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The Airships
Series: d20
Publisher: Bastion Press
Type: Sourcebook
Media: Softback
Review: here
Review Intro:
Airships is a superb book. Okay, Airships is a superb book if you want make heavy use of magical, high fantasy airships in your campaign world. If you think there’s any chance, any chance at all, that airships will fit in your campaign then US $24.95 for the 96-paged colour book is well worth it. Airships isn’t an Oathbound book, not as such. It just so happens that Bastion Press’s capstone campaign setting, Oathbound, does make use of airships and it just so happens that Airships is extremely Oathbound friendly. One of the sample airships in the book is an Asherake vessel and there are notes to remind us that the anti-gav option is the one used by Oathbound ships.
The first chapter is all about construction. This is heavy with the numbers but it gives you plenty of options. There’s a wide choice of hull construction materials, type of engine and then all those airship enhancing extras that players are bound to want. It’s cheaper to build your airship out of bone than it is mithral but the latter material has some obvious benefits. It’s not just the matter of cost and toughness, manoeuvrability is also vital and some materials have other specific merits and flaws. The choice of engine also involves finding the right balance between cost, power, material and special abilities. You don’t want a necrotic engine that eats dead flesh to power the airship if you’re good aligned or have a sense of smell. Bottling a fire elemental or channelling magic directly from a mage are two other possible options from the long list. That’s just the basic; afterwards you might want to modify your hall (so it can land in water, for example) and add all sorts of extra components. You guessed it. There’s a long list of these too.... [ more ]
Ultimate Equipment Guide
Series: d20
Publisher: Mongoose Publishing
Type: Supplement
Media: Hardback
Review: here
Review Intro:
Mongoose’s Ultimate supplement series always manage to surprise me. Each time I find myself thinking . o O (This will never work) and then when I get my hands on the book I discover that it does work. The Ultimate Equipment Guide has the hardest task of all, perhaps, since there’s very little room for shades of grey, partial or superb successes. A collection of equipment presented in a book is either helpful or not.
The Ultimate Equipment Guide does work, it is helpful and the only catch is you need to pay $34.95 for its help. I know, that’s a heck of a lot of money but there’s also a heck of a lot of book. As with the other Ultimate supplements the Equipment Guide is a large hardback, 256 pages in all. There are illustrations and indexes galore. The illustrations tend to be small, a centimetre or three in height or width but that’s enough to picture the piece of equipment in question. You can find pages with a dozen illustrations on them. The index is complete, ten pages of small text and numbers. If the bit of equipment is in the book then you’ll find it in the index.
The rules summary is over 30 pages long. Compact grey’n’white shaded tables make up the summaries, putting together all the game mechanics for the items used. This is cost and weight (also always found in the items main entry), damage where necessary and armour stats too (armour bonus, max dex, armour check, spell failure and speeds).
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Savage Species
Series: d20
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Type: Supplement
Media: Hardback
Review: here
Review Intro:
Too much filler and not enough killer; Savage Species is in trouble. What’s the point of the book? It’s there to let you use monstrous races as player character races. Actually, the blurb notes that the supplement "provides everything you need to play a monster as a character or make the monsters your heroes fight even more formidable". The latter is certainly true. The two usual candidates of yet more feats and yet more prestige classes step forward to add more tooth and claw to your monsters. There are templates too. The difference between a template and a monstrous prestige class is that the prestige class progresses on a scale whereas the full effects of the template come into being straight away. There are better and cheaper ways to improve your monsters than paying US$29.95 for Savage Species. What about monsters as player characters? There are two key elements to this and depending on your own roleplaying style you’ll rate the importance of them differently. The supplement will need to get to grips with rollplaying and the roleplaying problems of playing a monster, it’ll need to help out with the game mechanics and help out with the game itself. After all, you’ve got this Ghoul PC, what the hell are you supposed to do with it? Just how overpowering is the need for flesh? Does a four armed Sahuagin need as long for its craft roles as a dwarf?
Savage Species tries to sort out the game mechanics. It’s not really interested in offering advice on how to roleplay a monstrous race or even on pointing out what makes a monstrous race different from a character race in the first place. As far as I’m concerned that’s not a good start but it’s not a fatal flaw. I’m not a crunch happy gamer but if the dice bits are slick and smooth then I’ll treasure that. The conversion from monster to player race isn’t slick and smooth; it’s awkward, cumbersome, full of grey areas and DM estimates. DM estimates are good. The ability to make good DM calls separates the pro from the newbie. Advice on DM estimates is something to encourage. I appreciate books that present rules as a set of options for a DM to gauge and use as they think best.fusion of war games. Escape from Monster Island remains good fun for you and for your kid brother.
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Streets of Silver
Series: d20
Publisher: Living Imagination
Type: High Fantasy / Supplement
Media: Paperback
Review: here
Review Intro:
Streets of Silver is a 312-paged book from Living Imagination Inc.. The website quotes the RRP at US$ 29.95. There are two ways at looking at that; that’s a lot of money for a single city but it’s not too bad for such a hefty book.
Streets of Silver isn’t going to win any beauty pageants. It’s blocky at times, with short paragraph entries and bold type headings of the same size as the default text. The book can be reminiscent of an encyclopaedia in places. It’s little surprise that illustrations start to run thin in such a large book. This is especially true at the end of the book where you can go pages without a break from the squared paragraphs of text. There’s plenty of cartography and that’s a good thing, if you’re buying Streets of Silver then you’re paying for a minutely detailed city guide. It’s not all peaches and cream with the cartography though. The book itself succeeds gracefully in conjuring up a Renaissance flavour for the city of Parma but many of the maps in the book are blocky computer generated images and this proves to be counter productive for the atmosphere. The exceptions are the great maps on page three and the double-paged entry on pages 10 and 11.
Then there’s the poster. The colour poster in the back of the book that unfolds to be four times the surface area of the book itself. Okay, so this map is in the blocky cgi style but the shades of colour really do help counter the square feel. I’m playing in a Freeport game where the GM makes good use of the coloured Freeport map and now with Parma I have a bigger map to call my own. Even if I don’t use Parma, or the Twin Crowns world, this map will do for any city on a pronounced peninsula. Fair enough, by itself the map isn’t worth nearly $30 but it certainly does add a point to the book’s rating on the GameWyrd scale.
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Mecha Compendium
Series: d20
Publisher: Dream Pod 9
Type: Fantasy Sourcebookl
Media: Paperback
Review: here
Review Intro:
Hmmm. Pretty! That’s a good first impression for a book. That’s what Dream Pod 9’s d20 Mecha Compendium got from me as I flicked through it. There’s always a catch though. The book has to live up to that first reaction.
And it does.
And there’s another catch. You knew that was coming, didn’t you? It’s recommended that you own the D20 Mecha rulebook from Guardians of Order and at the time this review was written, at the time the Mecha Compendium was released, that rulebook isn’t yet available. I’ve found it’s not too much of a problem, the game stats and rule implications are transparent enough and a practised GM isn’t likely to be thwarted.
If you thought the words Mecha plus Compendium would equal Crunch then you’re only half right. There are crunchy bits in the book, whole pages of mecha design, background, stats and illustrations. The whole page per mecha approach is a success. Everything’s neat and tidy, the stat blocks (the OGL bits of the book) have the suggestion of a computer display but don’t go over the top with that. The crunchy pages of the Compendium feel appropriate to the subject matter, to mecha, and that gets the thumbs up. There are plenty of flavour and campaign ideas in the Compendium. In fact, there are 11 campaign settings in the 160-paged paperback.
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