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The first city supplement for the Scarred Lands, this book was a shot off the bow of most d20 fantasy games, which had cleaved extremely closely to standard D&D in hopes of capturing a larger portion of the market. Instead, Hollowfaust makes a bold statement about necromatic magic, which the players must navigate not necessarily to survive (it's a city - city environments, by their definition, are hospitable to many different kinds of people), but to thrive in the way that D&D pushes its characters to thrive. You won't just feel like you're in Fantasy Canada (the Forgotten Realms - a setting I love) when you come to Hollowfaust. You will feel the pressure of magic and possiblity on the world in unusual and eye-opening ways. GMs will find that Hollowfaust lets them talk about how ancestors and memory both empower and are exploited by the present.
If I had to name something to improve about Hollowfaust, it is that the city is a fantasy city first and a D&D city second, perhaps the only area where it doesn't excel. There are many areas of pressure to explore which D&D heroes will have no means of fully interacting with. In a way, it's more of a fantastic experience than D&D, with its romantic and escapist nature, can ever embrace.
It's perhaps the best fantasy citybook of the d20 era, and well worth your time.
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The second best feature of the Scarred Lands was, as it was in Planescape, was the incorporation of the alignment into the cosmic setup of the world. Rather than being a dumb 9th grader's idea of what morals and ethics might be, instead, alignment became the embodied will of cosmic entities - the gods, in Ghelspad.
The best feature, of course, is that Ghelsad desperately needs heroes exactly of the sort D&D is set up to deliver. No matter where you go, the cosmic conflicts of the Scarred Lands cause suffering and injustice, which heavily armored magical superheroes can repair. This book is a comprehensive look at Ghelspad as an adventure setting, combining exploratory culture and ancient treasures. It's everything you want D&D to be.
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When the SRD hit, people didn't quite know what a good PWYW supplement was, or how to set suggested prices (there wasn't even a price box back then!) Over time it has developed well and this little $1 supplement is right in my wheelhouse. It has exactly what you need for one dollar. It's a nice little town with a serious dungeon/adventure nearby. It has a few rumors about it, and a couple of places relevant to adventurers, and that's it! It's exactly what people want in these types of supplements.
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As the Trinityverse series chugs through its second editions on Kickstarter, it's worth taking a moment to look back at some of the material that made this trilogy beloved in its White Wolf days (the Trinityverse is now owned by Onyx Path). Adventure! was the third game in the series, the only standalone book, and is among the most beloved by Trinityverse fans. Aberranmt had its (surprisingly prescient) near-future vision of microcelebrity superheroes struggling not to be consumed by their own powers, and Trinity took a stab at a combination of 1970s psi-fi and optimistic tean sf. For the series to take a plunge into period pulp action... well why not?
Adventure!'s system is a stripped down version of the Trinity-verse era version of the White Wolf house system; die pools rolled trying to beat target numbers. It's serviceable, and supplemented by, as always, the top tier supernatural powers written by the White Wolf team. It depicts an alternate 1920s-30s in which a mysterious experiment resulted in (or coincided with the appearance of) the development of weird abilities - some not even known to their possessors. It doesn't pretend to any kind of alt-historical verisimilitude (unlike Aberrant and Trinity which delve deeply intot their respective timelines). A! says instead that history is yet to be written, and turns your characters loose in an Indiana Jones/The Shadow-esque world.
The dramatic editing rules were among the innovations of this game, rarely seen in mainstream games to this point. These permit you to spend a currency to make small or even dramatic changes in the fictional world, and leaves the in-world reality of that currency an open question. (The second edition has closed that question in a very interesting way, emphasizing quite strongly that this ability actually fully exists in the game world.)
Nevertheless, the emphasis on these rules isn't truly reflected in the rest of the game. Much has to be done for the modern player to navigate the stereotypes of the pulp adventure world in a way that isn't harmful and doesn't reinforce those stereotypes. Few pulp adventure games have really attempted to dig into the roots of the genre and what you may find, excise or salvage from it, and A! is no exception to this. If there is an area where improvement could be found, it is in that, and in the awkward melding of the capacity-focused Storytelling system with the fictional-focused dramatic editing system.
At this late date, if you haven't read it, you definitely should. And given the improvements to the Trinityverse games so far, I can't wait for the next edition of Adventure! to come across.
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The d20 Modern system attempted to, in some way, make the traditional six-attribute D&D spread into something worth talking about - something no edition of D&D has ever done (nor anything any edition of D&D ever will do). The class feature and feat systems always melded with a great deal of uncertainty - what made something a good feat and what should be relegated to the class features. And, despite trying, without significant support for nonmagical ranged combat in the D&D system underlying d20 (something that's persisted to the present day - just try playing a nonmagical archer in 5e! Just kidding, don't under any circumstances do this), gunplay never seemed adequately exciting as combat. The only application that worked for it, Spycraft, essentially built its combat from the ground up on gunplay.
Sidewinder: Recoiled is probably the best version of a d20 Modern campaign supplement. Within the lines of d20 Modern, they created a very straightforward adaptation for a "modern" (i.e. non-fantastic) setting, adapted the class features to the setting in ways that express what a "smart" Western hero is, and did their best to make the feats, the building blocks of the D&D3-era character, interesting and evocative.
That said, Sidewinder: Recoiled should be considered a "generic" Western d20 Modern supplement. It doesn't go into great detail on how to navigate the thorny historical waters of race, gender and politics; it doesn't help with the conception of a campaign or collaboration on characters to have an exciting Western adventure. All it does, though this is not a small accomplishment, is take the action-adventure engine of d20 Modern and say "okay, here's a Western version of this." It assumes that you know what you want to do in a Western action-adventure, that team-based gunplay is the primary way you want to interact mechanically with the world, and (perhaps most artificially) that advancement, in this world, corresponds to the advancement of combat power.
It's a strange thought, the "advancement" of combat power in a Western, when most actual Western films portray the most deadly fighters as youthful and impetuous. But perhaps the idea in Western RPGs is that you're looking at narrative deadliness and not necessarily an inclination to violence. On the other other hand, isn't the inclination to violence, at least in part, a function of whether you think you'll be badly hurt by it? A little too deep a dive for Sidewinder: Recoiled.
Nevertheless, for the GM who wants to use a system familiar to players of D&D3 or its successors (Pathfinder, D&D3.5, etc.) to play a Western action-adventure campaign that they already have in mind, Sidewinder: Recoiled is a very solid outing. It is perhaps the best case for the "universal" D&D3-era approach to d20 gaming, which aimed to create a single system which could be used for multiple campaigns or concepts. However, by the same token, it doesn't expand much on the D20 Modern ethos, and gives very little concrete advice for dealing with the challenges of a Western story or identifying how violence and action is used differently in that story than in D&D. (Perhaps tellingly, there's a whole chapter on animals combat stats) I'm giving it a solid score because it really does what it sets out to do; but perhaps there's a reason the big d20-era games we remember today are ones that took big swings at altering the system deeply (Mutants & Masterminds, Spycraft, Blue Rose) while games that just did what the "theory" of d20 suggested, like Sidewinder, left us with that system.
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Fae Noir (originally published in 2005) is an example of a very simple urban fantasy game executed in a very straightforward way. As such, it's definitely worth your time.
In the world of Fae Noir, after three hundred years of exile, the world of Faery returns to Earth in the midst of World War I, somewhat naively picking their promises and treaties back up as if they had never left, which embroiled them immediately in the battlefield. Now that the war is over (the game is set between 1922 and 1925, depending on how well established and well known you want Faery to be in the world's mind), faeries are slipping into the cracks in the underclass of human cities. And there, at least in the fictional 1920s, they will be dealing with gangsters, speakeasies, flappers, and tommy guns.
The book does a solid job of saying that racial prejudice and segregation are dramatic in America, mentions the rise of the "new" KKK in that time period, but also doesn't overlook the remarkable cultural and political developments black Americans advanced in this time period. The historical overview (plus fairies) is readable, short and understandable. The one element of the game world that doesn't seem well-turned is the "Faith" section. It makes sense that with the resurgence of Faery into the world that the magic they use might return with them. But why would the Christian faith (for example) suddenly be invested with magical power? Also, it seems a little bit pat to simply shrug your shoulders at the relationship between faiths and the Faery when the last time they were around in human history was in the 15th century of Christianity and the 10th of Islam, and the early practices of both faiths were very concerned with magical entities like the ones depicted here. Can I turn away faery magic with the power of the baby Jesus in this game? Well, maybe, but the subject is underexamined. It honestly would make more sense to leave it out all together. Nevertheless, the world is overall presented with a well-considered level of detail and gives a good cultural and politlcal overview of the 1920s plus just the smidgen of alternate history that has occurred thus far.
The system is a die pool system in which players roll a number of d8s and count up how many successes (typically with a target number of 6 or better) they have rolled to determine the effect.
However, the book doesn't have a lot to say about how GMs or players should actually play the game. In this game, we are humans and faery, and we're involved in noir shenanigans, but how do we do that? Who's the opposition? The game doesn't give us much of an answer to anyone trying to figure out what it actually is, what procedures should be used when in order to make a memorable experience. And, perhaps because of its age, it lacks bookmarks and hyperlinks which would help navigate it. As a result, I have to mark it down just a little despite it being in one of my favorite genres of all time, the historical fantasy. Although it might benefit from a second edition, Fae Noir is certainly worth checking out.
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With the recent adaptation of Altered Carbon on Netflix, I thought it was time to take a look back at one of the most well-established transhuman-cyberpunk roleplaying games, Eclipse Phase. Sunward is a supplement that focuses on what I would consider the most common settings for Eclipse Phase: the Solar System from Mars (terraformed and under the control of a shady consortium) in to the surface of the Sun itself (colonized by people who have put their minds into highly alien and well protected bodies capable of withstanding the environment there).
Most of the book is taken up by a systemless description of this setting, though the organization of the book is top tier, and inclines it back towards the core action of the game. The typical Eclipse Phase game is based around a secretive troubleshooting/human defense organization called the Firewall, about midway between a secret vigilante group and a hacktivist syndicate. In Sunward, each chapter head acts as a mini-table of contents for that chapter and is pitched as "things a Firewall agent might want to consider when operating in this environment". Sometimes it's about typical threats or environmental dangers, sometimes it's about "unofficial" rumors, sometimes it's about the "secret history" of the world which Firewall navigates and discovers.
The remainder of the book includes new bodies for characters to use in different environments, some new threats and equipment stats, and, as is usual for Eclipse Phase, several sample characters who operate in the setting being described.
The typical criticism of Eclipse Phase was "wow, but the system doesn't do much, and what am I supposed to do with this?!" It's clear the creators of the game took this criticism to heart when working on supplements, because Sunward is very carefully aimed directly at the bullseye of what Firewall and the actions of the PCs are expected to be. They're expected to be scientific and espionage operatives infiltrating or exploring hositile environments to puzzle out the truthg of the chaos that a ultra-high-tech war left on humanity, and interacting with the human and near-human entities that form the blurred line of the transhuman sf experience. (The system is still kind of a wet noodle, so if I said we should improve this supplement it would be in that area. Also, I think for the bodies which the PCs might inhabit when (say) travelling to the Sun or Mercury, it would make more sense to have them on single-page pullouts, or cards, so as to easily distribute and keep them separate from the "minds" of the player characters on the core character sheet.)
Sunward is a great example of what a supplement should be. It enhances the understanding of the corebook, is easy to tell how it should be used, and has form factors and is structured in a way as to make it easily accessible. It gets my highest marks because of these traits.
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A solid outing, the Kith of the Harpy Queen is primarily a presentation of several "themed" harpies - the "giant" harpy, the small, flock-focused harpy, the demonic harpy, etc. as a monster supplement. It also includes several harpy-themed magical items and spells.
It's always difficult to assess a supplement like this. The Glory Harpy's CR seems off base (it has not just one but three spell-like effects which are among the most overpowered effects for their level, and can take one of the harpy feats listed to multiply their usefulness), but that's true of the monsters in the base game too. I can't call it great because it doesn't rise above the bad judgment calls of Pathfinder/D&D3 with respect to monster evaluation (or spell evaluation for that matter), but perhaps I can't rightfully critique it on that ground either.
I should say I very much appreciate the pagination of the monsters. Ever since the days of the three-ring-binder Monster Manual for AD&D, I've been very attentive to how I can assemble monsters and other information for the campaign. Just print the page you want and you're good to go. (The same advantage isn't there for the spells and magic items.)
I do love harpies, so perhaps I'm giving this one an extra star just because they're such great monsters, but there's still a lot to do on the subject - a discussion of the mythological harpies and their roles, roles for different types of harpies in different types of campaigns or adventures, at least some attention to the gender politics of the harpy legends and how they might be used for political expression in your game. These types of analyses would be my suggestion for ways to improve the supplement.
Overall, however, the Kith of the Harpy Queen is a solid, straightforward, simple monster supplement that carries with it some attention to other factors of the D&D3/Pathfinder era which are relevant to players: spell choice and character building. It's worth a look.
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The Call of Cthulhu monograph series varies tremendously in quality, and Casting Call of Cthulhu is one of the best. It contains dozens of NPCs for use in modern-day Call of Cthulhu games as people who might be informants or provide specialized assistance to the investigators.
A key element of why the Casting Call of Cthulhu is so effective is its organization. The NPCs are listed by the "field" they are in - art, crime, law enforcement, media - meaning that when the players suddenly, out of nowhere, want to go to the press (for example), you have several to choose from. The characters presented are diverse, and each are given fully humanizing qualities - you never know what characters the players will seize on as appealing, so having a solid background, goal, and personality helps bring them quickly to life.
Call of Cthulhu isn't a game that lives or dies by its recurring NPCs - this is a tremendous first step towards filling out a setting that can otherwise feel empty and isolating as the horror genre tends to be.
The missteps in the piece involve some typos (a problem throughout the monographs) and some archaic terms that don't reflect how best to describe a diverse set of peoples. (C'mon, "Oriental"? I get that Gary Gygax used it but Said published Orientalism in 1978. Can't we have caught up by now?)
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Sitting down to write a review of Monster of the Week while being a guy who can't abide essentially any episode of Supernatural you care to name, and who only really liked Buffy: The Vampire Slayer for the side characters is an exercise in trying to refocus on "but is this really FOR me?" Let's at least step back a little and try to see where this work fits in the history of the genre.
While episodic action-adventure shows have been common on television since the earliest days, the combination of horror, episodic enemies and recurring protagonists first came about in the cartoon Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! in 1969. Before that time, episodic horror was the realm of the anthology series (Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Thriller, etc.) or the soap opera - always an innovator in television (Dark Shadows). The Scooby-Doo formula would be refined in more standard dramas like Kolchak, The Night Stalker, and was a consistent theme in cartoons like The Real Ghostbusters. The formula is this: The characters, intertwined in various ways, with strong relationships and connections to each other, face a supernatural evil. The evil grows in intensity, the characters face setbacks and attempt to save each other and the world, and ultimately the (seemingly) supernatural evil is defeated, and the characters return to the status quo. The classic show that combined the episodic and the serial in this field was Buffy The Vampire Slayer, which ran for seven seasons on TV and another five in comics, which attempted to make the relationship web of the characters more serial, while the episodic threats were loosely connected, the characters facing a "Big Bad", as they self-referentially called it, at the end of each season.
At its most successful, BTVS was able to transcend the formula, but it often did so in ways that displayed the weakness of the formula itself. When BTVS elevated its supporting cast, it showed the web of deep, interwoven relationships that had developed over the seasons, and the changes the characters had gone through - like a serial show, like a soap opera. When it played with its own presentation (a silent episode, a musical episode) it showed how much greater range its performers had than the formula really required of them. While incredibly influential and successful, BTVS actually had threaded a very tight needle. Followups (Angel, Supernatural) seemed unable to replicate this, with good reason.
The monster-of-the-week genre is one that, ironically, the RPG hobby had developed far more aggressively and in-depth than television had. Call of Cthulhu's module play often emphasized the idea of the location-based scenarios - investigators came to a place, summoned by a letter from their favorite cousin or hunting buddy, came across horrible supernatural events and the survivors emerged shaken but ready to go to the next, unrelated scenario. Indeed, the idea of serial characters moving through a series of episodes has always been the standard setup for horror RPGs! This means Monster of the Week, the game, has a very difficult remit. It has to convince you that it actually brings something different to the table than Literally All The Other Horror RPGs Out There, because this subgenre has been ours longer than it has been anyone else's. We got here first. Buffy's the latecomer.
So, taking that very careful question, what does Monster of the Week bring to the table, there's several elements that combine both to make it an extremely good game in certain circumstances and a very boring one in others.
First, it does a great job of connecting the characters to each other, and using those relationships as the basis for the world. You are giong to be playing episodes of a show that is in its third season. Stuff has happened before. Nobody is going to be "but vampires don't exist!", the most boring thing ever to appear in monster of the week properties. So from a player perspective, it does a good job of bringing you into the dynamic of these kinds of properties. Nobody is going to be lost on the sidelines of a Monster of the Week game.
Second, it does a good job of funnelizing play - meaning that there is always a mechanical way forward. You are never stuck going "well, these werewolves are immune to silver, so NOW what do we do?" There's a simple, basic set of moves (this is a quasi-Powered By The Apocalypse game) that will always provoke you (or send you tumbling) forward through the plot of the scenario. You ascertain the nature of the threat, encounter it once or twice, learn its weakness, and defeat it.
What this means is that for one-shots and for brief campaigns - say, five or six sessions - Monster of the Week is ideal. But these same advantages begin to wear thin as the formula begins to show through. From a GM perspective, there's so little mechanical variation in your options for designing monsters, and none at all for responding to player character actions, that after you do 3-4 episodes, you've literally done everything you're going to ever do in the game. At least the players have their relationships to leap back onto, and a set of moves they can get themselves tangled up in; your options are much more constrained. Compare this to the role of the GM in Apocalypse World, where complicating the situation by introducing a new threat is as simple as coming up with something and saying it happens. The reification of the monster's weakness into a game mechanical token which must be delivered when and only when the players strike one of the moves that generate it means that a lot of the creativity of the GM side is just not there. (Compare, say, to Call of Cthulhu, where every player has 70-odd skills and is clambering all over your monster asking you what happens when they do something involving Botany.)
So that's that - and that was my experience with it. When I ran it once, it sang. When I ran 2-3 sessions of it, it was incredible. But at around session 6 I felt that, as a GM, I'd seen all it could do, and the prospect of more just seemed entirely too dreary. So in that respect, Monster of the Week fails to rise above the typical horror RPG, and, like most of the cultural content it is perching atop of, can't rise to the heights of Buffy-at-its-best. But surely it's better than Supernatural-at-its-worst. And the exceptional, fast-moving quality of the game makes it ideal for one-shot and convention play, so I can urge you to play in those social circumstances with an unqualified recommendation. Just keep an eye out for how the game's structure constrains you.
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RPGObjects has a long history of exceptional products and The Right to Live is one of them. What makes The Right to Live work as a module is that it provides a template for how Abandon All Hope adventures should function - by experiencing it, both players and GMs get a strong idea of what an Abandon All Hope adventure should be.
In case you're not familiar with Abandon All Hope, it tells the story of a massive prison ship that passed through an "evil" section of space and became infested with demonic presences and Satanic evil. Its inspirations include Event Horizon, and, of course DOOM. The player characters were incarcerated on the vessel and now must survive as ships systems break down, are seized by various evil factions, or are corrupted by the devil. It catches what makes survival horror compelling - this is an environment in which even the air you breathe can't be taken for granted. The Right to Live shows the precariousness of existence on board the prison vessel, as well as showing the oncsequences of various types of approaches to the evil that has come aboard.
The player characters are thrust into a conflict between two prison gangs, a conflict that has been exacerbated by their reactions to the demonic presence. Each feels they have the best way of protecting themselves against it, and that the other is interfering in those efforts. And even by the end of the adventure it isn't clear which of them (if any) are right or wrong (if those words can be said to apply here) about the situation they're in. Nevertheless they're committed to the conflict and the player characters must navigate it.
If there's an area where The Right to Live could be improved, I would say that expanding on the consequences both of player character action and NPC action would help. The situation the PCs come to has arisen as the consequence of certain NPC decisions; what happens after the PCs come in and take action? You could certainly spool out the consequences of even relatively minor decisions out of control as both the opposing gang(s) and the demonic presence respond to even small changes to the situations at times. Finally, although The Right to Live emphasizes the precariousness of the situation from a social perspective, it could use a little more in the way of system breakdowns and shortages.
Abandon All Hope is a classic horror game because it understands the nature of a horrific situation. The Right To Live is a strong entry in the series.
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A friend suggested I post some reviews of some underappreciated and under-rated material for GM's Day this year, so here's the Savage Worlds edition of Peacekeepers. Although it has some flaws (see below) it also has an interesting take on the "villains save the world" scenario that we have seen in other comic book RPGs for some time, including the Savage Worlds Necessary Evil campaign. As in those other campaigns, an existential threat arises from space, and former villains and heroes must put aside their differences to save the Earth.
However, Peacekeepers brings some unique elements to the table: the "lead" villain who put a crimp in the alien's attack plans is, unknowingly, a robot created by a mad scientist, who serves as her "science advisor". Her past isn't actually mysterious - it's just missing. Since one of the elements of a story of this kind is learning about the backgrounds and being paranoid about the true intentions of your comrades-in-arms, this information is extremely well-suited to this kind of scenario. Plus, I'm a sucker for any T.O. Morrow references I can work into my game.
The alien invasion is for a very good reason - a mysterious ane extremely powerful artifact which the aliens revere as a religious item. The aliens themselves are revered by a cult of collaborators here on Earth, a different type of quisling that we don't normally see. All in all, it's a unique setup. There's some attention to a supporting cast (the American President, the characters' "voice in the headset lady") which is extremely practical and ties in well to the concepts of the setting.
The flaws in Peacekeepers fall where it fails to embrace its identity. There's a superheroic adventure generator section which doesn't advance the core questions of the setting at all - it's just a regular superhero scenario maker. Fine for what it is, but not interesting in the context of Peacekeepers. Similarly, the scenarios offered don't really connect to the core conflict of the world at all. They're just regular superhero scenarios. I guess that's fine, but it raises questions about why we're doing these things when an existential threat still looms. The villains and heroes similarly don't really fit in. Finally, although the game raises ideas about what might happen in other parts of the world than the typical "Big American City" of superhero comics, there's very little detail given to them, which often lends itself to stereotypes. Better to use that space to detail how to research and come up with interesting and compelling scenarios on my own in those areas, if you can't fit all the details in.
Overall, Peacekeepers is worth checking out for the information about its core conflict, including many unique ideas you can use in your own superheroes-in-trouble campaign!
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A friend suggested I post some reviews of some under-appreciated, under-rated and otherwise overlooked material for GM's Day this year, so let's look at Rogues, Rivals & Renegades Collection Two.
Mutants and Masterminds supplements must live in a strange little ecosystem. M&M is probably the premier "carefully build a superhero's capabilities" game, having surpassed Champions relatively handily given the (often literal) weight of the HERO system. However, lacking the pacing system of Marvel Heroic or the emotional impact mechanics of Smallville or Masks, M&M must rely on setting and character material to get the melodrama of superheroic adventure across, and this is often quite idiosyncratic to the particular setting. In this respect, the DC and Marvel universes, created as they have been over decades of corporate restructuring, interal conflicts, mergers, and lawsuits, form more of a stumbling block to exceptional storytelling rather than a toolbox. M&M supplements at their best try to create something unique enough to have the feeling of the classic superhero story, but can't be too unique - we have to be able to pull the villain out of the villain supplement and put them in our own world, and maybe that's a world where heroes are hated and feared, or maybe it's a world where they're all Vine stars. You can't quite know what each individual group is doing because M&M is a system that encourages people to come to it with individualized ideas that can't be handled in more specialized systems.
RR&Rv2 is, primarily, a character collection, but what sets it apart is that it tries to communicate the world around the characters in a way that's both sufficient to understand where the characters are coming from and how to change it to fit your own world. For example, a character named "Blackwing" was empowered by a group which would wipe out her debts in exchange for her evil service. Great - tells us what kind of character she is, it fits with her personality, and when the time comes to situate her in a personalized campaign world, there are several different options for who might have given her this power, from a crime syndicate to a secret government program or an evil superscience organization. The GM is given the tools needed to use the characters well.
This even extends to the mechanics. More than one character have statistics which are outside the "norm" for M&M characters, but these are noted and explained. A character is extremely weird? Yeah, he's a joke character to lighten the mood or for a game that aims for more of a light tone. A character is extremely difficult to damage? Remember to use her for her own goals, of having fun and excitement, instead of as a serious and direct threat. Importantly, the characters also illustrate good ways to use the mechanics of M&M to get across particular capabilities, which is useful both for GMs and players.
In addition to the characters, there are several organizations listed, both helpful and unhelpful. I especially appreciate the characters that have their own agendas, which might not be directly evil, but which they pursue regardless of the consequences, likely to bring them into conflict with superheroes and authorities in an interesting way.
R&RCV2 is one of the best Mutants & Masterminds supplements out there; it gives enough of a world to have character, and to base characters on, but also gives you the tools you need to adapt it to your own campaign world. If there is anything I'd suggest to improve it, I would say to make the character sheets more usable at the table. Right now, they're bold-colored and sometimes difficult to read when printed out. Further, feats and powers are simply listed when they could be printed with reference material to remind you what they do and where they are in the book.
Overall, it's one of the best M&M collections out there and highly recommended from me!
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A friend suggested I post some reviews of some underrated or overlooked gems for this year's GM's Day Sale, so I thought I would put up Terror, currently on sale for under $4 for your consideration. Terror is a Call of Cthulhu adventure originally published in 1997, though the procedural changes in the most recent edition actually serve to assist in getting over some of the bumpier spots. Essentially a retelling of John Carpenter's The Thing set in Stalin-era Moscow, the best part of The Terror is that the monster fits the mood which the historical milieu attempts to recreate, and vice versa. Lovecraft's monsters reflect his fear of an atheistic, multiracial world, and he situates his stories in the crumbling remains of the Victorian milieu he (correctly) feared was dying out.
In Terror, the purges of the 1930s-era Soviet Union provide a backdrop for a monster who - like a cosmic NKVD officer - literally can be anyone or any living thing, and whose monstrous intent is the destruction of identity itself, to subsume the target in its own consciousness. This is a properly conservative fear to base a Lovecraftian horror scenario on.
However, Terror has a couple of big holes in it. First, the investigators are state prisoners who are brought out of prison in order to dig into the mysterious events at the behest of a secret policeman. This is fine, but there are no pregenerated characters and not one word about what types of "criminals" they are, nor about what types of "crimes" they might have committed - literally the first thing that happens is an interrogation about this, so while that's a great, atmospheric way to start, neither the GM nor the players will have any real grounding for what type of situation they could be in. The opening also doesn't really give a strong direction to the group - in standard Call of Cthulhu, you make a character who is "an investigator", someone who digs into occult matters for some personal, professional or psychological reason. Here, though, there's a strong incentive for characters to abandon the investigation and attempt to escape, and only some fairly severe railroading keeps this from happening. I think the character creation sections of the new corebooks might help with this problem, but unlike 1920s New England, there really isn't anything in either the corebooks or Terror to get across what it is like to dig into this situation in Stalin-era Moscow. The GM and players will be left to do their own research and build their own scaffolding around the scenario.
Still, Terror is worth mentioning, and worth looking at, for the close connection between the monster and the historical moment, an extremely Lovecraftian thing to attempt. In this, it beats out a number of other Call of Cthulhu "monster" scenarios that don't attempt to draw this type of tight connection.
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"Hey JD, here's another game that uses playing cards for a randomizer instead of dice! You're gonna give it a high score, aren't you?"
"That's not true, come on!! There's plenty of...okay it is true. I give high scores to all playing card based games. BUT THAT'S NOT THE ONLY REASON WHY"
I've been a fan of the "vs" series ever since it was printed on quad-fold, 4" x 4" glossy paper with pulp cowboys on the front panel. It's fun, it's light, and it's simple. Traditionally it has relied on your group's knowledge of and love for the source material to make it really sing. vs. Ghosts looks to action-comedies like (but not limited to) Ghostbusters for it's fun, and it does a lot of things right in making it work. The system is based on the flip of a card - players can also supplement this with bonus cards they have in hands, though replenishing those cards is much rarer than card flips. For a rules-light system it's fairly good. In terms of what characters actually do and how the opposition is portrayed, it nails something that even the venerable Ghostbusters RPG from West End Games didn't always remember, which is that the comedy in horror-comedy normally comes not from the monsters, but from the absurd actions of the protagonists. The ghosts, demons, eldritch beings and cultists in the Ghostbusters films are not overtly comedic (okay, that one guy's accent is pretty funny), it's the reaction of the mundane world to them and the actions of our heroes that bring the comedy. Hence, the ghosts and spirits in vs. Ghosts are presented in a faux-Victorian manner, and the characters and NPCs are presented in broad, cartoony pictures and statistics. Yet the scenarios are largely serious! This demonstrates that vs. Ghosts understands its genre, and presents a bullseye for the players to target. The GM gives a "serious" horror scenario, and our heroes the exorcists (Repossessed), mad scientists (Ghostbusters) or whatever (Scary Movie) go loping in to blow up the bar mitzvah and try to get paid for it at the end.
The areas I would suggest for improvement would be to urge some caution in the use of comedic stereotypes, or suggest ways to subvert and reimagine the stereotypes. We aren't limited by a 22-90 minute presentation format, so we have the freedom to make comedic stereotypes more interesting than television or film. Also, although this is a game that claims to be open content, it literally says "all material" here is designated Product Identity. Oh, uh, okay. You know, you can just copyright your game book if you want? Oh well, nobody pays attention to that stuff but me anyhow.
All in all, you get what's on the cover with vs. Ghosts. I recommend it!
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