It’s no secret to my gaming group that I’m getting burned out playing Dungeons & Dragons. I’ve wanted to try something new for years now, but as D&D 3.5’s variant rules (and even core rules) have proliferated with its end-of-edition publishing spasms, my desire to try something different has intensified.
The Battlestar Galactica RPG was one one of those different things.
My gaming group’s been playing in the World of Greyhawk for more than a decade. Greyhawk’s a traditional fantasy setting, one of the first for D&D, and it’s very much inspired by the likes of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. It’s a sword and sorcery realm in which the story revolves around rank-and-file adventurers, rather than the antics of super-powered heroics of uber-mages or unstoppable drow warriors.
The setting, and our campaign, has a lot of history. We’re not eager to give up either.
The Savage Worlds: Explorer Edition game book is a slim, seductive little tome that promises to deliver “fast, fun, and furious” action for any genre and in hundreds less pages than Dungeons & Dragons takes to recreate just the fantasy genre. It’s a promise it makes good on … up to a point.
This is the third printing of Savage Worlds, and perhaps the best one yet. The book is printed in folio format (6.5 inches wide by 9 inches high) and numbers 160 pages. It’s a slender book, but it manages to pack its entire game mechanic into those pages; this isn’t a “lite” edition; this is the whole game.
I had a chance to page through Spycraft 2.0 yesterday at Barnes & Noble (yes, B&N -- I was stunned that they actually carried any RPG books, let alone a new one like this). It's a hefty book, and after a quick glance at the table of contents and reading about the design philosophy, I do like where it appears to be headed. It looks to be more streamlined and cohesive, with less of the time-consuming paperwork associated with stuff like gearing up.
If I can swing it, I'll definitely be picking it up, and heck, maybe I'll even use it as the engine to re-launch my stalled Spycraft campaign.
Editor's Note: Listen to a review of this rulebook in Radio Active #9
Undead get the prestige treatment in Libris Mortis, the second of Wizards of the Coast's highly-focused, hard-cover and color-illustrated monster source books.
Like the Draconomicon before it, Libris Mortis starts off with an overview of undead, delving into physiology, psychology, society, and religion. Although brief, it hits on the major points of the undead life cycle, including their creation and connection to the Negative Energy Plane, rules for "hauntings" (locations infused with negative energy, but not proper undead) and new rules for undead cravings. The cravings -- a ghoul's hunger, a vampire's thirst -- are addressed both as part of the undead's unnatural ecology, and as a motivating force for them. It also gives a brief rundown of the various undead deities, including the major powers from the traditional Greyhawk pantheon (Nerull, Wes Jas, etc.) as well as a few new lesser and demigod additions.
The Book of Exalted Deeds is meant to be the good and noble counterpart to the nefarious, twisted, profane -- and excellent -- Book of Vile Darkness source book by Monte Cooke.
Unfortunately, it takes the mirroring of that Dungeons & Dragons sourcebook too far, creating counterpoints for every aspect of the Vile Darkness but doing so in an unimaginative, and in some cases, dumb way.
The thing that Dungeons & Dragons 3.0/3.5 excels at most is its flexibility: its possible to play the same class for years and never play the same kind of character twice. Unearthed Arcana expands that flexibility by adding hundreds of new options to the game.
After four years of playing Dungeons & Dragons 3.0 and its kin, poisons are old hat for most players. Depending on the situation, the rules lawyers, power gamers, and even that guy who spends most of the night exploring the nasal possibilities of his dice know what poison a Game Master is talking about when a noxious gas suddenly bellows from a locked chest, and starts dealing catastrophic ability point damage.
Bastion Press' Torn Asunder reintroduces critical hits and called shots to Dungeons & Dragons, providing a new system of location-based damage and effects to put the fear of dismemberment and decaptiation in back into players' minds.
When Eberron, Dungeons & Dragons' latest campaign setting, was announced, I was less than excited. Descriptions of it -- with its "lightening road" trains, airships, and various "modern" convinces powered by magic, struck me as being too much like "magepunk", and too little like fantasy D&D. And there was the spectre of the Forgotten Realms, Wizards of the Coasts' last high-magic campaign setting, which I've always found to be a wonderful playground for uber-powerful NPCs, but not so much fun for players.