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Spaceship Zero
Series: Spaceship Zero
Publisher: Green Ronin
Type: Roleplaying Game
Media: Softback
Review: here
Review Intro:
"But wait! That’s not all! Spaceship Zero also comes with its own original game system: a roleplaying game completely incompatible with other roleplaying systems! Toss away those troublesome twenty-sided dice! Hurl them at the bastions of conformity! We’ve seen the future, and we’re brining it to you today!"
That’s taken from the back of Spaceship Zero, the brand new RPG from Green Ronin. I did hurl my d20s; they bounced off the wall with a satisfying ricochet and scared the cat. I’m not sure about dealing the bastions of conformity though. Spaceship Zero uses a percentile system.
Perhaps you’ve already heard of Spaceship Zero? After all it was a successful radio play. A 1950s radio play. A German 1950s radio play. I think it’s only fair to award Spaceship Zero with the award for "Most Obscure License Ever". I hadn’t heard of Spaceship Zero but I feel as if I’ve missed out, it seems like great fun and I certainly know Universe 2 and Earth 2 well enough now.
Given that the game is supposed to be closely tied to science fiction ideas spawned from the ‘50s I think the futuristic elements are remarkably fresh. Events like the clone war on Earth are part of the campaign history. SpaceCorp’s future success came to depend on the Better-Than-Light drive for spaceships being successful. The crew of the spaceship flying off Saturn are the heroes from the series. The Better-Than-Light drive isn’t successful; it’s the worst possible failure imaginable. The spaceship doesn’t move, instead the Better-Than-Light drive causes the ship to gain infinite mass. You know, like a black hole but possibly even more massive. Everybody and everything outside the spaceship dies; sucked into and crushed by the cosmic hole that the spaceship becomes. ... [ more ]
Mutants & Masterminds
Series: d20 - MOD
Publisher: Green Ronin
Type: Roleplaying Game / Superhero
Media: Hardback
Review: here
Review Intro:
"The World’s Greatest Superhero RPG!" – so announces the front of Green Ronin’s Mutants & Masterminds.
Brave words.
I decided to put Mutants & Masterminds to the greatest test possible. I dropped the hardbound collection of glossy colour pages into the lap of a friend of mine. He has the unnatural ability to ‘parse’ rules and mechanics faster than any computer, he has a vast and extensive range of fan-boy knowledge about superheroes, their artists and comic book series but who was not only suffering burnout from his long experience of comics and suffering burnout from superhero roleplaying in particular. He had time to look through Mutants & Masterminds because just a few meetings ago he’d cancelled his own superhero game on us. I told him Mutants & Masterminds was a new d20 superhero roleplaying game and he didn’t look impressed. I mentioned that Green Ronin had bravely forgone the d20 logo on the book so they could get better control over the game mechanics. He still didn’t look very impressed. Do you know what? This nameless friend of mine flicked through a couple of pages of the book and then put it down. I had the sense he was just humouring my request that he look at it. He put the book down but picked it up again later. He picked it up again, then again and then suggested I ought to try running the game. In fact, the suggestion that someone should run Mutants & Masterminds was made several times that night. So much for being burnt out on superhero RPGs? Heh?
I think Mutants & Masterminds is that good.
Ditching the d20 logo was the way to go. In a stroke it broadens the appeal of the book. In a stroke the rules can be specially ... [ more ]
The Quintessential Psychic Warrior
Series: d20
Publisher: Mongoose Publishing
Type: Fantasy Supplement
Media: Softback
Review: here
Review Intro:
I’m going to peel the warning label off from my copy of the Book of Vile Darkness and stick it onto the Quintessential Psychic Warrior.
No, not really. The suggestion makes the point though. I shouldn’t go around cannibalising bits from one book to another. Some Psychic Warriors aren’t so concerned about books or even rival psions for that matter. There’s detailed rules for psionic cannibalism in this latest addition to Mongoose’s Collector Series. The word "cannibalism" is appropriate for the organ harvesting procedure. Hannibal Lecter would make a good psychic warrior, able to quickly carve out the chakras from the body of his latest victim. Not all psychic warriors engage in the practice. Some psychic warriors simply slice into the skin above their own chakras, to let the nexus of flesh and psionic energy breath more easily. If they can stand the pain then they can dig their fingers into the wound and pull away more flesh and tissue for another surge of power. This form of self-mutation is the wimpiest of three possible options. Why waste time with carving bleeding troughs into your skin when you can carefully flay away skin and flesh with a scalpel and dig even closer to the mystical chakras in your body. Flensing is more extreme than flaying. A psychic warrior who has undergone flensing will have gaping and bleeding holes cut through his body to expose bone and twitching organs. Oh yes, I can see it now, vast streams of psychic power flowing into the exposed and prepared chakra and total control over it all – for, well, about twenty seconds before you pass out and die for the blood loss. Again, not all psychic warriors undergo these self-mutations just to get a scrap more power. No, some of these uniquely scary people maintain their power through their addictions to drugs and chemical compounds. The Sybarite must experiment with new forms of pleasure – drugs, sex, marshmallow pizza – or start to loose her powers.
Then there’s the artwork. Mongoose keeps most of us happy, some of us ambivalent and a few of us righteously annoyed by keeping their products peppered with T&A art. That’s true here and then there’s another form of more mature art too. Some of the illustrations are rather gory. A noteworthy example lives on page 97 (and you’re all going to turn there first now) that shows a female psychic warrior with an unnaturally veined head using her teeth to pull the skin away from around the eyes of a severed and bleeding head she’s holding.
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Pale Designs: A Poisoner's Handbook
Series: d20
Publisher: Bastion Press
Type: High Fantasy / Supplement
Media: Paperback
Review: here
Review Intro:
Hmm. Yummy. Bastion Press books with their full colour and glossy pages always look good. The fact that I’m making yummy noises about a book on poisons can be discounted as one of those strange things roleplayers do.
I noticed a bunch of other d20 publishers listed in the credits. Yes, sadly, I look there first. Pale Designs makes some of the best use of Open Game Content as under the d20 OGL license umbrella that I’ve seen yet. The authors, Steven Creech and Kevin Ruesch have used their own reputations and wiles, assisted no doubt by the Bastion’s prestige to win permission to re-print poisons protected as Product Identity by other publishers. This explains the extra credits. This success means that Pale Designs really is a poisoner’s handbook. It lists and describes a huge range of poisons. There’s an added bonus for GMs and players who like consistency in their games too. Since Pale Designs uses some poisons from previously published supplements and adventures you can be sure that Hog’s Breath the players encounter after their GM bought the book is the same Hog’s Breath that they encountered before the GM had the book. The GM doesn’t need to go hunting through his collection of adventures or supplements to find the one with the details for that particular poison either.
It could be easier to find a particular poison in Pale Designs though. There’s no universal alphabetical index for the poisons. Sure, poisons are presented alphabetically but also by type. If you don’t know the type then you’re in for a lot of flicking back and forth through the book. The ‘type’ is fairly arbitrary. The primary division of type seems to be whether the poison is new (seen first in Pale Designs) or not. ...
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DungeonWorks
Series: Generic
Publisher: WorldWorks Games
Type: 3D Dungeon Model
Media: PDF
Review: here
Review Intro:
DungeonWorks is probably the most unique product I’ve reviewed on GameWyrd to date. As you might have guessed, DungeonWorks is a dungeon. The twist is that DungeonWorks is a 3D model of a dungeon, a model you download off the Internet. Clearly DungeonWorks isn’t 3D as you stream it off the website, it’s up to you to print it out onto cardstock, fold, glue and create the model. The selling point is that you get to have a good-looking model dungeon for a fraction of the cost of a traditional one. You can print DungeonWorks out again and again and expand your dungeon for peanuts and until there’s no more floor space left. The catch is that you have to put some work in yourself.
I put DungeonWorks to a strenuous test. If I could build a good looking corridor then DungeonWorks would have lived up to its claims, if I could build a satisfactory looking corridor then DungeonWorks would still be a success but for every finger I cut off or every dungeon door that ended up glued to the table I’d mark the product down by one.
I type this review with the assistance of all my fingers. Rejoice!
The download unzips into a number of different folders and PDF products. You don’t need to mess around inside a huge, colour and high resolution PDF just to find and print the page with that has the gold coin covered floor tiles on. This is a welcome blessing. To get to the gold coins you’d simply have to enter the floor tiles folder first, then item tiles and then open the PDF in there. A great advantage of using this modular presentation is that each set of dungeon components comes with their own specific instructions and difficulty rating. If it’s just a matter of using a craft knife to cut out a title then the difficulty rating is low but if you’re faced with tricky cuts, lots of folding and then careful alignment of glue covered tabs then the difficulty is much higher. ....
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