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I like the 50 Fathoms setting enough that I want to see an expanded Explorer Edition format of the book. Most of the rules created here have since appeared in other products, but the setting is light-heart4ed, swashbuckling fantasy fun. It's not just pirates, it's a water-based fantasy world with all sorts of aquatic player character races. The backstory to the world is interesting and fairly original, and the plot point campaign allows players to learn the world's mysteries and resolve the metaplot, something you don't get to do in a lot of fantasy settings.
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Savage Suzerain is a meta-setting that allows you to tie any and all Savage Worlds settings together into one giant universe. It also provides rules for a character level above Legendary, and offers some interesting expanded Savage rules. This freebie is a nice intro to both the setting and the crunchy bits, worth a look if you're a Savage worlds fan.
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It's hard to come up with an original superhero setting that has internal logic and consistency. Gestalt manages to do that and make it feel believable, while completely ignoring the pesky question of why, exactly, superpowers exist or how they work. Characters become the embodiment of an idea -- patriotism, wisdom, science, you name it. People who seem to embody these values spontaneously develop powers. This can be good or bad; the flavor text at the beginning is about a character who suffers loss and becomes the gestalt of sorrow, leading to a pretty tortured existence.
The possibilities to be explored within this concept are pretty limitless. You can play it as dark and gritty, or as four-color as you'd like, and even have characters from various styles of play side-by-side based on the ideals they embody. It builds the roleplaying possibilities right into the character concept, giving the player an instant hook and the gamemaster immediate access to potential conflicts and villains.
This edition tacks on rules for creating characters and running the game using the HERO System rules. It's got a nice list of pre-generated heroes and villains to use. While this is well done, the true value lies in the setting concepts themselves.
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It's hard to come up with an original superhero setting that has internal logic and consistency. Gestalt manages to do that and make it feel believable, while completely ignoring the pesky question of why, exactly, superpowers exist or how they work. Characters become the embodiment of an idea -- patriotism, wisdom, science, you name it. People who seem to embody these values spontaneously develop powers. This can be good or bad; the flavor text at the beginning is about a character who suffers loss and becomes the gestalt of sorrow, leading to a pretty tortured existence.
The possibilities to be explored within this concept are pretty limitless. You can play it as dark and gritty, or as four-color as you'd like, and even have characters from various styles of play side-by-side based on the ideals they embody. It builds the roleplaying possibilities right into the character concept, giving the player an instant hook and the gamemaster immediate access to potential conflicts and villains.
This edition tacks on rules for creating characters and running the game using the Mutants & Masterminds rules. It's got a nice list of pre-generated heroes and villains to use. While this is well done, the true value lies in the setting concepts themselves.
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This is a great example of setting implied through crunch. There is a lot of crunch here, to be sure, and not a lot of setting because, well, we're talking about the remnants of a destroyed planet. Solaris was a world where the Norse gods ruled; Ragnarok happened, most of the gods were destroyed along with the world itself. Now there are crumbling chunks of debris (some large enough to live on), a free-floating ocean, and a large complex of sewer pipes-turned-space station called the Pipedream.
What Broken offers here are 3.5/OGL rules for dealing with vacuum, lack of air, radiation, lack of gravity, cold, and other problems of space. There's information on the remaining gods and their clerics, how standard character classes are affected, new prestige classes, and new spells. Aside from mention of some places and some backstory, the gamemaster is left largely to sort the details out form himself. Create the chunk of planet the player characters live on. Create their motivations -- rebuild the planet (we're told it's possible, with great effort, but not how), escape to another world, flee the dimension.
If you're looking for a different type of campaign, give it a look. If you're looking for hard space rules for 3.5, give it a look. Focus on the writing, though; the only reason I didn't give this a 5 rating is the artwork, which is amateurish and not in sync with the rest of the product.
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8:32 of eerie ambient music to make you feel like you're not in Kansas any more. There are no tonal or tempo changes, it's just a constant low-level weird. You could put this on loop and never know it ended or restarted. Good background music if you need to explore a haunted house or an alien dimension.
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This 9:08 track is fun. Gulls squawking, the bell on a dingy clanging in the distance, a heartbeat-style drum. It's got a slow, methodical buildup. The early part feels like a travelogue, walking through the town and seeing the sights. Then it gets dark, and weird, and evolves into thriller/chase music.
We all know what degenerate seaside town they're talking about, of course. I could see the beats of that story unfold, almost scene by scene, in the movements of the piece. My only downgrade is that sometimes the accordion feels a little too "French
cafe" rather than "sea shanty", but that's minor.
Very well done, and this has gone onto my soundtrack playlist as music to just listen to, not just to use a game soundtrack.
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This 4:14 MP3 track has some weird science fiction sounds almost reminiscent of old Doctor Who incidental music. There's some gurgly-bits about 2 minutes in that could be a monster, but I'm not sure. There's a nice snare riff that gives off the feel of humans getting ready to face off against the monster. It's a nice piece for player characters gearing up, or to describe a cut scene of a sleeping monster, but there's no "rising" here, no bombastic "monster appears" moment that I expected from the title. A good track, mind you, but the title is misleading.
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Gnolls are one of my favorite fantasy bad guys, and this PDF traces their origins from a parody of a 19th century Welsh rugby team to OD&D gnome/troll hybrids to fungoid ghouls to cannibalistic hyena-men. That's right, gnolls aren't based on any known mythology, and have evolved from a 19th century satirical short story into a roleplaying game standard. An interesting look at how these creature came to be. Includes the original story, "How Nuth Would Have Practiced His Art Upon the Gnoles", and a lot of wonderful illustrations of hyena-men.
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This is Ken Hite rewriting Call of Cthulhu to match the sensibilities of modern Lovecraft scholarship, where not every character goes insane or does, the protagonists survive and often win, and different types of stories can be told. It takes the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game as its template, overlays it with Robin Laws' investigation-oriented GUMSHOE system, and then expands it to include oft-overlooked elements of Lovecraft's stories along with other pulp elements and historical tropes from the 1920s. What you get is a very nice period piece that accomodates various styles of play and allows you to more accurately simulate the feel of classic Mythos stories.
The primary concieptt of the GUMSHOE system is that you're going to find the clue. You don't have to roll to try to find that piece of information needed to launch you into the next scene or the next encounter. You find it. The academic checks the library stacks, the doctor goes through medical records, the private investigator questions the witnesses, and they get the clues. It's not about gathering data, it's about figuring out what it all means.
Some of the game is resource management; you get a pool of points to spend, if and when you want. You find the clue, but by spending a point or two you can gain some benefit, like finding out shoggoths are sensitive to electricity before you actually encounter the shoggoth. Important stuff. Skill tests are done on a single d6, with difficulty ranging from 2 to 8; you can spent points ahead of time to add to that.
Trail of Cthulhu also breaks character madness down into two pieces: classic Sanity, which measures long-term mental deterioration, and Stability, which measures your ability to function in a reasonably normal way. When you see something scary and freak out, you've lost Stability. You'll compose yourself eventually, with little or no long-term harm. On the other hand, you can be quite insane from exposure to the Mythos, with a low Sanity score, and still be quite functional and even pass for normal with a high Stability. This allows for not only more nuanced player characters, but far more frightening villains.
Overall a very nice update and expansion to Call of Cthulhu's style of play, with far more possibilities given to those who don't enjoy playing characters who will (not might) inevitably be destroyed during the game.
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What if, in addition to being a silversmith, Paul Revere was a werewolf hunter? That's the premise of this graphic novel, collecting a four-issue mini-series. It's entertaining, as writer Ed Lavallee tries to balance actual history with a Washington Irving vibe. The artwork by Grant Bond is amazing, definitely inspired by Mike Mignola but with more fluid line work remeniscent of artists like Alan Davis, definitely his own style. Action, facial expressions, costuming, background detail, panel and page composition, are all solid and well executed. Overall a fun read, and pretty to look at.
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This "virtual boxed set" is made up of five PDFs, comprising five booklets you'd find in an old boxed set. It's one large map (22"x34") that can be printed as 8 U.S. letter-sized sheets and put together. It can be used as a stand-alone dungeon, or as part of a larger mega-dungeon.
The rooms are numbered, and each room gets its own page, basically an exploded view of the room taking up a little less than a quarter of the page, and blank lines on the rest of the page. This is intended to be the gamemaster's reference, where you get to fill out what's in the room. There are no encounters here; what you're getting is just a map so that you can create your own encounters.
The final booklet has three tables to randomly generate sounds, smells, and "adventure-spawn features", which are just descriptions of the room's unusual features or some significant object within.
The PDFs have writable features, so you can type your own information in before you print and save yourself some hand cramps from writing. The maps can also be scales, and rooms printed individually, so you can lay them out like dungeon tiles and use them with miniatures.
If all you're looking for is a blank map so you can design your own megadungeon, here you go. It's pretty basic, but a solid idea.
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This "virtual boxed set" is made up of five PDFs, comprising five booklets you'd find in an old boxed set. It's one large map (22"x34") that can be printed as 8 U.S. letter-sized sheets and put together. It can be used as a stand-alone dungeon, or as part of a larger mega-dungeon.
The rooms are numbered, and each room gets its own page, basically an exploded view of the room taking up a little less than a quarter of the page, and blank lines on the rest of the page. This is intended to be the gamemaster's reference, where you get to fill out what's in the room. There are no encounters here; what you're getting is just a map so that you can create your own encounters.
The final booklet has three tables to randomly generate sounds, smells, and "adventure-spawn features", which are just descriptions of the room's unusual features or some significant object within.
The PDFs have writable features, so you can type your own information in before you print and save yourself some hand cramps from writing. The maps can also be scales, and rooms printed individually, so you can lay them out like dungeon tiles and use them with miniatures.
If all you're looking for is a blank map so you can design your own megadungeon, here you go. It's pretty basic, but a solid idea.
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This game is about the secret history of the American Revolution, where the Founding Fathers (and Founding Mothers) donned clockwork power armor to battle the British and then, after independence had been won, with each other to determine the philosophical course this nation would take. It's over the top, and more than a little silly.
This is a card game, with different suits defining things the characters are particularly good at. There are 17 pre-generated historical figures to choose from, as well as number of Tories to serve as enemies.
Each game begins at the secret Masonic Grand Lodge of the Americas, where the characters receive a coded message about British movements. This is a cleverly-disguised adventure generator; you draw 5 cards and discern their meanings on a series of tables. The players then have to sort out what this means, interpreting the rather vague results to create their own mission. There's really no gamemaster in this game; those responsibilities are shares.
The character you play is also somewhat random. Each player is dealt a card, and starting with the high card each player declares who has volunteered for this mission and picks a character. You can elect to play the bad guys, and if no one does then the player with the low card has to play them.
On your turn, you play cards and narrate the action. Each suit, again, describes as type of action, so you have to narrate to fit the cards in play. Other players can play cards to attempt to add to or alter the narrative. When a scene is resolved, the next player lays down cards and narrates a scene, and so on until the mission is complete.
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If you like random tables, Jon Brazer's inexpensive d66 products are a good series. Roll 2d6 and read them like percentile dice: a 3 and a 4 would be 34 on the table. Nominally for use with Traveller, can be used with any space science fiction game. Some of the names are quite specific, referring to characters and places in the Traveller universe, but that can be a stepping stone to creativity in other settings as you figure out who or what those names mean in the context of your own game.
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