Fantastic expansion that opens up so many new avenues of play worth every cent without question. Really excited about future expansions!

I just received my hard cover Honor + Intrigue Core Rulebook -- well worth the wait!!!

The Bad: The only negative thing I'll say about Honor + Intrigue is the hard cover book has lightweight paper, as opposed to a premium paper option. This is made known in the product description, so I don't feel ripped off. I appreciate the publisher's honesty. Very "Honor"able of them to disclose the paperweight quality. i just believe this game system to be such a High-Quality ruleset it deserves a high-quality print option.

Regardless of the paperweight, however, the interior design is great. And if you just want the PDF's, the content and layout are top-notich.

The Good: The Rules are simple and very "rules lite". Roll a 9+ on 2d6 for pretty much everything. There are no "skills" so you are freed up to try whatever you can imagine as opposed to what's on your character sheet.

The Amazing: There is some "crunch" to the rules, but in all the right places- particularly sword combat. This system's combat maneuvers make duels feel intense and dramatic. It's not just I swing/roll for damage, you swing/roll for damage, rinse / repeat-- the combatants have tactical maneuvering choices and the tide of the battle can swing as one dueler gains advantage over another through superior swordplay and footwork. It is Epic!

Have you ever met someone for the first time, but you feel like you've known them your whole life -- and you become instant best friends? I had that same feeling when I stumbled upon Honor + Intrigue. It's my new favorite RPG.

If you love swashbuckling action, treacherous political intrigue and eldritch horror, you should check out Honor + Intrigue. You won't be disappointed.

The Honor + Intrigue Core Book has a fantastic magic system for powerful black magic, with corrupted mages in league with demonic Patrons. Reminds of Elric. "Aid me, Ariorch!"

However, if you are looking for a more heroic version of Honor + Intrigue's magic system for your game's swashbukling PCs, Intriguing Options #4 Spells and Spell Casters is FANTASTIC!

It still has the 3 tiers of Spell Power levels- but heros are encouraged to learn "spells" as opposed to being to manipulate reality however they like.

It is a nice balance of ease of use for players to use spell casting characters, but not too powerful that magic wielders will overpower their martial swashbuckling companions.

Lots of fun magic items and ideas for adding more fantastic elements to your Honor + Intrigue adventures.

I just discovered Honor + Intrigue a couple of weeks ago and absoutely LOVE IT! I'm the type of GM that prefers sandbox-style campaigns-- the random story generators in this supplement are great resource to generate creative ideas on the fly for swashbuckling action and intrigue.

Big fan of the Gambit minor action!

I also like the alternate/optional rule suggestions. I haven't tried them out yet, but the "Defend thyself" option of letting players roll to defend attacks against them sounds like another great way to keep players engaged in combat by allowing them to roll more dice.

Great resources to spark creative inspiration and additional rules and options to allow less or more "crunch" to your games, depending on your preferred play style.

Bash! Ultimate Edition is not the Superhéro RPG of choice in my gaming group it's Supers RED but still I've bought BASH UE a few years ago and I was curious enough about this Awesome Powers Omnibus to buy it. I was not disapointed :) .

A lot of stuff in there: mainly all the powers from the various Awesome Powers series but to my surprise, also a few erratas and rule corrections.

This book is a little gem if you are a Bash GM so don't hesitate to buy it, it will improve your games options a lot!

For the last few days, I have soloed my way through All Hallow’s Eve from BAM! Basic Action Magazine #1 (25 pages, free at DriveThruRPG). The system that I used to play it was Bash! Basic Action Super Heroes (Original Edition). I used SoloCutz (same place) as the solo engine. I did use the six characters that are included in the RPG rules.

So, the first scene was investigation (crime scene). The second scene was combat. Things really got interesting with the third scene. The P.C.s were up against a litch-lord. My White Witch cast a magical duel arena spell. The litch cast wizard tower. The end result – both teams ended up in the White Mausoleum. The White Witch was still with Baby Face, but all of the other characters were on their own. This could have ended badly if they ran into the lich too soon. They did have a chance to explore 21 rooms full of challenges, tests, and a combat. They did find the lich’s weakness (a coin from a sorority house). They used it to incapacitate the lich, they tossed him through the black portal, they found the exit, and arrived back to their home city. The final scene is where the sorority girls find their lives getting back to normal after the coin disappeared from the necklace around the sorority president’s neck. The White Witch took the most damage, so she is ready for some R&R to recover from her wounds.

Give this exciting game a try!

For the last few days, I have soloed my way through All Hallow’s Eve from BAM! Basic Action Magazine #1. The system that I used to play it was Bash! Basic Action Super Heroes (Original Edition). I used SoloCutz (DriveThruRPG) as the solo engine. I did use the six characters that are included in the RPG rules.

So, the first scene was investigation (crime scene). The second scene was combat. Things really got interesting with the third scene. The P.C.s were up against a litch-lord. My White Witch cast a magical duel arena spell. The litch cast wizard tower. The end result – both teams ended up in the White Mausoleum. The White Witch was still with Baby Face, but all of the other characters were on their own. This could have ended badly if they ran into the lich too soon. They did have a chance to explore 21 rooms full of challenges, tests, and a combat. They did find the lich’s weakness (a coin from a sorority house). They used it to incapacitate the lich, they tossed him through the black portal, they found the exit, and arrived back to their home city. The final scene is where the sorority girls find their lives getting back to normal after the coin disappeared from the necklace around the sorority president’s neck. The White Witch took the most damage, so she is ready for some R&R to recover from her wounds.

Give this exciting adventure a try!

Probably one of the best swashbuckler rpg there is, definitely the best I've seen.

Honor + Intrigue takes the core engine of Barbarians of Lemuria and adds stuff on top of it that makes it even better, while keeping the game simple and fast to learn. Combat has a bit more meat to it, adding maneuvers and dueling styles that add a lot of fun and make different characters actually feel different in play. The strong guy uses brute force, the charismatic guy makes flashy moves, and the smart guy brings a gun to a swordfight.

The game is well balanced, with every trait being useful in combat. One problem I had with Barbarians of Lemuria was that every character had to have at least one or two points in agility if you want to make them a decent fighter; Honor + Intrigue doesn't do that. Instead, every character can contribute to the fight.

There are some fun ways the system enforces the swashbuckling tropes: one is the use of Stunts to take out multiple pawns (the nameless mooks), which has the player come up with a way to take out a group of people by using the attribute they want. For example, you could pull a carpet from under a group of guards to sweep them off their feet and knock them out, or shoot that chandelier above them that seems to always be there whenever there's a big fight.

Also, using Advantage is a fun way to replicate combat where neither side hits the other, but one yields ground until they're at their opponent's mercy. Think of Dread Pirate Roberts against Inigo Montoya: nobody is actually hurt during the whole fight, but the victor is clear.

One more and I stop: I liked that the list of Boons and Flaws is more than just "You get a bonus dice at doing that thing, you get a penalty dice at the other thing" but some are more narrative bonuses/hindrances, like being part of a Dueling School or having an Incompetent Servant, and they give you a little bonus whenever they give you big problems.

The biggest flaw I can think of for Honor + Intrigue is the art. The oil paintings are fine, but the original art is a bit ugly (as you can see in the cover art). It didn't detract from my enjoyement of the game, but then I don't personally care much for the art in general.

Overall, completely recommended, whether you want a campaign with Musketeers, Pirates, 17th century occult hunters or more.

After the thorough diappointment that was 7th Seas Second Edition, I went searching for a set of rules that would give me and others the swashbuckling fun we wanted. We thought about homebrewed DnD5e but it wasn't exactly the kind of environment for that in the game's resume. I read a few Reddit threads mentioning using Honor + Intrigue's system in 7th Sea's world and decided to peek at it.

The system itself is pretty simplistic at first but broadens out. Unlike most systems where you're working from a broad list of stats and narrowing it down to skills, you're doing the inverse where stats are narrow but the skills are broad. The career system basically takes traditional rules and says they're more like guidelines really. Instead of a hard and fast skill system, you have a career where you can make an argument to the GM that your character would know how to do some basic smithing because you were a farm boy and sometimes farmboys have to know how to make and shoe a horse. If you successfully argue your position you can then use the career points to add towards the roll. If you don't have a crafting career at all though, you're likely not going to be able to justify your character being able to make a blackpowder rifle out of no where.

The GM is encouraged to work with the players in the rules which is a nice additive. I can say without a doubt there will be rule lawyers who fight this method but it will be an uphill battle for them.

The combat seems clunky at first, and the initiative system I feel could be handled better with just a traditional roll order, but ultimately I'm fine with it as is and just use RAW methods.

The 2d6 system keeps the flow simple and math light. Two base stats + 2d6 to equal 9 or more. Its that simple. Combat is two relevant stats versus 9 as well. If the enemy has a defense stat of 1, then that just gets added to the base 'versus' and it becomes 10 you have to beat. Most everything is like this.

Where I find things get interesting is the Advantage system where you can win a battle without either side ever drawing blood. The moments where the good guy manages to keep the enemy pushed back and back until they're on their butt with a sword at their throat? You can recreate that easily here and can give plenty of GM narrative opportunities and give players plenty of space to role play.

Some of the wording in the book gets a little confusing and it took me a few read-throughs to fully understand combat but once I did it was easy enough to explain to my players.

One spark of criticsm that I'm not sure is really criticsm is that I wish there was more content. I'm hoping for either an expansion or Honor + Intrigue 2 of sorts where it has a more fleshed out fantastical element, where there are magical pieces that could be suited. As it stands the book leaves a lot of that up to GM imagination. Its easy enough to have a Pirates of the Caribbean style epic but beyond that you're wandering into waters not yet charted. Even if its just another expansion, please give us more.

Ultimately its a great pick up and play game with lots of pirating fun to be had. Solid foundation with unique mechanics in the Advantage system. If the Dueling styles interest you, definitely check out the add-on Duelist's Guide where they go more in depth with each style and give more of a draw to them. Full package runs you about 24 dollars which for a good pirate feel, its done well at that price.

Simply the best swashbuckling RPG you'll ever play. One of the best RPGs I've ever played at all, let alone in genre. Highly recommend.

Hello,

This review is based on reading only. I have not yet played the game.

Bash does not seems to be a complicated RPG. The basic book contains all what is needed to play and run the game : character creation with small and not overwhelming budget, easy rules to play (if you know multiplications), a lot of powers to choose, good advice for the game master, a setting chapter who describes 10 of the most used comics settings and how to implement them in play and a lot of already made heroes and villains for all power levels covered by the game.

It is a game I could run somehow in the future. My only small gripes are : Hit Points, I don’t think Hit Points is a good thing in a superhero RPG and the tactical aspect of the game which, I think is playable without a battlegrid but seems to requires one anyway.

I love using this supplement. Whether I need a character on-the-fly or I have an idea for one, I can easily find the class's basic description and quickly flesh him/her out. And the idea of the "Classic Combo" suggestions is a good way to recreate characters from other media. There are even a couple of classes I hadn't considered before! This is a great modular add-on for the fun BASH: Fantasy or BASH: Legends of Steel games.

I'm a fan of swashbuckling style and I've ran a entire campaing in this genre (2 years), but with a homemade system. It worked well, but I didn´t have time to write and test the designed rules, so I decided to find a system to emulate all funny things like, battle ships, heroic combats, social intrigues and some magic, and finally I found Honor + Intrigue. It´s an amazing book, really great job! In a single book we can do everything we need in my group! It is unbelievable how we think similar about the rules (my homemade system and yours), but Honor+Intrigue is far better. I can see a large research and effort in development of this book!! Next month we will play again but using Honor + Intrigue. Thanks for this great job!!

In my group, the Crew is very important, because we play like Pirates, so the fame, resources, and influence, became good points in my campaing as managing the loyalty and moral of the crew. The crew sometimes did important missions while the PC's was doing another quests in paralell. So my suggestion is to created a mini system to manage this, for example: If I want to pick some pirates to invade a Fort (as my own pawns to help me in combat)? If I pick some pirates to spy someone, how they succeed? And about the loyalty (never miss the Rum)? And how to rule the fame, influence and the resources of the Crew (Oh! You are a pirate from The Undertaker's Ship! It´s better think twice before betrayal you).

This is a must have for BASH Fantasy if you want a structured or more spell casting options than the base book provides. Using the system provided you can create a dedicated sorcerer using 1 area of magic or a general mage that doesn't specialize in any school of magic but could have a wider variety of magic to choose from. Alot of new enhancements and limitations along with different ideas of how you could use magic or how easy/difficult it is to cast expand on the base book which did not offer any form of real magic system. A multitued of spells for each school will give you a great base should you decide that you might want even more spells or just to tinker with a spell already presented. The best part is this system could be used in any setting or even another game engine to provide a great magic system.

GIving this book a 4/5 only because it is not an absolute must have. It does however add alot of races and can make any racial interactions easier and just by adjusting some stats, talents, or powers you can create any new race or sub species. The fact you can also use the races in any setting or any BASH product is a bonus. A couple of the new powers, advantages presented are naturals for a sci fi setting or even a supers settings. I guess every race could have used an illistration as some names do not directly conjure the right vision. the descriptions do however do a great job. this more of my preference than a slight on the functionality of this book.