|
(Preface: I'm going to leave the more technical critiques to others. I haven't played enough 5th ed to know if any of the original content in this game is actually good. I do think stapling 5th ed's casting system to every class is a bad idea because it's inherently a bad system inherited from the worst of 3rd ed so there's that.)
.
Secret World Legends the actual game is something significantly different from The Secret World by Star Anvil Studios, and sadly largely in superior ways.
.
What we have here is a cousin of the Fix Fic.
.
A Fix Fic is when some very deeply attached and well-meaning fans decide to "fix" their beloved setting. This always comes with at least two problems.
.
The first is playing favorites and foes. In this case it's the Illuminati who are given a fresh coat of "actually deeper than you think," and the other is the Dragon; the new version is idiotic and bowdlerized.
In the case of the Illuminati the shallowness is the point: the Lumi's should care but don't. Both they and the Templars are wallowing in decadence and institutional inertia. That doesn't make them mirror images of each other because that inertia and decadence has different expressions, but it does give them a similar kind of problem to confront. Crucially for the ][ they are choosing not to. Their conspiracy lost any sense of duty and is only about its own power, influence and internal rivalries.
.
That's who they are. Or, it was who they were. That's been "fixed." Ironically by making them less the rightful mockery of all-powerful, all-controlling capitalist boogieman and more actually the dark figures who cruelly and capriciously control entire nations.
.
For the Dragon it's inserting cartoonish "terrorism" (what a sentence) by way of its operatives committing random faux pas in order to achieve some outcome. Like, "step on that person's toes in this elevator." Or "insult that woman's dog in this park, at this time. Because reasons. Don't ask, we're mysterious."
.
One would think the Dragon's actually history of targeted social upheaval (like causing the Black Death) would be enough. But, no. The Dragon (used to) pride itself on the depth of it's carefully tested predictive models. That's been replaced by B-roll content from a Youtube prank show.
.
All that leads to the second: poor choices of structure.
.
The introduction is by Dave Screed, a greasy, paranoid obsessive who's occasionally used as a pawn of all factions in SWL. Dave is a parody of someone obsessed with conspiratorial truths. He happens occasionally onto something actually true, though he can't actually tell the difference nor produce meaningful evidence. He's "trust me bro the 'Lumis built a moon base and use it to control the weather," original edition. He's exactly the wrong person to give the setting any kind of sense of depth or intensity or intimacy.
.
In comic book movie terms this would be like introducing Endgame with a monologue by Deadpool. I'm sure the sheer meme-ness of the subversion would win a few fans, but the other 99% would rightly wonder why the illusion of drama and stakes they came to enjoy being part of was being subverted instead of crafted.
.
There are some early contextless lore-bombs that in game are very big reveals. That there are Ages and that the world transitions through them, for example. Typically the hints of this begin in the second zone of SWL: Egypt. The game structures this very carefully, leads the player carefully to that point because the thrill of that moment of revelation is significant.
.
Here it's just crapped out on the page before we even get to character creation. So also is the true identity of the major NPC antagonist Samuel Chandra the CEO of dominant megacorporation Orochi. Again, this is a BIG. DEAL. FULL. STOP. This is one of the last big secrets in the actual game. Instead, splort "here's a deep secret: discuss."
.
This illustrates a kind of structural confusion. Who is this for? New players might appreciate the magnitude of the spoiler just thrown at their feet, but they won't >feel it.< Veteran players will recognize it but are likely to wonder why it's here. It really should be in a section dedicated to Orochi by itself. Or at hinted at for a future supplement maybe say explicitly including the in-game mega-dungeon set that is Orochi Tower Tokyo.
.
Nope.
.
This also doesn't introduce Orochi, a major player present across the globe, in any coherent manner. What Chandra personally is up to and why is nothing anyone would have any insight into, nevermind be encountered in the actual world. In the actual game the first Orochi agents are part of a detachment sent to Solomon Island to achieve certain ends. The two central agents are a pair who display both Orochi's hubristic callousness and indifference to individual human lives, and another who exemplifies the humanity of its actual individual people.
.
That contrast is important.
.
That's the core tension of Orochi. It seeks to save the world by overtly dominating it, but it's terribly callous. It's not truly a villain, but it's not a good thing either. It's a paragon of the kind of misguided repressive order the natural world/Gaia instinctively defies.
.
That Samuel Chandra has is SPOILERS is so incredibly meaningless without the entire story and context. It's like blurting out the ending of an eight-season dark-fantasy TV show 5 minutes into the prologue of the first episode. At best the audience forgets until it's reminded -probably the first time they see either character- or at worst they throw up their hands in disgust.
.
Speaking of structure: Zuberi. A side character in a side plot is now Gandalf.
.
My best guess is he and The Hive -formerly the very dark prison jointly sponsored by all the Conspiracies to imprison rogue Bees, now a confederation of Cabals- exists to rationalize the in-game Guild-parallel structure of Cabals. It's not like there aren't other groups besides the Big 3 who thrive like the Druids of Avalon or the Brotherhood of Phoenecian Sailors it's that, as would befit extremely powerful and ruthless conspiracies, there is no tolerance of compromised loyalties.
.
Well, thanks to Zuberi the Wise now there are. And he magically directs and protects them all. Players still have to swear loyalty to one of the Big 3, but now they also can join their own little sub-conspiracy and play nice together. All of it coordinated by one shaman who also tells them what to do.
.
One might even think that would make the big players mad and even give them a single collective threat to pounce on.
.
Nope. Too much plot armor, sorry blokes.
.
Giving Star Anvil a little credit the sheer massive volume of content being adopted here would always have presented a daunting problem. But the actual solution is hilariously obvious: do it like in the game.
.
Start small.
.
Here's Solomon Island. Here's all the factions present. Here's an Orochi field team, here's a detachment from the Council of Venice, here's the Morninglight, here's the Wabanaki. Here's the difference between them.
.
Here's the way the Secret World of monsters and malign magic sometimes floods into daylight, and here's the town full of zombies who used to be normal people who got caught in it when it did.
.
Really the core problem is that this pdf/book has to be every book. It's a bestiary of threats, it's a DM's guide that has to lean too heavily on the player being familiar with the setting, here's a few dozen pages of spells copy/pasted from the 5th ed Player's Guide -that last detail really shouldn't have been included. That page count really would have served better fleshing out the world. Maybe some serious and well-structured cosmology.
.
But, as I've argued structure is so much of the problem here. The introduction is bizarrely inappropriate, there is so much cringe-making editorializing and "fixing" lore, there are lore-bombs without impact and bizarre mechanical missteps (a terrible weapons system where ammo is doled out per bullet but many common weapons like assault rifles can't fire single shots, armor that's ac-based instead of providing damage resistance, ammo effects that are both over-complex and trivially unimportant, etc) and more.
.
That Star Anvil genuinely took it's best shot is undeniable. There's care in every sentence. It's just bad. It's the product of a feverish surety of vision untempered by any outside review. Nobody present apparently dissented with changes from the original lore, or if they did no one listened.
.
I wanted this to work, and I bought the full $60 package. It just doesn't. Maybe the Savage Worlds edition will be mechanically superior, but the real flaw are of the worst kind: intentional.
.
PS: one ironic hint is the cover art. It's terrible. It's really ugly and poorly composed. The female in color-coded Dragon green doing the "chest push" pose looks straight out of 90's Liefeld era comics.
.
I noticed that right off, and I wish I'd taken that observation to heart. I will say the actual print quality is high. The paper quality is excellent and the physical tome is sturdy. So at least it feels like a $60 rpg book should.
|
Log In 
