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Swords & Wizardry Complete Rulebook (Revised)
Publisher: Mythmere Games
by Mark H. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 06/11/2023 22:23:48

Reviewed over on my blog: mdhughes.tech: Review: Swords & Wizardry Complete Revised

Summary:

Swords & Wizardry is much more eclectic and opinionated. It’s also much more playable, more hackable, and more easily used as a “modern” RPG (I always air-quote that, but RPG design has moved on from Dave Arneson’s game that Gary Gygax published & ripped off). There’s still a lot of weird little gaps.

★★★★½ — S&W is a really great “dnd”-like to run, and Complete Revised is the best of these. I really dislike not having an index. I still need a booklet of house rules to play.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Swords & Wizardry Complete Rulebook (Revised)
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Anvil of Power (build your own magic weapon for deluxe Tunnels and Trolls!)
Publisher: Slloyd14
by Mark H. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 04/15/2019 05:11:21

Anvil of Power

  • Starts with variant rules to make the dungeon match the abilities of delvers. This is wrong, a bad practice called "Quantum Ogres", where everything moves around to match your choices, which makes your choices meaningless. Instead, the world should be the world, and the delver takes a chance with the stats they have.
  • There are many typos and just incoherent sentences, like: "SPD: If you next round, you may reroll a number of your dice equal to your Attribute Level in SPD."
  • The spell listings for each level always have boilerplate lists, even when there's nothing there. "Spells you may use before or during combat: Spells you may use on another, willing target (not too useful) Spells you may use on any paragraph you are not fighting or performing a saving roll:"
  • Much of the solo rules are just restatements of the rulebook. It needs 14 pages to do less than the current mini-rules do in 10, or the old solo quickstarts do in 5, or most solos just do by telling you to read the rules, and 1 paragraph = 1 turn.

  • So finally we reach the adventure. It really isn't an adventure, so much as a crystal-collecting quest, a town with some shop paragraphs, and then the rules for forging a weapon buried in a maze of paragraphs. A number of paragraphs are just wrongly linked, like 160 sends you from a library trying to read a book to 172, a random corridor. Impossible to know how much of this is just broken, but there's a lot of loops where you meet the same things again.

  • The annoying NPC Darej/Deraj ("Jared") is a labyrinth designer (uh huh) who says "And there was one guy who wanted a bunch of puppets in his labyrinth", and references Terence and Philip from South Park. Seriously? Making an oblique reference to Jareth the Goblin King from Labyrinth is fine, pop culture nonsense is really not, and not even keeping your spelling consistent is annoying.

  • Magic weapon creation rules. The writing here is often confused, for example: "The formula to work out the cost of a power of a higher level is: The cost of that power – ((The power’s level – your level) x75)

    So if you are a level 1 delver and you decide you want a level 10 power, you work out the discount which will be 10-1 = 9. 9x75 = 675. The cost of a level 10 power is 1000 magic weapon points. 1000- 675 = 325. So it will cost 325 magic weapon points to buy a level 10 power when you are level 1. Let’s hope you live long enough to use it..."

    The cost would actually be 675, 325 is how much you have left afterwards. Unless the author meant to really give a 75% discount for higher level powers, instead of the reasonable 25%.

    This could be simplified, but I think it'd be better removed: It makes these weapons incredibly cheap if you buy ahead and focus on one game-breaking power.

  • You can't just turn AP into "Magic Weapon Points", you need an artifact to do that.

  • Many of these powers quickly stack to abusive levels: Fire Resistance stops 10 points of fire damage, can be taken every odd level; so by level 9 you can stop 50 points of fire damage, which makes adventures in volcanoes and against fire demons trivial. Clearly not tested or done any math on.

  • Meanwhile stat boosts are under-powered. Increase STR adds 1, can be taken at every even level; so by level 10 you can have +5 STR, but your highest stat by definition would be 100+. If it added +Level each time it was taken, that'd be +30, which is a respectable power boost.

  • Spell embedding only works for non-Warriors; which makes it somewhat pointless, since you could just cast the spell. A handful of the powers are utilities, mostly equivalent to casting a spell, and these work for Warriors just fine.

  • Easy to Wield reduces STR and DEX requirements for a weapon by 7, up to 3 times; which I suppose makes Trollish weapons manageable by average stats, but even by Level 3 a warrior should have better than average stats.

  • Some of these powers are useful, but I'd have to analyze each one to see how badly unbalanced it is, and then why? I may as well just do it myself; and already have, in my treasure tables, but I don't let players make their own weapons.

  • There's no drawbacks. Great magic swords in myth and literature tend to be just as annoying to own as they are powerful; Saberhagen's Books of Swords illustrate that well.

The basic idea of a forge that lets you turn AP (forget this MWP stuff) into a level-scaling magic weapon — or armor or artifacts, not addressed here — is interesting. This is not a good adventure, and the rules are greatly unbalanced and untested.

★½☆☆☆



Rating:
[2 of 5 Stars!]
Anvil of Power (build your own magic weapon for deluxe Tunnels and Trolls!)
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Creator Reply:
Thanks for your in depth review, Mark H.! It might be possible that you put more effort into this review than I put into the book! Quantum Ogre: I know, I'm a big softie. I don't want to deprive anyone of not having a powerful magical weapon. The quest: You are right - it really took a back seat to the magic weapon creating rules. The quest was a thinly veiled excuse to get a magic weapon. Pop culture references: I guess they are there to amuse myself, mainly. It's kind of like how people make bad puns, not because other people think they are funny, but because the person making the pun thinks that the other person's reaction to the bad pun is funny. I did actually mean to give a 75% discount for higher level powers. I worked with the logic that you are not getting anything of value straight away, and, as you pointed out, you have to survive long enough to use it. You pay in time, rather than with MWP. Power stacking: It does get abusive at higher levels. I intended that to reward people who wanted a "theme" to their weapon. You actually didn't point out that stacking gets you a discount, so it is even more abusive than you mention in the review. After all, if someone is sinking a large portion of their MWP into one power, they won't have as much versatility as someone is diversifying. I put the whole MWP in to make sure that people couldn't just power up their weapons all the time - a way to not abuse them. There are no drawbacks, and you are right, a lot of powerful magical weapons do have drawbacks. I tried to think up an easy list of drawbacks to include which would grant the user more MWP. I couldn't think of easy ones. Of course, I thought of ideas such as the weapon losing its powers in situation X, against enemy Y or if you do action Z, but I would never be sure if there would be enough information in a solo to make the situation clear. What I've taken from this is that I should trust my readers to make that decision themselves. The stat bonuses are weak: I'm a bit disappointed in myself that I didn't realise how weak they were. I will rectify this if I get to the rewrite. In short, all the ways of making super awesome powers was deliberate as most of Tunnels and Trolls seems to actively encourage abuse. I mean, TARO and DARO can create obscene situations. In conclusion, I might rewrite it as a level 1 adventure and I will rectify all the spellings etc. Many thanks for pointing this out. I know this probably means very little to you, but I learnt a lot making this book and the magic weapon rules and I will carry this over in my future projects. I'm not sure if you see that as a good thing or not. It's a thing, at least. May the Troll God Father always smile upon you!
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Entartete Kunst
Publisher: Zoid Enterprises
by Mark H. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 11/10/2017 06:59:57

Originally published https://markrollsdice.wordpress.com/2017/11/09/review-entartete-kunst/

The RPG we all deserve.

"There is a spectre haunting gaming. It is the polemic. This is one. Maybe two. Madness, impertinence, incompetence, and degeneracy."

Veering drunkenly (on absinthe and heroin, no doubt) between perceptive discourses on the premises of our very boring, consistent style of RPGs, to outright parody like the alignment chart, to random quotes and paintings from postmodernists, existentialists, and the Nazis who burned their works. It’s a shame the author didn’t include swing music or jazz noises. see Wiki

Character creation, system, sample of play, and sample adventure are cut-ups of random unrelated games, and… it doesn’t exactly work, but it’s like hearing conversations in a crowd, and for a moment something interesting surfaces, and then is drowned out again.

The monster list is perhaps the only authoritative list ever, I can see no fault in it. Appendix N: Reading List includes such essentials as Junky by William S. Burroughs, and Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, which by themselves make it 50% more practically useful to gaming than most such lists.

Appendix P: Creating a Party on the Spur of the Moment is great advice, which makes me question how it got in here.

If I have any complaint, I do feel that Appendix Q: Glossary suffers from not being included in Appendix A: General Attributes Enumeration.

I cannot give this a star rating, because that’s just, like, my opinion, man.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
Entartete Kunst
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Better Than Any Man
Publisher: Lamentations of the Flame Princess
by Mark H. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 07/05/2013 22:25:29

Five horrific adventures in one book, tied together around the doom caused by holy wars. Fantastically gross and disturbing, and perhaps no way to win. The art is the usual fantastic torture porn common to LotFP, and earns the 18+ warning. The maps are excellent, and in the PDF hyperlinked to the encounters.

Unlike a typical Free RPG Day book, this has only a link to the free rules online, so it's all adventure. While it's mostly usable with any Old-School game, it only fits the tone of LotFP.

Give Raggi your money, read this, and take as much of it as you need for your demon-worshipping heavy metal fantasy horror gaming.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Better Than Any Man
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