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The organization, layout and visual presentation are perfect. A lot of the rules are great and innovative. But I have one problem: 2nd edition tries to "fix" the armor rules from the 1st edition, and it makes things worse. Now, your armor is rated with an Armor Value, which give is an equivalent pool of D6 Armor Dice. Characters "burn" these dice to ignore the damage of a hit, and after a short rest, they roll these dice to see if they recover. On a roll higher than the AV, the die recovers. Otherwise, you'll have to repair it later.
Got that? So now your armor has several separate stats you have to track, because most of them change:
- Armor Value: This one doesn't change, at least.
- Broken Dice: The number of dice that have been spent to negate damage.
- Damaged Dice: The number of Broken Dice which did not recover when given a chance.
So now we're tracking all kinds of armor information. Plus, if you're wearing plate, then you probably need to get repairs every other fight, since these mechanics cause it to be worse at recovering than less protective armor. Not exactly the lightweight and intuitive experience that TBH otherwise provides.
Still, it's easy enough to use the old rules for armor, or substitute whatever you like. I like the idea of using an armor usage die.
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I have to admit that I'm a little disappointed. I'm a big fan of some of Zzarchov's other works, especially One-Thousand Dead Babies and The Gnomes of Levnec. This one has a good premise and some solid ideas, but it leaves a lot on the table. I was definitely irritated by the fact that it suggests you roll up any demons on the Lamentations table for the Summon spell, or the Random Esoteric Creature Generator. The adventure would have greatly benefited if the author had pre-generated a few of these on your behalf, allowing you to roll or choose which one, or go to the forementioned tables as a fallback. It just smacks of laziness.
There were some nice hooks, but the adventure doesn't talk much about what else you can do with the adventure location other than closing it. I can imagine that it could be a great place for PC mages to perform experiments, or to create their own transportation nexus. It can also be a great hook for future adventures (e.g. demon invasion).
Also, there isn't much to do for role-playing or any kind of faction play. The few encounters that aren't innately combative are pretty straightforward.
Finally, considering the location, I think there could be a bit more creepy atmospherics. The sole survivor, with flies embedded in his face, is probably the best step in that direction.
On the plus side, as I mentioned, the premise and the hooks are quite good. I really like the nastiness that happens when characters fall asleep in hell.
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I think Michael T. has a very good point. I also think that this is an excellent open-ended adventure.
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A great example of an open-ended sandbox-oriented adventure. Scourge is well-grounded in standard fantasy tropes, and I was worried this would make it generic, but it just ended up making it portable to a wider array of campaign settings. It's not hard for a GM to manage all the different plot elements, but there are enough hooks and background events that the players can go a lot of ways with this. Conley helpfully provides notes about his experiences running the adventure as well as an entire sandbox mini-setting for the adventure to take place in. This is great material that empowers a GM to empower his or her players in an old-school way.
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Creator Reply: |
Thank you for taking the time to write this and for the kind words. |
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I'm a big fan of Kevin's stuff, and this is no exception. I already owned everything in it except for Sixteen Stars, so I feel qualified to talk about the bundle as a whole. What I really like about it is that it very much lives up to its name; which is to say that iit provides a great starting point for a SWoN campaign. Sons of Gold is a good style of play to start with (i.e. the PCs as interstellar merchants). Sixteen Stars , introduced in this bundle, gives a prospective GM a ready-made inspiration engine for science-fiction role-playing, using a series of tables to quickly assemble plot seeds for tropey SWoN locations (like asteroid habitats, alien jungles and the like). Hard Light gives the GM a solid adventure to start with, and a good blueprint for writing one's own. I could go on, but you get the picture.
If you have any interest in SWoN, this is a good bundle to start with. It's very reasonably priced (usually $52 but currently on-sale for $25) for the quantity and quality of content. What is SWoN, you ask? Basically, it's a traditional tabletop RPG set in a wide-open interstellar science fiction setting. Humanity is recovering after a mysterious apocalypse struck its psychics, who are necessary for navigating the hyperdimensional journeys between stars. This basically establishes a universe that can accomodate almost any possibility, but the various supplements do a great job of sketching out how to run different styles of campaigns. Suns of Gold caters, as I've said, to adventurers-as-merchants, while Darkness Visible provides rules and content for running a science fiction intelligence agency.
To those familiar with certain corners of the hobby, this is an OSR update of Traveller as rendered by Sine Nomine aka Kevin Crawford. As usual with anything put out by Mr. Crawford, it's very sandboxy, its supplements crammed with tables for generating content. Remember all the Traveller books, like High Guard and Far Trader? That spirit is preserved here, and if truth be told, improved upon.
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As a fan (from way back) of the original Sorcery! series, as well as the recent excellent video game adaptation, I was very disappointed by Crown of Kings - The Sorcery Campaign. This adaptation from gamebook to tabletop RPG campaign ends up being far too literal. What worked as a gamebook in 1985 does not translate well to the roleplaying tabletop in 2016. The GM info on how to handle each encounter is straight out of the book, with no explanations for seemingly illogical NPC actions. While this behavior may have contributed to a kind of unpredictable fairy tale logic in the original books, here it leaves a GM with little understanding of how to run an encounter that ends up straying outside the expectations of the text. The adventure is presented as a pure pointcrawl, with no notion of what to do if the adventurers try to travel overland.
As an example, the PCs can creep by goblins and an ogre to infiltrate a goblin mine. If they are seen, they will be immediately attacked, with no real explanation of why. What if the PCs want to parlay? It's hard to know how they would respond, unless the GM just decides that they keep attacking no matter what the disposition of the party or the odds. Later on, the party can encounter a goblin overseer, who will challenge the party if he sees them, but let them leave safely if they immediately withdraw. Why doesn't he attack immediately? Why does he just ignore the party if they withdraw? Why does he ever attack? It makes no sense, and good luck trying to GM that as anything but a narrated gamebook.
Another example: When the party infiltrates the city of Khare, the GM is instructed that the PCs must be captured and temporarily incarcerated by the watch upon entry. It is explicitly stated that this is important to the plot! On top of this, even though the party should be captured, they will not be disarmed or otherwise divested of their possessions. Honestly, I've never before seen of such an extreme instance of railroading the PCs.
For what it's worth, it is a faithful adaptation, complete with the original artwork. The layout is pleasing and very readable, and the writing is fine. I just think that this product compares very poorly with the highly imaginative Sorcery! adaptation to video games. It's unfortunate when a video game exceeds a tabletop roleplaying game in terms of demonstrating what can be accomplished by taking the source material in new directions. There are a lot of missed opportunities with this book, unfortunately.
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The Cruel Empire of Tsan Chan is a wonderfully inventive extrapolation of a future Mythos setting where Cthulhu emerges to begin an apocalyptic reign of psychotic madness, and the titular Tsan Chan Empire becomes the primary surviving human civilization. But this is not a story of plucky survivors who prevail against daunting odds - appropriately for a setting with Old Ones stomping around the Earth, things are only slightly less awful for the time being, and doom seems assured. It's very much in keeping with a Lovecraftian interpretation of the future, where our choice is extinction or transforation into something terrible and alien.
This is also the primary weakness of The Cruel Empire of Tsan Chan as a campaign setting: it's bleak as hell. There are no happy endings in Tsan Chan, even less so than in your typical CoC campaign. Some groups will definitely be into this, but it might grow old, after a while. Personally, I would prefer to use TCEoTC as some kind of alternate timeline or planet in another campaign. Or you could just take advantage of the many excellent and atmospheric details, like The Empress: a toxic gelatinous mass as large as a city, godlike in power, but only capable of communicating through cryptic pronouncements and dreams to be interpreted by the surgically-tortured Eunuchs.
There's a lot of great gonzo detail here, and plenty of intriguing dangers and rewards that could be introduced into any campaign. I really like TCEoTC's interpretation of the Tcho-Tcho, and the terrible implications of what could happen if they allied with the ghouls. Traditional Mythos entities are given slightly tweaked interpretations to fit into a coherent setting. Why are the Elder Things giving Tsan Chan access to their technology? Because we have agreed to serve as their foot soldiers against the Shoggoth in Antarctica. Who even Cthulhu might be a little afraid of. It all fits together very nicely, while staying true to what the Mythos is all about. All the while, this creates a setting rife with possible "adventure" (generally ending in madness and mutation or death).
This monograph is mostly setting detail, with very little in terms of mechanics, which is fine for what I'd want to use it for. There are some guidelines on creating characters, campaigns and plot hooks for this setting. The latter are more useful for me since, as I mentioned, I'd probably not use this as a primary setting. Tsan Chan would be a great place to have your players visit through a gateway in a more contemporary CoC campaign, or even via a portal in a more fantasy-oriented game. This is a solid and inventive use of Mythos ideas for roleplaying purposes.
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Not only is this book packed with great ideas, but the writing is absolutely hilarious. As GM, it's up to you whether you want to pass these jokes on to your players, or keep them to yourself. You might be tempted to do the latter, because you don't want your players missing all the great ideas amidst all the great jokes. I'd quote from the PDF, but it's cheap and short so just go get it.
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Sine Nomine? More like Sine Qua Non, amirite? Kevin Crawford has been killing it with these OSR sandbox supplements, and Silent Legions is no different. Each SN setting tends to add a couple innovations over old-school mechanics, but nothing too radical. Silent Legions is no different, using the "slaughter die" to make combat a significantly more dangerous affair - at least for human beings (lots of monsters are immune to the slaughter die). Other than that, there are evocative setting details, and scads of inspirational tables. That's the Sine Nomine way.
It's not always easy to capture what makes these products so brilliant. I'd say it's all in the details. Crawford doesn't just churn these out, although it would be easy to do so with the Sine Nomine formula (maybe he has tables for making tables, somewhere). Instead, everything here is very quality and professional. There's just the right amount of detail. The prose gives you just enough detail to put the flavor of the setting in your head, without crowding out your own ideas. The tables themselves are uniformly excellent - one gets the impression that Kevin actually uses these. His kickstarters meet their goals and deadlines. The man is a machine.
Anyway, Silent Legions has all you want for your own Mythos-inspired campaign. The idea of having the GM come up with his or her own cosmology is actually a pretty radical idea, when you consider that Lovecraft has been appropriated not just into games like CoC but even lots of sword and sorcery settings. Who would have thought to ditch Cthulhu as a starting point for a Mythos setting?
There are plenty of tools in here that help not just to define your own personal Mythos, but also to build secretive cults, magical artifacts and plot hooks aplenty. I'm curious to know how a sandbox campaign would work in such a setting, but if that's not your speed, you can still get a lot of use out of this product whenever your own creativity runs a little dry. If nothing else, you can just read this stuff, and get inspired.
Suffice to say, I recommend Silent Legions without reservation.
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