointed either. Factory pulls off the same trick and keeps our attention by adding a little more.
Factory is designed to let you use high technology (computers, robots, cyberware) along with high magic (elementals, demons, golems) as ... |
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NeoTerra, 15th April.
NeoTerra is a thinker. It’s a campaign setting running off a smart idea. Treat this review in the same way you might a review of a pre-written adventure – it’ll contain spoilers. I think that’s fair enough, if you’re interested in buying NeoTerra then I suspect you’ll read through all of it and to the GM only section. Here’s an advantage of a PDF game that I hadn’t thought of before. You can print out your copy, move the GM only bit to a second folder and let your players safely flick through the first.
The GM section in the game is ultraviolet clearance, citizen. The computer is here to help.
Oh wait. No. That’s Paranoia. If y ... |
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Mutants & Masterminds Gamemaster Screen, 13th April.
My main concern with GM screens is that the side the players see doesn’t always help the GM. I remember playing in a light hearted, political satire of a D&D game where the GM sat behind the default D&D screen. The political satire wasn’t assisted by the pictures of heroes battling against giant spiders and monsters from the Underdark. The GM’s side of the screen might have been useful but the players’ side wasn’t.
There’s no such problem for a Mutants & Masterminds GM screen. The genre is pretty much the theme (although, yes, there are exceptions). The bold colour illustration on the players’ side is safe and sound; images ... |
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Mindscapes: Beasts of the Id, 13th April.
Mindscapes: Beasts of the Id is short, sharp and to the point. The Beasts of the Id are supplemental to the Bruce Cordell’s Malhavoc Press Mindscapes psionic supplement. Beasts of the Id comes in at 34 pages and that includes cover, inside cover, index, back page, full page advert for a forthcoming Event Book and another page for the OGL text. There is room in the $7 (currently discounted to $5) PDF for 18 monsters and a new psionic power. The new power happens to be "Calling the Beasts of the Id" which does exactly that.
Even with respect the new power it would be wrong to describe Beasts of the Id as having nothing else going for it ... |
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The Avatar's Handbook, 13th April.
Don’t try this at home (or in your local store). If you rip every page out of a copy of The Avatar’s Handbook, shuffle them and pick one at random then it would be very unlikely you be holding anything about the avatar class. That doesn’t bode well.
The front cover illustration is great piece of gamer art and a good summary of the book as a whole. On the front cover you’ll see a celestial from the upper planes giving a wretched demon the smiting it deserves. If you drag your gaze away from the illustration’s centrepiece and look upwards you’ll see a silhouette of a man standing in a pillar of light. That’s the avatar. He’s there all ri ... |
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Ythrek, 12th April.
Okay. Be fair to Ythrek; even if a PDF is set up to be as annoying as possible it’s often easy to fix. In this case, in Acrobat, go to the View menu and move the tick from Single Page to Continuous and you’ll probably want to select Fit Width too. This doesn’t help with the bookmarks, if you use them then the page will re-size to fit your screen length-wise and that’s no good for me. At least Ythrek has bookmarks, too many PDFs don’t.
Don’t get me wrong; Ythrek’s selling points are far more than just having bookmarks. There’s the EABA game mechanics, that’s a plus point. Even if you have to buy EABA separately, the combined cost is les ... |
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Encyclopaedia Arcane: Crossbreeding, 1st April.
Crossbreeding: Flesh and Blood starts to move the emphasis from the "arcane" to the "encyclopaedia" in Mongoose’s Encyclopaedia Arcane series. The last half of the book is a beastiary, an encyclopaedia if you will, of crossbred creatures. We also seem to have moved to the American spelling of the word, tossing out the British ‘a’ like so many unwanted ‘u’s.
Crossbreeding differs from its compatriots in other ways too; there are no new lists of spells in this book, there’s no attempt to create a new way of casting magic (Chaos Magic, Battle Magic, etc) and neither are their any notes on Guilds, feats nor story text running through the ... |
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EABA, 31st March.
EABA – the End All, Be All of roleplaying systems. No, not really, the day someone writes that is the day I spontaneously combust. EABA is rather good though. Right at the start of the product, in the list of ‘other credits’, there’s a list of RPGs that have helped inspire EABA. D&D, CoC, Champions, GURPS, Over the Edge, Timelords, 3G³ and CORPS. Those last three there are other games designed by EABA’s designer Greg Porter. I’d heard plenty of good things about CORPS before and that rather playfully spoils a witty tag line on one of BTRC’s banner adverts; "The best games you’ve never heard of." BTRC translates as Blacksburg Tactical ... |
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The Complete Guide to Treants, 28th March.
As a rule I try not to check out what other reviewers are saying about a product before I’ve made my own mind up. I think it’s best to approach the book as neutrally as possible. This didn’t happen with The Complete Guide to Treants, people just kept on talking about it in the chatrooms or raving about it on forums. If I were to summarise the comments I’d picked up about the book before opening it myself then it would be as "Treants kick ass!"
They do, especially if you’ve been lighting fires in their forests.
It’s not the ass kicking that puts this book a notch above most of the other slim guide supplements though; it’s the me ... |
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Undiscovered Quests & Adventures, Issue #3, 27th March.
Way-hay! Eilfin’s PDF editor must have gone up a character level.
There are a bunch of new and worthwhile features in issue #3 of Quests and Adventures. We have bookmarks; that’s not an impressive PDF feat, it’s just a really useful one. Issue #3 is 104 pages deep and so being able to jump straight to what interests you, without having to scroll through picture laden pages, is a real bonus. The bookmarks are done right; using them doesn’t cause Acrobat to jump to "Fit to Window" where the page is too small to read but maintains "Fit Width" where the text is readable. There are internal page bookmarks too. As you read issue #3’s conten ... |
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Idylls of the Rat King, 26th March.
"Remember the golden days of role playing, when adventures were underground, NPCs were there to be killed, and the finale of every dungeon was the dragon on the 20th level?"
No! I don’t! Back then, as a very young boy, friends and I made do with homebrewed game systems because D&D was too expensive (so far out of pocket money range) and rubbish.
So it seems very likely that this reviewer is going to rubbish Idylls of the Rat King as well, after all, this "Dungeon Crawl Classic" strives to be just like 1st edition D&D. That’s not going to happen though, Idylls of the Rat King oozes with innocent retro charm and really is ... |
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Atomik Grimoire, 25th March.
Stay with me. Atomik Grimoire is a supplemental add-on for Atomik Magick. Atomik Magick is a generic add-on that requires the Atomik Add-On Booklet. The Add-On Booklet is free, Atomik Magick isn’t. These generic add-ons are designed complement any game.
I don’t think you really need Atomik Magick to use Atomik Grimoire. The Grimoire contains 400 ready-to-use spells and I think they’re generic and transparent enough to be easily converted to any other system. Score one for the generic add-on idea.
Atomik Magic is an intelligent offering. It discusses historic and contemporary views on magic. The PDF introduces nine spheres of ma ... |
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Atomik Magick, 25th March.
It really wouldn’t do to describe Atomik Magick as a magic supplement. The PDF download doesn’t supplement your magic system, although I suppose it could. Atomik Magick is there to let you design your own magic system. Once Atomik Magick has been used to create the basics of magic in your gaming world it can then be used to design whole libraries of spells and vaults of magic items. The add-on even contains text on familiars and alchemy.
Atomik Magick is an add-on. The add-on series from Atomik Vortex Studio is designed to be compatible with any game system, any set of rules, any number of dice – and it does that by using its own ada ... |
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Mecha Compendium, 25th March.
Hmmm. Pretty! That’s a good first impression for a book. That’s what Dream Pod 9’s d20 Mecha Compendium got from me as I flicked through it. There’s always a catch though. The book has to live up to that first reaction.
And it does.
And there’s another catch. You knew that was coming, didn’t you? It’s recommended that you own the D20 Mecha rulebook from Guardians of Order and at the time this review was written, at the time the Mecha Compendium was released, that rulebook isn’t yet available. I’ve found it’s not too much of a problem, the game stats and rule implications are transparent enough and a practised GM isn’t likely to ... |
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Another 101 Mundane Treasures, 25th March.
Do you really need me to tell you what Another 101 Mundane Treasures is about? No, probably not, certainly not if you have 101 Mundane Treasures from Philip J Reed already. Another 101 Mundane Treasures uses the PDF style that I’ll now forever associate with Philip J Reed products and Studio Ronin art. The pages are wide and short compared to the usual PDF tactic of thin and tall. And yes, I know other PDF produces use the former layout too. Dotted sporadically throughout the download are wonderful Christopher Shy illustrations. You might not need a review to tell you what you can expect to find in Another 101 Mundane Treasures but this revie ... |
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Pocket Magica, 24th March.
Pocket Magica is a small book. Pocket Magica is 240 pages long. It manages both of these feats at the same time by having half the typical height and width dimensions of RPG supplements.
Pocket Magica is a late triplet. Green Ronin managed wonders with Pocket Grimoire: Arcane and Pocket Grimoire: Divine; two similar books that brought together Arcane and Divine spells from around the d20 publisher spectrum and stuck them together for convenience. It’s convenience that I’m looking for in Pocket Magica. Not entirely convenience I suppose. I’m eyeing the US $14.95 price tag too since that seems to be the value for money you’d expect for ... |
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Undiscovered Quests & Adventures, Issue #2, 24th March.
Quests & Adventures is the ezine from Eilfin Publishing for their own high fantasy hardback epic Undiscovered. Quests & Adventures is an incredibly cheap, US $5, PDF download. This issue, number #2, is even better value than the first as it breaks the century mark and tallies in at 104 pages.
Issue #2 of Q & A is dated September 2002. As is the case in issue #1 there’s no internal bookmarks in the ezine and that’s a shame. Bookmarks are always useful in a PDF and become vitally important when the product gets to be as large as this release of Quests & Adventures is. Despite all the illustrations in Q & A the PDF ma ... |
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Streets of Silver, 24th March.
Streets of Silver is a 312-paged book from Living Imagination Inc.. The website quotes the RRP at US$ 29.95. There are two ways at looking at that; that’s a lot of money for a single city but it’s not too bad for such a hefty book.
Streets of Silver isn’t going to win any beauty pageants. It’s blocky at times, with short paragraph entries and bold type headings of the same size as the default text. The book can be reminiscent of an encyclopaedia in places. It’s little surprise that illustrations start to run thin in such a large book. This is especially true at the end of the book where you can go pages without a break from the square ... |
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Undiscovered Quests & Adventures, Issue #1, 24th March.
The first issue of Undiscovered Quests & Adventures is a surprise package, it’s a bit of a gem. The PDF is the first ezine from Eilfin Publishing for their Undiscovered: The Quest for Adventure RPG. If you’re pleased with your copy of Undiscovered then Quests & Adventures, Issue 1 really is something you should consider buying. It’s only US $5.00
Quests & Adventures, Issue 1 was written back in April 2002 and so, at the time this review was written, its nearly a year old. It just goes to show that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover or an e-book by its date. Q & A #1 isn’t a crude beast. Its 96 pages are nicely fo ... |
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Savage Species, 23rd March.
Too much filler and not enough killer; Savage Species is in trouble. What’s the point of the book? It’s there to let you use monstrous races as player character races. Actually, the blurb notes that the supplement "provides everything you need to play a monster as a character or make the monsters your heroes fight even more formidable". The latter is certainly true. The two usual candidates of yet more feats and yet more prestige classes step forward to add more tooth and claw to your monsters. There are templates too. The difference between a template and a monstrous prestige class is that the prestige class progresses on a scale whereas the ... |
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Kings of the Desert, 20th March.
If you’re worried about spoilers – clear off. Kings of the Desert is an adventure. Actually, let’s use the term dungeon crawl. It’s a three-barrelled dungeon crawl based around a centre of operations and that works better for me than just one really large adventure.
Large. That’s the first thing I noticed when I opened the 56-paged paperback. The text size is large. This gives the book something of a newbie feel to it. The introduction certainly does explain how to use a pre-written adventure. I think Eilfin Publishing did the right thing though. It could well be that Undiscovered, a complete RPG in one big book, is someone’s first and ... |
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Ultimate Equipment Guide, 19th March.
Mongoose’s Ultimate supplement series always manage to surprise me. Each time I find myself thinking . o O (This will never work) and then when I get my hands on the book I discover that it does work. The Ultimate Equipment Guide has the hardest task of all, perhaps, since there’s very little room for shades of grey, partial or superb successes. A collection of equipment presented in a book is either helpful or not.
The Ultimate Equipment Guide does work, it is helpful and the only catch is you need to pay $34.95 for its help. I know, that’s a heck of a lot of money but there’s also a heck of a lot of book. As with the other Ultimate ... |
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Undiscovered: The Quest for Adventure, 19th March.
My copy of Undiscovered: The Quest for Adventure arrived in the mail and now my postman hates me. It’s understandable, I’d not be happy if I had to lug the Undiscovered tome up the hill where I live. The 368 pages are sewn securely in place between two halves of tree (or possibly just really thick card), one of which is rather nicely decorated with a collage of Julie Bell illustrations. Julie Bell. Mmmm. I don’t think many people will complain about the art in the book.
It’s the feel of Undiscovered that strikes me most. The meaty book is the sort of thing that GMs (or Adventure Guide as they’re known in The Quest for Adventure) can ... |
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Mindscapes: A Psion's Guide, 6th March.
The name Bruce R Cordell appears on Wizards of the Coast’s Psionics Handbook and so it’s especially nice to see him as the author of a Malhavoc Press’ psionic supplement. That’s a good meeting of minds, heh. As it happens Cordell and Malhavoc have already collaborated to produce a previous psionic PDF in the from of If Thoughts Could Kill and it shows that I’m not the only one to succumb to the temptation to play word games with psionic, just that these people are better at it.
You will need the Psionics Handbook to use Mindscapes but you won’t need If Thoughts Could Kill. That’s the theory. Mindscapes spends so long helping GMs conver ... |
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The Quintessential Psion, 4th March.
If you’re looking for a friendly, classic, heroic fantasy supplement for the Psion then the Quintessential Psion is not for you. If you have been after Psion supplements that would let you play around with a fantasy themed Jedi or a way to add psicraft to a game with dragons and a pet Unicorn called Uni then you don’t want this book. If you’ve been in the market for such a family safe version of the Psion then you might already have bought the book’s prequel The Quintessential Psychic Warrior and in which case, if you’ve stop screaming now, you should move to a position of safety behind the sofa while the Quintessential Psion does the rounds. ... |
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Airships, 3rd March.
Airships is a superb book. Okay, Airships is a superb book if you want make heavy use of magical, high fantasy airships in your campaign world. If you think there’s any chance, any chance at all, that airships will fit in your campaign then US $24.95 for the 96-paged colour book is well worth it. Airships isn’t an Oathbound book, not as such. It just so happens that Bastion Press’s capstone campaign setting, Oathbound, does make use of airships and it just so happens that Airships is extremely Oathbound friendly. One of the sample airships in the book is an Asherake vessel and there are notes to remind us that the anti-gav option is the one u ... |
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Stonebridge, 2nd March.
Leonardo DeVinci is a gnome. DeVinci is a gnome with copper dragon blood; he might have a few copper scales and a tail. That’s what springs to mind within minutes of opening Stonebridge – City of Illusion. The city is put together with the scientific and artistic precision of a DeVinci blueprint. Therein lies both the success and failure of Stonebridge. The city holds together and will probably work but there’s no real incentive to build it, to add it to your campaign or offer it to your players. Stonebridge doesn’t have the bubbling tension that Skraag or Stormhaven have.
Stonebridge is one of Mongoose’s Cities of Fantasy. The city ... |
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Unearthed Adventurers: Volume I, 1st March.
Ninety-one pages for two core character classes. That’s something. Let’s be clear; there are only two main core classes in Unearthed Adventurers: Volume 1 and not the three the supplement sometimes says there is. You’ll get the cultist and the swordsman, you’ll loose out on the divine knight. A whole class missing: that’s either a series of unfortunate typos or a serious omission and severe kick in the teeth for the $7.50 supplement. Fortunately, it’s the former, Unearthed Adventurers is sold on the grounds that it offers up two new core classes and so no one will buy it expecting to find the divine knight inside.
The Cultist steps fo ... |
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White Robes, Black Hearts, 28th February.
The full name of this Dark Portal Games adventure set is "White Robes, Dark Hearts: Enigma of the Arcanexus". Enigma is right. I was surprised to find this book bundled with a shipment of new releases. Dark Portal Games; I remember them; they were one of the quick companies out of the OGL gate. As I recall they hit on the good idea, they made much of their campaign world freely available online and then sold White Robes, Dark Hearts as a PDF. I thought they’d fallen off the face of the Earth after that.
I guess not. I guess they’re back. This printed version of White Robes, Dark Hearts certainly looks as if its come from an experience ... |
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Academy Handbook: St. John's College of Abjuration, 27th February.
The heads up on Malladin’s Gate doesn’t look good. At US $6.50 the 41-paged PDF Academy Handbook: St. John's College of Abjuration doesn’t seem to manage the superb value for money that many ebooks do; although it is still a good price. Opening up the PDF and scrolling down past the faux leather cover and quickly skimming pages to the bottom means that you’ll discover there are no illustrations in the product either. On screen this Academy Handbook can become a sea of text at times and it is easy to loose your place. On the other hand, this is an easy product to print off. The absence of colour, pictures or sidebars means that all you face is ... |
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Power Classes: Explorer, 27th February.
Mongoose’s Power Classes are, I think, one of last year’s surprise hits. The books are tiny, too small really to be called books and I’m surprised they’re allowed to claim an ISBN. They’re booklets, 16 thin pages between a card stock cover and stapled together. They’re actually rather robust. The idea behind the power class is value for money. US$2.95 gets you a single new core class, a little crunch dressing in the form of new feats or equipment and nothing else. In other words, just what you need to use the class.
There’s no question that the nature of the Explorer makes it a suitable character class. Whether the game centres on explorin ... |
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Power Classes: Hedge Wizard, 27th February.
Mongoose’s Power Classes are, I think, one of last year’s surprise hits. The books are tiny, too small really to be called books and I’m surprised they’re allowed to claim an ISBN. They’re booklets, 16 thin pages between a card stock cover and stapled together. They’re actually rather robust. The idea behind the power class is value for money. US$2.95 gets you a single new core class, a little crunch dressing in the form of new feats or equipment and nothing else. In other words, just what you need to use the class.
This Hedge Wizard class makes a good attempt at introducing Hedge Wizards to d20. The approach is to give the class unparalle ... |
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Power Classes: Artificer, 27th February.
Mongoose’s Power Classes are, I think, one of last year’s surprise hits. The books are tiny, too small really to be called books and I’m surprised they’re allowed to claim an ISBN. They’re booklets, 16 thin pages between a card stock cover and stapled together. They’re actually rather robust. The idea behind the power class is value for money. US$2.95 gets you a single new core class, a little crunch dressing in the form of new feats or equipment and nothing else. In other words, just what you need to use the class.
The Artificer is the sixth book in the power class series and the second book in the second batch. The illustration of the Ar ... |
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Power Classes: Knight, 26th February.
Mongoose’s Power Classes are, I think, one of last year’s surprise hits. The books are tiny, too small really to be called books and I’m surprised they’re allowed to claim an ISBN. They’re booklets, 16 thin pages between a card stock cover and stapled together. They’re actually rather robust. The idea behind the power class is value for money. US$2.95 gets you a single new core class, a little crunch dressing in the form of new feats or equipment and nothing else. In other words, just what you need to use the class.
The Knight is the fifth book in the series and the first of the second batch. The Knight makes a good choice of player charac ... |
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Battlemaps: Floorplans, Inn Vol I, 25th February.
Hmm. Yummy! Gorgeous floorplans from master cartographers 0one Roleplaying Games. Oh wait. Hold on. We’re back at the Fang!
Okay. The chances are high that you’ve never been to the Fang before, even if you’re an ardent 0one fan it might just be for their quality battlemaps. The Fang is the inn from their Deadly Ice adventure and that PDF perks included floorplans of the Fang. I’ve had a bit of a wrestle with this; is this a bit cheap or this is a genuinely handy bonus? I think it’s a bit of both. The repeat floorplans are at a minimum, there are 23 pages in "Battlemaps: Floorplans, Inn Vol I" and most of them are new. Er, okay, wait, that ... |
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Plains of Penance, 25th February.
The Plains of Penance is a worthy follow up and addition to Bastion Press’ spectacular Oathbound: Domains of the Forge. Oathbound gave us a vibrant world; chock full of races, cultures and magic. The name "Oathbound" comes from the powerful oaths that bind Seven Feathered Foul to the Forge. It’s these Seven who have created the Forge from a divine prison, forging the land to their will and forming seven domains. Penance is the domain of Queen Israfel and the city in the middle of Penance, known as Penance, gets a whole wad of pages in the core Oathbound book. The chances are very high that if you’re playing Oathbound or want to play Oathbound ... |
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Beyond the Walls, 24th February.
Beyond the Walls is the next in Mystic Eye’s Foul Locales series. The title of the book says it all; in this issue we’re looking at foul places outside of the city. Actually, if we want to nitpick (and I often do) then we’re looking at interesting places outside of walls. The absence of walls is often the tricky bit in a wilderness encounter; players and NPCs can go anywhere, combat can spiral out in all directions and chance encounters are all the more unlikely. One of the first things I looked for in Beyond the Walls was to see whether the book had genuinely managed to step outside and stay outside. No. Quite a few of Beyond the Wall’s loca ... |
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Sanctuary, 22nd February.
Sanctuary is an adventure from Auran d20. As you might expect, it’s an adventure that uses the d20 system and this review will contain spoilers for it. If you think someone might run this game for you in the future then you’ve already been naughty by clicking on the link to this review. Go on; back out now before you make it worse.
The rest of us can safely discover that Sanctuary is about a vampire in a castle above a quaint little village. There’s a catch. Some of the villagers are up to no good, are waylaying people and sending them up to the castle. Er. Okay. That isn’t a catch at all. It’s cliche. I suspect at least half of a gami ... |
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Allies & Adversaries, 18th February.
One day there will be a book of NPCs published that does not include an NPC with a parent slain by raiders background. One day there will be such a book but it isn’t today and it isn’t Allies and Adversaries. The very first character in the book, a dwarf fighter called Dagan, had his parents killed by Drow.
Cliched character backgrounds wont be your first impression of Allies & Adversaries. Your first impression will be "Coo. Pretty." It is an attractive book and its super model thin with only 32 pages. Allies & Adversaries is full colour. Really, full colour, the pages aren’t white but a lovely weathered and decorated leather style i ... |
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Of Sages and Sorcerers, 18th February.
This the first offering from Children of the Grave Press and it has a rather experimental feel to it. PDF products are cheap, that’s one of the electronic medium’s main benefits but at the time of writing this review Of Sages and Sorcerers is only $2.50. That’s not cheap. That’s more expensive than free but less expensive than just "cheap". It’s a small product. $2.50 is probably a fair price for 26 pages. Of Sages and Sorcerers is experimental visually rather than with its contents. The PDF pages are boxes with black borders and headings; that’s the new bit. The supplement’s contents are of classes, prestige classes, spells and feats; that’s ... |
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The Complete Guide to Wererats, 16th February.
The Complete Guide to Wererats is a classic example of an "on the ball" RPG product. At 32 pages long and only $11 the Guide falls safely in the budget end of the gaming spectrum. The Guide works, there’s plenty in the book that can be taken into your own campaign and so being on the budget end of the scale is a boon, not a bane. There are already well established "were" RPGs and supplements, although perhaps not so much in the d20 mechanic. There’s certainly quite a few famous ratmen in the d20 camp. Given this it would be all too easy to rehash what’s done before, scrape the barrel in search of something new or loose any really convincing ... |
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The Slayer's Guide to Undead, 16th February.
It certainly isn’t every D&D; accessory that makes me nervous. The Slayer’s Guide to Undead manages this, it makes me nervous whenever I turn the page. If you were to admit to me that the full colour artwork on the inside covers made you nervous or uneasy then you’d have my sympathy, I can see why that would be the case. It’s not the illustrations that worry me. The book itself makes me nervous. More preciously, it’s the paper; it’s the very thin paper. I pushed The Slayer’s Guide to Undead up against the other 128-paged book in the series, the Slayer’s Guide to Dragons, and the difference is striking. The Slayer’s Guide to Undead is only abou ... |
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Escape from Monster Island, 15th February.
Escape from Monster Island is an inexpensive and effective expansion for Monster Island.
Monster Island was published a few months ago at about the same time as another game dedicated to giant monster fun. Escape from Monster Island wins the race to be the first supplement; well, the first paper supplement anyway. Escape from Monster Island makes good use of being a paper product (rather than PDF) and follows on from one of Monster Island’s strongest selling points. In the centre of the Escape from Monster Island book you’ll find a removable cardboard stock of perforated army, emergency service and civilian tokens. You don’t have to r ... |
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Shady Gulch: Roleplaying in the Old West, 13th February.
Shady Gulch doesn’t exist. If Shady Gulch had existed then it would have done so in the old west, the dusty frontier and beside an abandoned gold mine. Luckily for the non-existent Shady Gulch other minerals would be mined from nearby and this would be enough to keep the town alive, small but alive. This is about all we’re told about the town in the entire Shady Gulch RPG. That’s a little unusual, but it’s also a little unusual to have a whole RPG in just 49 pages. My previous look at a Politically Incorrect Games RPG was The Colonies and although I thought that was a concise (it is), Shady Gulch is slimmer. There are other similarities betwe ... |
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In the Saddle: Horses and other Mounts, 12th February.
I’m not sure whether to introduce In The Saddle as potentially one of the most useful d20 supplements in recent years or as the download that gave us the Galloping Trollop, the Halfling Weasel Assault Chariot and the Battle Goat. Hmm. I’m going to have to go with the latter.
The Galloping Trollop, bless her, is a prestige class. The Halfing Weasel Assault Chariot is one of the half dozen famous and infamous chariots. The Battle Goat is an exotic mount. In The Saddle is a supplement dedicated to the forgotten party members: the riding animals.
Great! I know next to nothing about horses and yet they’re common in many roleplaying ... |
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The Colonies RPG, 11th February.
The Colonies is a cute and concise Sci-Fi from Politically Incorrect Games. There’s a distinct retro feel to the game too – which isn’t a bad thing.
The Colonies is a 67-paged PDF. 67 pages, that’s good going for a fully-fledged RPG. It is fully-fledged; it is a whole game, everything’s there. Just about. That covers the concise. The cute? Well that come from a surprising source; the game mechanics. It’s a slim and trim system. The core mechanic is a 2d6 roll that attempts to get as low as possible. Bonus or penalty dice give you the luxury of rolling more and taking the most favourable combination. In order to represent degrees of suc ... |
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Atomik Psioniks, 9th February.
Atomik Psioniks is an add-on from Atomik Vortex. Like the other add-ons you’ll need a copy of the Atomik Add-On Booklet to use it. Unlike the other add-ons Psioniks is 64 pages long and that’s the largest to date. The booklet is free and I strongly encourage anyone to download it first, check it out and make sure the concept of a generic, suits all game systems, add on is something that you’re comfortable with. Atomik Psioniks is such an add-on, you can use it with whatever roleplaying game or system you want to add psionics to.
Atomik Psioniks is a list of psionic powers for RPGs and it isn’t. The PDF download is more of an intellige ... |
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Deadly Ice, 9th February.
I always think of absolutely stunning floorplans whenever anyone mentioned 0one Roleplaying Games and so when I opened up Deadly Ice I whisked through it to see whether the adventure would give me any more. It does! Deadly Ice has two full-paged "battlemaps" – one room per page – as well as a few wonderfully illustrated maps and multi-room floorplans. 0one call again on their prodigious artistic talent to produce a set of four beautiful player handouts. Handouts are one of advantages of PDF products like Deadly Ice have over books. You can print these handouts off as many times as you need – one for each player, one for each game and a GM cop ... |
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Atomik CyberTek, 7th February.
Atomik CyberTek is an Add-On. In order to really use Atomik CyberTek you’ll need to download a copy of Atomik Add-On Booklet but that’s free and easy so there’s no cause to pout here. The Add-On Booklet explains how the generic add-ons work but the best summary and pitch for the idea comes from the introductory paragraph from Atomik CyberTek. "If you play ‘Wizards and Towers’, but then decide to change to ‘Knights and Castles’ you don’t have to discard any Atomik Vortex Add-On book that you have purchased." I don’t think you’re likely to be playing with Wizards or Knights for CyberTek but whether you’re moving from Cyberpunk to StarTrek™ ... |
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Atomik Alienz, 7th February.
Atomik Alienz is an intelligent supplement backed by an intelligent idea and written for intelligent gamers. Notice the keyword there? Don’t let the haxt0r spelling of aliens fool you, this PDF could almost pass as an academic paper on aliens – there’s even a list of references at the end. Sadly the PDF is without bookmarks and that’s a disappointment. The 54 pages scroll quickly and there’s a hefty contents page at the start so the lack of bookmarks doesn’t quite give me nightmares in the same way as 120+ paged PDF rulebooks without bookmarks do. There’s a reason why the 54 pages scroll quickly - there’s no illustrations nor is there a sideb ... |
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The Quintessential Paladin, 6th February.
It says at the start of the Character Concepts chapter that at first sight the Paladin appears to be a narrow class. It says at the start of the Prestige Paladin chapter that the Paladin is a narrow class. Aljandro Melchor, author of the book, is right. The Paladin class is annoyingly narrow and given the introduction of prestige classes looks an awful lot like a fighter with prestigious abilities. I’ve taken to skipping straight to the end of Mongoose books and reading the Designer’s Notes first. Here that begins with the quote "Lawful Good is not the same as Lawful Stupid" and so it is clear from that that Melchor is going to avoid the wors ... |
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Plot and Poison, 30th January.
What slander. "People play to have fun, engage their minds, and socialize; moral arguments can ruin this and destroy the suspension of disbelief necessary for a good game." That’s from the "What Is Evil?" subsection in Plot & Poison’s introduction. People do RPG for all of those reasons but moral arguments, intellectual decisions and ethical debates are often the bread and butter of mature gamers. Fortunately for those of us who do not enjoy the "smite the genetically evil!" side to D&D the book doesn’t linger on the shallow side of this debate and gets quickly going. The subject matter of Plot and Poison is the Drow. The companion b ... |
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Heroes of High Favor: Elves, 28th January.
The hobby needs another elf race book as much as it needs a wizard class book. Welcome to Heroes of High Favor: Elves. If you know the Heroes of High Favor line from Badaxe Games then you’ll know that that opening line was a little unfair. The Heroes of High Favor are certainly not another character splat book. The meat of the small book is the chapter of multi-class based prestige classes. The favourite class for the elf race is Wizard and so the book contains ten prestige classes based on wizard multi-classes. The Anarcanist, for example, is a Wizard-Rogue inspired prestige class. In previous Heroes of High Favor it’s been the racial favou ... |
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The Second World Sourcebook, 27th January.
I’m in two minds about this book and that seems rather appropriate for a sourcebook designed to let you play in two worlds. I’m not sure whether I want to encourage you to rush out and buy The Second World Sourcebook or to rush out hide every copy of the book.
Why the dilemma? The Second World Sourcebook takes the mucky crunch of game mechanics mongering and turns it into a graceful science. A fair proportion of the 288-paged paperback is spent looking at tweaking d20 rules to best suit a twin world setting. Steven Palmer Peterson doesn’t limit this discussion, this game science class, to producing just one solution but allows the larg ... |
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In the Depths of BlackWater, 22nd January.
It’s a brave attempt. In the Depths of Blackwater is an adventure setting with adventure seeds. It’s trying not to be a linear pre-written adventure. That’s great; I’m no fan of those restrictive sorts of games. Unfortunately In the Depths of Blackwater doesn’t quite break free of those restraints and in its attempt to do so has left itself rather battered and tired. You should assume that there are spoilers for these adventure seeds in this review.
The adventure seeds are not snippets of plot that might bloom into the flower of a scenario or campaign. They are summaries of short adventures. These short adventures summaries really need the ... |
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Blood and Space, 20th January.
Blood and Space is all about spaceships. It’s all about building and staffing your spaceship, about equipping it with the best in computers and defences and dodging around planets and gravity wells in a dogfight with rival space pirates. Blood and Space isn’t a game in it’s own right, although I do feel you could use it to run a tactical war-game campaign in space. You can run Blood and Space with either the fantasy core rules or D20 Modern and that’s a bonus. Blood and Space does a lot of things right. Heck, Blood and Space does an awful lot of things; there’s a whole host of rules in the supplement. Blood and Space also distinguishes betwee ... |
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The Kandris Seal, 18th January.
If you have a copy of the fifth edition Hero rulebook then you know this sentence is a lie. There is no such book. The fifth edition Hero rules are a brick; not a small brick either, a large paper brick that could safely be used as the construction material for the next Fort Knox. The Kandris Seal follows this tradition despite being a PDF product. The 171-paged download has a size of about 7,900KB. My modem heaved and groaned but got there in the end. That’s not over-sized though; it’s not a case of poor PDF creation; it is actually very good for 171 electronic pages. The supplement isn’t overloaded with illustrations (a notorious way to pus ... |
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Construct Mechanus, 15th January.
Construct Mechanus lets you have a construct as a player character. Well, nearly. You can have a Mechanus as a player character and that is a special sort of Construct. Mechanus have both intelligence and free will and that’s enough to qualify them as possible PCs. Their simple Construct cousins probably wouldn’t do. Mechanus have more than just intelligence and free will, they pack a mighty punch and that’s why they have an effective level of plus four.
Nicely – heck no, wonderfully – all the text in Construct Mechanus is Open Game Content. This small PDF product (24 pages) could open the floodgate. The artwork isn’t Open Game Content, a ... |
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Musical Mistresses, 13th January.
Musical Mistresses is a set of adventures designed for us with HeartQuest. This review will contain spoilers. Reviews of adventures always do.
Musical Mistresses is more sophisticated than most reviews though. It begins with player friendly sections – you know, like how to design a suitable character for the adventures, some enticing flavour text and pages on the setting. When the download (Musical Mistres is currently only available in PDF) gets to the point where the players should stop reading – it says so. I think this is a good start; I wish more pre-written adventures had a similar percentage of content suitable for the players. It’ ... |
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101 Mundane Treasures, 7th January.
101 Mundane Treasures gets off to a magical start. In between downloading the product and starting the review I received a free upgrade. So did everyone else, I think, who ordered the original. Bonus.
The revised copy comes in two PDFs. There’s a full version and a cut-down black and white copy for printing ease. This review is of the latest full version. It’s a pretty version filled with bold colours, bold layout choices and full colour detailed illustrations. Philip J Reed.com seems to have the knack of picking talented and interesting artists. This time round it’s Studio Ronin. There is a solid colour sidebar but it’s on the right hand ... |
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Good, 5th January.
AEG’s Good – isn’t.
AEG’s Good – is just about acceptable. When the sun’s shining I tend to see the acceptable side of the supplement, on most days I tend to see the "just about" side instead. The numerical score for this review isn’t as important as the text but I dithered between two possible scores. In the end "Good" received the higher of the two possibilities.
The problem is that the book doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. There can be no doubt; AEG’s Good should be about good. They could have talked about the nature of good, the forces of good, the role of good in the Planes or even fallen into the traditional hole and ... |
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101 Arcane Spell Components, 5th January.
101 Arcane Spell Components is a 20-paged PDF from Philip J Reed.com. Okay. 20 pages is the slimmest PDF product that I’ve reviewed to date but the current price for the supplement is less than $4. That’s the lowest price for any RPG product that I’ve reviewed (with the exception of a free adventure or two). More importantly than the price, perhaps, 20 pages is enough for 101 Arcane Spell Components to do the task at hand.
The product begins with a nice Larry Elmore illustration. A brown line sketch on weathered paper. It’s a similar style to the first in the 101 line, 101 Spellbooks, and prints off without guzzling ink. The rest of ... |
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HeartQuest, 4th January.
HeartQuest is an anime RPG that makes good use of the excellent Fudge system. Old gaming veterans will be pleased to see that HeartQuest includes the appropriate Usenet credits for the creation of Fudge. I think old gaming veterans might just be caught out with the idea of a Shoujo anime game though. Shoujo is the Japanese word for girl. Shoujo anime is designed for girls. HeartQuest’s full title is "HeartQuest - Romantic Roleplaying in the Worlds of Shoujo manga"
It’s easy to address that style of game with a sceptical "Huh-uh".
At least, that was my first reaction. I imagine it’ll be a first reaction that HeartQuest will come ... |
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101 Spellbooks, Tomes of Knowledge, and Forbidden Grimoires, 2nd January.
101 Spellbooks, Tomes of Knowledge, and Forbidden Grimoires have been kicking around in RPGNow’s catalogue since September and so you wouldn’t expect the product to be bristling with technological innovations. It doesn’t. The bookmarks, for example, are nothing more than six entirely capital letter headings. They seem to have been rushed in. I spotted my first typo in the 36-paged book in just a few minutes. As ever - there’s a twist in the tale, it’s not quite as simple as that. This is a d20 product but I had to double check. Author Philip Reed is a name I associate with many top SJ Games books. Chalk up one impressive RPG industry name. Th ... |
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Ultramodern Firearms, 22nd December.
Right from the start the book pitches the bizarre idea that firearms are somehow important to modern day roleplaying. Hmm. I remain to be convinced. Change the spelling slightly so that firearms are important to modern day rollplaying and I’ll accept that. Sometimes firearms can be used as part of a story plots in modern day games. The peculiarity of a weapon can be used as a clue but typically RPG firearm encyclopaedia fail to make it easy to find the specific peculiarity you want. This is at least one test Ultramodern Firearms can try and pass in order to have some claim of appeal to those of us who aren’t gun-geeks. I’m a European without ... |
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The Quintessential Samurai, 22nd December.
My first reaction to the Quintessential Samurai was an overwhelming "Eh?". I hadn’t read it. I hadn’t even opened the book. I was wondering why on earth I was even looking at the Quintessential Samurai. Why would the Collector Series detour all the way to the Samurai? If you’re going to do an Oriental themed book then why not write about the ever-popular ninja? Surely anyone who’s likely to be tempted by the Samurai will already be playing Oriental Adventures or L5R? I don’t know the answers to these initial questions but having read the book now – I don’t think they matter. What matters is the Quintessential Samurai is a terrific book.
... |
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The Book of Hallowed Might, 21st December.
There’s nothing quite like a sales pitch to put me off buying a book. In this case we’re told that The Book of Hallowed Might will supercharge divine spellcasters. If that were true then I’d be tossing the book out the window. Except, of course, I can’t toss this particular instance of Hallowed Might out of the window since it’s a PDF product and my computer is too precious. Fortunately, there’s no supercharging, Monte Cook does what he’s especially good at and introduces a wider range of rules and maintains game balance. As a matter of fact, variant rules in the Book of Hallowed Might are presented early on as a way to improve on game balanc ... |
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Spaceship Zero, 20th December.
"But wait! That’s not all! Spaceship Zero also comes with its own original game system: a roleplaying game completely incompatible with other roleplaying systems! Toss away those troublesome twenty-sided dice! Hurl them at the bastions of conformity! We’ve seen the future, and we’re brining it to you today!"
That’s taken from the back of Spaceship Zero, the brand new RPG from Green Ronin. I did hurl my d20s; they bounced off the wall with a satisfying ricochet and scared the cat. I’m not sure about dealing the bastions of conformity though. Spaceship Zero uses a percentile system.
Perhaps you’ve already heard of Spaceship Zero? ... |
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Ultimate Feats, 19th December.
A book with two hundred and fifty-six pages and a hardback cover is the sort of weapon a frustrated GM could threaten to beat the annoying munchkin over the head with. Not so this book. I fear if Ultimate Feats is brought too near a munchkin that the bugger would swell with power, or worse, drool. Ultimate Feats is a book with a real “core rules” feel to it. It’ll thump down on your gaming table with the same weighty thwack as the Player’s Handbook does and probably more so. It is about as far from core rules as you could get though, Ultimate Feats consists of re-printed feats from other Mongoose Publishing products but there’s also a sizeabl ... |
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Raw Recruits, 19th December.
I’m not enamoured with pre-written adventures. You’ve heard me say that before. I’m not keen on packaged adventures because they tend to be inflexible and linear. If we’re lucky then they’re thinly disguised dungeon crawls. The pre-written adventures in Raw Recruits are not much better. Raw Recruits isn’t a just a single pre-written scenario, it is largely composed of them. The whole is fair greater than the sum of its parts.
This review isn’t going to go greatly into the details of the adventures but play safe and assume there are spoilers.
Dragonstar is a Sci-Fi campaign setting from Fantasy Flight Games. It’s a nice blend of ... |
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Pale Designs: A Poisoner's Handbook, 17th December.
Hmm. Yummy. Bastion Press books with their full colour and glossy pages always look good. The fact that I’m making yummy noises about a book on poisons can be discounted as one of those strange things roleplayers do.
I noticed a bunch of other d20 publishers listed in the credits. Yes, sadly, I look there first. Pale Designs makes some of the best use of Open Game Content as under the d20 OGL license umbrella that I’ve seen yet. The authors, Steven Creech and Kevin Ruesch have used their own reputations and wiles, assisted no doubt by the Bastion’s prestige to win permission to re-print poisons protected as Product Identity by other pu ... |
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DungeonWorks, 17th December.
DungeonWorks is probably the most unique product I’ve reviewed on GameWyrd to date. As you might have guessed, DungeonWorks is a dungeon. The twist is that DungeonWorks is a 3D model of a dungeon, a model you download off the Internet. Clearly DungeonWorks isn’t 3D as you stream it off the website, it’s up to you to print it out onto cardstock, fold, glue and create the model. The selling point is that you get to have a good-looking model dungeon for a fraction of the cost of a traditional one. You can print DungeonWorks out again and again and expand your dungeon for peanuts and until there’s no more floor space left. The catch is that you ... |
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The Quintessential Druid, 17th December.
I was looking forward to the Quintessential Druid. I was certain that the book would help address some of the problems I see in having druid characters active in the game. Of primary concern is how to get a druid out and adventuring when she should be looking after her grove. I set about reading the book with a "why would they?" test in mind. If the Quintessential Druid could answer the "why would they?" for adventuring druids, druids getting involved with the trouble of men or isolating themselves out in the wilderness then I would be happy. I had higher hopes still; Mongoose’s track record for remembering that the wilderness is more than wo ... |
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Races of Evernor - Part 2, 16th December.
Races of Evernor is a PDF collection of new fantasy races. There are plenty of similar products available and this includes another Races of Evernor. This review looks at Races of Evernor – Part 2. This version of Races of Evernor would need to do something special to stand out from the masses. It would be all too easy for this supplement to drop the ball or wobble just slightly and fall below the average mark.
Races of Evernor is actually a collection of new player character races. That’s a good start. Immediately the number of rival products has been cut down. This version of Races of Evernor does manage to produce that something sp ... |
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Metal Gods, 15th December.
This review is for the print version of Metal Gods. As with most of the Darwin’s World RPG line Metal Gods was published first in PDF form and then in dead tree format later. The 72-paged book comes in at $14.95. It’s fairer to see the product as having 8 pages extra. The traditional page count for supplements of this size is 64 pages and it is easy to find such books for $14.95. If you want to be mean then you could point out that a few companies manage to produce their 64-paged books for a couple of dollars less and this makes the 8 extra pages in Metal Gods awfully expensive.
Metal Gods has one of the longest introductions in a sup ... |
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The Quintessential Psychic Warrior, 14th December.
I’m going to peel the warning label off from my copy of the ... |
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Interludes: Sands of Pain, 13th December.
Interludes: Sands of Pain is a pre-packaged adventure for four forth level characters. It’s better than most published adventures for four forth levels characters insofar that throughout the book there are tips for increasing or decreasing the difficulties of scenes if your group of players are just off level. Sands of Pain is based in the Bluffside campaign setting from Thunderhead Games. It’s better than most campaign specific published adventures insofar that having Bluffside is an advantage but not an necessity.
I don’t normally mention text size and density so early on in a review (if I mention it at all) but I don’t normally fi ... |
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Whispers of Death, 12th December.
If there was a catchiness test for roleplaying supplements then Whispers of Death would do well. I think that’s a pretty catchy title. I think Sundered Blade is an equally catchy for the company. Whispers of Death is source book for assassin characters in the d20 system. As with every other class source book there’s a bunch of new feats, spells and prestige classes.
Oh yeah. Wait a sec. Assassin is a prestige class. The new prestige classes aren’t uber-prestige classes that stack even higher. The prestige classes represent different styles and flavours of assassin. They’re an extra set of choices for that rogue, bard or whichever class of ... |
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Mutants & Masterminds, 7th December.
"The World’s Greatest Superhero RPG!" – so announces the front of Green Ronin’s Mutants & Masterminds.
Brave words.
I decided to put Mutants & Masterminds to the greatest test possible. I dropped the hardbound collection of glossy colour pages into the lap of a friend of mine. He has the unnatural ability to ‘parse’ rules and mechanics faster than any computer, he has a vast and extensive range of fan-boy knowledge about superheroes, their artists and comic book series but who was not only suffering burnout from his long experience of comics and suffering burnout from superhero roleplaying in particular. He had time t ... |
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Bane of the Salt Fen Lich, 6th December.
It’s big. It’s probably too big. At a scary weight of 15,000KB+ this initial offering from Heathen Oracle should be easy to write off as "gone wrong". It’s not quite that simple though. It would take one hell of a range of added extra to convince me that a 64-paged PDF product hadn’t been broken or corrupted to reach the 15,000KB level but the Bane of the Salt Fen Lich pretty much does it. There are lots of pictures in the download, lots of high quality pictures in fact but with likes of V Shane on the artwork this isn’t all that surprising. It might just also be the case that these pictures are included at a too high resolution and are weig ... |
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Terrors of the Twisted Earth, 6th December.
It took an age for me to work out what was different about the front cover to the Terrors of Twisted Earth. Initially I put it down to the fact that I’d previously seen the illustrations online as part of the electronic lineage of Darwin’s World line. That wasn’t it though. The front cover doesn’t just use colours not commonly seen on RPGs; pale greens and blues with orange highlights but the title text on the book are more discrete than usual. The image of the two adventurers, standing the back of some crashed machine and fighting off some unsavoury mutant creatures dominates the book in a way that cover illustrations don’t often do.
I kn ... |
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Vigilance, 6th December.
Disclaimer: This is a review based on a preview copy I have of the game. It’s a PDF copy entitled 0.8 and so I’ve been advised that the actual game could change a little. It’s also worth noting that hero games often fall into two groups - the glossy/expensive category and the frugal/inexpensive category. I expect this game to fall into the latter. This will please about 50% of the super hero RPG market.
This copy of Vigilance might carry the label 0.8 but Vigilance as a game has been around long enough to already have had several revisions. Vigilance previously has been published by, guess who, Vigilance Press in PDF form. It’s in the elec ... |
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Death by Corium Light, 2nd December.
Death by Corium Light is a dungeon crawl adventure for RPGObjects’ post-apocalyptic game of mutants, survival and mixed technology. Since this is a review of an adventure you should consider it to be a spoiler.
Describing Death by Corium Light as a dungeon crawl is cruel because it tries to give the players and GM some more than just a bog-standard location to adventure in. The corium mines aren’t bog-standard; they’re genuinely different. Well, different for mines anyway. There’s more to the game than just the mines too, there’s a whole town above ground and Lil’ Vegas is full of twists and turns.
Death by Corium Light is a 53-paged P ... |
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The Fir Domain, 17th November.
What a little gem! The Fir Domain is just 32 pages long but don’t let that put you off. Every page has earned its place in the book so the quality is up and the price stays down.
The Fir Domain are one of the key tribes of the Earth Goddess, one of the Celtic tribes that your players are likely to come from. They’re known as the Tribe of the Growling Shields because their shields really do growl, they’re specially designed to amplify the tribe’s war cries – oh, and the specially sharpened razor edges on the shields are worth noting as well. This tribe gets up to such un-Celtic things as organising its troops before battle and getting cross ... |
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Book of Eldritch Might III: The Nexus, 17th November.
The Book of Eldritch Might III: The Nexus finishes off the series and rounds things up by giving a home to everything else arcane. It’s the Nexus itself that provides this catch all basket. There are over hundred new spells in here – 111 spells, 49 feats and 97 magic items in fact – but there are also interesting locations and scenario ideas. Not every scenario idea is built around the premise that great evil had been locked away somewhere, has now escaped and now has to be defeated. That’s good.
The idea of some mysterious place filled with doors that lead to different worlds is something of a fantasy staple so your players shouldn’t stru ... |
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Battlemaps: Dungeon Rooms I, 17th November.
There can be no doubt 0one Roleplaying Games produce masterwork cartography. Battlemaps: Dungeon Rooms is no exception – in fact, it pushes the standards of quality implied by that rule even higher.
The product is simple. For a couple of bucks you’ll get the most mouth-watering floorplans that you’re ever likely to see. It all depends on whether you have a couple of bucks, whether you use floorplans or whether you’ll suddenly run a mile when I mention that this is an electronic product. You get a 22-paged PDF for your money. You’ll need to print it off yourself.
Printing and the wonderful colour floorplans of the battlemaps don’t sit v ... |
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Victorian Age Vampire, 16th November.
Victorian Age Vampire is not a game in itself. This is not another Vampire: Dark Ages but in with a different historical focus. Victorian Age Vampire might have a solid hardcover, a price tag of $26.95, 220 pages, full descriptions of all the basic vampire clans (Camarilla, Sabbat and Indies) but it’s a sourcebook, its an expensive historical setting for Vampire: The Masquerade. There are quite a few different versions of Vampire: The Masquerade lingering on coffee tables and under candles in role-players’ houses across the world but it’s the latest of them (you know, that revision which is more than two but less than three) that you’ll need ... |
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The Bonds of Magic: The Faithful, 15th November.
Was your first character someone who had sworn revenge against raiders who had attacked your village and killed your parents? It’s the first character in The Bonds of Magic: The Faithful too!
Am I being too harsh? I really don’t know. It is an ultimate cliché but here the raiders happen to be chaotic evil Grey Dwarves who fit rather snugly as the polar opposite of the lawful good Wind Deity’s teachings that the revenge-sworn Cleric follows. This volume of The Bonds of Magic tries to walk a tightrope line between "usable" and "used" and does that tricky task fairly well. On the other hand the product does a good job at illustrating just ... |
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Visira: City of Sorrows, 14th November.
Gosh. I’ve greatly enjoyed Darkfuries floorplans before; they’re top quality and cheap. Visira: City of Sorrows isn’t a set of floorplans and at $10 it’s not particularly cheap for a PDF either. Mind you, most super-cheap PDFs are shorter than Visira’s 129 pages. So, Visira isn’t cheap, the city isn’t a set of floorplans but it certainly is high quality product.
The City of Sorrows plays to my tastes. The "City of Sorrows" is an appropriate moniker for Visira but there’s no trace of badly designed "tragically hip angst" that steals into other RPGs that like to talk about sorrow. The setting is high fantasy; half-elf prostitutes work in the ... |
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The Slayer's Guide to Duergar, 14th November.
The creatures covered by the Slayer’s Guides are getting progressively scarier and meaner – even when you discount the special Slayer’s Guide to Dragons - and the Slayer’s Guide to Duergar is further proof of this. Duergar are creepy little buggers, dangerous grey dwarves that can vanish at will and enlarge themselves too. (No sniggering at the back!).
The thing is, unlike many other Slayer’s Guides, this particular book doesn’t seem to make the Duergar any scarier. Their magical abilities of invisibility and enlarge are rarely touched on and when they are mentioned you can almost hear the voice of an embarrassed author. At one point i ... |
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Book of Vile Darkness, 12th November.
It’s not vile but it’s not especially good either. The Book of Vile Darkness was doomed to crumble under the weight of the hype. It wasn’t just Wizard’s marketing to blame (in fact, they’re not only allowed to market/hype their products but I encourage them to do so) but also sealed-sections-in-magazine hype, mouth-watering-fan-boy-on-webpage hype and heated-debate-in-forum hype too. I do think Wizards were wrong to launch their new adult line with this book though; they’ll catch themselves in a corner by setting the limit with the initial experiment.
"Vile Darkness" – the title gets my goat. It’s either an oxymoron or redundant, depen ... |
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Encyclopaedia Arcane: Illusionism, 9th November.
Smoke and Mirrors is the sub-title for the Encyclopaedia Arcane: Illusionism. It’s an ambitious book with three spell lists and three different sets of feats tucked into just 64-pages. I didn’t even notice the prestige classes had been deferred until very late into the book until I turned the page and found the chapter.
At times Smoke and Mirrors reminded me of an academic paper but never so much as to put me to sleep in the way that real academic papers are likely to do. The choice of language is responsible for this association and it seems to be a deliberate strategy by the author, Joseph Miller, as he tries (and succeeds in part) ... |
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Monster Manual II, 9th November.
The Monster Manual II has only just (4th Nov) been released here in Europe. It’s been out in America for months. If I were reviewing Wizards of the Coast’s distribution skills then they’d be getting a stinky 1/10 rating. At this rate we’ll be lucky to see D20 Modern by Christmas.
Was it worth the wait?
If you’re a monster fan, one of those players who see Dungeons and Dragons ‘roll-playing’ as a succession of battles against interesting monsters then it probably was worth the wait. The range of creatures in the book is pretty good, the Challenge Ratings start off at less than one and push past the maximum values in the first Mo ... |
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The Witch's Handbook, 9th November.
The Witch’s Handbook is the current offering from Green Ronin’s Master Class series. This time round we see a Witch class as a core class and then a couple of prestige classes as well as new feats and spells.
But forget those. Skip to the middle of the book and start reading through the clean and smooth ritual magic rules. In just a short space of easy to understand rule suggestions the book gives you an alternative to the quick-fire casting of standard "melee magic". A ritual increases the casting time and the ingredient costs but allow you to enhance the spells in some simple but effective ways. The best feature of the handbook’s rit ... |
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Arsenal, 9th November.
Arsenal is a strange book. Despite the previews from Perpetrated Press I wasn’t sure what to expect from the book but I had a hunch it would be something different. We’ve had books filled with monsters, books filled with spells and even prestige classes but books dedicated to weapons and armour are somewhat more rare. Arsenal is more different still, the weapons and armour inside aren’t the bread and butter of sword and sorcery, they’re technomagic weapons and armour; a peculiar mix of mithral and Kevlar or machine-guns and fireballs for example.
The softback book is 128-pages long and comes in at just under $20. The text size is larg ... |
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Russian Roulette, 8th November.
Russian Roulette is the second of the three-part Kazan Gambit scenario set for Judge Dredd. As with the first book it’s 32 pages long and comes it at just under $10. You do really need to have read the first in the series, The Sleeping Kin, to get the most from Russian Roulette. If you’re the sort of GM who can take either a scalpel or axe to a pre-written adventure then I think you’ll be able to get juicy bits from Russian Roulette but to run it as-is you’ll need to plug into prequel.
This review will contain spoilers.
Previously the characters have discovered that East-Meg / Russian / Soviet agents have become active again in Mega-C ... |
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The Sleeping Kin, 7th November.
The Sleeping Kin is the first of three scenarios in the Kazan Gambit Trilogy for the Judge Dredd d20 RPG from Mongoose Publishing.
You don’t often see scenarios coming out of the great Swindon machine but I think it was a wise choice to put something together for Judge Dredd. Mega-City One is just a huge place and the Judges are so powerful in their own right that I can imagine putting together a scenario might be more of a challenge to many GMs than putting together another dungeon crawl would be. The Sleeping Kin isn’t a dungeon crawl, in fact it’s refreshingly balanced between investigation and slugging it out with perps. In some ways ... |
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The Complete Guide to Drow, 7th November.
Hmm. The Complete Guide to Drow has a shaky start. I found myself turning to page 86 of the Monster Manual to remind myself what the default basics of the Drow are. Jet-black skin, evil, live underground, spider goddess and matriarchal.
It’s pretty much from here that the Guide picks up. The Drow are still evil, they don’t have to have jet-black skin (the front cover has blue Drow), they do live underground, they’re still matriarchal and spider Goddesses are still important. It’s a different deity set though. Lolth, the spider goddess in WotC’s tome isn’t Open Source and so Goodman Games writing for Natural 20 Press has to come up with so ... |
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Guildcraft, 1st November.
Guilds. Those fantasy stalwarts. Stalwart and yet usually so annoying that they’re not worth the bother. In my experience Guilds have been deployed as a poor way to keep in check character’s level advancements, as impromptu and unrelated plot twists, as half hearted references to what the author thought should be there. I mean, if you’re heroes engage on an epic adventure which lasts seventeen years and has them cross the great sulphur flats of the Deadlands, scale the spine of the world and travel beyond the edge… then who cares that they’re a rank two novice in the wizard’s guild back in their home town?
Guildcraft is Bastion Press’s ... |
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Power Classes: Noble, 31st October.
"Noble" is a class in its own right. Sure, you could encounter nobles who are also wizards, nobles who are clerics, warriors or perhaps even sorcerers but these are nobles who have found the time to learn these skills as an addition to their nobility. Grand courts, shaded diplomacy, moving armies to threaten boarders, designing a new coat of arms to mark an important wedding, discovering secret deals, royal romance, running baronies, kingdoms, dealing with would-be usurpers and spies and lots more in this line are all core fantasy plots and fun but yet none of the basic character classes in D&D are really appropriate starting points. A y ... |
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Power Classes: Exorcist, 31st October.
The Exorcist core character class is the third of Mongoose Power Classes and is presented in a booklet of 16 thin pages. It’s about value for money. At $2.95 the booklets aren’t going to break the bank and they’re never going to fall into the same awful mistake category as a $39.95 hardback that you buy but never use. In that sense the series is a safe bet but they also present something of a risk; if the idea behind the new core character class gets off on the wrong foot there’s no space for it to recover. You’ll either like the booklet or you won’t. Or so I thought.
I really wanted to see an exorcist character class that wasn’t based in ... |
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The Minotaur, 27th October.
This is my first look at a full 0one Roleplaying Game but I had previously encountered their work in the likes of Gaming Frontiers and had been left with the opinion that their cartography is simply stunning. I was right. When you unpack your zipped copy of "the Minotaur" you’ll discover three pdf files; two are clearly smaller than the third. Look at these two first. They’re fantastic colour maps and they’ll make you wish you had an industry quality printer and if like me you have a namby-pamby black and white printer you’ll wail. These are the sorts of maps that your players will remember the game by for years to come. One of the maps is pr ... |
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Power Classes: Gladiator, 26th October.
The Gladiator is the second in Mongoose’s Power Classes series (and not the first as the introduction claims). The Power Classes are a series of mini-books or 16-paged booklets that come at the cost effective $2.95 each. I think the idea behind the series is about value for money. This mini-book is packet to the hilt with core gladiator class information. There are actually four different background concepts and then four different types of gladiator choices which effect the roleplaying and game mechanic options in the booklet and simple maths says that’s actually 16 possibilities in 16 pages.
The types of gladiators effect special abilit ... |
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Power Classes: Assassin, 26th October.
I arched an eyebrow when I noticed "Power Classes" on the Mongoose release schedule. The British company already does well through their Collector Series and I believe the Quintessential Fighter must be one of the few non-WotC d20 supplements ever to be make additional print runs, so just what on earth could the Power Classes be? I doubt there’s a market for a 32-page class book nor can I imagine hardbacks for any given class selling in sufficient number to make the production run worthwhile.
The Power Class series from Mongoose are 16-paged booklets. These booklets are similar to AEG’s old d20 mini-adventures. They’re just shy of being a ... |
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Necromancer's Legacy, 26th October.
Ambient Inc have an agreement with Mystic Eye which has their products put into print. Necromancer’s Legacy is one of these products. The title is an example of hiding in plain sight; the book really is about the legacy of a necromancer even though it also happens to be chock full of new magic spells, creatures, templates and prestige classes.
The background to Necromancer’s Legacy seems to be the tried and tested recipe; a favourite campaign world, brought to life through years of playing and then turned into a book. The transformation has been carefully done though; the readers benefit from the cherry picking of the best bits and th ... |
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Ultimate Prestige Classes - Volume 1, 24th October.
Prestige classes have quickly become the bread and butter of d20 supplements and publishers after their introduction in the Dungeon Master’s Guide. I’ve seen killer prestige classes as well as filler prestige classes and had entire books devoted to prestige classes but Ultimate Prestige Classes (vol 1) is the first hardbound of these supplements to hit my desk.
Value for money is hard to judge. $34.95 isn’t cheap but we’re continuing to see the cover price of RPGs creeping up to match the cost of similar generic books in the market. RPGs have been under priced for a while. This volume has 256 pages and although the font might look slig ... |
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Wrath & Rage, 17th October.
The Races of Renown series from Green Ronin is part of the OGL Interlink program. This means that titles will not clash with others in the OGL Interlink. Wrath & Rage is the Orc and Half-Orc book in the Interlink and it’ll probably be the only one. I can only hope that the other companies in the Interlink are producing material as good as Green Ronin’s because Wrath & Rage is rather good and before that the Dwarf book, Hammer and Helm, is even better.
The introduction here is your typical short RPG supplement introduction. It contains an important point though; the author, Jim Bishop, notes that orcs are often portrayed as fil ... |
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The Rookie's Guide to Criminal Organisations, 15th October.
The Judge Dredd license continues with the The Rookie’s Guide to Criminal Organisations. The 64-paged softcover book goes as far as the light use of colour for the borders but not for any illustrations however the whole book benefits from the better paper quality required for even what colour there is. At $14.95 it’s averagely priced. Another note for the illustrations is that there’s less than usual for a Mongoose book, the reasons for this seem to be the number of large tables and that the use of artwork from the Judge Dredd comic strip lends itself to discrete squares of illustration. There are ten pages of prestige classes in all of that ... |
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Arx Fatalis, 14th October.
Cosmic rules have been broken. It’s written in the stars that all CRPGs must be in the third person and that you have the right to pick your own replies to dialogs with NPCs even if there are only two possible selections. Arx Fatalis takes these conventions and throws them out of the window. Actually, there aren’t any such cosmic rules, first person RPGs are just very rare but they’re there and even in standard CRPGs there are often cut-away movie scenes which deprive you of the opportunity to do or say something other than what the plot dictates. The game is in the first person and you don’t get to pick what your character says. This takes s ... |
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Tir Nan Og, 9th October.
Tir Nan Og is the name of the world setting for the Slaine Roleplaying Game. Slaine’s described as the game of Celtic Heroes and does a very good job of getting across what individual Celtic heroes might be like but there’s not so much attention spend on the land itself. Tir Nan Og makes the natural choice for the first supplement.
It’s a 128-paged softcover which makes light use of colour. By light use I mean that the intricate Celtic criss-cross design of the borders are in colour but none of the contents are. The book still benefits from the higher quality of paper needed to support the colour borders though. Throughout the entirety of ... |
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Joe's Book of Enchantment, 9th October.
Joe’s Book of Enchantment is a surprise packet. The title alone is rather unassuming and the cover is entirely without art. As the old adage goes you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. That adage needs to be updated for the 21st century so it can include something appropriate about not judging a book because it’s a $5 PDF download either. There’s more than just new enchantment spells in Joe’s Book; there’s intelligent observations on the spells already available in the Player’s Handbook and this includes the author pointing out spells he thinks have gone wrong, there are new feats, a feat template, new prestige classes, new magical items, N ... |
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Slaine, 5th October.
It’s brutal, bloody and Celtic. Sláine’s "Land of the Young" is a mixture of fact and fantasy. Strangely enough it’s the factual elements of the game that make it such an appealing fantasy setting. This isn’t a fantasy game where the metallic clash of swords accompanies every melee and neither is this a game where the clerics are gifted magic by their gods. Tir Nan Og, known as the Land of the Young because so few people live to an old age, is northern Europe at the time when the Stone Age was slowly giving over to the Iron Age and before the sea levels rose to cut the British Isles and Ireland off from the continent. Most warriors fight with ... |
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Book of Templates, 5th October.
The Book of Templates is the latest PDF product from Silverthorne Games and I’m sure you’ll be amazed to discover that it’s a book of creature templates. New templates seem to have lagged behind new creatures in terms of new supplements from publishers and perhaps that’s an indication of wider roleplaying tastes. A brand new hardback of new monsters will arithmetically increase the number of nasties the GM can torment the players with and it’ll probably cost a fair bit too. A new book of templates will geometrically increase the number of nasties the GM has at his beck and call since one template can be applied to a whole range of monsters. T ... |
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Encyclopaedia Arcane: Star Magic, 3rd October.
I was won over by Star Magic – Wisdom of the Magi; I was suspicious at the start, worried that the book was suggesting a lot of work for little reward but through both persistence and completeness the author changed my mind.
Completeness is important. I’m under the impression that most of the new schools of magic introduced for the d20 system are incomplete. I might be incorrect but something’s gone wrong and gone wrong often enough to leave me with this impression. The pit trap is with school of magic specialisation. When you create a new school of magic it needs to be tied into the balance mechanism that regulates specialist mages. If y ... |
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Death: Guardian at the Gate, 3rd October.
Death: The Guardian of the Gate does very well. It shows that the Dark Quest and Natural 20 Press has been a win-win deal; it means that the rich flavour style of Dark Quest’s fantasy line benefits from the wider audience that the name Natural 20 Press is likely to attract and Natural 20 Press benefits from Dark Quest’s writing style. I don’t think I need to offer the caveat that my preference is for flavour over crunch and that this supplement caters to that particularly well. I don’t have to offer that as a disclaimer because Death: The Guardian of the Gate offers up a healthy dose of both. The new spells, items and prestige classes introdu ... |
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Chain of Being, 30th September.
Chain of Being is one of those rare creatures; it’s a humorous RPG that’s actually funny. The game described as; "The Fantasy Roleplaying Game of Epic Absurdity" is actually more of a spoof on the fantasy genre than it is far out and zany. It’s a large PDF. All 190 pages are meticulously book marked and its nice and easy to jump to where you want to be. There is a good deal of black and white illustrations throughout the book and this adds significantly to the size of the PDF. The high-resolution version of the product is actually just over 36,000K in size but the ‘standard’ version is about 9,500K. Taking the CD option for this particular el ... |
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Gaming Frontiers: 3, 26th September.
I was fairly certain that Gaming Frontiers could not continue in the same quality and at the same cost as GF #1 and #2. I was right. The price has gone up from $17.95 to $19.95 and the magazine’s lost its colour. It’s not a disaster; the magazine is still jam packed with interesting articles and illustrations. It’s not a disaster but it is something you notice, especially the loss of colour but at least in these shaky times for the hobby United Playtest are doing what’s required to keep going.
Keeping track of everything that’s going on has become one of the main reasons to pick up a copy of Gaming Frontiers. The magazine’s always managed ... |
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Encyclopaedia Arcane: Enchantment, 24th September.
Oh dear. I’ll always remember Enchantment: Fire in the Mind for the absolutely dreadful exchange of letters between a master Enchanter and an apprentice which run throughout this Encyclopaedia Arcane. The book itself certainly isn’t awful and as it turns out, after a twist, that the exchange of letters is only half as awful as it first appears but the association is there.
Enchantment: Fire in the Mind is like its fellow Encyclopaedia Arcane in that it takes a type of magic, often one of the basic schools of spells from the core rules and builds on it. However, unlike others in the series this Encyclopaedia Arcane isn’t so sure of its cho ... |
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Heroes of High Favor: Half-orcs, 24th September.
This half-orc book is the second in the Heroes of High Favor line from Bad Axe Games and this time round the tight focus of the small 62-paged book is a strength. Half-orcs must be the neglected race of the D&D setting and so this time Heroes of High Favor set about addressing that wrong. The book looks at half-orcs and prestige classes derived from multi-class combinations of the race’s favoured class. Since the half-orcs’ favoured character class is barbarian we have a list of some intriguing and original prestige classes rather than the "oh… and can fight too" combinations which were produced for dwarf fighter.
I described the $9. ... |
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Common Ground 2, 23rd September.
To be up front and keep this review in perspective, I didn’t much like Common Ground 1 and Common Ground 2 isn’t very different. I don’t think Common Ground 2 could have been very different, there wouldn’t have been much time for opinions expressed about Common Ground 1 to have worked their way into the writing of this sequel.
Common Ground II is a 48-paged soft back book that will set you back $11.95. It really is a softback book; the covers being more like that of a magazine than a book. The page texture is glossy and even more so in the centre of the book where there’s a colour plate of miniature floorplans. The glossy pages further th ... |
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Metal Gods, 21st September.
Metal Gods is the latest PDF in the Darwin’s World line. Darwin’s World recently appeared in print form here in the UK. That must be the quickest transition from PDF only, into print and then into Europe yet. It’s not uncommon for straight to print RPG products in the States never to make it to Europe. Metal Gods has two main strengths: the quality of the packaging and the sheer volume of content.
Yes, a PDF product can have packaging. Metal Gods unzips to reveal a colourful and cleaning formatted RPG supplement. It also reveals a text only PDF copy and unbundled images of the map locations found at the end of the product. You’ve a good-lo ... |
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Masters of Arms, 20th September.
Oh great. A book of prestige classes, 36 prestige classes in 96 pages for $18.95. That’s just over 50c a prestige class and would sound fairly cheap if the d20 world didn’t already ooze with thousands of prestige classes. But wait, there’s more going on in Masters of Arms than just yet another collection of prestige classes. This is a Second World Simulations product and the lead author Steven Palmer Peterson wields one of my favourite writing styles in the entire industry. Peterson’s style is great at getting across flavour and detail clearly and succinctly. There’s a lot of complex game mechanics in this book. The only thing that drives me ... |
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The Quintessential Witch, 20th September.
The first of the Collector Series from Mongoose Publishing saw the Quintessential launch a line of class books but then it changed and we saw Quintessential race books and even though there are core classes and core races left untouched we find ourselves with The Quintessential Witch. So what on earth is going on?
The Quintessential Witch introduces a new core character class. Straight out of the gates the Witch knows what he (and he is used more often than she) has to do and sets about proving that the class really is different from a druid. The witch’s special abilities include Wildshape (as per the druid), a companion (much like the ... |
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Neverwinter Nights, 19th September.
I’ll stand up and admit it; I think Neverwinter Nights is overrated. It looks good but it doesn’t look all that better than Dungeon Siege. I uses core d20 rules but if that’s done right you should barely notice. The main problem with the game is that the plot suffers hugely in the face of people getting carried away with the scope of the graphics. There’s very little in the way of plot. Oh sure – there’s a big story. (Surprisingly similar to Dungeon Siege on reflection). Story isn’t plot though. Your left to run around the northern bit of Faerun and gain levels faster than Popeye on a spinage drip.
The awful plot was compounded by a hu ... |
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Dungeon Siege, 19th September.
Microsoft’s Dungeon Siege isn’t really a roleplaying game. It’s a lot of fun though.
Why isn’t Dungeon Siege a roleplaying game? You don’t really do any roleplaying. Sure, you play the role of a character – but you do that in any computer game. Then there are plenty of generic game play features that you’d expect from a CRPG. You collect a party. You talk to people. You level up and place things in your inventory. If you want to define these traits as all that’s required in order to claim the title of CRPG then I suppose Dungeon Siege gets away with it. I’d rather call Dungeon Siege a "real time melee strategy game" though. RTM? It’s a ... |
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Arcanum, 19th September.
Arcanum needs to be given a chance or two. I gave it three. My first character, a gnome pistol duellist, killed himself with three successive misfires before the first monster encounter ever got in to melee range. My second character, a swashbuckling and charming half-orc, simply could not get passed the first major villain (the round boss style). The problem with the second character was that as a half-orc he was neither charming nor swashbuckling. By the third time through the character generation procedure I had a character who stood a chance of getting somewhere in the world. It wasn’t until late on in the game that the fine balancing lin ... |
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The Witch of Loch-Durnan, 19th September.
Hmm. Traditionally I’m not a fan of pre-written adventures. Most just don’t seem to be worth the money. Most just seem to be dumbed down (so they can be printed in a realistic number of pages) scenarios that any amateur GM could write. They’re just not value for money. There is one clear way in which a publisher can start to claw back up that important value for money scale and that’s to start chaining their published scenarios together, to produce stand alone adventures which can also be part of an engaging campaign. The Witch of Loch-Durnan is designed so that it follows on nicely as a sequel to The Pit of Loch-Durnan and yet adaptable enou ... |
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Wild Spellcraft, 19th September.
The core idea in Wild Spellcraft is a rocky steady one. Wouldn’t it be better if magic was a little less scientific? Magic works to rules and carefully defined regulations in a roleplaying game because that makes for neat, clean and easy to understand game mechanics. Wild Spellcraft suggests a simple extra mechanic to govern those times when the spell might not go as described by the spell book. It’s a d20 mechanic but the concept works for all high fantasy games and much of the "mishap tables" content can easily be adapted for other game systems. As simple as the Wild Spellcraft idea is I don’t think true blue newbies will be likely to be tr ... |
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The Book of the Righteous, 17th September.
It was sacrilegious. I read most of The Book of the Righteous either in bed or here beside the PC. You just have to pick up the hardbound tome to know that the correct way to read the book is to rest it on an altar or pulpit, light a respectful amount of candles and share the carefully composed mythology with an eager congregation.
The back of the Book of the Righteous claims; "[…] the most comprehensive religious tome the d20 system has ever seen." It’s an entirely justified claim. The same paragraph goes on to say, "While other books waste pages on god stats you’ll never use, The Book of the Righteous gives you a dynamic, lifelike r ... |
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Assassin's Handbook, 17th September.
One of my favourite companies in the d20 scene at the minute are Green Ronin. The quality of their writing is top of the line and their products are wonderfully professional. The Assassin’s Handbook also has great writing and a professional layout and quality to it – but the concept falls flat on it’s face.
I think class books are a solid idea. When they’re done right class books can help players and GMs alike to add flesh to the barebones of character concepts inherent in the class. When a class book is done right it can help steer people away from clichés and yet keep them safely in the realms of believable concepts. The same is true of ... |
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Oathbound, 14th September.
Oathbound is a truly impressive book. Physically the book is impressive; a scary tally of 352 pages, solid hardcover, full colour and plenty of sinewy illustrations. Oathbound: Domains of the Forge is a campaign setting, a high fantasy, high powered campaign setting and done with elements of grit and tangibility that are so often missing from other attempts on the genre. Oathbound makes no attempts to hide the world’s secrets from the players. The reasons why things are as they are tend to be spelt out. I think this forthrightness suits the high fantasy of Oathbound for two reasons; the answers help define the setting, helping the players and ... |
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The Lord of the Rings RPG, 9th September.
There are some people who’ll tell you that whether it’s any good or not you really should buy Lord of the Rings RPG. Why? Would you dare risk having to admit in five or ten years time that you were roleplaying back in the great Lord of the Rings "revival", when the movies where coming out and the man on the street knew who Grima Wormtongue was but that you didn’t get around to buying the brand new RPG? Sure. I can see some strength in that point but I think it is far better to buy a game because it’s good and not just because it is famous.
Thankfully, the new Lord of the Rings roleplaying game is pretty good. It’s not amazing. It isn’t ... |
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Chain of Being, 3rd September.
Chain of Being is a roleplaying game like no other. For a start this review is for the electronic version of the Higher Arc rules edition and that’s a 266-paged PDF. That’s a hefty download but some of the enterprising online stories offer you the chance to have a CD copy mailed to you through the post.
Really. Chain of Being is a roleplaying game like no other. It manages to be very funny and entirely serious at the same time. It is a professional approach at a humorous game and it doesn’t get carried away with trying to be too wacky or zany. In fact you very well say it’s a successful parody of typical high fantasy roleplaying games. Vi ... |
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Requiem for a God, 31st August.
Requiem for a God is an electronic event book from the ever popular Monte Cook's Malhavoc Press. Requiem is an electronic product at the moment but come November it'll be available in print. Malhavoc Press works through Sword and Sorcery Studio (hence the logo on Requiem's cover) and SSS are part of White Wolf. I'm a great fan of electronic supplements, they save trees, they're delivered as and when you want them and they're very cheap. I'm content to sit and read the document on my computer's screen too. I've a 1024x768 resolution screen at the minute and that's the larger of the two common sizes at the minute. Requiem for a God opens up in ... |
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The Slayer's Guide to Medusas, 31st August.
Popular fantasy roleplaying games have butchered the Medusa myth. She’s no longer the vain beauty who so terribly annoyed the goddess Athena and was cursed as a result. Medusa has become an entire race. The Slayer’s Guide to Medusas doesn’t try and correct this but it does succeed in making D&D’s version of the Medusas far more tempting to use in your game.
Every Slayer’s Guide has an anatomical view of the creature under inspection on the inside front cover and this time the special attention given to how the snakes attach to the medusa’s head is particularly creepy.
The anatomy moves on to the physiology, looking at the dietary r ... |
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Hellboy, 31st August.
Steve Jackson Games were so pleased when they secured the rights to produce the Hellboy RPG that they told the world in a carefully marketed special announcement. By all accounts, this special announcement left many people wondering what the fuss was about. People were expecting news of the fourth edition of GURPS. What’s so special about Hellboy? Have you even heard of Hellboy?
Hellboy’s a popular set of graphic novels by the respected comic book author and artist Mike Mignola. It manages to be popular and removed from the mainstream at the same time. That’s why it is perfectly respectable never have heard of Hellboy and why people wh ... |
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Darwin's World, 26th August.
I really rather liked the electronic edition of Darwin’s World so I wasn’t sure whether the new print edition would be able to maintain my enthusiasm. Worse, I was slightly worried that the book would actually start to spoil things for me. There’s more than just the PDF Darwin’s World in the book, highlights from the first couple of supplements are added in to ensure that the 128-paged softback book is complete. In fact, the electronic edition of the book is known as Darwin’s World Complete. Still with me? Good!
You’d be bloody hard pressed to find a book with the manufacturers code "0001" that’s as good as this "0001" product.
The int ... |
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Mansions and Manors, 26th August.
This is my third review of a Darkfuries floorplan set – and it’s not a redundant review. Each of these floorplans have evolved significantly from the one before. Previously I started by pointing out that although these are electronic floorplans that they are not packed as PDF documents. The floorplans come as a zipped up package of html files. There are pros can cons with this, as noted in the Inn and Tavern Floorplans review an important pro is that you only need to open up the image with interests you rather than having to open up a many megabyte spanning document. This becomes even more important for Mansions and Manors because this produc ... |
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The Slayer's Guide to Female Gamers, 22nd August.
Rarely has there been such a controversial roleplaying supplement. Long before the release of the Slayer’s Guide to Female Gamers there had been much debate on the Mongoose forums and mailing list. It’s a satire, poking fun more at male players than female players but the mere suggestion that something negative might have been published about female players was enough to sally forth a steady stream of men with ready protests. Now having read the book the irony of such a reaction is not lost on me. The reaction from actual female gamers, at least from what I’ve seen, was a more level "Why should I buy this book?". That’s a harder question to a ... |
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Epic Level Handbook, 22nd August.
GameWyrd strives to bring you reviews of the latest releases and that’s just what we’re doing with this review of the Epic Level Handbook. This high profile Wizards of the Coast product was released in the UK just this week. It’s been available for those of you who share a landmass with the Wizard’s Tower for quite some time now. If this were a review of Wizard’s distributing powers it wouldn’t be a very flattering one.
The Epic Level Handbook is well written and has convinced me it’s possible to roll-play epic levels. I remain unconvinced that it’s possible to role-play much of the epic style.
What do I mean by that? Take the ... |
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Temples and Shrines Floorplans, 22nd August.
Temples and Shrines is an electronic product but it’s not a PDF download. These floorplans are packaged as a carefully grouped html frameset. This means its easy to print out the exact floorplan you want but really hard to print them all out in one go. Over all, the advantages in the html format really do out-weigh any disadvantages and a more detailed discussion of this can be found in this review of Inn and Tavern floorplans.
Unlike the Inn and Tavern product though this offering from Darkfuries contains more than just floorplans. Where there are temples and shrines then there are deities and priests too and this holds true for this pro ... |
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GM Mastery: NPC Essentials, 13th August.
NPC Essentials carries the d20 logo; whereas I appreciate the marketing strategy there I have to say that it doesn’t do justice to the sheer universal scope of the guide. The advice for GMs on running NPCs can be applied to any game, any setting and at any time. The use of the d20 logo is justified though since sample mechanics and attributes are all for that system and there’s an intelligent study on Challenge Ratings too.
Prices change but at the time of writing this issue of GM Mastery costs $8.95 from RPGNow and although that’s a bit more expensive than the discounted ~$5.00 products on sale there, GM Mastery is still very much cheape ... |
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The Way of the Dead, 12th August.
The Way of the Dead, I thought, promised two things - information on the powerful, glamorised and thus favourite character "race" of the undead Harrowed and conversion rules to turn your entire collection of original Deadlands into the d20 system. Ah. Silly me.
It’s a 96-paged, soft back, black and white book that comes in at just under $US 20.00. That’s on the expensive side. I was struck straight a way was the giant sized font the book uses. If you want to make a serious price per page comparison then you should probably take off a half dozen pages from The Way of the Dead’s total. There’s an advert in the back and so there goes another ... |
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Monster Island, 11th August.
I don’t know how close it was in the rest of the world but here in Scotland FireFly Games’ Monster Island: The Game of Giant Monster Combat arrived in the local RPG shop the very same week as Mystic Eye’s Giant Monster Rampage. This would seem to be bad for the publishers, especially Firefly who are newer and smaller but it doesn’t seem to have worked out quite like that. The arrival of so many monster products seems to have successfully inspired a kaiju revival (which is good for the publishers) and left us consumers with two rather different and high quality products to try and choose from.
Monster Island has several advantages. On the s ... |
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Prometheus Rising, 10th August.
Prometheus Rising is a new PDF Sci-Fi d20 RPG from Vigilance Press, the small company behind the super-heroic (a carefully selected term since I’ve been told that Marvel own ‘superhero’ as a trademark) Vigilance RPG.
Prometheus begins with a page of great story. There are hints of a rebellion, The Company, space prisons, strange technology and more. The tagline for the download on its virtual shelf at RPGNow announces “95 Worlds, 1 Destiny" and the front cover of the download itself says “95 Planets, 1 Destiny". I was all set to soak up this new campaign setting and so after quickly reading through the new character classes I took to scro ... |
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Encyclopaedia Arcane: Chronomancy, 8th August.
Temporary paradox, permanent paradox, awakened, celerity and an entirely different magic system than the Dreaming system used by the fairies. I’m talking about Mongoose’s duel Encyclopaedia line of course. Which product line did you think I was talking about? If you thought I was talking about White Wolf then I was probably being too harsh; terms like "paradox" go hand in hand with any discussion on temporal magic and it would have been wrong to avoid it just because reviewers can think of other products that use the same terms. I don’t imagine terms like "paradox" or "awakened" are copyright either, whereas I recall from the fine print in m ... |
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Way of the Shugenja, 8th August.
Way of the Shugenja is two books in one. The front cover boasts the Legend of the Five Rings logo as well as the phrase "Oriental Adventures" and when you turn the book over you’ll find the d20 logo.
It sounds like a rather daunting task for a 96-paged book but Way of the Shugenja goes as far as to print the mechanics for both systems – that’s L5R 2e & d20 (D&D; 3e). Did you understand that? The secret language of the RPG community; we’ll leave the code-crackers at the NIA scratching their heads. This means that some of the game mechanics are posted twice, d20 in black and L5R in blue. For example, the social benefit in belonging to the Do ... |
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Highthrone, 7th August.
Highthrone is populous city that thrives on top of a mountain. The mountain is missing its peak and at the very top there’s a huge crater in which the city nestles. Think volcano and you’re there. The local mages know but the average man on the street in Highthrone has not actually clued in on the fact that his home is build in a volcano’s crater but I suppose that’s realistic enough in a world with neither schools nor the Discovery Channel. Highthrone is one of those "Cities of Fantasy" from the extensive Mongoose product line. In the search of more land Highthrone actually has three floating islands; one for growing food one, one for tradin ... |
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Inn and Tavern Floorplans, 6th August.
Inn and Tavern Floorplans is an electronic product and it is an electronic product unlike any other currently reviewed on GameWyrd. Inn and Tavern Floorplans is not a PDF, its actually presented to you in HTML format. This worried me and I can only imagine that other people might worry too but as it turns out the HTML format is a bonus rather than a bane. Inn and Tavern is a collection of floor plans, in other words, it is a collection of graphics. The clever use of HTML and frames means that the reader only has open up one image at a time whereas with a PDF (even with the proxy design pattern – note to geeks) you have to open more than you n ... |
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Moon Elves, 29th July.
Wow. I’m surprised. This most recent offering from Dark Quest really impressed me. I was expecting a supplement with about sixty or seventy pages, entirely black and white and a collection of assorted venues. I was thinking of the City Guides from Dark Quest but this, a Culture Guide, is an entirely different animal. The Moon Elves supplement sees elves that are described in wonderful detail and in over 100 pages of colour. If prefer to print your PDFs off so you can read them in bed and are alarmed at the possibility of so much colour then I believe there’s a black and white copy available from RPGNow as well. Whereas the existence of a blac ... |
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Hell on Earth, 26th July.
D20 Goes to Hell!
No, that’s not this reviewer’s opinion of the latest campaign world to see the d20 treatment but the catchy title on the blurb on the back of the book. Deadlands: Hell on Earth is the sequel to Pinnacle’s popular Deadlands: the Weird West series. This is a review of the d20 edition of Hell on Earth. Pinnacle is synonymous with zombie cowboys.
Zombie cowboys? I think it’ll be best to give a quick overview of the Earth that’s become the Deadlands. In the book we’re introduced the Hell on Earth through the recordings of a dying Templar called Jo. She’s taken a mortal wound while fighting a gang of Trogs from the radioacti ... |
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Giant Monster Rampage, 25th July.
Stomp! Crush! Destroy!
Giant Monster Rampage is a set of rules from Mystic Eye Games, perhaps better known for their The Hunt: Rise of Evil d20 series, that gives us the means to turn our old monster toys and leg… oh, sorry, stackable plastic blocks into a giant monster war game. The old monsters toys, when you find some on a similar scale, are, of course, the models for the battling giant monsters and the stackable plastic blocks will briefly be buildings before they’re destroyed in titanic battles.
It’s not a complex set of rules. The back of the book suggests the game is suitable for players 12 years of age and older. I’m [age ce ... |
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Encyclopaedia Arcane: Elementalism, 22nd July.
I almost didn’t notice at first. It occurred to me just as I closed the book. I had to go back and flick through the pages – twice! It’s true though.
There are no new feats. There are no new prestige classes.
The Encyclopaedia Arcane: Elementalism is a 64-paged book about those specialised wizards and sorcerers with a special understanding and mastery over elements and those magics influenced by them. There’s a great expansion to the standard magic rules. There is text of the Elemental Planes and the creatures who live there. There’s all this and yet nothing in the way of feats or prestige. Does this omission adversely affect t ... |
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The Slayer's Guide to Rules Lawyers, 22nd July.
Ah yes. The dreaded Rule Lawyer. The inside cover of every Slayer’s Guide is given over to a quick biological study of the creature in the guide. This is what the researcher has discovered about this infamous fiend.
1) Note the mimicking of the humanoid.
2) Paper thin skull provides extra room for useless facts.
3) Sticky fingers adapted for page turning, note the clammy handshake.
4) (on dice – always found nearby) Perhaps some kind of symbiote? Maybe the true intelligence behind the fiends!
5) Feet, soft and vulnerable through lack of use. (the researcher speculates "Caltrops?")
The Rules Lawyer gains d4 hit points ... |
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Pocket Grimoire: Divine, 21st July.
The Pocket Grimoire: Divine is the sister of Pocket Grimoire: Arcane and it’ll come as no surprise that the books are very much the same. There’s little chance that a busy GM being pestered by three players at once, fighting for his slice of pizza, stealing the last can of Mountain Dew while quickly checking the rules of an obscure spell will confuse the two books though since Divine is in blue, Arcane in browny-red and the internal page borders of the books are two very different patterns.
The Pocket Grimoire: Divine covers more character classes than the Arcane book did. Adept, Blackguard, Cleric, Druid, Paladin and Ranger spells are all ... |
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Pocket Grimoire: Arcane, 21st July.
256 pages and nearly all of them are entirely given over to arcane spells. 256 pages for $14.95 US; that’s amazing value. Ah yes, so the title of the book gives the game away "Pocket Grimoire". I watched with some incredulity an online debate as to whether the pocket grimoires could actually fit into a pocket. Don’t get carried away with this pocket concept. The book is just shy of 14cm (5 ½ inches) wide, 21½cm (8 ½ inches) high and 1½cm (½ inch) thick. The pocket grimoire is a book designed to be thrown into your travelling GM back of books, to take up as little space as possible on your table or behind your GM screen. It’s a great idea.
... |
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Urban Blight: Foul Locales, 20th July.
Urban Blight is the first offering in Mystic Eye Games’s Foul Locations series. Strangely, the first thing I noticed when I flicked open the cover was a credit to SkeletonKey Games; a mention in the cartography section. My initial feeling of "what’s going on?" was quickly set at rest. The maps are simply something else; well worth effort and the credit to the rival (presumably friendly) company. In fact, in this fast paced hobby of ours, Urban Blight was nominated as a candidate in the popular Ennies awards for best cartography only a few days after the book arrived on my desk.
The maps are good. What about the rest of the book?
... |
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Heroes of High Favor: Dwarves, 11th July.
Heroes of High Favor is half a book; at least it is the size of half a book, being only 15cm wide. It’s 62 pages long and comes it at $9.95. That’s interesting; a cost per word evaluation would come down unfavourably on the book, it took me just a few seconds to shuffle around in a pile of RPG supplements behind me to find a "normal" sized 64-paged book and a 62-paged book and each cost $12.95. On the other hand, $9.95 for a paperback RPG supplement is fairly cheap and it must appeal strongly to youngsters making the first purchase, poverty ridden students or even people just wanting a cheap and easy way to inject some new prestige classes in ... |
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Hammer and Helm, 10th July.
Hammer & Helm is the first in Green Ronin’s Races of Renown series. It is also the first book I’ve seen in the new OGL Interlink brand. Hammer and Helm isn’t the first in the OGL Interlink since partner publisher Paradigm Concepts used it first with their "The Lords of the Peaks: The Essential Guide to Giants". I’m not entirely sure that OGL Interlink is about. I know it was kind enough to change its name from OGL Interlock to OGL Interlink after minnow d20 publisher Interlock Games waved a flag and stamped a foot. I think the OGL Interlink aims to produce "related" books in a way which makes sure that Company A doesn’t write a rival book on ... |
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The Quintessential Dwarf, 5th July.
The Quintessential Dwarf is a book dedicated to the dwarf and the dwarves are a particular hard race to dedicate an entire book too. Whereas people are willing and happy to imagine elves as arrogant scholars, wild tree people, sage druids, mysterious archers or even sailors and giant eagle riding cavalry most people will grumble sceptically if you try and present the dwarfs as anything other than miners-cum-warriors who live deep inside the heart of the mountains. The Quintessential Dwarf does not stray too far from this stereotype, it would probably be foolhardy to do so, but the book does push forward some fairly decent sub-races. I’m a gre ... |
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The Lost City, 3rd July.
The Darwin’s World RPG line goes from strength to strength. What has been one of the champions of the PDF publishers has moved on to paper but the electronic format has not been abandoned and there’s now a Darwin’s World Complete which bundles the World Rules, Denizens of the Twisted Earth and Artifacts of the Ancients into one. The newest addition to the Darwin’s World collection is The Lost City which is a rather good adventure, described as a "campaign adventure" due to its depth, and this too is currently available in electronic format.
I like the Lost City. The first thing I noticed as I opened up the document and quickly scrolled dow ... |
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Librum Equitis, 2nd July.
Prestige Classes. The internet is full of them. Every second d20 publication offers yet more. There’s nothing inherently wrong with having so many prestige classes available but I just can’t help shake the feeling that too many of them are badly designed, mechanically flawed, uninspired or otherwise badly short of the mark. Librum Equitis is a book dedicated to prestige classes and in many ways that’s so much tidier than those books that tuck their prestige class offerings away in adventures. I’ve said that too many prestige classes are badly designed but you can’t accuse Librum Equitis of that mistake. If you want to be picky, as I am then, ... |
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Common Ground 1, 2nd July.
Common Ground may be the first book to come from Bard’s Productions but it’s not the first RPG offering I’ve read from them. Earlier this year work from Bard’s Productions appeared in Gaming Frontiers and it was rather good. Common Ground starts on good ground; on the premise that the players do something unexpected and the GM faces the task of quickly throwing together a temple, merchant’s store or inn on the fly. Common Ground is 32 pages of gloss and colour; but the colour is restricted to some tiny thumbnail style maps in the centre of the booklet, the glossy pages and covers are flimsy and the last bunch of pages are taken up with rathe ... |
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Darkness and Light, 30th June.
Darkness and Light in another PDF offering from the Vigilance Press super hero d20 line. Darkness and Light is presented in a similar style as Vigilance; size 12 font, solid use of red and blue in the text and two clear columns without anything in the way of stupid single word lines of text squeezed down the side of a table. I like the style, I know some people don’t but I suspect they’re blessed with large computer monitors and besides its easy enough to shrink the font size by clicking on the (minus) button in your copy of Acrobat but you can’t increase the font size without suffering horrible horizontal scrolling. Fine. Great. Super. We’ve ... |
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The Hunt: Rise of Evil, 29th June.
Okay. It’s been out for a little while now and it’s amassing something of a fan base. Mystic Eye’s World Book The Hunt: Rise of Evil gets the best of two worlds by providing a high fantasy world which provides the level of spell casting and multitude of character races that players are familiar and comfortable with and successfully combining that with a dark, gritty and somewhat gothic setting which manages to inject something new and enticing.
It was a gamble. If you’d asked me whether the RPG consumers of the American market would do anything other than ignore a gothic campaign world before The Hunt: Rise of Evil hit the shelves the ... |
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Vigilance, 21st June.
Vigilance is a PDF publication that brings superheroes and the d20 system together. I think the d20 particularly suits the superhero genre, the advancement from of the level system quickly turns mundane people into elite warriors and the feats are naturally super heroic in nature. Vigilance does not rely on the d20s system natural inclination for granted and actually serves up some improvements. The armour system is changed; armour doesn’t make you harder to hit; it makes you harder to damage. In addition there’s a slightly more complex Vitality and Wound system and I think this better reflects all those comic book fight scenes.
Illustrati ... |
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City Guide: Coffer of Coins, 20th June.
The City Guides from Dark Quest are a great idea. I think their basic premise is true; cities generally are so vast that players and GMs alike often get lost when they try and move their roleplay there. The first City Guide, "Everyday Life", did really well. It presented a number of everyday shops, shopkeepers and staff in a roleplaying friendly way. I think "Coffer of Coins", which as City Guide 3 seems to have overtaken City Guide 2 on the release schedule, is pretty much the same. The main difference between the two is the in the quality of layout. The presentation style of "Coffer of Coins" really doesn’t work. Whereas the first have grey ... |
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Blight Magic, 19th June.
I like the idea of Blight Magic; a ritual that sucks the very essence of life from the land and turns it into fuel for magic. I like Mystic Eye too, they’ve been good those of us who like to stray from the typical high fantasy (known fondly as cheese fantasy by some) and try something with a bit more grit. Mystic Eye sells the Blight Magic system a little short when they suggest its best suited for High Fantasy games where magic is plentiful and common and not so well suited for Low Fantasy games where magic is rare. I think the Blight Magic ability to drain energy from the land to earn additional spell slots would be a wonderful way to deal ... |
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Races of Evernor - Part 1, 19th June.
I imagine it is likely that many readers will not have heard of Silverthorne Games but they’ve been around for over a year. In this time a number of free downloads have been made available from their website and their first product, "The Races of Evernor – Part 1", a PDF download, has just now been published. Silverthorne could have rushed the Races of Evernor out in much less time but I’m glad they didn’t. A look at their release schedule shows that they’ve a range of products, both PDF and paper, planned over a sensible publisher’s timetable. That’s the best way to manage releases in my opinion, ensure that you’ve enough ideas, enough to wr ... |
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The Rookie's Guide to the Justice Department, 13th June.
If you were expecting "The Rookie’s Guide to ____" to be a carbon copy of "The Slayer’s Guide to ____" then you might be in for a pleasant surprise. It depends on your opinion of the 32-paged Slayer Guides, I suppose, but it was never going to be possible to treat Mega City One’s Justice Department in the same way you might write about trolls, hobgoblins or bugbears. The Rookie’s Guide to the Justice Department has twice as many pages, smaller, crisper font and makes use of colour.
The use of colour is interesting. The cover is classic Dredd, the brooding judge himself towering above Mega City One, there’s a colour image of a cut away ... |
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The Quintessential Elf, 13th June.
Elves must be one of the most popular fantasy races in the realms of fantasy rpgs, stories and poetry alike. Mongoose Publishing’s Collector Series doesn’t quite have the same dominance over other rpg supplements as elves have over other races but it must be one of the most popular independent d20 series out there. The Quintessential Elf marks a change for the Quintessential line, it’s the first book to cover a race rather than a character class.
Character concepts are one of the core strengths of the collector series. They show that the books are not just a shameless "power up" for your favourite sort of character; that they really do tr ... |
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Spells and Magic, 9th June.
I purchased the softback 96 paged Spells & Magic at the same time as I bought a hardback campaign world of some 250 paged. Spells & Magic was the more expensive – and not by a small margin either. Spells & Magic lives up to its name and offers a collection of new spells, magic items and magical prestige classes. The internet oozes with these three offerings. I could ask any RPG newgroup or forum board for suggestions on new spells, items and mage prestige classes and expect to be snowed under.
I would dearly love to slam this book and write it up as a complete and utter waste of money.
I can’t. Spells & Magic co ... |
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Ghelspad, 8th June.
I might introduce a brand new way to judge a book for Ghelspad. The little brother test. Only this brother isn’t so little any more, he’d gone away to University for a year where he kept on roleplaying but had managed to stay more or less away from the d20 phenomena. So, when presented with a table laden with recent d20 releases, and I do mean laden, which of the myriad of books do you suppose this errant roleplayer picks up first? Well yes. Of course, you’ve guessed, it was Ghelspad. I have to admit that the appearance of the book is insidiously striking. It tosses any claims of oxymoron out of the window. The book’s hardbound 250 pages and ... |
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The Slayer's Guide to Dragons, 3rd June.
If you thought the Slayer’s Guides are a series of 32 paged books designed to bolster, study and enrich those creatures your players are all too good at turning into meat paste then you would be wrong. You wouldn’t be very wrong, but you’d wrong. The Slayer’s Guide to Dragons aims to show that just when you’re starting to take things for granted that it can all change.
There’s a famous name on the front of this book of famous monsters. Garry Gygax is known as the grandfather of the hobby and as the man who wrote the original Dungeons and Dragons. This dragon book has Gygax as the author on the front cover, indeed, Mongoose would be mad ... |
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Bodies and Souls: 20 Templates, 3rd June.
The first thing you’re likely to notice when you open Bodies and Souls if the technical proficiency of the document’s creator. It seems that I’m still finding cause to say that even has the PDF roleplaying publication sector matures. This is good. The more suave and sophisticated the PDF get then the more popular they’ll become and the more healthy the industry as a whole will be. What’s so special about Bodies and Soul’s electronic panache then? (We’ll get to how it’s rather special in terms of quality rpg offerings in just a bit.) It’s a three-dimensional PDF; there are non-offensive inner-windows of text that either open up to explain term ... |
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Judge Dredd, 29th May.
Judge Dredd. You know the name. Whether you’ve read any of the comics or seen the movie, you know the name. In fact, world wide, I think it’s safe to say that more people know the Judge Dredd name that those who know Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft, the World of Darkness, or any other campaign world you care to mention. So are Mongoose, the developers, or Rebellion, the current owners of the 2000AD license, sitting on a gold mine? Well, probably not. It’ll be a shame, though, because the d20 Judge Dredd roleplaying game is a cracker, it’s really rather good. Just while I’m linking these URLs back to the various company’s websites, let me offer up ... |
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Random Megacore DM Screen 2002, 29th May.
For an age, it seems, the most popular download on RPG Hoard has been a downloadable DM screen. It’s actually had over 15,000 downloads. You may ask, "What on earth is a downloadable DM screen?" and I may very well reply, "It’s a special electronic format which you save to your hard drive and then watch as electrons rise up, pour out from your floppy disk slot and slowly congeal together to form a solid DM screen," but then, I’d be pulling your leg. You download a zipped up PDF file, print it out and then stick the pages onto cardboard you’ve found yourself. That’s how my very first GM screen came to life. It is easy enough to collect the bac ... |
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The Quintessential Wizard, 23rd May.
The Collector Series continues with the Quintessential Wizard and if you take a peek at Mongoose’s schedule you’ll see that the next two in the series are Elf and Dwarf and it’s August when the series comes back to cover character classes with the Quintessential Monk. I’m not the only one out there to keep an eye on when the next offering from the Collector Series is due to hit the shelves, it’s an extremely well received set of books and fast becoming a d20 stalwart. The Quintessential Wizard continues in the tradition of high quality and gaming insight.
The very first of the Collector Series, the Quintessential Fighter, introduced t ... |
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Encyclopaedia Divine: Fey Magic, 22nd May.
Fey Magic is alternatively known as Dreaming the Reverie, Seeking the Reverie and Calling the Reverie. The Fey are a fickle race but they don’t deserve being overlooked; this seems to suit the book as a whole. A good way to get to grips with what the book is trying to present is to skip to the very last chapter and read the designer’s notes first. I think I can quote the author’s opening paragraph safely.
"I have always felt a bit concerned how the fey are portrayed in the ‘classic’ fantasy campaign. While legends persisted of their incredible magical powers, they were still depicted as flighty and annoying ‘props’ to throw at characte ... |
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Feuerring, 21st May.
Feuerring: Gateway to Hell has exactly the same number of pages as any of Mongoose’s Slayer’s Guides but it feels like a very much more meaty book. There’s the impression of more bang for your buck. Feuerring is the first of a new series "The Planes".
Okay. Let’s assume that the minutia of the legal agreements from Wizards insist that most of the content from Manual of the Planes is not part of the Open License. This would mean Mongoose wouldn’t be able to write about Feuerring in relation to any of these trademarked Planes. Feuerring’s introduction makes it clear that the book has been written for any fantasy based game in mind and al ... |
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Prophecies of the Dragon, 5th May.
Money. You can tell a lot of money has gone into the production of this book – be it the Wheel of Time license, the artists, the glossy full colour pages or even the maps that decorate the book. Despite this you may very well blink when you see the price. I know I did.
This book is a long awaited good idea. The Wheel of Time Roleplaying Game could be a fantastic license for the d20 system but many people are finding it very hard writing campaigns and scenarios for it. The problem is simple; the Wheel of Time fantasy series isn’t finished yet. If running your game as events intertwined with the plot in the books was not hard enough, im ... |
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The Slayer's Guide to Trolls, 5th May.
I’ve mixed feelings about this book. On one hand it’s the Slayer’s Guide to Trolls and on the other hand it’s the Slayer’s Guide to Trolls. By that I mean the troll is an awkward monster to look at closely; it should be an unique terror for many parties of heroes but it is often a mundane bore. The book suffers from the simple nature boredom that is troll lore.
Trolls are dumb and brutal. They don’t bother with weapons and most always attack with their claws and bites, this means that the guide to trolls couldn’t offer any sagacious advice on troll weaponry. Trolls’ combat tactics are non-existent, they attack with a thoughtless sava ... |
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Deities and Demigods, 4th May.
Deities and Demigods is a 224 page, hardbound book and in those two hundred pages you’ll find an interesting mix, a frustrating mix. There are sections of filler that threaten to bring the quality of the book down. There is also just enough work put into this book to make it a worthwhile purchase for a GM. If you’re looking to Deities and Demigods as a way to add richness and flavour to the pantheons and religion in your Dungeons and Dragons game then you’re likely to pick up on all the filler and be a little disappointed. If, however, you’re aiming to run a game where the player characters are likely to go toe to toe against gods, aspire to ... |
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Encyclopaedia Divine: Shamans, 29th April.
The popular Encyclopaedia Arcane series slyly morphs into the Encyclopaedia Divine. It’s absolutely right to do so, not all Dungeons and Dragons spellcasters use arcane magic, some are gifted their spells through their relationship with the Gods. Shaman, however, do neither of these. The shaman are able to produce spells through their relationships with spirits and these spirits are neither gods nor ghosts. Actually the spirits might be gods, they might even be older than the deities that form the basis of the D&D world or it might be that a shaman can actually gather power for spells through deities after all but it’s not really clearly ... |
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Call of Cthulhu, 28th April.
Given that the Wheel of Time roleplaying game was doomed to success, the conversion of Call of Cthulhu was the first real threatening test to the d20 project. Love it or hate it Call of Cthulhu: d20 is here to stay. It’s a book of two halves; a first half which presents a slick d20 conversion but struggles slightly to define a playable Cthulhu atmosphere and a second half which bothers less about dice and dots and successfully brews a stronger Cthulhu flavour.
It works. The book gives you the means and the inspiration to play in the CoC setting and to give the new d20 system for it a go.
The first thing you’ll notice about th ... |
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Stormhaven, 24th April.
I was sceptical as to whether a series of d20 books based on "Cities of Fantasy" would be up to much. Skraag: City of Orcs proved me wrong. Yes, I know, this is a review of Stormhaven but the contrast between the two styles is quite startling. Skraag worked by providing enough detail on the mountain city and then a lot of rich flavour on the people, factions and the building tension between them. Skraag presented a city with a plot overlaid. Stormhaven is a richly detailed city with plot suggestions tucked in underneath here and there. Two very different things and they both seem to work for me.
Stormhaven: City of a Thousand Seas is a ... |
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Terrors of the Twisted Earth, 24th April.
RPG Objects seem to be onto a winner with Darwin’s World and it is in no small part due to the hard work put into the product range. In recent months a whole slew of Darwin’s World reviews having been appearing around the internet, including from some rather famous names. In the same time, since GameWyrd’s first review of a Darwin’s World download, the previous editions have been updated, greatly enhanced and made freely available to anyone who had purchased an earlier copy. PDF supplements are the way of the future for all but the most mighty of RPG companies and RPG Objects really have made a flying start.
I’ve been looking forward to th ... |
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Encyclopaedia Arcane: Battle Magic, 23rd April.
If you use Battle Magic in your campaign then you’ll be introducing two powerful (and possibly over-powering) factors to your game world – mighty spells and influential guilds.
The premise of Battle Magic is simple; do away with those spells of knowledge, summoning or other spurious effects and concentrate entirely on ways to inflict huge amounts of damage on their foes. A great deal of damage in as little time as possible. The author estimates that the Battle Mage can inflict about 30% more damage than wizardly rivals. The basic rites and rituals of spell casting are pushed aside as well and replaced with two differing the system. Th ... |
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The Quintessential Cleric, 10th April.
Clerics are like wizards but different. They get their magic spells in a different way and they’re better able to make use of healing magic too. Oh yeah, they’ve got something to do with gods and stuff but they seem to be too busy off on adventures to really have all that much time for sort of thing. I'm sure that that sort of sentiment is not uncommon in some games, it doesn't really seem right though and seems to be the problem this book sets out to address. There's a great feat in the Quintessential Cleric called Combat Co-ordinator which gives the Cleric the ability to boost the combat prowess of his fellow adventures as he hangs around a ... |
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The Slayer's Guide to Bugbears, 9th April.
I think the Slayer's Guides are swiftly becoming one of the most famous, or infamous, series of independent d20 supplements. The very name seems to cry out to the legion of munchkin roleplayer, to those hack’n’slash masters of the dungeon crawl. It can’t be denied that the Slayer's Guides do have something of that taint about them. That said; the opposite is also true. The introduction in each of the Guides I’ve read always states that the aim is to add more depths to those creatures which all to often simply get mowed down by the characters en route to higher levels. (I imagine the introduction to Slayer’s Guide to Dragons will strike a diff ... |
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Crusades of Valour, 8th April.
I can’t really compare Crusades of Valour to AEG’s War because it would be like trying to compare a dragon to a frog. I hated War, I really liked this book. In fact, even as Crusades of Valour was being printed out some of us wondered whether its biggest rival would be a fellow Mongoose Publishing product. The extremely popular Quintessential Fighter which in addition to its wealth of Fighter Character Class information also held the Open Mass Combat System. Would Crusades of Valour, a d20 supplement on Holy Wars, rely in the OMCS, present a rival system or leave one out entirely? Any of those three options would have thrown the Mongoose Prod ... |
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Masters of the Wild, 5th April.
Masters of the Wild is the official class book from Wizards of the Coast and it covers Barbarians, Rangers and Druids. The three prestige classes have squeezed into the one book because they’re supposed to have the wilderness in common and because there was an uneven number of basic character classes. The book arrived on my desk at the same time as the second issue of the Gaming Frontiers magazine. Masters of the Wild is a 96-page black and white book that costs $19.95, Gaming Frontiers is a 160-page colour magazine that costs $17.95. I guess you have to pay more for official products.
We are told that Masters of the Wild will provide ... |
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Encyclopaedia Arcane: Constructs, 4th April.
Alejandro Melchor, Mongoose’s new writer, took six entries from the Monster Manual and span them out into a jam-packed 64-page book. You’ll find that even the inside covers of the book are used so I guess you could argue on a 66-page book. The inside cover, full colour art, is rather creepy – just the thing to inspire your players. The Encyclopaedia Arcane: Contacts comes with the tagline "It is alive!" and this Frankenstein feel is rife throughout the book. Those would-be Frankenstein wizards are sometimes called transmuters in the book and I can see where that’s come from, straight from the Dungeons and Dragons magic categories but I would ... |
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Gaming Frontiers: 2, 3rd April.
Issue one of Gaming Frontiers was warmly received. Issue two marks the start of the real fight. Gaming Frontiers is a big and colourful magazine, it’s also a rather expensive publication that will press you for $17.95 (here in the UK I’ve seen it go for ~£14). There are dozens of small d20 companies out there in the wild now and each one is busy churning out publication after publication. Gaming Frontiers provides a forum for the best of those companies and freelancers to present exclusive, expanded or sneak previews of their work and it gives us, the humble consumer, the chance to decide which interests us the most. The clutter of publishers ... |
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Black Flags, 18th March.
Black Flags is the first Avalanche Press book that I’ve picked up. Avalanche Press came highly recommended to me by a historic rpg fanatic of a friend. His games are all about realism and about historical accuracy and apparently no other company out there that even comes close to Avalanche. So, when I saw a brand new Avalanche d20 book I snatched it up.
There’s also a sexy picture of a female pirate on the front cover. Did I forget to mention that? My local retailer tells me that this is fairly common move for Avalanche Press, they’ll decorate the front cover of the book with some eye candy, very much in the Luis Royo style but then fall ... |
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The Quintessential Rogue, 18th March.
The Quintessential Rogue is a fantastic book. The success of its predecessor, the Quintessential Fighter, put a great burden of expectation on the Quintessential Rogue. Even with a production line that included such tempting offering as the Slayer’s Guide to Dragons and Judge Dredd d20 the Quintessential Rogue was widely anticipated. The Quintessential Rogue had to be a good book, it carried the success of Mongoose Publishing’s prestigious Collector Series on its shoulders. As it happens, given the superb quality of the book, it has not only taken the Collector Series from strength to strength but it casts further shade on the idea of buying ... |
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War, 11th March.
No. I think not. This book really failed to bring me any value for money. I found the content all too simplistic and patronising. You might as well skip straight to page 137 of a 144-paged book and start reading the mechanics for mass combat. Whereas I can that see some effort has been put into these rules they just don’t sit well with me, they’re rather like the battle rules from GURPS but with all the nice touches taken out. In comparison to the Open Mass Combat System in The Quintessential Fighter the system in War really isn’t up to much.
Even as the book began to irate me more and more I wondered whether I was being too harsh on i ... |
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The Wise and the Wicked, 4th March.
Um.
You don’t need this book but you might want to buy it anyway. The Wise and the Wicked is simply a collection of NPCs.
I’m not really keen on the idea of someone else bundling together a couple of characters and then trying to sell the stats to me. Fortunately, the Wise and the Wicked is a little more than just that. It’s a professional quality book, that might sound obvious but it is no longer something than you can take for granted in this brave new world of the Open Game License, it’s a pleasure and not a chore to flick through the book and idly scan the characters. The artwork helps and each and every character has a por ... |
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Hollowfaust : City of Necromancers, 4th March.
The preface in Hollowfaust: City of Necromancers announces that it wants to do away with the stereotypes. Hollowfaust is a city where undead minions prowl and protect the expansive sewer system, where the necromancers wear black robes and claim, by right of law, the bodies of all who die in the city. Okay, so I’m rather cruel there. The Scarred Lands, where mankind and their allies face a daily struggle for survival in a world all but destroyed in a war between the Gods and Titans, were never going to be the home of fluffy wizards that would be content to keep animated bunny skeletons.
In fact, to be honest, I think the Scarred Lands has ... |
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City Guide: Everyday Life, 28th February.
City Guide: Everyday Life will cost you a couple of bucks for a whole collection of shops. Yes, shops. As I began to read through I was more and more convinced that it was worth it. I started to ponder just what I might say in the review and then I found a paragraph on the very last page of the download that makes the point very well. So, here’s the quote; "One of the dangers of having PCs go into a town for rest an relaxation is that the majority of the time you have no idea what should be there. Many PCs of course just want to go to the latest and greatest tavern for a bar fight. But there are those out there that want to go shopping. Those ... |
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Ships of War, 27th February.
"Oh, I see. More boats!" That’s pretty much what I thought as I sat down with Ships of War. Then I opened the book. The picture of the war gallery with the striking lightening bolt had already soften me up but full colour picture of a mighty whale armed with spear like ram and transport dome rising up from the deep blue of the ocean was enough to upgrade my initial impressions to "Oh, wow!"
Traveller’s Tales: Ships of War really is about the boats though. The whale (Ëar’Mellon) is not alone in the ranks of weird and wonderful nautical additions though. The gnomes seem to have the inclination to build strange looking boats, most of the ... |
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Gaming Frontiers: 1, 20th February.
I had been waiting with barely restrained enthusiasm ever since it became clear that GameWyrd was going to receive a review copy of the magazine. I’d caught sight of Gaming Frontiers in my local shop a few days before my own copy arrived and I only just resisted the urge to sneak a peek. I left the shop wondering whether Gaming Frontiers really was a magazine or whether it was actually a book! That question is addressed within the first couple of pages by the "magazine" itself.
This is issue one. The first. I gather there was a preview Premier copy that Gen Con and Origins attendees got their grubby mitts on, but Volume 1 has a special ... |
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Cave of Life, 19th February.
Those Wyrdlings who frequently read my reviews will know that I like to savage pre-written adventures. Generally I find them to be clichéd and a waste of money. I’ve found good cause to give many scenarios below 5/10 scores, including some written by famous names. The Cave of Life is immune to some of my savagery. It’s immune because it’s free. It costs nothing, zippo, nill, ziltch, it is entirely up for grabs. In fact if you’re new to the world of PDF RPG and are feeling rather nervous about downloading and unzipping files then Cave of Life is an absolute must for you since it’ll serve as a great introduction to the procedure.
... |
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Vigil Watch : Warrens of the Ratmen, 19th February.
It started off pretty bad. I call it "lead page syndrome" since turning the pages seems to become a Herculean task. I think it took me three attempts to sit down and actually make it past the first couple of pages. The problem was that I had discovered I was lacking all of the suggested companions for the book, four different Scarred Land texts; I wouldn’t have the basic ratman information at hand. From that point on the book started to tell me that one brood of ratman daub mud into the walls of their huts. "Reallly," I thought, "So, they live in the marsh and actually find mud to coat their dwellings with. Interesting". Yes, I’m awfully pron ... |
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Artifacts of the Ancients, 18th February.
If you’re running a Darwin’s World game or even if you’re only thinking about it then I will recommend Artifacts of the Ancients. The supplement does an awful lot of work for the GM and is a good reflection of RPGObjects growing competence in the PDF RPG market.
The "front cover" had been on preview on the publisher’s website a few days before the download was released but I had not found the time to go look, the resulting effect was the sudden appearance two scary eyes when I opened up the file. I did not have too long to wait for the download, it comes all zipped up and weights in at 1,802KB – which isn’t bad for 50+ pages of text and gr ... |
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Book of Eldritch Might II: Songs and Souls of Power, 14th February.
I liked the download enough to persuade me to save my pennies and buy the paperback version of Eldritch Might I. It’s a pretty download, a nice blend of colourful borders and black and white pictures. There’s going to be a third too. The Book of Eldritch Might III: The Nexus.
Once you’ve got your copy downloaded – and it’s a big download, it’ll take a while – it’s worth making use of the bookmarks to find your way around. Press F5, you’ll see you can jump to all of the chapters. I recently saw a Bastion Press download where the ability to jump straight to a page was “hyperlinked" into the actual contents page but given Malhavoc’s enth ... |
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Demon God's Fane, 14th February.
Demon God’s Fane is an adventure for high-level characters. This review will contain spoilers, well, in as much as a dungeon crawl can be spoiled. Oh yes. There’s a murder mystery too but unless the GM slyly withholds important information that entire section may very well be completely ignored by the characters.
Monte Cook begins the game by setting out just why his first published adventure for Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Editions is for a group of characters in the 14th and 15th level experience range. He says that if things are going the way they were planned a lot of GMs out there will have groups of characters in that region. Oh dear. I ... |
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Denizens of the Twisted Earth, 11th February.
Darwin's World is a pdf based game world in the d20 mechanics from RPG Objects. Darwin's World is a blasted wasteland were mutants evolved from the human stock that managed to survive the nuclear fall look to be new inheritors of the earth.
Denizens of the Twisted Earth is the first pay-to-download supplement for the game and it covers more than just a sampling of people. Denizens is certainly value for money, it has 48 pages that are absolutely packed full of text I’m looking at the new revision of the supplement at the minute, the first was a wash of text, in this one they’ve mingled in pictures to break up the sea of words. It sounds li ... |
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e-Villains, 11th February.
I blinked when I opened up my e-Villains, moments later I was rather impressed. My collection of pdf rpg products is just growing and this is the first time that I’ve seen something with embedded bookmark links. Simply put you can click on the entry that interests you in the table of contents and you’ll be whisked straight to that villain. If you’re going to publish electronically then I think it’s important to make as much of the benefits of the new media as possible, otherwise it’ll be nothing more than a substitute for paper. If you want the bookmark side bar in your Acrobat Reader to appear or disappear press F5.
There are two basi ... |
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Skraag - City of Orcs, 2nd February.
"Home to over twenty-five thousand rampaging orcs, Skraag is a city of pure brutality, a place of nightmare that even the bravest adventurer will fear to tread. Built from the ruins of an ancient dwarven stronghold the orcs themselves destroyed, the hordes of Skraag range for miles in every direction, brining slaughter and misery to any community unfortunate enough to be within range of their predations."
What's this? No, the authors of the Baedekers Guide's haven't gone insane and written a cruel guide to Boston. It is, as you've guessed, the introduction to Mongoose Publishing's first book in their new Cities of Fantasy series. I ac ... |
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Creatures of Rokugan, 29th January.
A list of monsters should never be essential for any roleplaying game. A roleplaying supplement that is sold as a list of monsters, a bestiary, a creature collection or anything along those lines should stick to those lines. The Creatures of Rokugan from AEG strays off the path and although this makes the book a little easier to review, it also makes it harder to rate. Previously I've been able to rate bestiaries for what they were, a manual of monsters, which is why the likes of Minions, from Bastion Press, a whopping nine out of ten. I'll do Creatures of Rokugan a favour and rate it as a decent collection of monsters for a Rokugan setting ... |
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The Slayer's Guide to Sahuagin, 21st January.
In case Seas of Blood and then the subsequent release of the Ships of the Goblinoids and the Ships of the Elves have failed too push you into the deep end of an aquatic adventure, the Slayer's Guide to Sahuagin is here to make taking the plunge even more tempting.
The Slayer's Guides from Mongoose Publishing are designed to beef up the information on those races of creatures that the players are too busy hacking through to stop and study. I'm not sure that applies to the Sahuagin though, I think many adventures will be too busy fleeing from the Sea Devils to study them properly. The Guide certainly succeeds in presenting these underwat ... |
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Ships of the Elves, 20th January.
Ships of the Elves is the next in the Traveller's Tales series from Mongoose Publishing and if you have Seas of Blood you will know what to expect. I really enjoyed Seas of Blood and rated it 9/10. In Seas of Blood you were given a no nonsense set of rules and suggestions to cover a huge range of sea based roleplaying stuff. Ships came with "floor" plans, cost to build and how much damage they could take. There were sea magic as well has information on what might happen if you try and cast certain spells under water. Monsters, new feats, character classes and even a set of rules for grand naval battles and all this just a sampling of what the ... |
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Lords of Darkness, 17th January.
This reviewer was not wowed by the third edition campaign setting for the Forgotten Realms. It was good book, skilfully presented and rich in flavour but it wasn't a great book, it didn't have the Ravenloft rave factor. One of my main concerns about the main Faerun book was the lack of clear theme and focus, you were given a wash of information about the hugely detailed world and even if you managed to read through to the end you were left hanging with where to start. Lords of Darkness is a very real solution to this and if, like me, you like the basis of the Forgotten Realms but wanted just a little push to get going then this book could ver ... |
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Encyclopaedia Arcane: Necromancy, 15th January.
I enjoyed necromancy much more than I did demonology. Oh boy, quotes like that will come back to plague me.
"Beyond the Grave", I though, covers a good scope of power as it caters from everything through fledgling dabblers in the negative art all the way up to powerful Liches. The unfortunate core rules conflict between Clerics and necromancers has also been addressed. Simply put; if you stick with the vanilla rules then your clerics aligned to the death domain are simply so much better at things necromantic than any studios mage. Whereas clerics who can channel the power of death gods still have huge advantages in some areas the overall ... |
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Encyclopaedia Arcane: Demonology, 15th January.
Demonology, the Dark Road, is the first of Mongoose Publishing's Encyclopaedia Arcane series. I am not normally a great one for demanding more spells and special powers but I was expecting a book on demonology to provide a couple of new incantations but they're simply not there. There aren't any new demons either, instead the book recaps on those in the Monster Manual and adds a bit more flavour text, suitable ingredients for the pentagram and the summoning focus. In terms of mega-super-blasto-power-ups for wicked demonologists this book might start to sound like a bit of a failure. On the other hand there are some rather snacky new demonol ... |
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Seas of Blood, 14th January.
Hey! Don't ever try and throw a lightning bolt spell while you're underwater!
Someone said that the hobgoblins on the front cover of the book are facing in the wrong direction. I think it depends on whether the captain is pointing to tell his rowers where to row to or is pointing at the target of the nasty looking flaming ball catapult that's mounted on the deck. If the hobgoblins are facing in the wrong direction then its only one of the few things wrong with this well rounded and successful book.
It has been my experience that nautical adventures are often over looked in fantasy games. It's a shame, just because Tolkien didn' ... |
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The Gryphon's Legacy, 14th January.
The Gryphon's Legacy is a mixed bag of bones. Gryphon's an old spelling on Griffon apparently, well, duh. Gryphon's Legacy is an adventure for beginning level characters but I would hesitate to recommend it to a fledgling Dungeon Master, there are a lot of places where the heroes could find themselves in deadly trouble and even more places where the re-occurring villains could be thwarted before they've had the chance to re-occur.
There are lots of good things to say about the adventure too but I would assume the risk of spoiler information from this point on.
Gryphon's Legacy is the introductory adventure to Gasslight Press' Sun & ... |
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Arcana: Societies of Magic, 13th January.
Hmm. Um. I'm not entirely sure what to make of Arcana – Societies of Magic. I liked the book, it was well written, conceived and presented but I'm not entirely sure of just how much use it will get. The book needs a little thought and the more I think, the more it grows on me. I have the tendency not to like pre-written adventures because they, in turn, tend to be rather too linear for my tastes. There are exceptions, Interludes: Brief Expeditions to Bluffside is certainly not linear and Of Places Most Foul just oozes value for money. Societies of Magic is not a pre-written adventure but it certainly is a campaign supplement. The book ... |
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Nightmares & Dreams II, 13th January.
Nightmares and Dreams II is, as you might guess, the second in the series. The original book was received with wide acclaim and with the likes of Bastion Press's Minions out there on the shelves, N&D; II was bound to have a fight on its hands.
A quick comparison between Minions and Nightmares & Dreams II would seem to put N&D; II at a loss. I think you would be wrong to compare the two too quickly though, each book might be a collection of monsters but they're very different beasts. Nightmares and Dreams II is, for example, less than half the price of Minions. Minions goes for gloss, colour and a wide range of creatures, Nightmares and D ... |
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Minions, 13th January.
I found myself with a small pile of new RPG supplements in my hand the other day. I had to decide which one to read first and so I flicked through them all. Minions jumped out as the one to read. Full colour. Glossy pages. A wonderful ‘solid' feel. That lovely new book smell. I find it hard to believe that Bastion Press isn't a well established veteran of the industry… at least, that's what I felt until I double checked their website and discovered that key members of their staff are actually well established veterans of the industry.
Minions lives up to its name; it is a collection of nearly one hundred monsters. If you're exp ... |
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Interludes: Brief Expeditions to Bluffside, 13th January.
This is the sort of scenario that I like. Interludes: Brief Expeditions to Bluffside is a detailed adventure, with lots going on and has a lovely non-linear approach to it. As you read through the adventure you'll be given plenty plot hooks (many of which just screamed out for bigger things – like an adventure to the city of Bluffside itself), rumours and NPCs.
There's actually much more than an adventure in Interludes, there's a dozen new creatures, some news spells, items, prestige classes and feats. In many ways, Interludes seems to act as a teaser for the Bluffside: City on the Edge saga (due out February 2002) and it teases ve ... |
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Forgotten Realms: Campaign Setting, 13th January.
Oh. Um. Well. Forgotten Realms isn't a bad book, in fact you'll be able to see that I rated it 7 out of 10 book. The problem is that there seems to be more to complain about than praise.
When you pick up your newly acquired copy of the campaign setting it is absolutely impossible to ignore what a lovely looking book it is. It looks like an old tome, the pages have that "worn" colour and even the spectacular artwork inside matches the same theme. The huge map of Faerun is so successfully tucked into the back page that you might not immediately notice it is there. If you flick through the book and read paragraphs at random then you'll conti ... |
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The Quintessential Fighter, 11th January.
I was glad that I didn't cough up the cash for The Sword and the Fist. I was worried for a while but after merely flicking through the Quintessential Fighter those concerns were put to bed. I didn't realise just how good the Quintessential Fighter was until I sat down, read it through and then tried to think what might have been missed out from the book. I couldn't think of anything. This book heralds the full rules for the Open Mass Combat System.
So, what you get in this book is a great collection of impressive Feats and Prestige Classes enough to turn your fighter into a whirlwind of bladed death!
I'm joking. The idea of re ... |
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Ravenloft, 8th January.
The biggest and most pleasant surprise of the d20 Dungeons and Dragons revival, for me, has been Ravenloft. Everything I had heard about the setting before just put me off, it seemed to be the heaven for power gamers and twits. It was like the secret power up level hidden away near the end of some beat ‘em up computer game poorly masquerading as a computer RPG. Needless to say, I never really had much time for the previous edition of Ravenloft. When my copy of the third edition rules Ravenloft arrived and I flicked through it I was not impressed. It arrived at the same time as the wonderfully colourful Oriental Adventues and Forgotten R ... |
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e-Minions, 7th January.
Okay. I'll admit it. If you had asked me half way through 2001 whether I would be keying in my credit card details to pay for someone's downloadable collection of Dungeons and Dragon monsters then I might have laughed at you. However, paying for 16 colourful monsters in pdf format is just what I did… and, surprisingly, I don't regret it.
Why would you pay for a collection of monsters that you could easily make up yourself? You might do it for the same reason why you'd buy a pre-written adventure or even a rules supplement. It makes your life as a busy GM a darn site easier. I doubt anyone could really ask for much more from a downloa ... |
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Of Places Most Foul, 7th January.
Having just recently lambasted Deep Horizon as being a classic example of why pre-written adventures are rarely worth the money I shall hold up "Of Places Most Foul" as an example of just the opposite. "Of Places Most Foul" is excellent value for money. I picked it up from the new release section of my local store because I know Mystic Eye's website. A good example, I think, of why you should have a website.
"Of Places Most Foul" is slightly more expensive than a single adventure supplement churned out by Wizards. However, you get seven different adventures and four "Foul Locales" as an added extra. That's value for money already, even if ... |
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Deep Horizon, 7th January.
I tend to err on the side of caution whenever I am tempted to buy a pre-written adventure. Deep Horizons reminds me why. The review will inevitably contain spoilers.
It isn't a bad book. It isn't really a bad adventure. It just isn't something I would consider value for money, it lacks the pound for pound punch of source books. The lasting impression from Deep Horizons is that of Beholders as careful archaeologists.
Skip Williams, the author, should know his stuff since he is one of the title page credited authors of the third edition Dungeons and Dragons. You certainly get the feeling of confidence as you read through the outline. He c ... |
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Secrets of the Dread Realms and Dungeon Master's Screen, 5th January.
Sometimes we are just doomed to waste our money. I really enjoyed the new edition of Ravenloft; it has been my surprise best-yet d20 production. I noticed Secrets of the Dread Realms and jumped at the chance to buy it. I wish I hadn’t. What a dreadful waste of money.
The promise of what the book could contain was the all-so-tempting lure; Ravenloft’s main book does such a good job at dealing with the Dread Realm’s mysteries I assumed this book would follow on suit. The DM’s screen was an added bonus.
I quickly ripped the plastic cover off the bundled collection and unfolded the screen. “Eh?” I thought. For a second I was worried that I’ ... |
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Encyclopaedia Arcane: Chaos Magic, 1st January.
Do you find the spells lists in Dungeons and Dragons to be a bit restrictive? I know it gets to me at times. I can't really claim to be much of a fan of the way White Wolf's Mage allows you to compose spells either, not so much because of any flaws in the way the system lets you bundle the spells together but because of the extremely weak Paradox concept. Mongoose Publishing as produced Chaos Magic as the third game in their Encyclopaedia Arcane range. The book follows on the heels of the Necromancy and Demonology titles and this one introduces a new brand of magic. Chaos Magic offers up a way to rid yourself of spells lists and it does it in ... |
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Oriental Adventures, 24th December.
Rarely has there been a supplement that had such a burden of expectation on it. I was not surprised when the introduction to this new edition of Oriental Adventures made heavy reference on its predecessor. The new edition merges the old setting of Kala-Tur with the Rokugan world created and populated by the card game Legend of the Five Rings
. To be honest, the game handles this melding extremely well, there is an easy to spot Five Rings symbol that is used to highlight especially suitable material for the Rokugan setting. However, as someone who is not especially familiar with Oriental settings I did find the wash of information somewhat in ... |
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Darwin's World, 23rd December.
It seems like an absolute age that I have been harbouring a hunger for a real, gritty and fully radiated post-apocalyptic roleplaying game. Darwin’s World is a downloadable game that uses the d20 system and has been published by RPGObjects. If the idea of a PDF RPG is a strange or a new one to you then this essay in the Lost Archives might help explain things.Not all the same e-publishers offer you the same deal on their products. RPGObjects have done the honourable thing and made it easy for you to update your book at no extra cost. That is to say, when traditional paper based publishers scramble to issue an errata or go as far as printing o ... |
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Divine and the Defeated : Gods and Titans, 20th December.
I liked this book. Oh yes. The Divine and the Defeated was my introduction to the Scarred Lands setting and now I hunger for more. In many ways the story of the Gods and of the Titans is both a backward and appropriate way to get to know the world that was once Scarn. The Scarred Lands setting is a creation of the Sword and Sorcery Studio and uses the d20 system. Scarn was once a prettier place but the cruel Titans ruled unchallenged, they tormented whole nations and created dangerous monsters as play things. Their children, the eight gods, rose up against them. The divine war, the clash of such unimaginable powers, the immense and prolonged ... |
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The Slayer's Guide to Amazons, 19th December.
Amazons. Yes. Amazons. The race of warrior women who run wild through the deepest, darkest and most dangerous jungles while dressed mainly with spear and bow and the occasional strategically placed scrap of clothing. Those Amazons. The busy writers at Mongoose Publishing have put pen to paper and produced a Slayer's Guide to Amazons. I thought, at first, that I’d been sold a book that was falling apart at the seam. The middle pages appeared to be totally loose. Ah, but wait. They're supposed to be loose. Why yes, this book on the exotic fighting femme's comes with its very own four page high centrefold. Nymphia the Amazon! I can see the testo ... |
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The Slayer's Guide to Centaurs, 12th December.
Centaurs are an interesting race to pick for examination and often a difficult race to include in a game. Everyone knows what a centaur is, you don't even have to be a roleplayer. Greek mythology is rife with stories about these half-human half-horse creatures. Yet, when you put your mind to Tolkien's Middle Earth then it is unlikely that you find yourself thinking about centaurs. This is good and it is also bad, in fact, it's a peculiar blend of them both, just as the centaur is a peculiar blend of man and beast. There are no particularly strong associations attached to the centaurs, they don't inherit the same "race rules" from Tolkien's wo ... |
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Manual of the Planes, 21st November.
Manual of the Planes is a luxury but it is a luxury in the same sense that a car or a television might be. If you can afford to buy it, can you afford to do without it? It’s also surprisingly easy to come up with arguments as to why you definitely need to have a copy. The book is mainly designed as a supplement for the Dungeon Master but I suspect there will be plenty of players out there who will enjoy flicking through the richly detailed pages.The Manual is a supplement for Wizards of the Coast’s third edition of Dungeons and Dragons. As an additional book and not a set of core rules there is no discussion whatsoever in the text of how to a ... |
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The Wheel of Time, 14th November.
The Wheel of Time is a popular fantasy series by Robert Jordan. In fact some people might argue that the Wheel of Time is surprisingly popular since it can be rather difficult to find anyone who will admit to actually liking the books. I didn’t particularly like the first nine books in the series but I’m sure I’ll jump to buy the tenth should it ever hit the shelves and perhaps therein lies the success of the series.The Wheel of Time Roleplaying Game has been published before the fantasy series has finished. The game, however, seems to have been written in full co-operation with Jordan and rather than stumbling over this obvious problem the a ... |
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