NeuroSpasta looks like its going to be an excellent cyberpunk campaign setting, one obviously inspired by great anime like Ghost in the Shell and Appleseed, as well as computer games like Dues Ex. I'm looking forward to the full release. I'm not even much of a D&D 4th fan, but I really like the twists Dias Ex machina has put on the rule set. Just an aside to the authors: lower the opacity of the 'circuit' page borders, please. Those things are so dark they're very distracting. CHRIS

I normally like Forge Studio's stock art, but I'm disappointed in this one. The figures are very sketchy, looking more like warm-up sketches or costume proposals than finished products, and the proportions are off. These characters tiny heads and such huge torsos it's impossible to take them seriously.

An amazing collection of high quality inked images with an African fantasy vibe. If you're a publisher looking to produce a follow up to Nyambe: African Adventures, you could use virtually every one of these excellent, free images. I'll be using tons of these images in my Endara campaign setting, which has a psuedo-African nation as one of the good guy factions. CHRIS

Tons of great content for an old school system, including a better bestiary of local alien fauna than most paid products.

This is one of the simplest pieces of stock art I've ever bought but one that I use the most. Since purchase, I've used this hex art as the background on three different PDF covers, as a printable tactical map for a board game and will be using it, overlaid over some public domain NASA art to make hex maps for an upcoming sci-fi product.

Buy this thing; you'll find a use for it. CHRIS

Scorn is an amazing, modern horror game about demon hunting and killing monsters in gruesome ways. It's closest cousin would be White Wolf's classic Hunter: The Reckoning, but Scorn is tons gorier, more vulgar, much more blackly funny, and better organized and with far superior art. Scorn also has some of the best original demons I've seen in a modern horror game.

The only, and I mean only reason I didn't give this puppy five solid stars is that most of the spells are inconsistently named. About 75% of the spells in the game have one name in the fiction and another name in the game rule paragraph above the fluff. It's obvious that the spells changed names during the revision process, and an editing pass didn't catch this.

Fix that one problem and you've got a dead solid perfect, rules light action/horror game.

CHRIS

I don't understand the logic of releasing a very late in the game D20 Modern campaign setting with only five illustrations. Four of those illustrations by the way, were public domain images from Wikipedia, while the fifth was a character illustration.... an image of a futuristic soldier in vaguely Roman gear, created using City of Heroes (or some other superhero MMORPG, but City of Heroes looks most likely).

Wow. Add to that poor organization, unimaginative layout where paragraphs and concepts seemed to blend into each other randomly, and a generally cliched premise, and you've 60+ pages of wasted space.

I bought the OGL Monster Compendium: Egyptian because I'm a huge fan of Egyptian mythology. Unfortunately, this PDF is too lazy of a product to hold my interest, though it does EXACTLY what it says on the tin.

OGL MC: Egyptian is a compilation of various monsters from assorted OGL sources, including Testament and Hamanaptura (from Green Ronin), Bastion Press' deities books, and the D20 Fantasy SRD, among others. While having all these monsters in one place is convenient, no additional work or effort has been put into this PDF other than copy and pasting over stat blocks.

These various monster statblocks were all released at various points long the 3.5 OGL life cycle, and several were from products released before the 3.5 revision, and are designed for 3rd edition D&D. This means power levels and mechanics are wonky at best. No effort was made to clean up the stat blocks or convert the creatures over to Pathfinder- had the publisher put forth that much effort I would have been satisfied. Had the publisher included a few short (50 word or less) adventure hooks at the end of each monster stat block I would have been satisfied. had the publisher purchased cool new art or used appropriate stock art, to give me a well illustrated book, I would have enjoyed this PDF.

Xandegar's Adventure Realm did NONE of these things. So instead of being satisfied with this PDF, I feel like my pocket just got picked to the tune of $10.37. Avoid this book. CHRIS

One of the neatest high-fantasy citybooks I've read in a while and it's free. There is absolutely no reason for gamers not to pick this thing up. The city of Miles is a great adventure hub,and has plenty of ideas you can steal for you home games, no matter what system you use. CHRIS

Other Dust is an excellent companion to Stars Without Number, and a wonderful modern example of sandbox gaming. Other Dust uses a slightly updated version of the classic AD&D 'engine', adapted for sci-fi gaming. The setting seems a bit grimmer and more serious than older post-apoc RPGs like Gamma World, which is a clear inspiration. That feeling of realism comes from an amazing setting conceit, one I wish I'd thought of first. Instead of radiation causing mutations, a malfunctioning global emergency system, called the HighShine, unleashes out of control healing nano-colonies upon those suffering from radiation poisoning or other trauma. To modern gamers, this might be more plausible than the old 'radiation as magic' tropes.

Aside from the brilliant HighShine concept, the real greatness of the sourcebook is found towards the back. A phenomenally deep random creation system will allow you to build settlements, plot out adventures, dress sets ranging from a limestone cavern to an abandoned factory in seconds.

I'd been waiting to write this review until my print copy of the book arrived. Fortunately, Other Dust looks as good in print as it does on screen. CHRIS

Psionics Expanded: Advanced Psionics Guide is a great continuation of Dreamscarred Press' psionics line. This book is both imaginative and consistent. It's consistent in that the Advanced Psionics Guide mimics the format of Paizo's Advanced Player's Guide, which is a great design choice, considering both books have a similar niche. The book is wildly imaginiative in that it adds dozens of new Psionic powers and classes, some of which seem familiar to fans of 2nd and 3rd Edition D&D Psionics, many of which are completely new. The classes are amazing, and easily the strongest part of the book. The Aegis (who manifests ectoplasmic armor) and Aegis-related content is almost worth the book's purchase price by itself. The Aegis is just one of the classes I can't wait to play- this from a gamer who never really liked the standard OGL psionics system. Good job, Dreamscarred Press. CHRIS

Nice clean art with a goofy sci-fi vibe. I'll definitely be using this in Galaxy Command. Thanks for the freebie!

I picked this game up out of curiosity, mostly. In some ways, it seemed similar to what I like writing about, and I was curious how another designer tackled similar issues. I'm not a huge fan of cooperative storytelling games, but Misspent Youth is kick-ass example of the genre.

I give Misspent Youth points for clarity of the layout, and rules. Exactly how the game wants you to tell a shared story is clearly laid out, and somewhat logical. The shared worldbuilding aspect of creating your campaign's distopian future is well thought out, and seems like it can really rock with a group of like-minded sci-fi fan gamers. Task resolution, by the way, is basically a game of craps between players and storyteller, which should make students of probability smile.

The best thing about this game, though is the layout. The design of the game looks like old punk album covers- it's grimy and low-fi, and attractively ugly. However, for all the style laid into the design, the game never loses clarity. I've also rarely seen public domain artwork used as well, and as evocatively, as this low-budget sci-fi game does. Great work on the design front. CHRIS

The new Marvel Heroic Roleplaying game by Margaret Weis Productions was one of the products I was one of the products I was most looking forward to in 2012. Note the past tense: WAS.

Simply put, the game is shockingly ugly and worthless as ‘pretty gaming product’ and uses rules so convoluted and ill-conceived it’s useless to me as an actual RPG.

First up, the game uses the most counter-intuitive, slow-moving, bean counting form of a dice pool mechanic I’ve seen in 20 years of rolling dice! By forcing players to build a new and unique dice pool every action, choosing one or more component dice from a variety of personal motivations, teamwork elements and power sets, the game forces the action to slow to a crawl EVERY SINGLE TIME a player attempts to do something. Anything.

Is your superhero going to: Throw a punch, fire an energy blast, hack a computer, bust through a door, bandage a knife wound, or dodge gunfire? If so, prepare to spend at least a minute on the action building up a dice pool and reading the results and assigning the result dice as desired. If you’re playing with first time gamers, expect them to spend at least 2-3 minutes per action just figuring out what the hell is going on and what dice to use.

Seriously, what’s wrong with simple percentile rolls or dice+ rolls (such as D10+ skill or D20+skill, or whatever)? They’re far quicker, and lots more intuitive, especially first time gamers, which I think this deformed specimen of an RPG was supposed to be aimed at.

And then, instead of having Hit Points, damage tracks or damage saves (ala Mutants & Masterminds), player characters accumulate stress. Seriously? The biggest threat to my superhero is getting stressed out? It’s a simple problem of terminology, but by calling accumulated damage in this setting ‘stress’ I find it impossible to take seriously. In the comics, when Sabertooth rakes his claws across Wolverine’s belly, Wolverine isn’t a little ‘stressed out’ he’s disemboweled.

Now let’s talk about the ugly-factor.

This is a licensed product that Margaret Weis Productions went to a ton of expense and effort to earn the license for. And all that effort, and the spectacular art resources Marvel Comics has to offer a licensor, is wasted. Images in this RPG are amateurishly cropped. The picture of Wolverine on the bike, which is cropped from the knees DOWN, in the section on stunts (pg 103) is probably the single worst panel in the book.

The game’s margins are so laughably huge I feel like MWP owes all the trees chopped up to make this book a heartfelt personal apology. Most of the half and quarter page illustrations in this book are shrunk so they seem more like 40% and 15% illustrations at best. Some of the images in the skill and character improvement sections are so small they may as well be punctuation, and are placed at either the extreme top or bottom of a page, shattering the visual flow. Seriously- you’ve got any piece of Marvel art you want to put into a game, so why make these images so TINY?

Finally, the game makes the same mistake the DCU Heroes RPG (Green Ronin) did before it. Most of the art in this game is from the last ten years. If I’m playing a licensed Marvel RPG, I want it to have great artwork from the entire span of Marvel’s history. I want Jack Kirby and Jim Lee art at the least, in addition to the work of more recent superstar artists like Jimmy Chueng, David Finch and Greg Land.

And speaking of art, let’s talk about the cover of the Operations Manual. The OM’s cover is an amateurishly Photoshopped collage of popular Marvel characters by several different artists. It looks like a fan product, not something officially licensed. If there was ever a time to spend the money for an original cover, putting out this hugely anticipated licensed product is it. By cheaping out, Margaret Weis Productions gives me the impression they don’t want to spend any more money on this product than absolutely necessary.

Another gripe, and this applies to Marvel products as a whole, and not just to the MWP game, is that the main book is too X-centric. While I love the X-Men, a Marvel Universe RPG should include play examples and interior art focusing equally on Spiderman, the FF, the Avengers, those quirky 3rd stringer fan favorites, AND the X-Men.

The game makes also some odd choices regarding which heroes to include, and why. The example adventure is based on the Breakout storyline, which ran through New Avengers 1-6, and the sample characters include all the heroes involved in the story line (Captain America, Spider Man, Iron Man, Luke Cage, among others) it also includes stat blocks for a variety of other popular Marvel heroes who weren’t in the comic book storyline, but could easily be included in your game group’s adventure (the Fantastic Four, Black Panther, the Beast and Storm, and several others).

Though one character was dead at that point in the comics, and the other was off planet, I’m really baffled by their refusal to include stat blocks for either the Hulk or Thor in the core book. They’re quintessential Marvel characters! This choice is especially baffling when MWP includes the relatively minor X-character Armor (who certainly hasn’t ever headlined a major motion picture of her own) and Luke Cage’s loser buddy, Iron Fist. I know MWP will soon release expanded roster books, and team supplements of some kind, but leaving Hulk out of the core book is frankly idiotic.

On the plus side…. There’s not much really.

The game uses terminology from the original TSR game and the Marvel Saga game, which is a nice shout-out to long time fans. And the “unlockables” mechanic, where the players can spend plot points (sorta like Karma in the TSR game) to activate special events and plot twists is genuinely neat. I’d love to see the unlockables concept ported over to a better RPG. The “milestones” built into each character profile, which award XP for accomplishing personal goals (or failing utterly at those same goals) add a ton of personality to the characters. Like unlockables, milestones are another idea I’d love to see explored in a more competently produced game.

In conclusion, if you want to play a Marvel supers game, either pick up your favorite edition of Mutants & Masterminds, or if you really crave the license, go to a used book store and see if you can find the TSR version. You’ll be a happier gamer than if you waste your money on this version of the license.

CHRIS

Sometimes classic games just don't age well. The rule set behind this Star Trek-homage just doesn't work by modern standards. However, this PDF collection looks like a very faithful, high resolution copy of the original game, and does include a neat scenario generator for running a classic Trek-inspired game. You can pull the scenario generator, which is the largest single portion of the text, for use with other sci-fi games with no problem. Do that, and you'll feel like you got your money's worth. Trying to play Star Explorer as written will have you bashing your head against the wall.

One other problem- the PDF files in the package feel a bit bloated. The cover alone- a single page, color PDF- is over 30 megabytes, and could probably of been shrank a bit without seriously harming resolution. That's not a big issue in and of itself, but it's another strike against an already flawed nostalgia product. CHRIS