|
|
Heroes of High Favor: Half-orcs
Series: d20
Publisher: Bad Axe Games
Type: Supplement
Media: Softback
Review: here
Review Intro:
This half-orc book is the second in the Heroes of High Favor line from Bad Axe Games and this time round the tight focus of the small 62-paged book is a strength. Half-orcs must be the neglected race of the D&D setting and so this time Heroes of High Favor set about addressing that wrong. The book looks at half-orcs and prestige classes derived from multi-class combinations of the race’s favoured class. Since the half-orcs’ favoured character class is barbarian we have a list of some intriguing and original prestige classes rather than the "oh… and can fight too" combinations which were produced for dwarf fighter.
I described the $9.95 62-paged book as small because it is. It’s physically small. The surface size of the book is about 40% smaller than the industry average. The text size certainly isn’t 40% smaller but is on the small side of the scale. Heroes of High Favor gets a way with this because it’s a book with an acutely defined application; half-orc multi-class based prestige classes. You’ll get the appropriate trappings such as new feats and skills with that but you’ll not get anything else. Fans of the style, those who might favour the crunchy side of role-playing, have described this as "cutting out the fat". For me, though, it’s more like doing without flavour. That said, sometimes you can extract a little bit of flavour when game mechanics have a backbone concept behind them and that’s what you’ll find here. The feat "Mark of the Eye" caught my eye. I immediately wondered, "What Eye? What’s so special about the Eye!" and perhaps it was a bit of luck (or sly layout management) because the turn of the page offered to me rules for the Tribal Focus "The Burning Eye" (no harm in a bit of Tolkien homage, the who genre is built on it) and the finally the "Favored of the Eye" prestige class for barbarian-cleric multi-classes appears later on.
If you put together all the flavour implied by the mechanics and, of course, the explanatory text in the prestige classes you’ll be left with the view of the half-orc being caught between civilisation and savagery. Since the favoured prestige class is barbarian the view of the half-orcs in the book moves strongly in favour of the rural, the rustic and relatively wild orc. In fact, the most ... [ more ]
Death: Guardian at the Gate
Series: d20
Publisher: Natural 20 Press
Type: Supplement
Media: PDF
Review: here
Review Intro:
Death: The Guardian of the Gate does very well. It shows that the Dark Quest and Natural 20 Press has been a win-win deal; it means that the rich flavour style of Dark Quest’s fantasy line benefits from the wider audience that the name Natural 20 Press is likely to attract and Natural 20 Press benefits from Dark Quest’s writing style. I don’t think I need to offer the caveat that my preference is for flavour over crunch and that this supplement caters to that particularly well. I don’t have to offer that as a disclaimer because Death: The Guardian of the Gate offers up a healthy dose of both. The new spells, items and prestige classes introduced by the supplement are all firmly rooted in the church of the Pale Lady and so you really need to soak up the flavour from the text in order to get the most out of the mechanics. Having said that there is an even balance between crunch and flavour I’ll also bet that if you’re more of a mechanically minded roleplayer that you’ll see the weaker aspects of the prestige classes and spells before you see their strengths. 
The PDF is a colourful one but not annoyingly so. In fact given the favourite colours of the Pale Lady and her religion it would have been rather strange to have a bright and breezy colour scheme. The sidebars, which appear on alternate sides of the screen, are an inspirational in their elegance and utilise embossed purple icons of the Pale Lady’s religion on a purple background. Dark Quest have improved this PDF’s usability from their earlier works and the detailed contents page is presented as a page of links. You can click on an entry in the contents page and Acrobat Reader will take you directly to the corresponding chapter in the supplement. The traditional bookmarks for PDFs are present too, they’re correctly ... [ more ]
Slaine - The Roleplaying Game of Celtic Heroes
Series: d20
Publisher: Mongoose Publishing
Type: Core Rules
Media: Hardback
Review: here
Review Intro:
It’s brutal, bloody and Celtic. Sláine’s "Land of the Young" is a mixture of fact and fantasy. Strangely enough it’s the factual elements of the game that make it such an appealing fantasy setting. This isn’t a fantasy game where the metallic clash of swords accompanies every melee and neither is this a game where the clerics are gifted magic by their gods. Tir Nan Og, known as the Land of the Young because so few people live to an old age, is northern Europe at the time when the Stone Age was slowly giving over to the Iron Age and before the sea levels rose to cut the British Isles and Ireland off from the continent. Most warriors fight with spears, clubs and perhaps axes rather than swords. Stone edged weapons, sharpened flint, are as likely to be used as metal weapons and any metal weapons will be of iron rather than steel. Iron weapons are prone to bending mid-melee and blunting in just one fight. There aren’t any clerics. The idea of praying to deities for power and magic is alien in Tir Nan Og, people struggle to appease the gods and sacrifice their belongings and each other to try and do so. This is a fantasy game though; there is magic, in fact everyone has a little magic, there are races other than mankind, there are demons and dinosaurs and flying ships. Sláine’s unique.
The hardback costs $34.95 (I was charged £24.99) and when you pick it up, stop staring at the front cover, you might worry that the book’s rather thin. It is thin. 192 pages is short of the mark when compared to recent giant offerings like Oathbound (352 pages, $39.95). The price difference begins to settle down a little when you compare text density. The word "attack" in Oathbound and in most other RPG supplements that use standard text density is 9mm in length but in Sláine it measures only 7mm. That tiny 2-millimetre difference multiplies up significantly over 200 pages. In addition, Sláine’s a licensed product and this must impact on the price a little. Sláine originally appeared as a strip in the popular 2000 AD comic and has gone on to have graphic novels of his own. Mongoose Publishing seem to have made good use of their license though and a great deal of artwork from the original comic and simply breathtaking full colour, full page illustrations appear throughout the book.
[ more ]
Encyclopaedia Arcane: Star Magic
Series: d20
Publisher: Mongoose Publishing
Type: High Fantasy / Supplement
Media: Paperback
Review: here
Review Intro:
I was won over by Star Magic – Wisdom of the Magi; I was suspicious at the start, worried that the book was suggesting a lot of work for little reward but through both persistence and completeness the author changed my mind.
Completeness is important. I’m under the impression that most of the new schools of magic introduced for the d20 system are incomplete. I might be incorrect but something’s gone wrong and gone wrong often enough to leave me with this impression. The pit trap is with school of magic specialisation. When you create a new school of magic it needs to be tied into the balance mechanism that regulates specialist mages. If you’re a specialist mage then you loose access to Star Magic. If you specialise in Star Magic then you loose access to Necromancy and one other school of your choice. There. Done. Complete. It’s just about fair too because although this seems to make Star Magic rather rare… well, it’s actually rather convenient if you’re introducing the new rules into your campaign world.
Mongoose Publishing have been rattling off the Encyclopaedia series rather quickly. This is the eleventh book from the collection already. I was wondering whether a dozen interesting sounding names were put together over beer and pizza one night and then thankless writers outsourced to put 64 pages of appropriate material together. A quick check to the Designer’s Notes which often appear in Mongoose books pushed this concern away. Star Magic has been an established part of the author’s own campaign world for many years even if its only recently been converted into d20 mechanics.
[ more ]
Wrath & Rage
Series: d20
Publisher: Green Ronin
Type: Race Book / Fantasy
Media: Softback
Review: here
Review Intro:
The Races of Renown series from Green Ronin is part of the OGL Interlink program. This means that titles will not clash with others in the OGL Interlink. Wrath & Rage is the Orc and Half-Orc book in the Interlink and it’ll probably be the only one. I can only hope that the other companies in the Interlink are producing material as good as Green Ronin’s because Wrath & Rage is rather good and before that the Dwarf book, Hammer and Helm, is even better.
The introduction here is your typical short RPG supplement introduction. It contains an important point though; the author, Jim Bishop, notes that orcs are often portrayed as filthy, stupid and savage and that’s entirely as it should be. Right from the start then you can’t expect Wrath and Rage to offer you any cliché busting orc character types. However, the book does look at a few different reasons as to why the orc race is so angry and why they’re so… well, why there’s so orcish.
The first chapter, "The Way of the Scar", begins with a brief look at playing the half-orc or even an orc. Before reaching core classes (NPC and PC) it quickly runs down a few of the most obvious stereotypes for the race: the noble savage, the battlerager, back-alley kneecapper, separatist and the exception (the polite orc). It’s doesn’t seem all that often when a race book bothers to include the NPC classes, the adept, expert or warrior and it seems a shame....
[ more ]
|
|
