BIG BANG RPG – Review

I really enjoyed, and am still enjoying, the BIG BANG COMIC ROLE-PLAYING GAME. It is a fun adaptation of a comic-book which will allow new & old gamers to play an RPG based in the setting of the BIG BANG COMIC worlds.

BIG BANG COMICS – A quick word Remember when comic-books weren’t the awful pieces of travesty most of the great ones have turned into? I’m talking about the days when Stan Lee was actually allowed to write the stories of the characters he created, and when Jack Kirby was still chomping of cigars like cotton-candy. I’m talking about before the dreaded Spider-man “clone sagaâ€. (If you’re young enough not to know about that, consider yourself blessed and move on.) These were the days when comic-books were fun, well drawn, and made sense. The people who produce BIG BANG COMICS remember those days and produce their line of comics as a tip-of-the-hat to these more enjoyable times for comic-book readers and comic-book heroes. The two worlds of BIG BANG COMICS, Earth-A and Earth-B, are parodies, but in the creators’ desire to shoot straight AS creators, they have stayed true to a comic-book paradigm that, with the exception of movie-producers, was lost by the two bigger comic-book companies a long time ago.

RPG VETERANS Veteran gamers have come to know PISCES ALL MEDIA’s ability to produce new rules (Feats & Negative Feats, Qualifications, Superpowers, Mass Combat, etc) into their RPG books. The BIG BANG PRG delivers on these criteria in the usual excellent fashion. What makes this book stand out, in my opinion, is the way designer & writer Chris Carter has taken old & new rules, and created a simple, fast-flowing super-hero system – a system that aids the comic-book story. In particular the “SUPERSLUGFEST!†rules are a very good application of the standard d20 rules to super-hero games & combat.

RPG NEW-COMERS The BIG BANG RPG is also well written for the new-comer, explaining rules & terminology in a simple easy-to-understand manner. I wanted to cast a particularly critical eye over this, and was not disappointed. Chris Carter seems to have taken a “beginner’s mind†approach to explaining the rules and concepts of super-hero RPGs. The key question for any RPG with the new-comer audience in mind is: “can some who has never played an RPG before pick up this book, read it, and then both know how to play and still want to play?â€. I feel the answer is an affirmative “yesâ€, and Chris Carter deserves a lot of credit for writing a book with this end result.

BIG BANG COMICS FANS I had extremely high expectations in this department, thinking perhaps quite unreasonably, that the internal layout would have four-colour comic-panels on every other page. The book is still an RPG book, and so the 229 pages contain more writing than they do art. (The RPG does contain more artwork than any other Pisces book, and the artwork is the real-deal comic-book stuff. More on the art later.) However, the question to answer for an RPG adaptation is “does the RPG allow you play (1) the characters from the world; (2) play your own characters in the world that is being adapted?â€. Yes on both accounts. Not every BIG BANG hero is there, but twenty-five (25) of them are lovingly and realistically reproduced. Over 50 pages of the RPG are detailed descriptions (including artwork) of characters and places from the worlds of BIG BANG COMICS. The RPG also contains information (such as tailored charts) for adding more details to a BIG BANG COMICS world.

ARTWORK Wow! The cover is amazing. I thought it was done by Alex Ross at first glance. (It turns out it was done by Andrew Sheppard.) The art is not only the best ever produced by Pisces All Media’s RPG line, but is possibly the best of any RPGs out at the moment. This is because the artwork is all comic-book artwork from BIG BANG COMICS. The list of contributors has been reproduced below. Go ahead, type one of these names into a search engine and take a look at what else they have done. Andrew Sheppard, Jerry Acerno, Jeff Weigal, Shelly Moldoff, Bill Fugate, Chris Ecker, Mark Lewis, Bart Schmitz, Jim Brozman, Charles Smith, John Watkins-Chow, David Zimmerman, Mark Stefanowicz, Mort Todd, Ben Torres, ALEX ROSS, Curt Swan & Murphy Anderson, Jim Starlin, Frank Squillace & Mark Lewis, Glenn Whitmore, Charlie Albert, Dan Reed, Steve Bissette, John Schuler.

RULES KRUNCH The list of Feats, just by name, goes for 4 pages – most of them are new to this book. The previously mentioned SUPERSLUGFEST! section is worth a read for any power-player. The Qualifications (again, mostly new) are well picked to flesh out your super-hero characters and yet leave room for more to be created from the examples given. (As pleased as I was to see “Astronaut†in the Qualification list, there was a child-like exclamation of glee when I read the coolest Qualification there: “Ninjaâ€!) The rules make sense within the world, and true to the GOG format, can fit into the vast majority of d20 systems.

WRITING STYLE Chris Carter writes clearly and expresses himself well. The editing & layout teams have done good work also for the presentation is clear and visually comfortable.

I’m not an unbiased reviewer for I am a fan of virtually all of the work that is produced by Pisces All Media, but I am a critical fan and I have been honest with this review. This is a good book and is of a production quality that any firm would be proud to publish. I sincerely hope this level of quality is replicated in all future Pisces All Media products. I don’t know what the guys from BIG BANG COMICS think, but I suspect they will be proud to have associated themselves with this for it is not only a good RPG for their product line, but it is a good RPG in itself.

Whether you love this book, or hate it, will depend almost entirely on what you expect from a d20-based superhero game.

On the positive side, this is probably the simplest, most straightfoward superhero RPG game system I've seen since the days of first- (white cover) and second-edition (green cover) Villains & Vigilantes. Superpowers are handled as feats (with "Negative feats" acting as disadvantages for balance), while nonpowered heroes a la Batman or Daredevil use stat contests or non-power feats. Characters have levels, alignments, attributes, and general classes as per the d20 system, along with what amount to feat/skill-type packages to represent their various talents and abilities -- superheroic, civilian, or otherwise.

This system seems tailor-made for gamemasters and players who just want to get into the action as quickly as possible and not sweat the game mechanics. Because the rules are so straightforward, it shouldn't be too hard for GMs to add in anything they deem missing. Again, the rules are very simple, and it's always easier to add on to a simple game system, than to take away from a complex one.

On the negative side, those who want a very detailed, strenuously logical ruleset had best look elsewhere. This game is built to be fast and flexible with an emphasis on action, rather than realism.

Perhaps the most damning flaw of this product is its embarrassingly low-rent production values. Despite the art imported from the rulesets' nakesame -- the Image Comics-published Big Bang Comics line -- too much of this book is simply double column black-and-white text. While typos are at a minimum, and the writing itself has spirit, the page layout and general design is embarassingly amateurish -- pages switch between full-page and two-column formats without warning; fonts change size for certain sections, and so on. It looks for all the world like this package was assembled on the fly by someone who was completely new to Adobe Acrobat -- or worse, was using one of those free, online PDF converters to create their master document.

The only defense one could offer is that this book is only $10 US -- about half what its competitors charge. Design-wise, though you'll get exactly what you pay for. Perhaps less.

If anyone reading this is actually a hardcore fan of the Big Bang Comics line, the supplementary material here is very much keyed to the published comics: the ruleset encourages player-characters (and campaigns) set in either the Golden Age of comics (the 1940s) or the Silver Age (the 1960s), although other eras, including the present-day, are certainly possible.

Many Big Bang Comics characters -- heroes and villains -- are statted out under the rules. For those unfamiliar with Big Bang, most of these characters are very very thinly-veiled homages to Golden and Silver Age DC Comics characters. The only Marvel icon who seems to get swiped here is the Sub-Mariner (appearing here as an homage called "The Atomic Sub"), and even the Atomic Sub didn't make it in the comics themselves. In the guide to Big Bang's timeline, it's mentioned that in the company's homage to the original DC "Crisis" story, the Sub dies saving his comrades!

There's very little in these rules detailing incidental objects (jetplanes, howitzers, and the like), but again, these rules are so transparent and straightforward that it wouldn't be to too hard to extrapolate whatever you might want as needed.

In the end, I have to rate the product dead-center, with a 2.5/5 because of the extreme reactions it will provoke.

For those who want an ultra-simple, straightforward, d20-based superhero game system, the Big Bang Comics Rpg will give you that at a cheap price. If you're a gamer who needs a professional-looking product, with an intricate, finely-balanced rules system covering most every possible game-table development, then you'd better stay far clear. Even at $10 US, you'll certainly feel ripped off.

In the end, the Big Bang Comics Rpg is a fast-and-dirty simplistic game system for those who don't want to be bothered with an intricate ruleset, and who can't be bothered to write out their own.

As I said at the beginning, you'll either love this game or hate it, depending on your expectations.

Owlman is a great paced, fun filled rollercoaster ride of the action-horror genre. Focusing on a group of friends who head out for a summer job it provides equal parts suspense and horror - with a few surprises on the way. The chapter stucture is similar to previous novels by Jonathan Nolan - story chapters interspersed with articles and other excerpts from the world/story. This helps the reader catch their breath and provides layered context for the story and the world in whicg the characters live.

Although not for the squeamish this is not as explicit as the Nightside series. It is also a complete story arc rather than a series of linked or intertwined shorter episodes.

A great read.