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Guildcraft
Series: d20
Publisher: Bastion Press
Type: Supplement
Media: Softback
Review: here
Review Intro:
Guilds. Those fantasy stalwarts. Stalwart and yet usually so annoying that they’re not worth the bother. In my experience Guilds have been deployed as a poor way to keep in check character’s level advancements, as impromptu and unrelated plot twists, as half hearted references to what the author thought should be there. I mean, if you’re heroes engage on an epic adventure which lasts seventeen years and has them cross the great sulphur flats of the Deadlands, scale the spine of the world and travel beyond the edge… then who cares that they’re a rank two novice in the wizard’s guild back in their home town?
Guildcraft is Bastion Press’s attempt to convince me that Guilds are worthwhile – or, at least, if I want to use guilds how to get the most out of them. The book has mixed success.
There’s a quick note about "world neutral" right at the start and that makes for a good beginning. Guildcraft is written so that it can be used in any fantasy world or as many different fantasy worlds as normal. This rounds off the bell a little, drawing everything closer to the average but does mean that you’re likely to be able to fit at least one of the guilds in the book into your campaign if you wanted to.
Just a few pages in and Guildcraft totally wrong foots me. What’s your idea of a typical Guild? The over-present Thieves Guild (and are thieves across the D&D universe the most organised people ever?) or perhaps a Mages Guild? Does your list of organised professionals working together for a better tomorrow include barbarian hordes? No? Me neither. Yet, barbarian horde is the first example guild in Guildcraft. Putting the boot into your expectation that guilds are inherently civilised and an urban phenomena is the Druid’s Cabal. ... [ more ]
Arsenal
Series: d20
Publisher: Perpetrated Press
Type: Supplement
Media: Softback
Review: here
Review Intro:
Arsenal is a strange book. Despite the previews from Perpetrated Press I wasn’t sure what to expect from the book but I had a hunch it would be something different. We’ve had books filled with monsters, books filled with spells and even prestige classes but books dedicated to weapons and armour are somewhat more rare. Arsenal is more different still, the weapons and armour inside aren’t the bread and butter of sword and sorcery, they’re technomagic weapons and armour; a peculiar mix of mithral and Kevlar or machine-guns and fireballs for example.
The softback book is 128-pages long and comes in at just under $20. The text size is larger than customary for d20 products, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing but it does mean fewer words per dollar. The book is full of tables, at times you can just let the pages flick by and see nothing but rows of white and grey. This doesn’t go over the top though; it’s pretty much what you would expect when you have a shopping list of holy grenades to pick from. Careful layout and design stops all these tables turning the book into a square mess. There’s just a simple border image in Arsenal, a curving line that extends over the top of the page as well and this softens up the square blocks of stats. I enjoyed the artwork too. At times the illustrations slide into a comic strip style and there’s even lettering on some of the strips. Actually, the illustrations really do help make the book. There are many gamers out there who like the pose factor of blasting away with twin pistols, lining up a shot with a sexy sniper rife or just sauntering around with a holster on and the artwork captures and capitalises on this. Consistently the illustration style would remind me of something other than the traditional fantasy games inspired by D&D. I was reminded sometimes of Palladium’s Rifts line, sometimes anime (especially the front and back covers) and the full page drawing on page 28 had me thinking Cthulhu for some reason. All this together means that there’s already a distinctive Prepetrated Press illustration style – or there will be if the company produces further books and they adopt the same approach.
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The Book of Vile Darkness
Series: d20
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Type: Core Rules
Media: Hardback
Review: here
Review Intro:
It’s not vile but it’s not especially good either. The Book of Vile Darkness was doomed to crumble under the weight of the hype. It wasn’t just Wizard’s marketing to blame (in fact, they’re not only allowed to market/hype their products but I encourage them to do so) but also sealed-sections-in-magazine hype, mouth-watering-fan-boy-on-webpage hype and heated-debate-in-forum hype too. I do think Wizards were wrong to launch their new adult line with this book though; they’ll catch themselves in a corner by setting the limit with the initial experiment.
"Vile Darkness" – the title gets my goat. It’s either an oxymoron or redundant, depending on your definition of darkness and that’s an impressive trick. I suppose many Dungeons & Dragons players have never had the "darkness" debate but if you’ve gone through your pretentious White Wolf phase (I know I have) then you probably have. Gore doesn’t equate to dark. A werewolf ripping your head off with its big claws isn’t dark, that’s just goring, that’s just vile. The werewolf’s battle against a three-headed giant slug isn’t dark either. It’s the fact that no matter how hard the werewolf fights that the war is already lost that’s dark. Seven is a dark film; Rambo isn’t – not even when he’s being tortured.
Of course, I shouldn’t judge the book by it the cover, the title or anything as superficial as that. Which is a bit of a shame for the Book of Vile Darkness; if I was to rate it based on the illustrations, the cool scary tome look, the black borders and layout then it would get a very high score. It’s a nice book to have lying out on the table when friends come to visit – anyone flicking quickly through it will be more impressed than anyone sitting down to read it. ...
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The Slayer's Guide to Duergar
Series: d20
Publisher: Mongoose Publishing
Type: High Fantasy / Supplement
Media: Paperback
Review: here
Review Intro:
The creatures covered by the Slayer’s Guides are getting progressively scarier and meaner – even when you discount the special Slayer’s Guide to Dragons - and the Slayer’s Guide to Duergar is further proof of this. Duergar are creepy little buggers, dangerous grey dwarves that can vanish at will and enlarge themselves too. (No sniggering at the back!).
The thing is, unlike many other Slayer’s Guides, this particular book doesn’t seem to make the Duergar any scarier. Their magical abilities of invisibility and enlarge are rarely touched on and when they are mentioned you can almost hear the voice of an embarrassed author. At one point it is suggested (and I can’t tell if it’s a joke or not) that the grey dwarves devolved invisibility as a good way to avoid the perceptive glare of others of their race. On the other hand, the book does quite well at making the Grey Dwarves seem more real. You could just about run an all Duergar game with this Slayer’s Guide.
The book follows the familiar Slayer’s Guide pattern. The Introduction quickly gives way to a chapter on physiology. The grey dwarves are grey. Oh. They’re without body hair and if they’re not bald then they’re with grey of "colourless" hair. The Duergar here are described as emaciated. The word’s used twice. The Monster Manual uses it too. I get the point, they’re slender compared to other dwarves and the authors go on to remind us that the Duergar are not physically weak. Someone just forgot to tell the artists though. There are some great pictures of these blighters in the book but if you want to find an illustration of a Duergar that certainly doesn’t look emaciated then you don’t need to look far. The section on the powers possessed by these dwarves runs through the formidable list. All their powers and poor reaction to sunlight are a result of the species evolving to suit the dark environment of these cavernous homes. Fair enough. It was the obvious call to make. Darn it though, I’d like to see the obvious being put on the shelf more often and something daring being tried once. ...
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Victorian Age Vampire
Series: Storyteller
Publisher: White Wolf
Type: Historic Setting
Media: Hardback
Review: here
Review Intro:
Victorian Age Vampire is not a game in itself. This is not another Vampire: Dark Ages but in with a different historical focus. Victorian Age Vampire might have a solid hardcover, a price tag of $26.95, 220 pages, full descriptions of all the basic vampire clans (Camarilla, Sabbat and Indies) but it’s a sourcebook, its an expensive historical setting for Vampire: The Masquerade. There are quite a few different versions of Vampire: The Masquerade lingering on coffee tables and under candles in role-players’ houses across the world but it’s the latest of them (you know, that revision which is more than two but less than three) that you’ll need to get the most from the Victorian Age. The chances are that if you’re still buying World of Darkness books that you will have the latest Vampire anyway – but not necessarily so. Any problems here aren’t really White Wolf’s fault, I don’t really expect them to write every new sourcebook so it’s fully and easily backwards compatible with everything else they’ve ever written and if I did I would still be complaining about the Tremere. Nonetheless, if like myself you’ve been tempted back into the Darkness after a long period of absence to check out the new books coming out of the printers then this is something to keep in mind.
The cover of the book is this yellowish-greenish wash with the title of the book presented in huge letters as part of a wrought-iron style grill. The cover might be yellowish-greenish but inside you’ll find the text is completely purple. Purple prose is nothing new for a Vampire line but it seems especially hued in this particular offering. Since I’ve been away from World of Darkness for a while the first thing that struck me as I started to read was the size of the text. Compared the rather more competitive fantasy RPG markets Victorian Age Vampire is written in giant font and with canyons of white space between each line. The layout wasn’t something that I was still struggling with by the time I reached the designer’s notes so it can’t be all that bad. The purple prose isn’t all that bad either. As I’ve said, that style of writing isn’t particularly new to Vampire and to be fair it’s probably the very stuff of Vampire, that extra academic twist that appeals to gamer-intellectuals, goths, weekend poets and those people who like to really and truly escape the clichés of traditional fantasy RPGs. ....
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