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A useful setting book. Excellent production values. Any book that lets you know what restaurants are the best ones in the setting is one that shares my priorities.
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This is an excellent selection of martial arts for those looking for additional player options, with a particular focus on insect styles. If you're a fan of Hollow Knight, you might see a few things you recognize.
Dopa! Dopa-dopa-dopa!
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Exalted returns to the Scarlet Dynasty with the Dragon-Blooded hardback for Third Edition. This book gives all the material needed to play a scion of the Realm and the mechanics needed for the Dragon-Blooded, while also brushing alongside a few smaller Terrestrial nations, including old favorites the Forest Witches and the new hotness, the Indian-inspired nation of Prasad. (Fuller details on these groups should appear in the companion book, Heirs to the Shogunate.)
All in all, I was impressed with this book, in large part because it has no major flaws. What Fire Has Wrought has much better art than the last book Exalted released, having apparently worked out some of the kinks in their process and gotten a much higher average quality out of their partner studio. The mechanics are usable and solid. Most importantly the Realm now seems like a real place and a real matriarchy, with a culture and mores that aren't just our own repeated in a place where they don't belong.
I'm prepared to call this book a spectactular success.
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An excellent supplement of nasty creatures both scary, weird, and sad.
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This book is essentially a round-up of a huge collection of Old World of Darkness metaplot elements, updating the metaplot for twenty years later and revisiting many locations in the World of Darkness as Beckett wanders around poking his stupid nose into everything.
This is a book full of interesting locations and new takes on old problems, as well as a bunch of fascinating bits of new stuff, including the secrets of the vampires of South America, the Drowned Lineages, and hints at a new take on the vampires of Africa. Other elements get re-envisioned for the modern world, so that the most famous transgender vampire is no longer a tentacled sex murderer, which I think we can all be happy for. (They are now just a regular murderer.)
If you wanted a book where Beckett travels the world and people make fun of him because he prints their emails out and glues them in his diary, this is that book. If you wanted a book that weighs less than one million pounds, this is not that book. Thing is huge. But if you love huge books, that will just make you even happier.
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A bunch of Charms requested by backers, plus some extra Charms just because. A good resource for people who want more Solar Charms.
Cloud-Wreathed Scholar is my favorite, because I should be able to be right all the time and not just sometimes.
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For a long time people have been saying "I hear Mage is great, but the corebook is awful." So then they made this book to replace it. So, if you're wondering whether this book makes Mage sound entertaining and easy to understand and good? The answer is yes.
If you're already familiar with the present state of the setting from last edition, there are no big changes that will surprise you. It's just cleaned up and spruced out and the Atlantis myth has been chained up in an appendix rather than eating wordcount everywhere else. Little things that developed over the course of the line, like the details of the Guardian's religion, are now in the core.
Mechanically, the magic system got a big cleanup, and the divide between covert and vulgar has been eliminated. Paradox risk now derives entirely from overreaching your grasp of your magic and from the presence of Sleeper witnesses. Spells often invoke Conditions or Tilts in order to provide a standard base for effects, which you may or may not care for. Every dot of each Arcanum now seems more useful than might have been the case previously, and mastered Arcana are just ludicrous.
This is pretty much the go-to book for modern occult adventure.
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Breakfast Cult combines the high-school drama of The Breakfast Club with the cosmic horror of the Cthulhu mythos and also with the cosmic horror of Japanese animation. The result is a fun time for the whole family!
Players take on the roles of students at Occultar Academy, a school in the far future where prodigies are taught just enough occult science to advance human knowledge without getting into trouble. Then, they get in trouble anyway.
If you like the idea of being a really good sorceress who would like to be a really good rapper, or a sugar-dependent high school superdetective, this game is for you. If you dislike people with a tentacle instead of a face, people with really big adorable eyes, or fun, this game may not be for you.
Consult your doctor before playing Breakfast Cult. If you hear voices, stop reading Breakfast Cult. Unless they are the voices of your gaming group. In that case, you should help them make a character. The results can only be good for your SAN score!*
- breakfast cult does not contain sanity mechanics
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The development team formerly known as "the Ink Monkeys" spent quite a long time (I think we've all heard that story) on this new edition of the Exalted role-playing game. The second edition was plagued by mechanical issues that even the really rather extensive errata couldn't really fix. Everyone's been waiting for years now to see if the Third Edition would make everything right.
Did it? Well, if you're looking for a high-crunch game of tactical action that's not apologetic about having eleventy-million options in character customization, I think you'll be pleased. Ex3 goes out of its way to make every Ability pull its weight and to make the use of Solar magic exciting again, rather than "push Solar button; receive victory." (If you were hoping that Exalted would become a rules-light game; this edition isn't going to grant that wish.)
But, the rules we do have are a lot more exciting. Social interaction is now oriented around goals and Intimacies rather than being a duel-to-the-death with mind control lasers. Combat is now based around Initiative in a system that may remind you of Final Fantasy: Dissidia, where combatants wither away initiative before making a strike for the kill. It's all very complicated and interesting and has potential to make the game's battles much less of a "defend until you die" situation.
The setting has undergone some major changes, with more land being added in the West (including a Lunar domain hotly contested by the Realm) and a giant Dreaming Sea added to the Southeast, which forms a new, sword-and-sorcery flavored, genre venue for people who wanted a bit more Elric. There's also been a shakedown to focus on the sandals-and-swords vibe and to keep cosmic weirdness as a background element. I for one am pretty happy with this change, although it was controversial.
The look of the book is very high-quality (with the hitches of the backer PDF now behind us). It's also easier to read than the page design of 2e, which had a sort of rice-paper thing going on. Artists like the amazing Melissa Uran return, as is only proper, but the book skews a bit less towards manga than previous outings. Prince Diamond's appearance on the cover is pretty great for multiple reasons.
Ultimately, I can say without hesitation that this was a book worth waiting for.
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This novel, the first in the "Enemies Endure" trilogy, brings Jenna Moran's unique sensibility to the heavy philosophical questons of how we make our own enemies and whether it's possible to live with them. Also there are renegage alchemists, svart-elves, and the Doom Team of young adventurers. As usual, the author's whimsical style hides an awful lot of serious content, but the reader who enjoys that sort of thing will find it extremely rewarding.
Also, Echo Chernik's cover is quite gorgeous.
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This expansion to the Nobilis game covers the Deceivers, one of the four kinds of Excrucians, making these enemies of reality playable at last. The book includes lifepaths for Excrucian characters and guidelines to designing and using pStates, the bizarre self-referential powers that Deceivers use.
Deceivers range from the hilarious to the terrifying and are frequently both. (Iolithae Septimian, whose lies frequently supplant reality, reaches out to the reader and says sweetly, "No one can really know whether God exists or not.") This book is completely suitable for those who want to play them or who want to use them as antagonists for standard Nobilis games.
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For the first time since 2006, the Nobilis RPG returns to print in a third edition. The new full-color book is quite a change from the over-the-top elegance of the second edition, but it's colorful and has quite a few amazing pieces of art. The new rules replace Realm and Spirit with Persona and Treasure, two new attributes that provide greater granularity to a Power's embodiment of their Estate.
Taken as a whole, the new edition of Nobilis is a rousing success for fans of the gameline and an excellent starting point for players who have wanted access to the game for years but were unable to find it.
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The Exalted writing team finally brings what fans have been waiting on for nearly two years- the missing pieces of the Infernal Charmset, complete with Kimbery Charms and the hotly-anticipated Heretic set. The writers have drawn on some references from Kindred of the East to create the Triumphant Scream of the Devil-Tiger and the Charms that follow it, in which the Green Sun Princes throw off the Yozi's shackles and become unique titans of their own Creation.
Michael Goodwin finally gets to display the Charmset of Kimbery, oceanic titan of passive-aggressive motherhood. When Kimbery loves you, she really loves you. When Kimbery hates you, she really hates you. The difference between Kimbery's love and her hate is about ten seconds. It looks to be a fun ride for players who like emotional rollercoasters, being Aquaman, or shoggoths.
John Mørke contributes a new set of Charms for She Who Lives in Her Name, based on old '50s horror movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. When the Whispering Flame invades the dragon lines, no one is safe, and creepy children and possessed warstriders are soon to follow. Every titan has some love, though, although the Ebon Dragon got most of his standout Charms frontloaded in Return of the Scarlet Empress. We also have a contribution from the newest Ink Monkey, Eric Minton, who brings us a collection of Malfean hearthstones, including one from his own Yozi creation, Qaf, the Heaven-Violating Spear.
There's something for everybody to enjoy. If you like Infernals, this is an excellent supplement, and it's only $5. You've spent more than that on a sandwich. Buy this.
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Finally, a PDF of the boxed set has arrived, with all the errors and terrible Charms replaced with fresh, minty clean errata. A bundle of thanks to White Wolf's Errata Team Prime for going out of their way to essentially replace entire segments of the boxed set with brand new goodness, so that this digital version is nearly flawless.
This is an excellent look into the utopian decadence of the Age of Dreams.
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Not a bad little supplement, with pieces left out of former books. I can see why some of it was abandoned, since it leans more towards the readable than the gameable in parts, but there are some very cool bits of work in Splinters.
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