Ravenous Role Playing

Bloodsand Arena is WotC’s introduction to Athas, the world of Darksun. The books are already on the shelves, but when Free RPG Day happened, they were slated for a month or three release date out from June. I have not had a chance to even glimpse the innards of any recent Darksun books, and this is because I’ve not made the time. I’ve seen them on shelves, but walked right past them to more lush offerings. Darksun never did catch my interest, and the more I learn about D&D 4e and the more I read the books and the more I play it (which is rare, I’ll admit) the less I like the system or settings. I just have a bad taste in my mouth from the World-of-Warcraftification of my favorite RPG. However, that’s a rant for another day. I’m here to review Bloodsand Arena.

The cover has some amazing artwork on it and some good maps on the internal sides of the cover. My only complaint at this point is that I wish the grid lines on the internal maps were a little thicker to make them stand out more. It’s a cartography thing, I guess.

The character cards that come with the game are excellent and well put together. I can imagine that it would be a breeze to simply shuffle the cards and hand them out to the players at random, or toss them in the middle of the table and have them fight over it (or bid on them like Amber?)

The large fold-out map that comes with the game is excellent for miniature combat situations, which is what I imagined they intended the large maps to be used for. Instead of breaking out the battlemat and markers, it’s possible to just use the maps provided as-is. I like this quite a bit and I wish more games included features like this. It would be worth the extra $5 to $10 dollars to me.

Lastly, the 24 page book gives a brief on the world, setting, environment, geography and socio-political make up of Athas. After reading this, I remember now why I never did like the world. It’s too brutal for my tastes. No. I don’t like everything wrapped up in a pretty little package with a bow on top, but I do want my players to have a chance to live to see second level. Ok. Sorry. Enough of that rant.

Once Athas and the immediate surroundings are laid out, the adventure starts. In typical WotC fashion, the adventures are very well put together, outlined for the GM and players wonderfully, described clearly and the monster stat blocks are immensely useful. It took WotC a long time from purchasing TSR to finally get this down and get it right. I hope they continue to do well in this area.

Both adventures (yep, there are two!) seem to be very fun to run and play in, but not in the world of Athas. At least, not for me.

One final thought is that you need the D&D 4e books to run these adventures. This is not a stand-alone book to entice new players to join the game like most other Free RPG Day offerings. I’d rather see Free RPG Day stuff bring in new players, not try to get existing players to buy more stuff.

Grade: A  (Though, I’m still not enticed to buy any more D&D 4e stuff or Darksun materials.)

This “book” was actually a magazine preview for a new publication, which threw me off at first. Once I realized what was going on, I started judging each article on its own merits and then the magazine as a whole.

The “Dead Things” mini-game was actually quite impressive in its layout and how quickly someone could pick up on the rules. The game is very similar to the popular Zombies! tile-based game that I’ve played a few times. The general premise is the same: Make your way from the start to the finish while traversing a field of zombies. The rules appeared to be smooth and well thought out, but that’s hard to say without playing it first. Since I already have a decent amount of cash sunk into Zombies! and know those rules, I’ll probably stick with the people that have already cornered the market.

The next article detailed six spells for creating monsters. The spells were intended for use in Labyrinth Lord or Mutant Future, but could easily be ported to D&D 3.0/3.5 or maybe even Pathfinder. The spells themselves were pretty good and seemed to me to be fairly balanced.

After the spells came a two page article about quarries. I would have picked a more exciting topic to give away in order to entice a greater number of purchases of their book that contains similar articles. The quarry piece was well written, well researched and clearly stated. I may get online and see if I can find more previews for their City Builder: A Guide to Designing Communities to see if it’s worth purchasing.

Next came a monster entry featuring the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland. The cat was fairly balanced, well written and quite usable in a D&D 3.0/3.5 or other OGL system even though the intended audience is Pathfinder.

Following this was a two page article that I just could not bring myself to read because of the strange font that was used. Due to the font, everything on the page was fuzzy and unclear. I did look closer. This was not caused by misprinting or a bad run at the printer. It’s definitely the font causing my issues. I’d recommend to the publisher to pick a standard font that is clear and legible and stick with it throughout their publications.

It seemed to me that the folks at Skirmisher Press are trying to attract a large crowd from a wide variety of games. I’m afraid they’re going to miss the mark on all of them. Most people are fairly fanatic about their systems and only want supplements dedicated to their cause. By targeting multiple game systems, the people that they’re going to attract are going to be limited in nature, I think. I wish them all the luck in the world and great success, but I don’t see it happening because of the “jack of all trades” approach.

Grade: B-

The introduction to Deathwatch from Fantasy Flight Games has an incredibly high production value for being a free module. The paper was thick, the artwork fit the theme and mood of the book and was well done, the printing quality was very high, and over all, I was quite impressed with what I held in my hands.

The first part of the book is a brief introduction to the theme of the game followed by some pre-generated characters for use in the module that fell at the end of the book. Pages 8-21 held the basic rules of the system and then the remainder of the book was a well-thought-out and well-written adventure for the system. Basically, this is everything a group needs to play the system, game, characters and adventure presented. That, in my opinion, makes this a great freebie to give out and entice people to run off and buy the Deathwatch game. This is very much like the Rogue Trader game that was part of the Free RPG Day from last year.

However, the content, material and concept behind the game left me cold. It’s all about playing Space Marines in the Emperor’s military forces that have been elevated to the elite troops of the Deathwatch. This just doesn’t grab me. It sets up the game to be a run and gun type of science fiction game instead of one in which the players are making cool discoveries and exploring strange new worlds. I can imagine that the game could be played in the vein that I would appreciate, but that’s not the core focus of the game. If I were to pick up either Rogue Trader or Deathwatch, I’d probably lean toward Rogue Trader. However, there are groups out there that want the run and gun style of playing and this system and concept are tailor made for those groups.

Even though the ideas presented in the book didn’t grab me, I still see this as a high quality game.

Grade: A-

The adventure, “Abominations of the Amazon,” written by Mike Ferguson and produced by Goodman Games is a decent introduction to the system of Call of Cthulhu, but the adventure does require the core book to run properly. It’s a great way to introduce players to the system, but not new game masters. I found myself wondering how various rules worked and such, and felt like I needed the main book in my hands to run the game properly. I’ve played in a CoC game in the distant past, but never run it. I suppose if I were more familiar with the game, then the adventure would have flowed better for me.

Aside from the lack of knowledge on my part, the adventure read very smoothly, was very well laid out and had some excellent maps and handouts to go with it. I could see this being run in a night or two and possibly hooking some players to the system.

My chief complaint is that the “horror” of the adventure was purely mechanical. There wasn’t much in the descriptions, box text or overall game that invoked the raw terror one feels when reading an H.P. Lovecraft story. It makes me wonder how much Lovecraft Mr. Ferguson has read in the recent past and if he wanted to apply any of that reading to the adventure. I just feel that a greater sense of terror invoked in the players not the characters could have been useful in setting the mood. Maybe that’s just me.

Grade: B+

In the past few weeks, I’ve received or bought:

• The Dresden Files RPG that I pre-ordered months ago.
• Mutants and Masterminds and a supplement with a bunch of pregenerated characters.
• Runequest from Mongoose Games
• A variety of items from Free RPG Day.

Now to find the time to go through all of this and start writing some reviews. I’m still not sure what order I’ll be hitting them or when I’ll have a chance to get through all of this new material. I can’t wait to do it, though!

I finished off the Pathfinder Core book while at lunch today. I was nearly done, so it didn’t take too long. This review is of the parts of the book designed for the GM.

Chapter 12: Gamemastering

This chapter gives great words of advice to anyone, new and old, on how to run a game. This includes proper preparation of a session, how to start a campaign, what to do during the game and some tips for higher level/power games. One of the most valuable parts of this chapter was the sidebar about keeping a campaign journal. They are invaluable to any GM that runs a long-term game.

Chapter 13: Environment

Holy cow! The folks at Paizo went all out on this one. There are 35 pages dedicated to all the types of terrain (indoors and out) that could possibly be found on the Material Plane. Sure, there are going to be some weird terrains and places in the outer or elemental planes, but if you’re running a game on an Earth-like planetoid, then I highly recommend this chapter… no matter what game system you’re running. There are some excellent details of terrain, environment, plant life and the difficulties and dangers found in the various terrains. My chief complaint about this chapter is that it is mostly fluff with a few rules scattered about in them. That makes it hard to find the rules.

Chapter 14: Creating NPCs

These 7 pages fell flat for me. I feel that if you’re going to dedicate a “chapter” (it’s in quotes because 7 pages does not a chapter make) to one of the most vital aspects of gaming then it should be at least 20 pages or more. Perhaps they are saving their real work for an “NPCs of Pathfinder” book down the road. If that’s the case, then I’m OK with it. However, the treatment they gave to NPCs was a little too brief. I guess it could be considered a launching pad of sorts, but it doesn’t have much of a runway to allow a new GM to get up to speed before taking flight.

Chapter 15: Magic Items

Like with the spells, I didn’t read every item. I just read the basic rules government magic items and skimmed most of them. I actually found myself reading the artifacts at the end of the magic item listing to see how things were changed or altered. I really liked what I saw in the few items I actually read through. Not much really changed in between D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder other than some rules clarifications. What did change (at least in the writing) was more clarity in the magic item creation process. I thought WotC did a decent enough job with it in 3.0/3.5, but the Paizo folks cleared up a few of the finer points of the rules.

Appendices

The appendices of the book included information about abilities, bonuses, ability damage, level drain (which I really like they way they worked!), curses, poisons, and various special abilities that PCs, NPCs and monsters may have. Lastly, the book closed with the conditions appendix. I like the fact that this came last in the book. It’s so hard to remember which affliction does what, and having them in an easy-to-find location in the book is the best thing ever.

Index

A 4 page index closed out the book, and that’s a decent-sized index for a book of this weight. While scanning through the index, I found most every topic you could think of to look up. This is a good thing. It’s still no match for the quality of the indices that Steve Jackson puts in their GURPS books, but I think that’s because GURPS is a far more complex system and needs the support of a good index.

This closes out my review of Pathfinder. As the game that I’ll be in starts up over the next month or two, I’ll let you know how the system works in play. Thanks for listening… er… reading.

The six of us (5 players and 1 GM) got together Saturday night to create Pathfinder characters for the newly starting campaign. Usually, when we start a new game everyone comes to the table with an idea of what they want to play. In this case, only one player had a solid concept and the rest of us sat around the table staring at each other with blank looks. It took a while of leafing through the books, character traits PDF and player’s guide PDF before things started to gel.

I was trying to sit back and decide last because I wanted to create a character that would merge well with the rest of the group. I didn’t do that in the Rifts game, and it caused tons of contention between Eric and me. Unfortunately, I didn’t have that option on Saturday. I had to help get the ball rolling. Kelly was waffling between playing a rogue or a paladin. I think she was hooking more into the paladin idea, but didn’t want to create a character that would be at odds with the rest of the group. At this point, the GM said that not all paladins have to be lawful good, but can match whatever alignment of another god if the player chose to do that. This freed up Kelly to lean stronger towards a paladin.

What finally tipped the balance was the fact that I told her that if she played a paladin, I would play a cleric of the same god. We settled on Abadar, the god of cities, wealth, merchants and law. We decided to focus on the wealth part since both of our characters were from wealthy families. Nat, at this point, picked up rogue as her class and decided to, I think, worship Abadar as well since she feels that he will help guide her character to the greatest wealth.

Once I chose cleric, Rhonda decided to dive into her ranger class choice now that she knew we had a healer. I think she wanted to play a front-line fighter all along, but was afraid of the lack of healing that would be coming her way.

In the end we ended up with:

• Bill – The Gamemaster
• Eric – Wizard (Conjurer specialty)
• Rhonda – Ranger (Bow specialist)
• Kelly – Paladin of Abadar
• Nat – Rogue
• Me – Cleric of Abadar

I don’t have a full character background written up just yet, but I’m working on it. I tend to do this with most of my characters. It helps me know them better. However, one thing I’m going to latch onto is the 1st edition AD&D cavalier ideal of having the best armor at all times. This doesn’t mean the best AC, but the best looking. That means that I’ll choose mundane full plate  over half plate +4 because full plate just looks that much better.

As the game progresses, I’ll be giving a report of how things go. I probably won’t be doing a full campaign log, but my impressions of the game flow and how well the system works (or doesn’t).

As far as the quality of character creation goes in the Pathfinder system, I really like it. It’s quite simple and flows very well. Of course, I’m an experienced gamer, so this is usually true of most systems. However, I was reading the book from the eye of someone that had never played before, and I’m still impressed by the clarity of the rules and how well written everything is. This is definitely a game that could be tossed into the hands of a total newbie and they would be able to pick it up quickly if they had half a brain to work with.

Pathfinder Core

In my last review of Pathfinder, I covered chapters 1-8. This time, I’m just going to cover 9-11 because that is the last sections of the player portion of the book. Before I continue, though, I did want to point out something that I missed in my last review: the physical qualities of the book. The book is well bound with very high quality, thick paper. The printing is excellent and easy on the eyes, with a few rare exceptions. The fancy borders they put on all of the pages sometimes bleed into paragraphs, especially on the left-hand edge of the left-hand paper, which can make some words harder to discern. The usual “soda proof” glossy protection on the covers is also in place, which I’m very happy for. This glossy coating has saved a ton of my books in the past when an ill-timed mouthful of soda explosively merges with a well-timed hilarious joke or quip. You know what I’m talking about, right?

Now on to the rest of the player portion of the book.

Chapter 9 covered the basics of spell casting and the rules around how spells work. Again, the folks at Paizo did a wonderful job in clarifying rules, using images to depict exactly how spells work and making the whole process make more sense. I’ve been a role player for 26 years now, and these rules are some of the cleanest, easiest to read and most concise pieces of text I’ve ever read in an RPG. I think even the more junior members of my role playing group (and those adverse to reading the rules) will have a good time with this book.

Chapter 10 covered the spells. Did I read each and every spell description? No! There are 132 pages of spells! What I did, however, was to “spot check” the spell list. I started with the lists of spells at the beginning of the chapter. They are well put together and easy to read. The only problem I have with the list is the wizard/sorcerer spell lists are broken down by school before they alphabetized under each level. This makes quickly figuring out the level of a spell or skimming the spell list more difficult for people that are not used to how spells are broken down by school. I didn’t stumble through it much, but a total beginner will have a hard time knowing which school to look under for the spell he is trying to find.

For the several dozen spells (or so) that I read, the writing was well done and easy to understand. I came away from each spell listing with no questions about “What if?”, although I’m sure my group (and others) will come up with some that my brain is not. My only complaint about the detailed spell listings is the fact they chose to use a black background with off-white text for the spell name. While the black background clearly delineates one spell listing from the next, which is a good thing, it makes reading the text a little hard when you’re in a hurry. I don’t know of many people who casually read spell listings (though, I’m sure you’re out there.) Most of the time, a spell is being looked up in the heat of battle by both the player(s) and the GM at the same time in order to better remember how the spell works or to clarify some point. This means hasty skimming of the spell listings in search of a spell. The layout format Paizo chose for the spell titles inhibits this exercise just a slight bit. I know I’m being nit-picky, but when a product is as good as Pathfinder, you have to find something to gripe about, right?

Chapter 11 covered the prestige classes of the core Pathfinder system. These I did read thoroughly, and I am very impressed with the balance of the classes as a whole. Most of them are taken directly from 3.5 with some possible tweaks here and there with the exception of the Pathfinder Chronicler. This is an obvious addition to the list, and I feel it may be a bit overpowered as compared to the other prestige classes. Maybe this is just my first impression, and I could be wrong about that. The only way to know for sure is to talk someone into playing one of them. Heck, that someone might just be me. It all depends on what the rest of my group decides to do tomorrow night when it comes time to create characters.

This concludes the review of the player portion of the Pathfinder Core book. I’ll cover the GM portion of the book in its entirety early next week.

Pathfinder Core

I just finished off my lunch hour reading chapters one through eight of the new Pathfinder Core book. This part of the book took me through character creation, races, classes, skills, feats, equipment, basic rules, combat rules and the miscellaneous bits of rules that are required for any RPG. I must say that I am quite impressed so far. The wide selection of powers, abilities, feats, skills and combat maneuvers is grand. My group is about to start a Pathfinder game, so I haven’t played any of the rules just yet, but they appear to be balanced and well written.

Paizo’s goal was to take D&D 3.5 and clean it up. They did an admirable job of doing so, and I can’t wait to see the game in action. The many things that D&D 3.5 did almost right has been nailed down and spit polished by the Paizo crew. While reading the rules, I could see how they would play out on the battle board quite well. They were easy to read, easy to understand and appear to be easy to implement in the game without slowing things down. Sure, we’re going to have to look up Bull Rush the first time someone does that action, but it will only slow the game down slightly as the rules explain how the maneuver works in clear and concise text.

I’m not sure, as of yet, which race/class/feat/skill combination I’m going to play. I’m leaning towards a rogue/wizard multiclass character. However, this time around, I’m going to let everyone else choose their character setups and then I’ll “fill in the blanks” of the party. Once we get rolling with the game, I’ll let you know which route I go and how it works out.

So far, I think my favorite part of the book is the feats section. I can see the progression of the feats as they build on one another, and each one brings something unique and powerful to the game. There are so many options, I can see three fighters being in one party, and none of them having the same abilities if the players choose to build their characters properly.

Good job, Paizo! Keep up the good work. I can’t wait to see the Bestiary when it hits the shelves.

As I make my way through the rest of the book, I’ll let you know what I think. Expect part 2 of this review in a day or three.

This is the final installment of this year’s Free RPG Day reviews. I saved the last one for Khyber’s Harvest by Wizards of the Coast.

Free RPG Day 2009 - Khyber's Harvest Cover

This book is a quick-and-dirty D&D adventure set in the Eberron world. The adventure is for second level characters, and five sample characters are provided in the back of the book.

I’m not going to plot out the adventure here and spoil it for all of you players. I am going to say that I love the detailed work WotC put into the adventure, and I’m still totally in love with the new style of stats for monsters, adversaries, traps and other such obstacles. However, I’m still not a huge fan of social skill challenges. If it’s a mechanical, arcane or some other physical challenge that the players can’t get up and safely reenact, then I’m all for dice rolls. However, for things that involve the characters talking, then the players can talk their way through it. Using skill challenges to replace role playing opportunities just seems horribly wrong to me. If I were to run this adventure, the diplomacy, bluff, intimidate, etc. style checks would be thrown out and replaced with true-to-form role playing, not dice-invoked roll playing… but that’s just me.

The adventure came with a card stock, double-sided piece that contained nicely done maps of two of the rooms. However, I would have preferred WotC to save their money on the card stock and spend it on higher quality printing of the GM’s maps. The two maps on the inside covers of the adventure are lacking in detail, hard to read and are missing the ever-so-vital (especially in 4th edition) grid markings. I did notice faint hash marks in place of grid lines, but that induces so much eye strain, it’s not worth it. Despite the poor print quality of the maps, they are well done and match the flavor text very well. It’s always frustrating when a module or adventure doesn’t get the text to match the maps. That’s not the case with Khyber’s Harvest.

Grade: B+ — Give me better maps, and it’s an easy A. Wizards of the Coast just barely missed the cut in getting an A for their freebie.