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The world you know it has gone and not a single zombie in site. This is a great change on all those post apocalyptic books with flashed out city locations using a simple 5e convert. please check out my review here
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This is a fantastic medium weight rules book that does a lot that will be very familiar but also adds some amazing new things. Please use my review to see in more details https://youtu.be/bNMngMcgJ-g
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Picked up this book on a lark and was thoroughly impressed. The Life Path system is simple but very flavorful. Characters come out of creation with a story to tell and they do it quickly enough that players won't be out of the game for very long if they get killed mid-session.
The system is very elegant. It's d20 roll over if your character wishes to achieve something. Then it's D20 roll under (Your ability scores) if you wish to avoid danger and death. Very clever uses of both extremes of the die and a double use for ability scores. Top marks.
The next big thing to bring up is that monsters are simple to run but have little quirks that lend a lot to the atmosphere of the game. Things like Zombies being immune to all damage and requiring them to be decapitated is a simple and elegant way to drive home the horror elements in classic Old School play and dungeon crawling.
Finally, one of the biggest "Bang for your buck" parts of the book is the four story reverse dungeon in the back. The Premise is simple. Start at the bottom and work your way up. The process is a bit more complicated. WIth puzzle elements that would make Metroidvanias proud, monster ecology/factions for the PCs to use to their advantage, and hard fights that wield great rewards, the dungeon alone is a steal at the price. Highly recommend.
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I would give this four or five stars, but the stuff that is bad is like confusingly bad. A lot of these rules are very reasonable and I was suggested this game for solo play when I want to run more games than my one or two a week.
The rules for items are kinda spread out in a very confusing way. I've gone over those sections at least three times and I'm still puzzled. I can't remember if things are explained or given stats on one place or another.
Most weapons are a name, an attachment or ability, a caliber, and a price. I've played games with half as many pages and yet they had a much clearer idea Of having weapons have a mechanical purpose.
Right now expensive stuff is cheap, cheap stuff is expensive. Weapons that should have folding stocks don't, while almost identical guns have folding stocks somehow. I can't see why you shouldn't just use the largest caliber possible.
My players are puzzled by how expensive the vehicles are and how cheap the upgrades are.
There is lots of armor that mechanically is the same and doesn't have enough description to make you pick one over another. Its an unhappy medium of wasted space and lack of reason to care.
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A great game in the Grim Dark genre. Well designed, easy to read, and has an interesting world.
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GhostOps 2nd Edition is a major improvement over 1st edition, which is quite a feat. It's a solidly designed game that simulates the SpecOps worlds of Tom Clancy fiction. This is one of my go-to games when I want to run a military action thriller. Highly recommended.
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Great 5e book for anyone who is a little tired of pixies and wands, and want's something a bit more gritty and real. The book itself, (I own the hard copy), is nicely designed, layed out in an easy to follow manner and has some nice artwork. Buy this book before WoTC nuke it from orbit..!!
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I found the book poorly written with poor quality production. Phrases and sayings were often worded strangely, and the system was not clearly explained. The background information was somewhat nonsensical, feeling like there was an attempt to copy other "grimdark" settings but outdo them. It's not offensively bad, but it isn't interesting enough to be worth the time.
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Let me start with I ADORE THIS WORLD!
I came late to the party having missed the Kickstarter. I picked this up on a whim off this site, while looking for a Grimdark setting.
It's got grimdark in spades, being equally and in some cases more bleak than any grimdark setting I've encountered.
The system is a relatively simple D6 pool with a stand out dice (meaning one d6 of a different color or some feature to make it easily told apart). It works really well with this setting, and grim theme, at times offering up only that sliver of hope, when all is otherwise lost. This was a boon to my group as we look for relatively easy systems that we can easily shuffle into the background of play.
The setting is like enduring a Norwegian Black Metal album. Elves screwed everyone causing a cataclysm. The world is a wreck and societies have remolded themselves into insular, communities, run predominantly by fear and reactionary tactics. This really shines with some intresting environments and regions to explore at one's own peril. There are enough adventure ideas and quest nuggets to fill a truck.
Artwork does a great job of defining the grim world, providing visuals for the author's text. Envisioning the world isn't difficult.
Now, my gripe: This book requires another set of eyes (editing) on it. I can understand forgoing an editor, due to costs, but it's an excessive number of errors. Spelling, repeating words, improper sentences, word arrangement, are all in higher proportion to what would be considered a "normal" amount, I stopped counting in the 50s and I wasn't that far into the book. This said, it's just distracting. Nothing prevented my understanding the points the author was making. This is the only reason I took a star off.
If you're into grimdark, I highly encourage you to take the plunge and check out this book.
Hope this helps,
Rob
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There's a lot to love about this game. It's a unique take on the old d100 system, the art is great, and the rules seem to be pretty customizable. My only complaint is that this book really needed more editing. I have to go back and forth through the book to decipher whats being said because of typos. I even found a couple places where I assume the name of an attribute or skill was changed in one place and not changed in another. This created some confusion, but if you can deal with that, the game is a lot of fun.
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I got my copy this morning. It is an easy read, being one of the few books I've read from cover to cover. And the safehouse rules, the nationalities, and new skills could be used in a "The Spy Game" or a GI Joe game. It is not overly complex and for the most part simple to run, but...
Though the standard editing on this book was okay (with one glaring spelling error Linguitics on page 40) the rules editing leaves something to be desired. The experience table on page 13 shows that the Proficiency bonus increases by +1 per three levels but the tables on pages 34 and 37 show the proficiency bonus as +2 at levels 1-4, +3 at levels 5-7, and +4 at levels 8-10. Page 13 mentions that a character "to choosing their operators Class and Subclass" is missing an aposthrope and mentions Subclass even though that mechanic is not used in the game. Though it is nice that skills are in front of character creation it still takes page flipping to go from there to page 63. Strangely due to redundancy of class features ICO are maximized as Agents because they have one feature from Tactical Police (Breeching gained at 1st level) and one from Special Forces (CQB at 5th level) whereas PMC and ICI do not have such restrictions (though the Driving abilities of PMC and Agents has overlap). The experience rules on pages 13 and 94 contradict each other with page 13 shows a standard experience table but on page 94 it says that "Each Operator needs 50 xp in order to reach the next level" (Possible Fix: change the xp awards from 2 to 15, 3 to 20, 4 to 25, and 8 to 50 xps). The encumbrance rules on pages 45 and 64 also contradict each other (is it 200 lb or 15 lb per point of strength?). The separation of range, caliber, and weapon type is justified before the section on guns, this also produces more annoying page flipping to determine which weapon does what damage at what range. And 80 feet per round is 6 mph so a Very Fast vehicle is errr...not so fast. And just as a nitpick conditions are something that occurs to the character so I just think that "irradiated" should be used instead radiation. Any why is it that on pg 52 AoE is in meters?
I know these can be easily fixed in the .pdf form, but it is annoying when I also ordered a print copy.
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What is promised here is not what is delivered. You do not get 100 maps, and what you get are mostly unusable junk. VERY disappointed.
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Great looking book. Simplustic and easy to follow layout. Enoutgh new Edges and Hindrances. A good amount of info for playing special forces, teams,law enforcement personnel and enough difference between the various units that are practically the same in real life.
The only thing I would have changed is instead of making a handful of new skills is
- A: Used SW Skill Specialization and had some of the new skills be speclizations of existing skills.
- B. Turned some of the new skills into Edges - esppecially new skills that "could" fall under 2 or more skills.
Othe than those two changes, I love the book
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First of all, I do not usually leave reviews, much less bad ones. But this products is severely lacking in usability.
What we are essentially presented with, is a set of homebrew rules, resulting in a game that is hacked from 5e SRD, but closer to OSR products.
What we don't get (what I thought I would get) is a way for players who love OSR principles of quick fights and harder survivability, but have groups who like to play 5e for crunchy character building or its modules to have that happen.
It is something entirely else, there is no way to use the rules without using the custom classes presented, there are rules for nerfing HP and damage for players and monsters, but MM monster abilities, high damaging player spells are not accounted for, neither the original class system, if you want to stick with that.
Who is it good for, let me ask? Those who are okay with playing an OSR system are going to just play one of those, like BFRPG for about the same price. And those who would have wanted to stick with 5e for its merits cannot plug these rules in, because it doesn't account for much of its contents.
What would have been useful, is to make these changes completely modular and compatible to 5e, so if I would like to use 5e monsters, class system and modules, I can do so with a quicker grittier fighting system.
What else do we get? We get a lot of rules which are introduced just for the author to tell us that it is up to the GM to handle however he wants. Well... no shit!
My favourite of these is the part about hexcrawls. We get told that BFA is played on hexcrawls. No rules for that, no suggestions, no nothing, just that. Play hexcrawls, because the author likes hexcrawls.
Also, a bunch of random tables, with "imaginative" content like a bunch of goblins running at you, orcs blocking the road, and kobolds in caves.
And if I wanted to buy this in print, then because for every 50 purchase they add new content, by the time it arrives my copy would be out of date already.
All in all, what I would recommend the author to do for the next milestone, is to spend less time doing art (which is very good, to say something positive), and less time apologising for the word fuckin' (LotFP RPG has child rape magic, no one cares about your fuckin' word), and spend more time on designing the content to be more modular and usable with published 5e content without using the custom classes.
Otherwise the product description is completely misleading. It is basically a new game with its own class system, and has not much to do with 5e in itself.
Sorry, if I sounded too harsh, I hope that this product is going to evolve, the idea is good, just the implementation is lacking.
I would be happy to hear the author's opinion on the subject, other than what is written in the product that it works for their group (happy to hear that, but if it is sold commercially it should present real usable value).
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