RPG Review Portal

Victoriana

Publisher: Heresy Gaming   [Search for Site]
Format: Book
Series: Victoriana: Fuzion
Review: Here
Intro:
This is good. This is very good. I’ve been able to watch interest in Victoriana rise. It was first pointed out to me by a gamer who wanted to spread the word. GameWyrd has lucky enough to host some previews of the game and they’ve been popular. There’s hype and then there’s the snowballing of interest that occurs naturally when something new looks promising. Victoriana enjoyed the latter. Thankfully, Victoriana lives up to expectations. Did I mention it was good, very good?

The book is a satisfying 300+ pages and although we’re only given soft covers we treated to wonderful illustrations, good text size and density. I can see people buying two copies of the book: one to use, one to keep.

The setting couldn’t be richer, a fantasy version of Victorian England. There’s no need to use "dark fantasy" as a description because the real Victorian England was a dark place. Actually, the setting is wider than that; the book looks at the whole world, from the European powers, Africa and America. The Victoriana twist is everywhere. The twist? Fantasy races and magic are real. The character races include beastmen, eldren (elf), dwarfs, gnomes, halflings, human and ogres. There are other races and monsters too. The British and Prussians use mechanical Ornithopter in their aerial cavalry and the French and Russians are notable for riding Wyverns in their aerial cavalry. There’s a great drawing of a dwarf pilot in his ornithopter in the foreground and a wyvern rider with a menacing gatling gun looming in the background.

Oh dear. It’s easy to get distracted when the book is sitting here right beside me. It’s so easy to get sucked in and just start to flick pages and reading again. The game is not just about the fantasy races. Whereas many RPGs begin by talking about the races active in their world and the relations between them, Victoriana gets the ball rolling by looking at the class structure. Class structure is everythin . . .

Testament

Publisher: Green Ronin   [Site Info]
Format: Book
Series: d20
Review: Here
Intro:
"You’ve read the book, now play the game!" announces the back of this mystery d20 product. What could the book be? It’ll have to be something that publisher Green Ronin is confidant that most gamers will have read. Lord of the Rings d20? Nope. Not that. It’s a more popular book than the Tolkien omnibus edition. Harry Potter d20? Try again. Less popular than the most recent tales of the boy wonder. What’s this? You’ve read the title of the review? That’s cheating.

Yes, this is a review of Testament, the d20 roleplaying game set in the Biblical Era. Sodom and Gomorrah don’t seem to be Open License. The Bible doesn’t appear to be in the recommended reading list and bibliography. That’s good. I’d hate to actually have to read the thing in order to play this game. So no, Testament isn’t a book that offends me in anyway. I can only hope that someone sent the religiously anti-roleplaying Jack Chick a copy with the disclaimer that Moses wasn’t really a 3rd-level paladin.7th-level Levite priest/10th-level prophet of the Lord with an enchanted staff of control water scratched out.

My God! That was my first reaction as I opened up the 240-paged paperback rulebook. Look at that text size! Look at that density! This isn’t a game I can read without my glasses on. The print is small. The book is black on grey too, there’s no blasphemously boring white paper in Testament. The whole book has the appearance, albeit greyscale, of parchment and the border regions are marked by an insidiously clever darkening of the background rather than by a sharp contrast. Testament is a good-looking book. The illustrations are good. The layout is better. The contents page and index are both accurate and detailed.

What about the content? Goliath is a Challenge Rating 16 Half-Nephilim fighter and David’s as a CR 19 multi-classed wonder. The outcome of that fight wasn’t a fluke. I’d bet on David any day. Multi-classed wonder? Okay. You asked for . . .

Fang & Fury

Publisher: Green Ronin   [Site Info]
Format: Book
Series: d20
Review: Here
Intro:
The Races of Renown series from Green Ronin presents Fang & Fury as their Vampire race book offering.

If the 80-paged book seems slim when it’s on the shelf then pick it up and flick through the pages. The text size is small and the density good. Green Ronin really are giving you value for money on the word-per-cent count. Fang & Fury is marked at US $16.95. The only place where the text size is different is at the very back of the book for the appendixes where it is smaller still.

The artwork is excellent. The opportunity to draw sexy vampire babes was not missed. Its pretty book in strictly layout terms too. The shade boarded tables for facts and figures work especially well. There’s no index page, the appendixes carry on to the back inside cover, but the contents page is right at the front and will put you to the right chapter at least.

It’s a book about vampires. Dungeons and Dragons vampires at that. Fang & Fury tries to put forward rules for every possible vampire myth, strength and weakness that you can think of. It does this while wrapping the bundle in a typical D&D mythos. Vampires have a connection to the Negative Plane but it’s not as strong as it might be, the effects of the positive energy, of life, create the burning desire to feed. Rather ironic that. Where possible the D&D cosmology is used to explain the science behind the myths. Vampires repelled by church bells react in the way they do because of vibrations they carry from the Positive Energy Plane.

Author and BioWare designer, Jim Bishop, knows his stuff and shares a point of view with me (notice how I slyly link the two!). The standard rules for vampires aren’t much fun. Either the player party is equipped to deal with the vampire menace and do so with relative ease or they’re caught by surprise and are lucky if they’re not completely slaughtered. Neither scenario is particularly entertaining. The stand . . .

The Unholy Warrior's Handbook

Publisher: Green Ronin   [Site Info]
Format: Book
Series: d20
Review: Here
Intro:
The Unholy Warrior’s Handbook is part of Green Ronin’s Master Class series but the book’s connection to the widely successful and hugely popular The Book of the Righteous can not be understated. The Book of the Righteous introduced the Holy Warrior and gamers quickly adopted the class. If the Holy Warriors serve the good gods then surely there are Unholy Warriors for the vile gods too? Yes, there are, and they’ve got a US$16.95, 80-paged, supplement all to themselves.

It doesn’t happen right at the start of the book (that’s were the rules for this core class are) but the Handbook does explain the difference between the unholy warrior and blackguard. Blackguards work for themselves and do evil. Unholy warriors serve a dark master. Blackguards can serve a higher power but they don’t need to in order to use their powers; the unholy warrior is dependant on his evil patron for his. The unholy warrior is a core class. The blackguard is an ideal prestige class for the warrior and the Handbook offers some more prestige class choices.

The Unholy Warrior class is carefully constructed. Its a warrior class, duh, but has access to spells (eventually) as well. Unholy Warriors are granted domains by the powers they worship and a Dark Ally at 6th level. The Dark Ally will be something like a fiendish warhorse but it’s up to the unholy warrior to decide exactly what. Furthermore the ally is a tool, something to use, and so there’s no empathic link between rider and mount. If you’re tempted to use the Unholy Warrior as a prestige class then there’s a quick mention of suitable requirements.

If an unholy warrior core class appeals to you then the prestige classes will be sinfully tempting. The Angel Hunter is a crazy sicko but frightfully good at their self-appointed quest. The Champion of the Dark Seven gets to be my favourite prestige class in the book and from many recent supplements too. The class is tied to the plane of . . .

Encyclopaedia Arcane: Familiars

Publisher: Mongoose Publishing   [Site Info]
Format: Book
Series: d20
Review: Here
Intro:
Encyclopaedia Arcane: Familiars is responsible for one of _those_ moments. The d20 sceptical little brother was visiting, he picked up the book from the to-review pile, flicked through it and commented, "Oh, you can have a Tyrannosaurus as a familiar now."

I hadn’t actually read the book at that point but I felt compelled to defend it. "It makes sense in some circumstances," I pointed out, "Would a lizardman shaman have a cat as a familiar?" Thankfully he didn’t counter by pointing out that a toad familiar would suit the lizardman perfectly, I was even more fortunate that he didn’t know the d20 rules well enough to point out how silly it would be to have a tyrannosaurus with only 2 hit points.

In fact, the tyrannosaurus wouldn’t have had only 2 hit points – that’s clear after just one casual flick through the book. To summon a familiar as powerful as that then a more powerful summon familiar ritual is required. The tyrannosaurus is a Challenge Rating 8 beast so it would need to be summoned with the Beast Familiar Ritual IX. That ninth level ritual would be the wizard or sorcerer would be, at least, 17th level. At the very least, it would have 9 hit points. Heh.

It should be noted that the to-review pile of books from which Encyclopaedia Arcane: Familiars was plucked from by the D&D doubtful roleplayer was rather high. I think EA: Familiars stood out for two reasons. It’s a good idea, familiars are present in every game with a wizard or sorcerer character and yet they’re terribly under supported. The book has a great front cover with a catchy tag line, "Crouching Monkey, Hidden Toad". You’ve got to smile.

As already made clear by the opening paragraphs of this review one of the ways this Encyclopaedia Arcane sets about fleshing out Familiars is to dramatically increase the types of familiar available. Anything’s available now; oozes, undead, fey, humanoids and even dragons. Fey don’t ha . . .

The Quintessential Sorcerer

Publisher: Mongoose Publishing   [Site Info]
Format: Book
Series: d20
Review: Here
Intro:
The Quintessential Sorcerer was one of those books that were due out round about the release date for D&D 3.5. Mongoose Publishing did the sensible thing of holding it back by a week or so to ensure it could be published afterwards and be entirely 3.5 compatible. It is. This waiting for the best release time has meant that the Quintessential Sorcerer has been published along with Encyclopaedia Arcane: Familiars and the two books complement one another exceptionally well. In fact, the familiar section inside Quintessential Sorcerer uses similar rules introduced by the Encyclopaedia Arcane.

All the Collector Series (the Quintessential books) follow the same basic format of the super successful Quintessential Fighter but they’re not so inflexible that they’ll march past a good idea. The Quintessential Sorcerer has the standard Character Concept chapter and then extra few pages especially for non-human sorcerers. Character Concepts have been a great success for Mongoose, each is a roleplaying handle for the character, describe what such an adventurer might be like and then drive the point home with slender game bonuses and penalties. In most Collector Series books I look for a mix of "How the Character Became Class X" and "What Sort of Class X the Character is Now" character concepts, typically the series favours the former whereas I prefer the latter. This time round I think the origin of the Sorcerer is especially important. I was pleased to see a clear theme merging even here at the start of the book (and the flavour text supports this). The book is interested in where and who the sorcerer gets their power from. Sample Character Concepts include the Child of Nature, Child of the Elements, Divine Receptacle, or the Half-Orc Totem Avatar. The Totem Avatar is a concept even though the page heads declare it to be safely within the prestige sorcerer section.

This "source of power" shtick is even more obvious and more important in the pre . . .