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The Kandris Seal
Series: Heroes
Publisher: Hart-Felt Productions
Type: Sourcebook
Media: PDF
Review: here
Review Intro:
If you have a copy of the fifth edition Hero rulebook then you know this sentence is a lie. There is no such book. The fifth edition Hero rules are a brick; not a small brick either, a large paper brick that could safely be used as the construction material for the next Fort Knox. The Kandris Seal follows this tradition despite being a PDF product. The 171-paged download has a size of about 7,900KB. My modem heaved and groaned but got there in the end. That’s not over-sized though; it’s not a case of poor PDF creation; it is actually very good for 171 electronic pages. The supplement isn’t overloaded with illustrations (a notorious way to push PDF size sky high) but does enjoy just enough quality illustrations to maintain that hero feel and avoid the sea of text that some PDFs can become. I’ve mentioned the size of the Kandris Seal first because it’s the first thing you’ll notice. Don’t try the download before going to work in the morning or just at the end of your lunch break.
The Kandris Seal is a supplement designed for use with the Hero System and Champions. It does this well; there are no hiccups in the mechanics, the game rules are expressed cleanly and crispy. Right at the start of the supplement there’s a short note that pre-empts possible concerns about the use of END for some Powers by directing the reader towards the GM option rule in fifth edition. As a supplement the Kandris Seal is a collection of new NPCs, powers, equipment, game rules and adventures. All this is based around the Kandris Seal itself, a Seal that keeps thirteen powerful Chaos demons out of Earth’s Dimension and a Seal that is maintained by the Thaumaturgia. There is a wide range of useful rules, NPCs and adventures in the supplement but it’s not really those that gives The Kandris Seal its appealing flexibility. The Kandris Seal is especially appealing as a supplement because it has such a supple atmosphere and feel to it. I’m not being polite here. I’m not saying the supplement lacks a distinct mood. I am saying that it can be used to enhance a whole range of atmospheres, to enrich campaigns with different moods and flavours and that’s an unusual and therefore welcome boon. ... [ more ]
Blood & Space
Series: d20
Publisher: RPGObjects
Type: Spacecraft Combat / Sourcebook
Media: PDF
Review: here
Review Intro:
Blood and Space is all about spaceships. It’s all about building and staffing your spaceship, about equipping it with the best in computers and defences and dodging around planets and gravity wells in a dogfight with rival space pirates. Blood and Space isn’t a game in it’s own right, although I do feel you could use it to run a tactical war-game campaign in space. You can run Blood and Space with either the fantasy core rules or D20 Modern and that’s a bonus. Blood and Space does a lot of things right. Heck, Blood and Space does an awful lot of things; there’s a whole host of rules in the supplement. Blood and Space also distinguishes between the nitty-gritty, as scientifically accurate as possible, sci-fi and the go with the flow, high action, space opera. Many Sci-Fi games give you one, the other or a bad mauling of both but Blood and Space gives you both separately. There are two sets of engines; one hard sci-fi and the other space opera and there are two sets of weapons; one hard sci-fi and the other space opera. You’re left to pick your favourite from the two sub-genres. This works well for me; the supplement does all the hard work and I’m left to cherry pick.
There’s a big long contents section at the start of the product and that’s just what you want in a PDF. The bookmarks are complete too; expanding lists based on chapters. I don’t like the resize option though; whenever you jump to a bookmark the page resizes. It moves from Fit to Width to Fit in Window. In my case it takes a clearly readable page resize to an unreadable 81% scale. Blood and Space is 118 pages in length and PDFs this long without bookmarks are a nightmare to navigate so despite the resizing, I’m glad they’re there. ... [ more ]
The Second World Sourcebook
Series: d20
Publisher: Second World Simulations
Type: Fantasy Supplement
Media: Softback
Review: here
Review Intro:
I’m in two minds about this book and that seems rather appropriate for a sourcebook designed to let you play in two worlds. I’m not sure whether I want to encourage you to rush out and buy The Second World Sourcebook or to rush out hide every copy of the book.
Why the dilemma? The Second World Sourcebook takes the mucky crunch of game mechanics mongering and turns it into a graceful science. A fair proportion of the 288-paged paperback is spent looking at tweaking d20 rules to best suit a twin world setting. Steven Palmer Peterson doesn’t limit this discussion, this game science class, to producing just one solution but allows the large book to make a number of alternative suggestions. The First World is our world – or a world very much like it – and so the obvious rule set is d20 Modern. The Second World is a fantasy reflection of the First and so d20 Core would seem to fit here. For the record, the map showing Freeport ‘s location in relation to New York should be dolled up and turned into a poster. You can play with either d20 Modern or d20 Core because the Second World Sourcebook shows you how (and tells you why). In theory you’ll only need one set of rules. In practise you’ll want both. I think it’ll be impossible to read the SWS with its constant references to the two d20 sets without feeling as if you need to have them both to refer to. This produces a games mechanics discussion of a better level than I’m used to. I use the phrase "better level" rather than "higher level" quite deliberately. It’s a better level of discussion because it’s concerned with making the game playable despite the mechanics rather than because of the mechanics. It shows that you can stop being a greasy high school kid concerned with getting the highest possible Dexterity bonus at the smallest cost, become a mature gamer and be still concerned with how the numbers on your character interact with the game world’s mechanics. Game mechanics shouldn’t be glorified like this – they should be seen only as a necessary evil.
This is a book for experienced gamers. I don’t believe Second World Simulations has enough oomph as a company to ensure that the Sourcebook is a huge hit, I do believe it’ll become a cult hit. It’s really quite easy to see The Second World Sourcebook becoming the seminal advanced d20 product.
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Heroes of High Favor: Elves
Series: d20
Publisher: Badaxe Games
Type: High Fantasy / Supplement
Media: Paperback
Review: here
Review Intro:
The hobby needs another elf race book as much as it needs a wizard class book. Welcome to Heroes of High Favor: Elves. If you know the Heroes of High Favor line from Badaxe Games then you’ll know that that opening line was a little unfair. The Heroes of High Favor are certainly not another character splat book. The meat of the small book is the chapter of multi-class based prestige classes. The favourite class for the elf race is Wizard and so the book contains ten prestige classes based on wizard multi-classes. The Anarcanist, for example, is a Wizard-Rogue inspired prestige class. In previous Heroes of High Favor it’s been the racial favourite class that’s made or broken the book. I didn’t find the dwarf book all that worthwhile because their favourite fighter class didn’t combine with any other to make any inspirational prestige classes. On the other hand, the half-orc book worked with prestige classes that included barbarian influence and this produced some really cracking ideas. Elf wizards sit in this middle of this. There are some real successes here: the Ley Runner as the Wizard-Barbarian class, the Wayshepherd as the Wizard-Druid and Spell-shikar as the Wizard-Ranger being the top three. It seems to be the tricky ones, the real challenges that brings out the best from Badaxe Games. It is the tricky combinations that are the most interesting and which makes the book worth buying.
If you’ve not seen a Heroes of High Favor before then you’ll notice the size straight away. The book is two-thirds the length and width of most other RPGs. At 78 pages long this is the largest in the series yet.
The prestige classes take up 40 of these pages. They’re good but it’s the added extra on either side that bumps the whole book up from the realms of average and into pretty good. There are two main sections that lead into the prestige classes; feats and lost arcana.
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Plot and Poison
Series: d20
Publisher: Green Ronin
Type: Fantasy Sourcebookl
Media: Paperback
Review: here
Review Intro:
What slander. "People play to have fun, engage their minds, and socialize; moral arguments can ruin this and destroy the suspension of disbelief necessary for a good game." That’s from the "What Is Evil?" subsection in Plot & Poison’s introduction. People do RPG for all of those reasons but moral arguments, intellectual decisions and ethical debates are often the bread and butter of mature gamers. Fortunately for those of us who do not enjoy the "smite the genetically evil!" side to D&D the book doesn’t linger on the shallow side of this debate and gets quickly going. The subject matter of Plot and Poison is the Drow. The companion book is Paradigm Concept’s Unveiled Masters: The Essential Guide to Mind Flayers and if you want to get the best from the sexy if deadly front cover artwork then you need to buy both and place them side-by-side.
In previous Races of Renown from Green Ronin I’ve greatly enjoyed alternatives to the racial stereotypes suggested in the book. There’s here only in token form in Plot and Poison and that’s a shame. In fact, Plot and Poison sets about trying to re-create the image of the Drow made famous by Forgotten Realms as closely as possible and perhaps improve on what’s for offer when the lack of OGL material locks them out.
That’s two slight grumbles to begin with. In just a few pages the book pretty much explains that it’s most interested vanilla D&D and vanilla Drow. Having made that call, as unadventurous as it is, Plot & Poison does very little wrong. You could say that it aims low and scores high. The book really is tightly packed with page after page of safe Drow stuff – and that’s probably what most people want.
"Tightly packed" is right. The book is 160-pages in length, the text size is tiny and the word count per page is impressive. The illustrations work hard for their money too. Author Matthew Serrett must have been on the same wavelength as many of the book’s artists and we’re given peeks into the duality of the dark elf’s erotic and lethal sides. The picture of the female drow in the skimpy costume sitting on the back of an orc-slave is just perfect for the Dominant prestige class. Drow prostitutes, we discover, are bodyguards as well – responsible for protecting the clients while their defences are down. You will find some of the pictures used twice in the book through and that’s unusual from the normally well-stocked Green Ronin.
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